The Truth about Anastasia

"I will tell them that the play is over, now go home."

- Empress Dowager ("Anastasia", 1956)

Nicholas II of Russia and his family were executed by the Ural Soviet on July 17, 1918. It was the only certain fact in this tale, as what happened afterwards was being disputed by historians. Until now.

Guy Bolton and Marcelle Maurette wrote a play that would be talked about in both sides of the Atlantic. "Anastasia" was about a recovering amnesiac who had a striking resemblance to the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest daughter of Nicholas II. The Russian expatriates in Paris were suspicious, as she was a pupil of General Bounine, a known opportunist. He wanted to have an audience with the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of the Tsar. He was hoping for a handsome reward if the Dagmar of Denmark would be convicned that this young lady was indeed her granddaughter.

Both Bolton and Maurette based their text from numerous women claiming to be Anastasia. Until the discovery of the remains of the Romanov family in 1979, some were hoping that the young girl managed to get out of the Soviet Union. One story was the Tsar's four daughters survived the shooting because their corsettes were embedded with diamonds. But many doubted it, as the the soldiers, led by Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky, stabbed them with bayonets and then shot them at close range in their heads. If that didn't happen, the revolution - and the Siberian cold - might not make it possible.

What the playwrights have in mind was Anna Anderson, who was institutionalized in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt in Berlin. Her claim earned her public attention, and then notoriety after it was discovered that she was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness. But not a few believed in Anna due to her intimate knowledge of the imperial family and her speech, which had a strartling semblance to the Grand Duchess.

Time was on the Tsar's side. He was pinpointed as the main reason why the Russian Empire collapsed culminating in the revolution. But many sympathized. It might be Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, the youngest of the five children of the Tsar and his wife, Alix of Hesse. Alexei was supposed to succeed his father to the throne, but he was afflicted with hemophilia. (The disease was incurable during that time.) In fact, there were rumors going around that the teenage boy also made it. The believers have a romantic notion about the Romanov family.

The demise of the Tsar and his family ended the House of Romanov. He had two sisters who were living in exile, aside from Maria Feodorovna, surviving members of royal families whose fortunes were overturned by the tumultuous events in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As for Anastasia, even if there was concrete eveidence that she died on 1918, rumors persisted. Some are hoping for a bittersweet ending.