Anastasia (14 page)
Authors: Carolyn Meyer
Sailor Navgorny once tried to stop a soldier from stealing a gold chain belonging to Alexei. Navgorny was promptly arrested; four days later he was shot. Now it was the tsar’s task to carry his son outside, for after his accident with the sled on the stairs at Tobolsk, the tsarevitch did not walk again.
The days stretched into weeks. Summer came. Anastasia had her seventeenth birthday. There wasn’t much to celebrate, but the family still did not give up hope of rescue.
On July 4, Avdeyev and his drunken soldiers were replaced by the Secret Police. Their leader, Yakov Yurovsky, was not as boorish and insulting as his predecessor, but he was cold and apparently heartless. Determinedly brave until now, the family became afraid. They learned that the White Army, troops opposed to the Red Army of the Bolsheviks, were approaching Ekaterinburg. This might have seemed like good news, but Nicholas and Alexandra knew that if the city fell to the White Army, the Bolsheviks would have the Romanovs shot before they could be rescued.
Ten days later, the family sensed a change in the behavior of their captors. Something was about to happen.
Tuesday, July 16, passed like any other day. Late in the afternoon, Tsar Nicholas and the four grand duchesses went for a walk in the garden. By 10:30, the family had all gone to bed. Shortly after midnight on July 17, the head of the Secret Police woke them and ordered them to dress and go downstairs. They did as they were told. Anastasia carried her dog, Jimmy. The tsar carried Alexei, and someone else brought Alexei’s spaniel, Joy. The guards crowded them into a basement room with Dr. Botkin and some of the family’s servants. Nicholas asked for chairs for Alexandra and Alexei. The chairs were brought.
Eleven executioners entered. The shooting began.
By early morning, all were dead — Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, Alexei, their friends, and their servants. The bodies were carted away and destroyed with acid so that the remains would not be found.
A total of nineteen members of the Romanov family, including Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Anastasia’s aunt Ella, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. A few survived; one was Anastasia’s grandmother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, who in the spring of 1919 left Russia by ship for England. She never returned. The dowager empress died in 1928.
But the story of this tragic family refused to die. For years a myth persisted that Anastasia somehow managed to survive the executioners’ bullets and bayonets (the jewels sewn into the women’s corsets were believed to have caused some of the bullets to bounce off) and that she had escaped from the House of Special Purpose and from Russia itself. During the 1920s several young women came forward, each claiming to be the lost grand duchess. (There were rumors that the imperial family had hidden vast amounts of wealth in Europe, money that might be claimed by a survivor.) A woman named Anna Anderson succeeded in convincing many people that she was indeed Anastasia Nicholaievna Romanov. Anna Anderson died in the 1960s, before DNA testing could prove or disprove her claim. Books and movies about Anastasia’s miraculous survival have helped keep the myth alive.
Eventually, though, remains of the victims were discovered. Extensive testing has proved that they are those of the Romanovs and their servants. Still, not all of the imperial family has been accounted for: Alexei and one of the grand duchesses is missing. Scientists disagree about whether the missing girl is Marie or Anastasia. On July 17, 1998, the eightieth anniversary of their assassination, the remains of the Romanovs were finally buried in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, where nearly every Russian tsar and tsaritsa since the time of Peter the Great has been laid to rest.
The Russia ruled by Nicholas II was enormous, the largest country in the world, extending from the Arctic Ocean on the north to the Black Sea on the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. Across this vast continent were scattered the tsar’s 150 million subjects, from poor, illiterate peasants to noble families of great wealth.
The word
tsar
(sometimes spelled
czar
) means “emperor” and comes from Caesar, the title given to the emperors of ancient Rome. The tsar’s power over rich and poor alike was absolute. The first Russian prince to call himself tsar of Russia was a man who later became known as Ivan the Terrible. He ruled as tsar from 1547 to 1584.
Needing a wife, Ivan summoned two thousand young women to be paraded past him. Out of them he chose a girl from a wealthy family in Moscow. Her name was Anastasia Romanov. Not long after they married, Anastasia died, and Ivan was so overcome with grief that he went mad. He was known to carry an iron staff, which he used to spear anyone who happened to anger him. Sixty thousand people were tortured to death while he watched, and he burned many villages to the ground. In a fit of rage, he fatally stabbed his favorite son.
The period following Ivan’s death was filled with confusion. Many people claimed the throne. Finally, the national assembly decided to elect a new tsar. The only candidate on whom they could agree was Ivan’s grand-nephew, a sixteen-year-old boy named Michael Romanov. In 1613, Michael became the founder of the Romanov dynasty.
Several generations later, in 1682, Peter I came to power. Nearly seven feet tall, he was known as Peter the Great and was a powerful man in many ways. He wanted to modernize Russia by opening the country to progressive European ideas. With this in mind, he built St. Petersburg, designed to be a European-style city. The Great Palace at Peterhof was built in imitation of Versailles in France.
Peter the Great also had a bad side: He threatened to cut off the head of anyone caught sleeping with his boots on, because that showed the person was backward, not interested in modernizing Russia. Sometimes he pulled out the teeth of subjects who displeased him!
Peter’s grandson, Peter III, later married a German princess named Sophie, who changed her name to Catherine and forced her husband to abdicate so that she could rule. Under Catherine II, called Catherine the Great, Russia became a major world power in the eighteenth century. But the tsars were still harsh, and the peasants remained trapped in lives of wretched poverty while the aristocrats accumulated more and more wealth.
Over the next century, attempts were made to bring reforms to Russia that would improve the lot of ordinary citizens. But after a terrorist’s bomb killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881, his successor, Alexander III, began a reign that undid many of the reforms. This was the father of Nicholas, who would become Russia’s next, and last, tsar in 1894.
When Alexander III died of kidney disease, Nicholas was twenty-six years old and completely unprepared to rule. He had neither the training, the talent, nor the desire to assume such responsibility, yet he believed that he was ordained by God to fulfill his destiny. In time both destiny and responsibility overwhelmed him.
Soon after his father’s unexpected death, Nicholas married a German princess, Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Following a year of mourning, the couple was crowned in a five-hour ceremony in Assumption Cathedral on May 14 (May 26), 1896. The day after the coronation, a half million people rushed to a nearby park to celebrate. Fanned by rumors of shortages of food and drink, a panic swept through the crowd. Hundreds died in the ensuing mayhem. The decision of the imperial couple to go ahead with the coronation ball despite the tragedy was remembered years later as a sign of the heartlessness of “Bloody Nicholas” and “the German woman.”
Four grand duchesses were born to the imperial couple before there was an heir at last — Alexei Nicholaievitch. From his birth there were deep concerns about the health of the tsarevitch. Like many of Queen Victoria’s descendants, Alexei had inherited hemophilia, a genetic disease that affects chiefly males, passed on by mothers to their sons. Hemophiliacs have no clotting factor in their blood, meaning that even a minor injury can result in blood pooling in the joints and internal organs, causing terrible pain, crippling, swelling, and death. Not much could be done medically for Alexei at that time. His worried parents did their best to protect him from injury and, at the same time, keep his serious condition a secret from the Russian people.
It was during one of Alexei’s early attacks that Father Grigory, known as Rasputin, began to grow in influence in the imperial family. Born Grigory Efimovitch, the son of a peasant in a Siberian village, he was nicknamed Rasputin (meaning “dissolute”) by his neighbors for his wanton behavior. He left his wife and children and moved to St. Petersburg, where he passed himself off as a holy man.
Anya Vyrubova first made his acquaintance and, impressed by his mystical powers, introduced him to tsaritsa Alexandra. Although the tsaritsa regarded Father Grigory as a miracle worker because Alexei’s condition always improved after the holy man had spoken to him, it is more likely that Rasputin used a kind of hypnosis to calm the suffering child and his hysterical mother. Soon Alexandra began to depend on Father Grigory for advice of all kinds.
The tsaritsa, who took the name Alexandra when she converted to the Russian Orthodox faith before her coronation, was not a popular figure. Unlike her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, Alexandra was not a sociable person and disliked the grand balls and public appearances that were a vital part of Russian court society. Tsarevitch Alexei’s illness gave Alexandra more cause to withdraw, adding to the public’s disapproval.
During those same years, the discontent of the Russian people grew stronger. In 1904, lured by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, his wife’s cousin, the tsar had allowed Russia to become involved in a war against Japan.
Most of Russia’s ships were sunk in a single day, and she lost the war. In January 1905, unarmed workers marched to the tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to demand reforms. Troops fired on the peaceful crowd, and hundreds of marchers were killed or wounded. The revolutionary movement gained strength, and in October 1905, a strike paralyzed the country. Under pressure, Tsar Nicholas allowed the formation of the Duma, an elected assembly, with the ability to pass on proposed laws. But the tsar wasn’t used to the idea of sharing power, and he dissolved the Duma, later reinstating it.
Grand Duchess Anastasia was born into an exotic world of almost unlimited wealth and privilege that cushioned her and her sisters and brother from harsh reality. It was not until Russia entered World War I that their bubble burst and the outside world intruded. As Russia’s wartime losses mounted, and hunger and privation became widespread, dislike of the Romanovs intensified accordingly. Nicholas’s misguided attempts to take over the leadership of the military, leaving his wife to manage the affairs of a vast and complex country, further weakened Russia.
In March 1917, the people revolted, staging violent riots and strikes. Realizing he no longer had support, Tsar Nicholas abdicated his throne; the Duma set up what was named the Provisional Government. Eight months later, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the Provisional Government and formed a new government headed by Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, the Bolsheviks moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. It was under orders from the Bolshevik revolutionaries that the tsar and his family were murdered. Their deep love of Russia and its people failed to save them.
The Bolsheviks later became the Communist Party that took over Russia and other republics to form the Soviet Union. Until 1991, when it broke apart, the Soviet Union was the world’s most powerful Communist country.
Today, history views Alexandra as a lonely, frightened woman who listened to the wrong advice: Rasputin’s. Nicholas is remembered as a weak ruler, a kindly man who also listened to bad advice: his wife’s. And we are left to wonder what kind of woman Anastasia would have become had her life not ended so early and so tragically.
The Romanov ruling family was one of the richest of its time in lands and wealth. The dynasty began with Mikhail (Michael) Feodorovitch Romanov (1596–1645), a young aristocrat who was elected tsar of Russia on January 13, 1613. The dynasty ended with Michael Romanov’s descendant Nicholas II, who linked together two powerful royal houses when he married a German princess, Alexandra (Alix) Feodorovna, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. The chart illustrates the lineage of the Romanovs and their royal relatives through marriage beginning with the last tsar and tsaritsa’s parents. The crown symbol indicates those who ruled. Double lines represent marriages; single lines indicate parentage. Dates of birth and death are noted.
Alexander III:
The father of Nicholas II, he ruled as tsar of Russia for thirteen years until his death in 1894.
Marie Feodorovna:
Nicholas’s mother, born Princess Dagmar (called Minnie), was the youngest daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark and his queen, Louise of Hesse-Cassel.
Nicholas II:
He was the eldest of the five children of Tsar Alexander III and Empress Marie Feodorovna. Born on May 6 (May 19), 1868, he was crowned tsar on May 14 (May 26), 1896. Nicholas II was assassinated with his wife and children in the early hours of July 17, 1918, in the Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk) in the Urals of western Russia.
Alexandra Feodorovna:
Was born Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse on May 25 (June 7), 1872. She was the sixth child of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Alice, and Ludwig (Louis) of Hesse-Darmstadt, then one of the German states. She converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and became Alexandra. She married Nicholas II on November 14 (November 26), 1894, in the chapel of the Winter Palace.
Children of Tsar Nicholas II and
Tsaritsa Alexandra:
Grand Duchess Olga Nicholaievna:
The eldest daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, she was born on November 3 (November 16), 1895.
Grand Duchess Tatiana Nicholaievna:
The second daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, born on May 29 (June 11), 1897. She was her mother’s favorite companion.
Grand Duchess Maria Nicholaievna:
Born June 14 (June 27), 1899, she was known as Marie or Mashka.
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaievna:
She was born June 5 (June 18), 1901, and throughout her life was the favorite of her grandmother Marie Feodorovna.
Alexis Nicholaievitch:
Known as Alexei, the tsarevitch was born on July 30 (August 12), 1904. Called Baby and Sunbeam by his parents, just weeks after his birth, they realized he had hemophilia, a blood disorder transmitted only to sons from a mother who has inherited the gene. The family kept this a secret as much as possible.