The Impostor

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
The Romanovs were executed July, 1918. The Russian royal family were: Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina, Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, Alexi, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. In the aftermath of the massacre, there was a cloud of mystery and speculation, and the horror of the family's last few days were kept from the press. There was also doubt if the youngest, Anastasia and Alexei had been killed, and instead were spared.

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Ipatiev House

After being moved from house to house, by May 1918, the royal family was sent to Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, which was under Bolshevik control. They called it “The House of Special Purposes”. It was owned by Yakov Yurovsky, a dedicated Marxist and Bolshevik with close links to the Cheka — the secret police force run by the revolutionaries. The Romanovs spent their last 78 days there.

European newspapers reported that Anastasia had somehow escaped the fate that befell her family in the cellar of the House of Special Purpose. The Russian government would not acknowledge the whole family had been shot until 1926, fueling hopes that not all the royal family were executed. The most legendary claimant to being a survivor was a woman who appeared in 1920, saying she was Anastasia. Her name was Anna Anderson, and she was only one of many who claimed to be the last Grand Duchess.

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Grand Duchess Anastasia opposite woman calling herself Anna Anderson

It all started February 1920, when a young woman with no identification was pulled from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. Without anything on her person to lend a clue as to who she was or where she came from, the authorities nicknamed her "Madame Unknown" and took her to Dalldorf Asylum. The mystery deepened when she refused to speak the first six months at the asylum. She had scars all over her body, and when she finally spoke, she had a Russian accent.

According to the book A Romanov Fantasy (2007), there was another inmate named Clara Peuthert who had been admitted in 1921, after accusing her neighbors of stealing her money. Prior to WWI she'd lived in Russia. Clara would say to Anna, "Your face is familiar to me, you do not come from ordinary circles." Anna would put her finger to her lips in a shushing motion.

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Cellar of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where Romanov family were killed

In October of that year, Clara showed Madame Unknown a newspaper headlined: "The Truth about the Murder of the Tsar." It featured a portrait of the Grand Duchess with the caption: 'Is One of the Daughters Alive?' Clara then went on to tell others that Madame Unknown was Tatiana, even after she was released in January 1922, despite the fact she had little resemblance to any of the Romanov daughters.

Exiles from the Russian court came to the asylum to see the supposed Grand Duchess. Some were convinced she was Tatiana, others were at least intrigued, however Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, a lady-in-waiting to Tsarina Alexandra declared, "she's too short for Tatiana." It was after this that Madame Unknown specified she didn't say she was Tatiana, eventually intimating she was Anastasia, and taking the name of Anna Anderson.

She claimed that after being gravely wounded, she was rescued from the murder scene by a soldier named Alexander Tschaikovsky, whom she eventually married and lived with in Bucharest until his death, at which time she made her way to Berlin where exhausted and shaken, she attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge. ​

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Franziska Schanzkowska c.1925

Anna Anderson was eventually released from the Dalldorf Asylum, and went on to meet many of the acquaintances and relatives of the Romanov family. She spent the next few years living in the homes of her supporters, because there were many she convinced of her secret identity. During these years Lenin refused to confirm the Romonov family had been killed; only that Tsar Nicholas II had been executed. This left the fate of the rest of family in limbo, officially that is.

Despite her supporters, immediate family of the Romanovs who met Anna were convinced that she was not Anastasia. Both aunts, Princess Irene of Prussia and Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna met with Anna, and both came to the conclusion she was not Anastasia. The Dowager Empress refused to meet with Anna, but as painful as it was, she believed the reports that her son and the entire family had been executed. This included her granddaughter Anastasia. There were other telltale signs that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia. She didn't know how to speak English, French or Russian all which the real Anastasia knew how to converse in fluently.

In 1927, the Grand Duke of Hesse, Tsarina Alexandra's brother, completed an investigation that identified Anna as a factory worker from Poland named Franziska Schanzkowska. Despite the proof provided, others continued to support her in Germany and the United States.

Throughout the years, Anna Anderson was in and out of mental hospitals. She began a suit in a German court in 1938 to prove her identity. The case dragged on until 1970, when the court decided that she had not proven herself to be Anastasia.

In 1968 she came to America, where she met and married an American history professor and genealogist, John Eacott "Jack" Manahan. She was 72 years old, and he was 21 years her junior. Jack Manahan was also a millionaire who had paid for Anna's fare from Germany. 

Another man who was courting her, was a Russian émigré named Gleb Botkin. His father Dr. Evgenij Botkin had been murdered with the Imperial family. He said that Anna was indeed Anastasia, his childhood friend, and he had orchestrated her visit to Charlottesville. He was a peculiar character himself. He had established the Church of Aphrodite in 1938, and called himself the Most Reverend Archbishop.

Upon her death in 1984, Anderson's body was cremated, and her ashes were buried in the churchyard at Castle Seeon, Germany. Her memorial plaque at Castle Seeon, where her ashes were scattered, reads "Anastasia Manahan 1901-1984", even though her actual birth year was 1896.

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Anastasia movie poster c.1956

The 1956, movie Anastasia based on Anna's life earned Ingrid Bergman an Academy Award.

In 1979, under the guise of scientific research, geologists located three skulls in the area of Yekaterinburg, however the topic was still delicate and they were reburied until 1990, when Yeltsin agreed to a recovery of the remains.

Investigators found nine skeletons in one grave. DNA from the Romanov bones were compared with that from Prince Philip, and were found to be a match. Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Prince Philip's mother, Alice of Battenberg, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria as well.

They had the bones of Nicholas II, Alexandra, his wife and three of the children. After the bones were assembled it was found that two bodies were missing, those of Alexis and one of his sisters. They also recovered the remains of three servants and the family doctor.

​Anna Anderson died on February 12, 1984. In 1992, locks of Anna's hair were found in an envelope in a bookstore in Chapel Hill. It was inside a book once owned by Anna's husband, which she had sold. A dealer going through the book caught an envelope with 'Anastasia's Hair' written on the outside. He sold it to Susan Burkhart for $20. Six strands were examined at Penn State. It was concluded the owner of the hair could not be related to the Tsarina.

Then another source of Anna's DNA was found with a tissue sample kept at Martha Jefferson Hospital, which was retained due to a routine surgery she underwent. The sample was sent to the British scientist who had tested the Romanov bones. A blood sample was taken from Karel Maucher a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska. In 1994, his results were that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia, and there was a 100% match to Karel Maucher. It confirmed that Anna's real identity was Franziska Schanzkowska as proven in 1927.

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Romanov remains c.1991

In 1998, the royal remains were interred in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg where Russia's tsars had historically been laid to rest.

In 2007, Sergei Plotnikov, an amateur historian came upon a small hollow covered with nettles. He belonged to a group who would spend their summer weekends looking for the lost Romanovs. He, along with a companion, started to dig and found bone fragments which included a piece of pelvis and a skull. By the size they could tell it came from a child. In total 44 different fragments were found. They also found pieces of Japanese ceramic bottles - used to carry sulfuric acid poured on the corpses.

​Archaeologists confirmed they belonged to Prince Alexei and Princess Anastasia. The site was six miles north of Yekaterinburg, where the other bodies were discovered. It appeared to match the location described in the memoirs of Yurovsky, the Bolshevik executioner in charge of the Romanovs’ captivity. He described where the bodies of nine victims were doused with sulfuric acid and buried along a road, and Alexei’s body and one of his sister’s bodies was burned and left in a pit nearby.

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