Anastasia Romanov: The Russian princess who defied death?

Anastasia was born on 18 June 1901 (5 June according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia), and spent her early years in the grand residences of the Romanov family, including the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, where golden chandeliers, velvet-covered furniture, and decorative drapery provided a striking contrast to the social unrest that brewed outside the palace walls.

As the fourth daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, she lived a life filled with royal ceremonies that were based on centuries of imperial tradition, but her personality often disrupted the expectations of the royal decorum.

She was known affectionately within her family as “Shvybzik,” a nickname meaning “little imp,” and Anastasia displayed a playful sense of humour and boundless energy that surprised many who expected a more reserved princess.

Household staff, tutors, and even foreign visitors frequently commented on her quick wit and her ability to entertain.

She often used imitation, wordplay or tricks to command attention. She once imitated a visiting dignitary’s limp so convincingly that even her siblings burst into laughter.

Her unpredictable behaviour sometimes frustrated her governesses, yet it livened the household, where her three older sisters, Olga, Tatiana, and Maria, followed routines more carefully. 

Education in the Romanov household included daily lessons in languages, religion, history, geography, and the arts, which tutors delivered in both Russian and foreign languages.

Pierre Gilliard was a Swiss tutor who served the family for many years, who recorded Anastasia’s mischievous nature in his memoirs.

Formal instruction in embroidery, piano, and court etiquette was supported by exercise, games, and holidays aboard the imperial yacht Standart, which had a cinema, a piano, and comfortable cabins.

They also travelled to the Livadia Palace in Crimea, where the children remained under heavy guard, but within their inner circle the family behaved casually and ate simple meals, played card games, or took part in amateur theatricals.

Throughout the First World War, Anastasia and her sisters regularly spent time at military hospitals, where they rolled bandages and spoke with wounded soldiers.

However, only Olga and Tatiana trained as Red Cross nurses, as Anastasia and Maria, considered too young for certification, so assisted mainly with morale visits and light duties.

Their brother Alexei, the long-awaited heir to the throne, suffered from hemophilia, which often caused the family great worry and placed additional emotional strain on the girls.

However, the war’s increasing toll on Russia did not stop the Romanov children from continuing to live in relative comfort and isolation, largely protected from the anger that was growing among the working classes and from the stability that was declining within the imperial regime.

For Anastasia, who was sixteen when her world collapsed, life had previously offered mainly privilege and affection together with the companionship of siblings who remained emotionally close. 

Following the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne under pressure from military commanders and Duma leaders who no longer believed the tsar could retain control.

The Provisional Government initially allowed the Romanovs to remain at the Alexander Palace under house arrest, but concerns about their safety and potential escape led to their relocation to Tobolsk in Siberia, far from the political unrest of Petrograd.

By the time the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, the family had become a problem.

In April 1918, they were moved to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where their conditions deteriorated and the guards grew increasingly hostile. 

As White Army forces advanced toward the city in July, local Bolshevik officials feared that Nicholas and his family might be rescued, reportedly prompting a decision to execute them before any attempt could be made.

On the night of 16–17 July 1918, Yakov Yurovsky, the man in charge of the guards, assembled the family and their four loyal attendants, who were Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, valet Alexei Trupp, cook Ivan Kharitonov, and maid Anna Demidova, in the basement under the pretext of an emergency evacuation.

After reading a brief statement, he and his men opened fire. According to the official report, bullets ricocheted off the daughters’ clothing because the jewels, which were sewn into their bodices, apparently acted as makeshift armour.

Yurovsky later reported that 70 to 75 shots were fired during the disorderly execution.

The room quickly filled with smoke, confusion, and screams, and the executioners, who had not prepared for this resistance, apparently resorted to bayonets and close-range shots to finish the job.

Several of the bodies showed evidence of blunt-force trauma and repeated stabbings, which suggested some panic and disorder among the guards.

By dawn, all members of the imperial family, along with their doctor, cook, valet, and maid, had believed to have been killed.

Their bodies were transported by truck to a forest outside the city, to a location known as Pig’s Meadow (Porosenkov Log), which the executioners used to bury them hastily in shallow graves and reportedly tried to hide with acid and fire.

The Soviet government announced Nicholas II’s execution on 18 July 1918, but had delayed confirmation of the deaths of Alexandra and the children.

They did not publicly acknowledge the full extent of the execution for many years, and official Soviet sources remained vague or silent until after the fall of the USSR. 

In the absence of photographs, death certificates, or direct witness accounts accepted by international authorities, speculation about Anastasia’s possible survival spread widely throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Some reports circulated that one of the daughters had groaned or moved after the gunfire, and others claimed that a sympathetic guard had smuggled Anastasia out of Yekaterinburg under the cover of darkness.

Over time, these rumours took on a life of their own, especially as refugees from Russia dispersed across Europe and carried personal tales of royal survival.

Some stories placed Anastasia in convents or hospitals, where she reportedly suffered from amnesia and required time to recover before she could recall her true identity.

Others described secret escapes aboard merchant vessels or into rural Siberian villages, where she allegedly lived under an assumed name. 

These accounts found some support because the Soviet authorities refused to release official information about the execution and because the Romanov family’s bodies remained missing for decades.

Nicholas Sokolov, a White Army investigator, had compiled the first major report into the family's fate, and had collected several witness testimonies and items such as charred bone fragments and jewels that had been hidden in the soil.

His findings were published in 1924 and concluded that the family had been killed but had initially failed to locate all the bodies.

Some Western newspapers eagerly published speculation, sometimes treating it as fact, and royalists and monarchist émigrés, desperate to preserve a connection to the old regime, embraced any possibility that a legitimate Romanov had survived.

Authors and journalists turned the narrative into a romantic drama, complete with hidden identities, dangerous rescues, and the promise that the lost princess might one day return to claim her birthright.

The more the Soviet government denied access to records or locations, the stronger the myth grew. 

Among the many women who declared themselves to be Anastasia, Anna Anderson, who had been found in a Berlin asylum in 1920 following a suicide attempt, initially refused to reveal her identity and stood out to many observers as the most persistent and convincing.

Over the next two years, she began to claim that she was Anastasia Romanov and that she had escaped the Ipatiev House massacre with the help of a Bolshevik guard who had smuggled her out of the city hidden beneath his coat.

Anderson attracted the support of several Romanov relatives and former palace staff who believed she bore a physical resemblance to Anastasia and demonstrated detailed knowledge of imperial court life.

However, many others, particularly from the Hessian branch of the family, dismissed her story as false and argued that her resemblance could be explained by her status as Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who had vanished from her job and whose history matched Anderson’s psychiatric records. 

Legal proceedings dragged on for decades, and Anderson attempted to claim the Romanov inheritance in German courts.

The case, which began in 1938, remained unresolved until a 1970 court ruling in Germany declared that Anderson had not proven her claim.

The judgment left open the legal question of identity without affirming or denying her assertion.

Meanwhile, Anderson married an American academic, Jack Manahan, in 1968 and lived in the United States with a small circle of believers who continued to promote her claim.

Several other women came forward with similar stories, including Eugenia Smith from Chicago, who published a memoir in 1963, and Nadezhda Vasilyeva in Siberia, though none received the same level of support or publicity.

By the late twentieth century, historians remained divided, and the question of Anastasia’s fate remained unanswered. 

In 1991, a group of Russian historians, who acted with official approval, excavated a shallow grave in a forest outside Yekaterinburg that had originally been discovered in 1979 by researchers who had kept the finding secret under Soviet rule.

Inside, they found nine sets of human remains, which forensic experts in Russia and Britain identified as likely members of the Romanov family and their attendants.

Dr. Pavel Ivanov led the DNA analysis in Russia, while British testing was carried out at the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham.

Missing from the grave were initially the bodies of Alexei and one of the daughters, either Maria or Anastasia.

Forensic experts could not distinguish between the two due to identical maternal DNA, though later analysis of height and bone structure suggested that the missing daughter was likely Maria.

Mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones was compared with samples from living relatives of the Romanovs, including Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal line matched that of Alexandra and her children.

Results identified Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters. 

The absence of Anastasia and Alexei from the grave site kept speculation alive, particularly among some who had supported Anna Anderson or doubted the official Soviet narrative.

In 2007, Russian archaeologists discovered a second grave, located approximately seventy metres from the first, which contained burned and fragmented bones.

Scientific analysis showed that the remains appeared to belong to a boy and a girl, consistent in age with Alexei and one of his sisters.

A second round of mitochondrial DNA testing largely confirmed the match, and in 2009, both Russian and international experts concluded that all seven members of the imperial family had died on the same night in July 1918.

Additional tests on tissue samples from Anna Anderson, preserved in hospital archives, had shown no clear genetic relation to the Romanovs, and had confirmed that she shared markers with a known relative of Franziska Schanzkowska. 

In 1998, the Romanovs' bodies were reburied in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in a state ceremony attended by President Boris Yeltsin.

As of 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church has still not approved the burial of the remaining two bodies due to ongoing disputes.

Though the scientific evidence had resolved the question of her fate, Anastasia’s story, recast over decades of myth and longing, would continue to capture much of the public imagination.