Anastasia Nikolayevna of Russia

Anastasia Nikoláyevna Románova (Russian: Анастаси́я Никола́евна Рома́нова, transliterated Anastasíya Nikoláyevna Románova; according to Russian rules it is pronounced as a plain word: «Anastasía»), born on June 18, 1901 (June 5 according to the Julian calendar) and died on July 17, 1918, was the fourth daughter of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Imperial Russia, and of his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna. From her birth she carried the title of Grand Duchess of Russia.

Anastasia was the younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Maria, and the older sister of Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov, Tsarevich of Russia. She was executed along with the rest of her family in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918 by a Bolshevik group. The legend that Anastasia had survived the Russian Revolution lasted throughout the 20th century and many impostors claimed to be the Grand Duchess. The most famous of these was Anna Anderson, but despite the support of many who had known Anastasia, DNA tests of Anderson's hair and scarf revealed that she was not related to the Russian imperial family..

Biography

Childhood

Anastasia in 1904

Anastasia Nikolayevna was born on June 18, 1901 in Peterhof Palace, Russia, according to the Julian calendar, in force in that country until 1918. When Anastasia was born, her parents and the rest of her family were disappointed to have had a fourth daughter (after Olga, Tatiana and María). Her father, Tsar Nicholas II, did not immediately go to see his new daughter, as he decided to take a long walk to assimilate the fact that he had not produced a male heir. The newborn was given the name Anastasia, a name Very popular Christian among the Orthodox that means "resurrection". Some studies affirm that this name alluded to the release granted by his father, the tsar, to a group of students who had caused riots in Saint Petersburg and Moscow the previous winter in honor of his birth. literally, it would be that of a great princess, alluding to the fact that Anastasia, as an imperial highness, had a higher rank than the other European princesses, who were only royal highnesses. However, grand duchess is the most widely used form in Spanish and other languages when translating the rank of the daughters of Nicholas II of Russia.

The tsar's daughters were raised in the most austere manner possible. They slept on hard folding cots without pillows, except when they were sick; they took cold showers in the morning; They had the obligation to keep their rooms tidy and clean and to dedicate themselves to sewing to later sell the pieces in various acts of charity, as long as they were not busy with other tasks. Most of the household's inhabitants, including the servants, normally called the Grand Duchess by her first name and her patronymic, Anastasia Nikolayevna, and did not use her Imperial Highness title; they often used the French version of their name, “Anastasie”, or the Russian nicknames “Nastia”, “Nastás”, “Násteñka”, «Málenkaya», meaning "the youngest", or «shvíbzik», the Russian word for elf or imp, although some sources consider that this was not his nickname, but rather the name of one of his pets.

Anastasia (the last one on the right), from right to left next to Maria, Tatiana and Olga, 1906.

Living up to her nicknames, young Anastasia grew up a lively and energetic girl. She was described as short and stout, with blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair. Margaret Eagar, governess to the four grand duchesses, commented that young Anastasia was "the loveliest creature she had ever met". Very often described as a brilliant and highly talented girl, she could not handle the restrictions of study hours, according to her tutors Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes. Gibbes, Gilliard and bridesmaids Lili Dehn and Anna Výrubova described her as very lively, mischievous and a talented actress. Her witty and sharp comments often hurt sensibilities.

There are many testimonies about the behavior of young Anastasia that occasionally bordered on the unacceptable for contemporary customs. According to Gleb Botkin, son of court physician Yevgeny Botkin, assassinated along with the imperial family in Yekaterinburg, Anastasia "was largely responsible for most of the family's mischief and punishable acts, since in that aspect she was a true genius." He always tried to trick the servants or prank his tutors, committing pranks such as climbing to the top of a tree and refusing to come down, revealing typically childish behavior, or hitting his sister Tatiana with a large snowball hard enough. strength enough to leave her lying on the ground. A distant cousin, Princess Nina Gueorguiyevna, repeated that Anastasia "was as horrible and disgusting as the devil himself" and that she liked to deceive, hit and scratch her playmates, because Anastasia she felt insulted by the fact that Nina was taller than her despite being younger. She cared less than her sisters about her looks and appearance. Hallie Erminie Rives, American writer wife of a diplomat, explained how she saw a young Anastasia, only ten years old, eating chocolate bonbons without bothering to remove her long white opera gloves first, at the Opera House in Saint Petersburg.

A general pushes a cart with Anastasia, which makes the camera muecas, and his sister Maria. Courtesy: Beinecke Library.

Anastasia and her older sister, Maria, were known in the family as “the little couple”. The two girls shared a room, often wearing variations of the same dress, and spending most of their time together. The two older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, also shared a room and were called “the older couple”. The four sisters used to sign their letters with the acronym OTMA, the result of the initials of their first names.

Despite her vitality, Anastasia was not in good health. She suffered from hallux valgus (bunions), which affected both big toes, She also had a muscular problem in her back that required her to receive a massage twice a week. Her reluctance to her massages was such that she hid under closets or beds to avoid receiving them.

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna Romanova, Anastasia's paternal aunt, revealed in a belated interview that Anastasia's older sister, Maria, suffered a haemorrhage in 1914 while undergoing tonsil surgery. Her own mother, Tsarina Alexandra, had to order a cowering doctor to continue the operation. Olga Alexandrovna thought that the four girls were bleeding more than normal and believed that they carried the hemophilia gene, passed down from their mother, which could cause them to bleed heavily. Anastasia, like the rest of her family, adored and cared for his long-awaited brother, the Tsarevich of Russia Alexis, also called 'baby', who suffered from frequent bouts of hemophilia that came close to killing him several times.

Rasputin

Rasputín

Anastasia's mother, Tsarina Alexandra, blindly trusted the advice of Grigori Rasputin, a Russian peasant and wandering starets, reputed to be a holy man, whose prayers had supposedly eased pain many times. of young Alexis. Anastasia and her sisters were raised to view Rasputin as "our friend" and "confidant." In the fall of 1907, the girls' aunt, Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna Romanova, was taken by the tsar to the children's room to meet Rasputin. The Grand Duchess recalled: 'Anastasia, her sisters and her brother Alexis all wore long white nightgowns. Everyone seemed to like that man, they seemed comfortable with his presence.” Rasputin's complicity with the children was evident in many of the messages he sent them. In February 1909 he sent them a telegram in which he advised them to “Love all the immensity of God and his Creation, especially on this earth. The Mother of God was always busy sewing and picking flowers."

However, one of the girls' maids, Sophia Ivanovna Tiutcheva, was horrified in 1910 that Rasputin was allowed into the girls' rooms when they were wearing only a nightgown. Tsar Nicholas asked the monk to avoid entering those rooms in the future. The children, aware of the situation, feared that Tiucheva's words would make her mother angry. "I'm afraid that S.I. (Sofia Ivanovna Tiutcheva) say... bad things about our friend", Anastasia's older sister, Tatiana, wrote to her mother on March 8, 1910 (aged twelve) and added: "I hope our maid will be kind to our friend in the future." Shortly thereafter the Tsarina dismissed Tiutcheva.

Tiucheva reported what she saw to the rest of the imperial family. While Rasputin's visits to the girls were considered completely innocent by the monk, the rest of the family was shocked. Tiutcheva explained to Nicholas's sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia, that Rasputin would visit the girls, talk to them as they got ready for bed, and hug and caress them. Tiutcheva said that the girls had been instructed not to speak of the monk in his presence and to hide his visits to the rooms. On March 15, 1910 Xenia wrote that she could not understand «[...] the attitude of Álix (the tsarina) and the children towards that sinister Grigori Rasputin whom they considered almost like a saint, when he was nothing more than a vulgar jlyst».

The Alejandra and her four daughters, 1909.

In the spring of 1910, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, a royal maid, reported that Rasputin had raped her. Vishniákova said that the tsarina refused to believe her and that she insisted that "everything Rasputin does is holy." Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna stated that Vishniákova's accusations were immediately investigated, however "the young woman was caught in bed with a Cossack from the Imperial Guard". Vishniákova was prevented from approaching Rasputin and in 1913 she was fired from her.

Nevertheless, the rumors persisted, to the point that Rasputin was said to have seduced not only the Tsarina, but also the four Grand Duchesses. These rumors increased considerably when Rasputin himself released the letters that the Tsarina and his daughters sent him. "My dear, beautiful, my only friend," wrote Anastasia. "How I want to see you again. Today I dreamed of you. I always ask mom when you will come... I always think of you, darling, because you are so good to me...". four daughters and Ana Výrubova. Following the scandal, the tsar, despite strong opposition from his wife, ordered Rasputin to leave Saint Petersburg for a time, so he went on a pilgrimage to Palestine. According to rumors, the union between the imperial family and the monk continued until his assassination on December 17, 1916 (December 29 according to the Gregorian calendar). "Our Friend is very satisfied with our girls, he says that they have gone through hard trials for their age and that their souls are highly developed," Alejandra wrote to her husband Tsar Nicholas on December 6, 1916.

In his memoirs, A. A. Mordvinov wrote that the four grand duchesses were "visibly upset" by Rasputin's death and sat "with each other's arms" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms throughout the night in which they received the news. Mordvinov recalled that the girls were in a very bad mood and seemed to sense the political turmoil already brewing in Russia.Rasputin was buried with an icon, signed on its back by the Tsarina and her four daughters. Anastasia attended his funeral on December 21, 1916, and she and her family planned to build a church on the site of his grave.

World War I and Revolution

The great Duke Mary (left) and the great Duchess Anastasia together with wounded soldiers, 1915.

During World War I, Anastasia, along with her sister Maria, used to visit wounded soldiers in a private hospital located on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo (the Villa of the Tsars). The two teenagers, too young to belong to the Red Cross like her mother and her two older sisters, played with the soldiers to lift their spirits. Felix Dassel, who was hospitalized there, recalled that the young grand duchess "laughed like a squirrel" and that she walked so fast "that she always seemed about to stumble."

In February 1917, the Russian Revolution broke out, forcing Nicholas II to abdicate the throne. Anastasia and her family were placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, but given the proximity of the Bolshevik forces, Aleksandr Kerensky of the Provisional Government moved the family to Tobolsk in Siberia. After the Bolsheviks took control of most of Russia, Anastasia and her family were transferred to the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg.

The nervousness and uncertainty of captivity affected Anastasia more than the rest of her family. "Goodbye," she wrote to a friend of hers in the winter of 1917, "Don't forget us." In Tobolsk Anastasia wrote a misspelled essay for her English tutor on Evelyn Hope, a poem by Richard Browning about a young girl: "When she died, she was only 16 years old. Anastasia wrote. «There was a man who loved her without ever having seen her, but despite this he knew her well. And she had heard of him too. He could never tell her that he loved her and now she is dead... ».

From left to right, the great Duchess Olga Nikoláyevna, the Tsar Nicholas II, the great Duchess Anastasia Nikoláyevna and the great Duchess Tatiana Nikoláyevna in her captivity in Tobolsk in the winter of 1917. Courtesy: Beinecke Library.

In Tobolsk, she and her sisters hid jewelry inside their dresses to prevent it from being stolen, but guards searched Anastasia and her sisters Olga and Tatiana for the jewelry as they boarded the Rus, the ship to steamer that transported them to Yekaterinburg, where their parents and sister Maria were, in May 1918. Their English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, recalled hearing the grand duchesses cry and scream in fear and her own helplessness at not being able to help them. Pierre Gilliard spoke of his last meeting with the children in Yekaterinburg:

The sailor Nagorny, who took care of the little Alexis, passed in my window with the sick child in his arms, behind came the large duchess with suitcases and some personal effects. I tried to get close, but the sentinel made me back abruptly and made me get away from the carriage. I went back to the window. Tatiana Nikoláyevna appeared last, with her little dog and dragging a heavy brown suitcase. It was raining and I could see how his feet sank in the mud at every step he took. Nagorny tried to help her, but one of the commissars prevented her...

Less than two months later, on July 14, 1918, priests from Yekaterinburg prepared a special service for the family in which, they later said, they knelt during prayers to the dead, which was not their custom.

However, in the last months of her life, Anastasia tried to manage her captivity in the best possible way. Along with other members of the household, she organized games to delight her parents during the spring of 1918. According to Sidney Gibbes, Anastasia's performances "caused the rest of the family to burst with laughter." In May 1917, in a letter from Tobolsk to his sister Maria in Yekaterinburg, described a moment of happiness despite sadness, loneliness and concern for his sick brother: «We were swinging, and we couldn't stop laughing, the fall was so wonderful! I explained it so many times to my sisters that they got tired, but I could have explained it a thousand times more... We had a great time! One could only shout for joy.» In her memoirs, one of the Ipatiev House guards, Aleksandr Strekotin, remembered Anastasia as a «very friendly and joyful» girl, while another guard said that she was «a lovely imp. She was mischievous and rarely looked tired. She liked to do comic numbers with the dogs, as if they were in a circus." However, another of the guards called Anastasia "offensive and a terrorist" and complained that some of her provocative comments caused tension among the soldiers..

For most historians, Anastasia was murdered along with the rest of her family on the morning of July 17, 1918 by firing squad. The extrajudicial execution was carried out by members of the Bolshevik secret police under the command of Yakov Yurovski.

The Execution

Last known photo of Anastasia, May 1918.

Following the Bolshevik takeover, Russia plunged into civil war. Negotiations for the release of the imperial family between the Bolsheviks (whose military arm was the Red Army) and the rest of the family, many of them senior members of European royal houses, were suspended. The advance of the White Movement, whose arm military was known as the White Army or White Guard, over Yekaterinburg left the Red Army in a precarious situation. The "reds" they knew that Yekaterinburg would fall due to the superiority and better preparation of the White Army. When the "whites" arrived in the city, the imperial family had simply disappeared. The most accepted theory was that they had been executed, as maintained by the White Movement researcher Nicholas Sokolov, based on the discovery of personal effects of the imperial family found in a shaft located in the Gánina Yama mine.

Yákov Mikhailovich Yurovski in 1918

The Yurovski Report, a report of the facts sent by Yurovski to his Bolshevik superiors after the execution, was found in 1989 and reproduced in the book The Last Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky (1992). According to the report, the night of the execution the family was woken up and asked to get dressed. When they asked the reason, they were informed that they were going to be moved to a new location for their safety, because of the proximity of the White Army to Yekaterinburg and the violence that this could entail. Once dressed, the family and a small circle of servants and assistants (doctor Sergei Botkin, the maid Anna Demidova, the cook Ivan Kharitonov, the footman Alexei Trupp and a dog) were taken to one of the basements of the house, and they were asked to wait on the pretext that they were going to have their photo taken before leaving. Alexandra and Alexis were allowed to sit in chairs, at the Tsarina's request, on the condition that they were watched by guards. Minutes later, the executioners commanded by Yurovski entered the room. Without preamble he raised his revolver and declared to the tsar that the Russian people had sentenced him to death. The tsar managed to stammer: "what?" and he turned to his family at the moment when Yurovski shot him point-blank in the head. As the tsar falls dead, the tsarina and her daughter Olga try to make the sign of the cross, but are killed with the first burst of the enforcers, being shot in the head. The rest of the imperial family is killed with the next blast, except for Ana Demídova, Alejandra's maid. Demidova survived the initial blast, but she was quickly bayoneted against one of the cellar walls, while she tried to protect herself with a pillow, stuffed inside with jewels and precious stones.

The Yurovski Report added that once the smoke from the shots made it possible to see the result of the execution more clearly, it was discovered that some of the executioners' bullets had become embedded in the corsets of some of the grand duchesses. This was because the jewels and precious stones that the girls had sewn into their clothes, to prevent their captors from removing them, had inadvertently served as armor against bullets. Yurovski wrote that Anastasia and Maria huddled against a wall with their hands on their heads, before being shot. However, another guard, Piotr Yermakov, explained to his wife that Anastasia had been finished off with bayonets. As the bodies were carried out, one or more of the girls began to cry, and were finished off with blows to the head, Yurovski wrote.

Rumors of survival

After the execution of the Imperial family, a rumor spread about Anastasia's possible survival and eventual escape. Anna Anderson, the most famous grand duchess pretender, claimed that she had passed herself off as dead among the bodies of her family and servants and was able to escape thanks to the help of a compassionate guard who rescued her when he saw that she was still alive. alive. Anderson was one of at least ten women who claimed to be Anastasia. Some lesser known were Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilieva and Eugenia Smith. Two young women claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria were found by a priest in the Ural Mountains, where they lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964, buried under the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolayevna.

These rumors of survival were fueled by several contemporary reports of searches of trains and houses by soldiers and the Bolshevik secret police looking for Anastasia Romanova. During her brief imprisonment In Perm in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna, wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioan Konstantinovich of Russia, explained that a guard brought a girl named Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the tsar's daughter.. When Yelena Petrovna refused, the guard took her away again. Other witnesses claimed to have seen Anastasia, her mother, and her sisters in Perm after the murder, although this is now considered to be nothing more than an unheard-of rumor. no tangible evidence. A report, more credible by some historians, claims that eight witnesses saw a young woman being captured by armed guards as she tried to flee from platform 37 of a railway station north-west of Perm, in September 1918. The witnesses cited were Maxim Grigoriev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor Sitnikov, Iván Kuklín and Matryona Kukliná, Vasily Riábov, Ustinia Baránkina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin, a doctor who treated the girl after the incident. Some of these witnesses identified the girl as Anastasia when White Army detectives were shown photos of the Grand Duchess. Dr. Utkin also explained to White Army detectives that the wounded girl, whom he treated at the Cheka office in Perm, told him: "I am the sovereign's daughter, Anastasia." Utkin obtained a prescription from a pharmacy for a patient named "N", guarded by the secret police. Later, White Army detectives would find records of that recipe. During the same period, in mid-1918, numerous young men pretended to be members of the Romanov family who had escaped the massacres. Boris Solósiev, husband of one of Rasputin's daughters, Maria, defrauded important Russian families by asking them for money so that a false Romanov could flee to China. Solósiev also found numerous young women willing to pose as one of the grand duchesses to benefit from the families he had defrauded.

However, some theories suggest that there was a possibility that one or more guards could help a survivor. Yakov Yurovski had ordered the guards to report to his office to return the items stolen after the execution. It is pointed out that for a long period of time the bodies remained unattended in the truck that would transport them, in the basement or in the corridors of the house. It is also pointed out that several soldiers, who had not participated in the massacre and who had shown some empathy towards the grand duchesses, could have been in the basement with the bodies.

During a session of the trial held in Germany, between 1964 and 1967, to prove the true identity of Anna Anderson, the Viennese tailor Heinrich Kleibenzetl, who lived and worked opposite the Ipatiev house, testified that he was able to see a badly injured Anastasia immediately after the Yekaterinburg massacre, on July 17, 1918. The young woman was being cared for by her landlady, Anna Boudin, in a house located just opposite the Ipatiev House. According to Peter Kurth, in his book Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (Anderson) , Kleibenzetl declared that he heard shots coming from the Ipatiev House and one of the girls shouting "mom", and he ran away. thence. He spent an hour and a half walking through the town and when he returned he saw how her landlady filled a bucket with water: "Don't go into your room," he told her, and then told her "My God, I can trust you. It's Anastasia, the grand duchess, she's in your room. She is hurt. I'm trying to get her to drink some tea ». Kleibenzetl told her that he would help her and went up the stairs to her room: "The lower part of her body was covered in blood, her eyes were closed and she was pale as a sheet," she declared. We washed her chin, Frau Anushka and I, and the girl moaned. She must have broken bones. And she then she opened her eyes for a minute. » The girl remained in the house for three days, until the same Red Guard who had brought her took her away again. Kleibenzetl never heard from her again.

Kleibenzetl used to bring clothes to the Ipatiev house and had seen the grand duchesses there, though he never spoke to them. In his statement, he stressed that the injured girl was "one of the women" he had seen walking through the courtyard of the Ipatiev house, but that he did not recognize whether she was Anastasia or someone else.

News also came from Bulgaria of the possible survival of Anastasia and her little brother Alexis. In 1953 Peter Zamiatkin, an alleged member of the Russian imperial family guard, explained to a 16-year-old boy, who was convalescing in hospital with him, that he took Anastasia and her brother Alexis to their hometown near Odessa, following the tsar's orders. After the murder of the rest of his family, Zamiatkin would have taken the children by boat from Odessa to Alexandria. The alleged "Anastasia" and "Alexis" they would have lived under false names in the Bulgarian town of Gabarevo, near Kazanlak. The Bulgarian Anastasia called herself Eleonora Albértovna Kruger and died in 1954.

Another version defends that the Princess fled with part of her custody to Argentina, settling in the town of El Colorado, province of Formosa.

Anna Anderson

The possible survival of Anastasia is one of the great legends of the 20th century, with Anna Anderson being considered the creator of the myth. In 1922, rumors that one of the grand duchesses or even the entire family had survived led to the appearance in Germany of a woman calling herself Anna Anderson. She was found about to commit suicide on the Spree river bridge in Berlin (Germany), two years after the massacre. She was committed unidentified to an institution for the mentally ill, where two years later she claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, who had been pronounced dead in Yekaterinburg. There was always confusion as to Anna Anderson's true identity due to her supposed knowledge of Anastasia which, it was said, only the true Grand Duchess could know. Some relatives of the Romanovs stated that Anna was probably the grand duchess, but others were never convinced. The battle to learn her true identity became the longest trial in German history, beginning in 1938 and officially closed in 1970. The final verdict established that Anna Anderson could not provide sufficient evidence to prove that she was the Grand Duchess, although it was also established that Anastasia's death could not be confirmed as a proven fact.

Anna Anderson would die of pneumonia in 1984, her body being cremated. In 1994, using samples from a handkerchief of hers found in the hospital, along with the blood of Philip of Mountbatten, Prince of Edinburgh (who would be her distant relative), she had DNA tests done. According to Dr. Gil: "If we accept that these remains are those of Anna Anderson, then she Anna Anderson is not related to Tsar Nicholas II or Tsarina Alexandra." Comparing him with families on a list of missing persons in 1918 and 1920, it was discovered that his true identity was Franziska Schanzkowska, born in Pomerania (Poland) on December 16, 1896 and disappeared in March 1920 when she lost her memory working in a steel factory. Berlin. Finding her near a bridge in that city, he assumed Anastasia's stories that her husband had told him as if they were from her own life. He explained that the soldier who rescued her and later married her was the soldier Tschaikovsky (Russian-Polish), who would have been present at the Romanov massacre in 1918.

However, new forensic tests conducted in 1994, comparing the faces and ears of Anastasia and Anderson, following an identification procedure, erroneously concluded that Anna Anderson was Anastasia. This evidence appeared in a British television documentary.

Following the discovery of the remains of the tsarevich and the other daughter in 2007, mitochondrial DNA testing of a tissue sample from Anna Anderson, collected during a medical procedure in 1979 and kept at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville (Virginia), it was compared with that of the Romanovs and their relatives, not coinciding with that of the Duke of Edinburgh or with the bones, which confirms that Anderson was not Anastasia. The DNA samples match that of Carl Maucher, Franziska Schanzkowska's nephew, indicating that Maucher and Anderson were maternally related and that Anderson was likely Schanzkowska. Subsequent tests carried out on Anderson's hair kept in a book by her husband, Jack Manahan, have produced the same results.

The grave of the Romanovs

Imperial monogram of the great duchess Anastasia Nikoláyevna

In 1991 the remains of those speculated to correspond to those of the imperial family were exhumed from a mass grave, located in a forest near Yekaterinburg. The grave had been discovered a decade earlier, in 1979, but the communist authorities, who still ruled Russia, had kept it hidden. Once the tomb was opened, the excavators discovered that instead of the eleven bodies that they intended to exhume (belonging to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alejandra, Alexis, the four Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia), the family doctor Yevgeny Botkin, his servant Alekséi Trupp, his cook Ivan Kharitonov, and Alejandra's maid, Ana Demídova) there were only remains of nine people. The bodies of Alexis and, according to forensic expert William Maples, of Anastasia were missing. However, Russian scientists claimed that the missing body was that of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna of Russia. The Russians identified Anastasia by using a computer program to compare photos of the young Anastasia with the skulls of the victims in the pit. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where bones were missing.

The missing body was thought by the Americans to be that of Anastasia as none of the female corpses in the grave showed signs of immaturity, such as underdeveloped clavicles or vertebrae or missing wisdom teeth, something they would have expected to find on a seventeen-year-old corpse. In 1998, when the remains of the imperial family were finally buried, a body of approximately 1.69 meters was buried under the name of Anastasia. Photographs of Anastasia and her sisters, taken up to six months before her murder, show that Anastasia was several inches shorter than them. Anastasia's mother commented in a letter, dated December 15, 1917, seven months before the massacre, on her sixteen-year-old daughter's short stature: "Anastasia, to her despair, is now very fat, like before Maria. She has a lot of fat around the waist and very short legs. I hope she grows up soon.” The Americans considered it highly unlikely that the teenager had grown so much in just a few months, since her real height must have been around 1.57 meters.

DNA analysis showed the remains belonged to the imperial family and their retainers, but the fate of the two missing children remained a mystery. Some historians theorize about what is described in the Yurovski Report, where it is stated that two of the bodies were disinterred from the main tomb and cremated in an unknown area. The reason for acting like this was because, if the White Army found the bodies, they would have doubts as to whether they were the remains of the royal family as they had a lower number of corpses. Other historians believe that the total cremation of two bodies in such a short time and with the means available to Yurovski and his men was totally impossible. Numerous inquiries in the same land in the following years to find the place of the presumed cremation of the two Romanov children were unsuccessful.

On August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two partial skeletons burned in the remains of a bonfire near Yekaterinburg, very similar to the place described by Yurovski in his memoirs. Archaeologists say the bodies belong to a boy between the ages of 10 and 13 at the time of his death and a teenager between the ages of 16 and 23. Anastasia was 17 years and one month old when she was murdered, while her sister Maria was 19 years and one month, and her brother Alexis was one month shy of her 14th birthday. Anastasia's older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, were 22 and 21 when they died. Next to the bodies were found "shells of sulfuric acid bottles, nails, remains of a wooden box and bullets of various calibers." The bones were found using metal detectors. After testing the two skeletons found, it was determined that they belonged to Anastasia and her brother.

Canonization

In the year 2000, Anastasia and her family were canonized as strastoterpets (Russian: страстототéрпец; unlike martyrs they are not to be killed just for their faith, but for his piety towards God) by the Russian Orthodox Church. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR) as martyrs. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized the Romanovs as martyrs along with other victims of oppression by the Soviet Union, sparking controversy in many churches. Opponents in 1981 argued that Nicholas II was a weak ruler and that his government decisions had led to the Bolshevik revolution, but a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad claimed that his church's martyrdom had nothing to do with it. with the personal acts of the martyr, but with why they were killed. The Romanovs are not considered martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia, as they were not killed because of their religious faith. Religious leaders also objected to the canonization of the tsar's family because they viewed him as a weak emperor whose incompetence brought revolution and suffering to his people, and held him partially responsible for his own murder and that of his wife and children. For them, the fact that the tsar was, in his private life, a kind person and a good husband does not make up for the poverty of his rule.

The Russian Orthodox Church in Russia finally canonized the family as strastoterpets, people who have died with Christian humility. Defenders cited cases of previous tsars and tsarevichs who had been canonized as strastoterpets, such as Tsarevich Dimitri, assassinated at the turn of the century XVI, which set a precedent for the canonization of Anastasia and her family. Anastasia's piety was highlighted and how her mother and her sister Olga prayed and tried to make the sign of the cross before falling dead. The family's retainers were not, however, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were eventually interred in St. Peter and Paul's Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after his death.

Influences on Popular Culture

• Anastasia's possible survival has been carried on numerous occasions to cinema and television. The earliest production, carried out in 1928, was Clothes Make the Woman, where the story of a woman who tries to get Anastasia's role in a film is narrated and is finally recognized by the Russian soldier who originally rescued her from some men who were going to kill her.

• The most famous production is probably the very idealized Anastasia1956, starring Ingrid Bergman as Anna Anderson, Yul Brynner as General Bounine (fictitious person) and Helen Hayes as Empress María Fiódorovna Románova, a paternal grandmother of Anastasia. The film tells the story of a young woman who appears in Paris in 1928 and is kidnapped by Russian emigrants, who pretend that she will pass through Anastasia to deceive the Empress Maria Fiódorovna, her grandmother, and obtain a great reward. Eventually, the suspicions of such Madame A. Anderson It's actually the big duchess. This film inspired the musical of 1965, Anya.
• In 1968, the British rock group The Rolling Stones launched the Sympathy for the Devil song where Anastasia was mentioned in a paragraph. «Killed the Tsar and his ministers; Anastasia screamed in vain».

• In 1986, the NBC television network broadcasted a vaguely inspired mini-series in Peter Kurth’s book Anastasia: The Enigma of Anna Anderson (1983). The movie Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna It was a series of two chapters beginning with the young Anastasia Nikoláyevna and her family being transferred to Ekaterimburg, where they would be executed by Bolshevik soldiers. History continues in 1923 and, taking many liberties, fiction is positioned in favor of the woman named Anna Anderson. Amy Irving played the role of adult Anderson.

• In 1997 Anastasia, an animated musical that adapts the history of the flight of Anastasia of Russia and its own search for identity. The film takes more creative liberties than the version of the same name of 1956.

• In Prophecy Románov, novel written by Steve Berry in 2004, injured Anastasia and Alexis are rescued by the guards and taken to the United States, where they live under fictional names with a family of lawyers paid by Felix Yusúpov. In the novel, they both fall ill and die in the 20s, but not before Alexis gets married and has a child.

• Anastasia appears in the game Assassin's Creed: Chronicles being a 17-year-old girl who sniffs the skills and thoughts of the Assassin's Shao Jun to then embark on America with a false identity.

• In American Horror Story: Apocalypse, episode 10: «Apocalypse then», Mallory (Billie Lourd) tries to do a spell and travels in time and tries to help Anastasia complete a spell to protect her family from the Bolshevik attack.

Honorary Distinctions

• Lady Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Catherine.

Ancestors