After her family was killed in 1918, several women came forward with claims that they were Anastasia and had miraculously escaped the massacre — but each one was eventually outed as an impostor.
In July 1918, Czar Nicholas II of Russia was executed in Yekaterinburg by Bolshevik forces alongside his wife, Alexandra, and their five children. But it wasn’t long before rumors spread that one of his daughters, 17-year-old Anastasia, had survived the attack.
In the years that followed, multiple women came forward claiming to be the lost duchess. Nadezhda Vasilyeva was arrested while posing as Anastasia in Siberia in 1920, and even wrote to England’s King George V asking him to save his “cousin.” Another woman named Eugenia Smith authored an autobiography as Anastasia, all about her life as a Romanov and how she escaped the massacre that killed the rest of her family.
But the most famous impostor was a Prussian woman named Anna Anderson, who first claimed to be Anastasia in the early 1920s. Those who had known the duchess were skeptical, but some distant relatives of the royal family believed her. She fought for official recognition for years, but a court ultimately found that there wasn’t enough evidence to conclusively identify her as Anastasia.
Anderson died in 1984, but her assertions gained credence seven years later when the mass grave of the Romanov family was excavated in a forest outside of Yekaterinburg — and two of the royal children were discovered to be missing. In 1994, scientists compared Anderson’s DNA to the Romanovs’ remains. There was no match.
Then, in 2007, two partially burned skeletons were found in a second grave roughly 200 feet from the original burial site. They were identified as the remains of the only Romanov son, Alexei, and either Anastasia or her older sister, Maria. All of the Romanovs were now accounted for. There had been no survivors.
Wikimedia CommonsThough many long believed that Anastasia had somehow survived the massacre that killed her entire family, the truth was eventually discovered.
This discovery matched the accounts of Yakov Yurovsky, the commander of the Bolshevik guard that had imprisoned the Romanovs during their final months. He’d documented the assassination, and his description of Anastasia’s final moments was chilling.
She and two of her sisters had survived the initial gunfire that killed the czar and his wife, so the guards tried to stab them with bayonets. However, the family’s jewels had been concealed in their gowns, acting as a sort of armor against the bullets and blades. Yurovsky was then “forced to shoot each one in turn.”
Alexei and one of his sisters had been buried separately from the rest of the family to conceal the murders. The anti-Bolshevik White Army was rapidly approaching Yekaterinburg, and if they found the remains, the missing bodies would hide the fact that the grave held the Romanovs.
There is still debate over whether the body found with Alexei was Anastasia’s or Maria’s, but one thing is certain: Anastasia Romanov did not escape her family’s bloody fate.
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