The destiny of Grand Princess Anastasia
shows all the absurdity and cruelty
of our twentieth century.
Tatyana Botkina.
According to the official investigation version Grand Princess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova as well as all family members of the last Russian Emperor was killed in the basement of Ipatyev House. However this version holds no water after archive documents were studied. From the newly discovered documents situated in archives of Russia, Ukraine and Germany it follows that Grand Princess Anastasia stayed alive after the shooting and was evacuated to Ukraine. I wrote about the events that took place in summer 1918 in Yekaterinburg and Anastasia’s identification in my articles “The Night without a Dawn” and “Anna-Anastasia”. Blind spot of her biography is now the chronicle of events from the 19th of July 1918 to the 17th of February 1920. That is the events from the moment when badly wounded Anastasia was taken from the tailor Baudin’s house till her attempt to commit suicide in Berlin. Today the events of this period of her life are known only from the words of Anastasia. One of her stories has come down to us due to the book by Tatyana Evgenyevna Botkina «Anastasia retrouvee». This is the core of this story. Anastasia was saved by the Red Army guard man Alexandr Chaykovskiy. He hid wounded Anastasia in à neighboring house. A couple of days later Chaykovskyi took Anastasia from Yekaterinburg on a peasant cart. His younger brother Sergey, sister Veronika and their mother Maria helped him. By the middle of December the cart of the runaways reached the Dnepr coast. Due to the help of German intelligence officer Lieutenant Hassenstein Chaykovskiy managed to get across the Dnepr and to reach a nunnery in Prednestrovye region moving through the territory occupied by German army. There nuns cured the Princess. When the next attack of the Red Army began the Chaykovskiy family and Anastasia ran over the Dnestr in Bessarabia. After the Brest-Litovsk peace was concluded this territory of Russia became a part of Rumania. First they settled down in a two-storey building in Kishinev and later moved to Bucharest, “where a relative of the Chaykovskyi family who was a gardener placed his house in their service”. The gardener’s house was in the street of Stephan Bodzhi not far from the railway station. In Bucharest Chaykovskiy and Anastasia got spliced. On the 29th of September 1919 she gave birth to her son. Chaykovskiy many times insisted that she wrote to the Queen of Rumania Maria so that she got to know about miraculous rescue of her relative. The Grand Princess categorically refused to do it. Anastasia remembered about her mother’s distaste for Rumanian relatives. In November the Chaykovskiy brothers got into a street row. Deadly wounded Alexandr died before Anastasia’s eyes. She left her son in the house of Maria Chaykovskaya and secretly started for Berlin together with Sergey. She wanted to meet her aunt Irena Prusskaya in Berlin. On the 17th of February in the evening she lost Sergey and being tired of melancholy and loneliness decided to take her own life in an urban channel.
This story is at first sight plain but despite the plenty of details it is full of contradictions. Every time speaking about the events of that time Anastasia made significant changes. Even Alexandr Chaykovskiy turned now to a Siberian peasant then to an impoverished Polish noble. And according to one of her stories she left her son at Maria Chaykovskaya’s house and in the other story she left him in an orphanage in Bucharest. But the story about the bloody night events in Yekaterinburg always stayed unchangeable. Many contemporaries had the impression that all her recollections were the figment of the imagination of a mentally ill impostor. However all doctors that examined her made the conclusion that she was mentally sane just very frightened.
In the Anastasia’s story Tatyana Botkina wrote about there are two absurd statements. The first one is time spent during the trip from Yekaterinburg to the Dnepr crossing in the middle of December. The distance covered by the runaways is less than 3000 kilometers. Even if they made 50 kilometers a day they would have reached the Dnepr bank already in the middle of September not in December. Anastasia never mentioned in her stories about any reposes during this trip. The second contradiction is the list of events between the Dnepr crossing and arrival to Kishinev. Anastasia said that she had stayed and had been treated in a nunnery for a long time, she told about the Dnestr crossing and the day she got pregnant. According to this story it follows that all these events took place during one-two weeks as Anastasia’s son was born on the 29th of September 1919. It should be added that the Danish Ambassador in Germany Baron Tzalle tried to find in Rumania documents confirming Anastasia’s story. The search made in church books of Bucharest at his request gave the following result:
1. There was no record of wedding of any Chaykovskiy in any church of Bucharest for the period from 1919 to 1923.
2. There was no record of christening a boy called Alexey Chaykovskiy in any church book, neither a record about his death and burial.
3. There was no record of murdering any Chaykovskiy and burying him in any police station.
4. And by a strange coincidence there was no citizen having the surname Chaykovskiy in all the city of Bucharest at all.
The delegate of Baron Tzalle Ms. Spindler was not a lazy one and visited the government institutions, churches, police stations of all neighboring Rumanian towns. She also questioned citizens of small towns who usually remember foreigners. The search was vain. No traces.
Why did Anastasia tell half-truth? What did the Grand Princess conceal so carefully? For this secrecy journalists dubbed her “Iceberg”.
In Anastasia’s case there is one more interesting fact. At the judicial trial in Hamburg Baron von Schenk was listened to as a witness. In 1942 he was in the occupied territory in Kamenets-Podolsky Oblast. During the house-check he found a leaflet of the Ural Region Extraordinary Commission of 1918, which informed about search for the escaped Emperor’s youngest daughter Anastasia. Perhaps, this leaflet served to Chaykovskiy as some kind of pass to the territory occupied by German army in remote 1918. This coincidence makes me return to the story of Georgiy I wrote about in my article “Anna-Anastasia”. Today I have serious reasons to reckon that Georgiy was the Princess Anastasia’s son. He grew up and lived all his life in the USSR. Anxiety for his life and lives of people who had rescued her was the real reason of Anastasia’s concealing the truth even from her own friends. Peter Kurth told me that the last years of life in her everyday prayers Anastasia apologized to her husband and son for leaving them in the 19th year.
Vladimir Momot
Yekaterinburg, 2009
Translated by Anna Koksharova.