The 1956 movie Anastasia offered a more hopeful ending to the decades of mystery that followed the execution of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family in 1918. In the movie, his youngest daughter, Anastasia, is suffering from amnesia and goes by the name Anna. Ingrid Bergman played Anna, who, 10 years after the grand duchess’s presumed murder, is persuaded by the con man Sergei Bounine (Yul Brynner) to pose as the grand duchess to stake a claim to the Romanov fortune. As Anna manages to convince her most skeptical adversary, the dowager empress Marie Feodorovna, Anastasia’s grandmother (played by Helen Hayes), she ironically seems to remember her royal identity. But rather than take on her imperial role, Anna instead chooses to elope with Bounine. As satisfying as the movie ending is, the real Anastasia probably did not reunite with her grandmother years after the Russian Revolution and run off with a charming con man. In fact, she probably did not survive her family’s execution at all.
After Nicholas II abdicated the throne on March 15, 1917, he and his family—his wife, Alexandra; son, Alexis; and four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—were taken captive and eventually moved to a house in the Ural Mountains. In the cellar they and four of their servants were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad on July 17, 1918. However, no bodies were immediately found. Moreover, reports from Russia were so unclear that the dowager empress, who had found refuge in Crimea, doubted the news of her family’s death. Even the executioners’ later accounts were so muddled as to invite speculation. Some claimed that the daughters survived the first round of firing, having been protected from the bullets by jewels secretly sewn into their corsets.
With such sensational accounts of the murders and the chaotic aftermath of the Revolution, anything seemed possible. Romanov imposters sprang up all over the world in the ensuing decades, offering fantastic tales of escape. The most famous claimant was Anna Anderson, whose case remained in the German courts for more than 30 years until a 1970 ruling declared no conclusive evidence proving Anderson was or was not Anastasia. Anderson’s enigmatic story inspired the French play on which the 1956 film and 1997 animated film of the same name were based.
The mystery took an intriguing turn in the late 1990s when scientists using DNA evidence identified bodies found in the 1970s as the tsar, his wife, and three of their daughters. The bodies of Alexis and of one of his sisters, however, were not among those found. Because the discovered remains had been burned, it was hard to say which Romanov daughter was absent, and the news revived speculation that Anastasia had survived. In 2007 the two missing bodies were found, and soon afterward they were identified as Alexis and probably Maria. Anastasia’s remains were likely one of the bodies that had been found earlier.
Ninety years later, all bodies accounted for, the mystery seemed over until the Russian Orthodox Church reopened the case in 2015, claiming that the scientific investigations had been mishandled. Perhaps the church, like movie fans, preferred to maintain the hope of a happier ending than the dark one that most historians now accept.
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