The Romanov Sisters: The End of the Last Russian Imperial Family

The end of the last Russian imperial family has caused rivers of ink to flow and has thrown historians upside down. Especially when it comes to the fate of the Romanov sisters, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II.

The little that is known of the fateful night in July when they were massacred is known mostly from the reports and memoirs that Yakov Yurovski (1878-1938), the person in charge of the assassination, made after the assassination However, his testimony varies depending on the source we take, so it is difficult to accurately reconstruct what exactly happened at dawn from July 16 to 17, 1918.

This lack of information, which in the months that followed the tragedy it was absolute, it caused several women who claimed to be the grand duchesses to appear and that, apparently, they had survived the massacre. Among them, the best known was Anna Anderson (c. 1897-1984), the pretender who sustained her entire life to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. There were also, however, several Tatianas, Olgas and Marias, and even the occasional Alexei, the heir to the Russian empire.

What exactly happened that hot night in 1918? Is it true that some members of the imperial family managed to survive? What happened to the tsar's daughters? Is it true that Anastasia, the little one, didn't die? Join us on a journey through the biography of the four Romanov sisters, told beyond the legend.

• We recommend you read: "The Fox sisters and the beginnings of spiritualism: the story of a fraud"

Had one of the Romanov sisters survived?

In the year 1979, in the surroundings of Yekaterinburg, a group of amateur archaeologists made an amazing find.. Human remains were found in a mass grave on the outskirts of the city (where the assassins had supposedly buried the bodies of the imperial family and their servants). The USSR had not yet fallen, and the news could be dangerous, so the improvised expedition kept the discovery hidden and left the remains where they were.

This is how things remained until 1991, when, once the Soviet Union fell, work began again in the area and the nine bodies were identified as members of the last imperial family and some of his faithful servants After the respective analysis, the experts give their verdict: the bodies of one of the two young daughters, Maria or Anastasia, and that of her brother, the tsarevich, are missing Alexei.

The woman who wanted to be Anastasia

The news caused a stir, since, if the body of one of her younger daughters were missing, the story of that strange woman who, in the 1920s, began to stubbornly claim that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Let's review for a moment what the case consisted of.

It was the year 1920. It had been two years since the imperial family had been assassinated by the Bolsheviks, but the exact details were still unknown to the world. The international newspapers were full of news about the whereabouts of its members: some insisted that both the tsarina and her daughters had been transferred to a safe place, based on statements by Lenin in which he assured that only the tsar had been executed and that the family had been evacuated. If so, what had happened to the Romanov sisters? What was her whereabouts?

That year, a young woman jumped into a canal in the city of Berlin.. She was rescued and transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where she was registered under the name Fräulein Unbekannt (Miss Unknown), since she, at first, did not want to give her name. However, she later began to claim that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia and that she had miraculously escaped the Yekaterinburg massacre. The news spread like wildfire. An heiress to the Russian throne, long live!!!

As, thanks to the newspapers, the story was all the rage in those years, people began to be interested in her testimony. Some claimed that her resemblance to Anastasia was surprising (something that we doubt, in light of the photographs that have survived, and that we must attribute to the suggestion of her listeners). But the most incredible thing was the discovery, in the young woman's head, of several bullet wounds that seemed to prove her definitively right.

The matter went around the world and came to involve people close to the imperial family, who said they recognized the Grand Duchess in the woman.. The story even inspired a movie in the 1950s, starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, as well as an animated film in 1997. Finally, DNA tests carried out after the woman's death confirmed that she was lying. In reality, the impostor's name was Franziska Schanzkowska and she was a native of Poland.

the end of the legend

Despite the evidence, the questions were not closed. The absence of one of the female corpses continued to feed the legend of the missing daughter, and to it was added that of the boy, Alexei, whose corpse was also not found among the remains of the pit.

The answers were to come almost ten years after the discovery of the bodies, and almost a century after the tragedy. In 2007, the two missing bodies appeared in a nearby grave and, once again, DNA tests confirmed their identity. The corpses belonged to the missing daughter and her brother the Tsarevich. Case closed: no member of the Imperial family had managed to survive, and the rumors were just that, rumors.

From imperial family to prisoners of the Soviets

What exactly happened that night in July 1918? How did the members of the Russian imperial family spend their last hours? How were they killed? Yekaterinburg, at the gates of Siberia, was not the first imprisonment the Romanovs had suffered. After the triumph of the revolution, in October 1917, and the consequent abdication of Nicholas, they were placed under house arrest in the Tsarkoe Selo palace., the habitual residence of the Romanovs, near Saint Petersburg. Later they were transferred to Tobolsk, a remote city in the Russian steppe, where they spent several months in solitude and oblivion. Yekaterinburg was, then, the third and last prison of it.

The conditions of detention in the Ipatiev house, where they had been placed, were considerably worse than those they had suffered in Tobolsk. Because, while in the latter they were allowed walks in the garden of the house and enjoyed a certain permissiveness, in Yekaterinburg could hardly get out of the walls of the building and, in addition, the windows were painted so as not to be seen from the abroad. The days passed between tedium, sadness and despair, which Anastasia, the funniest of the sisters, tried in vain to encourage.

Much has been said about the fatal outcome of the Romanov sisters, but little about their character and intimate life. And it is that, beyond being grand duchesses of Russia, the tsar's daughters were four homely and calm young women who had been educated in an environment more bourgeois than imperial. If you want to take a closer look at them, keep reading.

A simple and bourgeois education

It is no secret that the birth of four daughters in a row caused some frustration in the tsar's mind, since he urgently needed a male heir. However, both he and his wife the Tsarina loved their little girls, affectionately calling them “our four-leaf clover”.

Despite Nicolás's image of an autocrat (earned hard, on the other hand), the truth is that, in their intimate life, the family behaved more like a bourgeois family than like the emperors of Russia. In Tsarkoe Selo, the palace built by Catherine the Great in which they used to live, they only used a few rooms that Alexandra, the Empress, fitted out in the English style. It must not be forgotten that the Tsarina's grandmother was Queen Victoria of England, and that Alexandra's upbringing had been Victorian, elegant and austere.

The four girls were forced to make their beds every morning and led a fairly normal life, without unnecessary fuss or luxuries. They had a careful study program, which the Tsarina closely watched, whenever her illnesses (mostly of a nervous nature) allowed her to. The sisters used to sign the documents they wrote together with the acronym OTMA, which was made up of the initials of their names: Olga, Tatiana, María and Anastasia.

OTMA

Helen Rappaport, in her extraordinary work The Romanov Sisters (see bibliography), makes a portrait excellent of each one of the sisters, of their personality and character and of the vicissitudes that touched them live. Of the OTMA brotherhood, the eldest was Olga, born in 1895. She had an oval and sweet face, although somewhat melancholy. Of all the sisters, Olga was the one with the deepest feelings.

Her intelligence and her extraordinary sensitivity made her quickly aware of the misfortunes and dangers of life, and for this reason she had sudden mood swings and fits of melancholy.. They tried to marry her off to the heir to the Romanian throne, Prince Charles, but she refused. The irony of the matter is that if Olga had married him, she would have been out of Russia during the Revolution, and perhaps she would have saved her life.

The second of OTMA was Tatiana, affectionately called the governess in the family, due to her practical and organized nature. Considered by many of her contemporaries the most beautiful of her sisters, Tatiana was nevertheless very shy and reserved, and she used to speak little. Her attractive beauty was greatly influenced by her elegance in dressing and walking, for she had the bearing of a true queen. However, like the rest of her sisters, she was a very humble and close person.

Both Olga and Tatiana were active in World War I as nurses. They spent much of the day by the side of the convalescent soldiers, and even dared to help with minor surgeries., which terrified Olga but which Tatiana faced with the serenity that characterized her. As teenagers, they were fascinated by some of the soldiers they cared for, who became their first (and only) loves.

Maria, the third of the sisters, was a sweet and dreamy creature. She had a strong and large complexion and a beautiful face where two enormous pale eyes stood out, which were known in the family as María's saucers. Of the Romanov sisters, she was the closest and most affable, and also the most flirtatious and enamored. Perhaps because she was her middle sister, it seems that Maria always felt a little lonely and displaced, and she constantly needed signs of affection to feel calm and happy.

Anastasia, the last of the sisters (who has inspired so much mythology) was mischievous and unruly to satiety. She had a rebellious character that brought her educators upside down, but she was also very witty, joking and nice. According to many testimonies, it was Anastasia who managed to brighten the spirits of her family during the long months of uncertainty and captivity., with their games and their jokes.

That hot July night

What happened to these four young women that night in July 1918? Let's see what Yurovski's testimony says about it. According to the head of the executioners, that night he gave orders to his men and assigned each of them a victim. Some Lithuanians who were among them asked me not to make them kill the girls, so they Yurovski decided to separate them from the macabre mission, fearful that, at the crucial moment, they would stop.

Around two in the morning on the 17th, Yurovski woke up the family and his servants and made them dress and go down to the basement of the mansion.. They lined up and some, like the Tsarina and Alexis, sat down. Then Yurosvki told them his death sentence, handed down by the Ural Soviet, and there was no time for reactions. The soldiers started shooting.

Despite the fact that each one had an assigned person, chaos soon took over the room. Some of the women seemed irreducible; Yurosvki soon realized that the jewels sewn into their corsets were stopping the bullets, so that he ordered them to be finished off with a bayonet (or with a shot to the head, depending on his testimony) Yurosvki). The result was a veritable carnage.

No one survived the massacre. The alleged grand duchesses that appeared, including the famous Anna Anderson (aka Anastasia), were all fake. The life of the Romanov sisters ended on July 17, 1918. The eldest was twenty-two years old, and the youngest had just turned seventeen.