History, Bitches: Fake It 'Til You Make It

Anna Anderson

Some historical mysteries, regardless of how persistently we might try, can never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. As morning dawned on July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries. Just two years later, a woman calling herself Anna Anderson turned-up in Berlin claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, the youngest of the tsar and tsarina’s daughters. She professed that she had escaped from the basement where her family was slaughtered with help from two brothers named Tchiakovsky, and fled to Romania. She perpetrated this fraud until 1991, when the previously lost remains of the royal family were unearthed. Posthumous DNA testing proved Anna was not a member of the Romanov dynasty. Some have postulated that she was actually a Polish factory worked named Franziska Schanzkowska who had a history of mental illness.

Grand Duchess Anastasia

Now, over two decades later, Veniamin Alekseyev, a Russian historian, has just released a book arguing that DNA testing conducted during the 1990s was incorrect, the bones purported to belong to Anastasia were misidentified, and Anna genuinely was the lost heir to the Romanov fortune. Furthermore, he also contends that Anastasia’s mother and three sisters were spared, too. Discussing his book, titled, “Who Are You, Ms. Tchaikovskaya?,” Alekseyev said,

“On the basis of the archive documents discovered, and new Russian and foreign evidence I have seen since 1991, I have reason to think the royal family's fate is not as certain as it has been believed for almost 100 years.”

In 1991, after the grave of the Romanov family was uncovered, it was revealed the bodies of one daughter and the heir, Alexei, were still missing. This disclosure ignited renewed speculation about Anastasia’s true fate. But, in early 2009, the Los Angeles Times, among others, reported that, “newly analyzed DNA evidence from a second, nearby grave discovered in 2007 proves that the bones are those of two Romanov children, ending the mystery once and for all.”