Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [195]
There was also, however, her amazing likeness to the photograph of the Russian tsar’s daughter. She even had the trace of a birthmark right where a birthmark had been removed from the young Anastasia, and the shape of her ears, and a similar handwriting. And, finally, the mysterious woman spoke freely about the details of the family’s life.
She attempted to defend her right to the name of the tsar’s daughter in court and suffered defeat.
But when the mysterious “Anastasia” died, she was buried in a crypt with her Romanov relatives the princes of Leuchtenberg.
Who was she?
To me she was a woman who for terrible reasons had suffered a shock and forgotten who she was and then spent her whole life trying to remember it. She truly believed she was the tsar’s daughter, but evidently she did not know precisely which one of the four. She declared herself to be Anastasia because, of the four sisters, she looked most like her, but to the end of her life she continued to dig painfully in her memory. So that for all her certainty, she was to some extent uncertain. That burning torment: trying to remember, going back and forth, into the monstrous past—in an attempt to meet up there, in that horror, with herself … and never to do so.
“Anastasia” declared she had been “rescued after the execution.” Subsequently books would begin appearing proving that the tsar’s daughters had not been shot at all. Only the tsar and the heir had been executed, these books asserted. The retainers and the unlucky Botkin had perished to create the appearance of the entire family’s destruction. In fact, at the demand of the Germans, on the basis of secret articles of the Treaty of Brest, the daughters and the tsaritsa were taken out of Russia. True, it is hard to believe that the second most important man in the government, Trotsky, who participated in the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest and in exile asserted that the tsar’s entire family had been shot, did not know about that. (What he would have given for it not to have been so!)
That these fantastic versions popped up was inevitable. After all, in the seventy years since the execution not one voluntary statement by participants in the execution in the Ipatiev house was published. The terrible night of July 16–17, 1918, remained the object of mysterious rumors and legends.
In the 1970s, at the start of my investigations, I did not believe anyone—not Sokolov and not his opponents. I set myself one goal—to find voluntary statements of witnesses to that terrible night. I was sure that they existed in the bowels of the Soviet secret storehouses. Only they could give the answer as to what did happen in the Ipatiev house. About one such document, the legendary “Yurovsky Note,” rumors abounded.
I began questioning my former classmates at the Historical Archival Institute, who worked in various archives. Everyone I talked to had heard of it, but no one had read it.
“SUBSTANTIVE EVIDENCE: THE EXECUTION WEAPONS”
In the late 1970s, an old and once close friend called me. We had studied together at the Historical Archival Institute and now, after many years, we met, frightening each other with our changed faces. She got into my car and without saying a word placed a paper on my knees.
I began to read:
“To the Museum of the Revolution, Museum Director Comrade Mitskevich.
“Bearing in mind the upcoming tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the younger generation’s likely interest in seeing substantive evidence (the weapon that executed the former tsar Nicholas II, his family, and those retainers who remained