Anastasia's Secret (27 page)
Read Anastasia's Secret Online
Authors: Susanne Dunlap
It felt odd to leave the Governor’s House by any door other than the one to the yard. The archbishop had sent a horse and carriage to take the four of us to the dock, so that Alexei would not be too uncomfortable, and I could see the horses pawing the street, impatient to be gone. The carriage was simple and black, but at least it had springs, unlike the rough carts that had taken Mama, Papa, Mashka, the prince, and Dr. Botkin to Tyumen the month before.
We all had to leave in order, our names checked off as we went. Rodionov and his men were coming along to guard us on the voyage. We three sisters stood in the hall and waited. I had little sensation of time passing, still not fully in the moment after the night before. Alexei sat in a wheelchair. Nastinka, General Tatischev, Dr. Derevenko, Zhilik, Trina, and Isa—who all this time had not been permitted to stay with us but was to be accompanying us now—all went out and ascended the carts that were to take them and a few possessions to the
Rus
. Once they had gone, a few servants, mostly locals who had been hired by the Soviet to do the things we were either not allowed to do or incapable of doing ourselves, started walking to the same dock.
Rodionov took a roll call one more time before leading us out the door, as if he could not simply count to four and know we were all there. Once outside, eight guards surrounded us. I drew in my breath sharply. At the front of the group was Sasha. Sasha. He had his back to me. I could see his sandy hair beneath his cap, recognize the set of his shoulders. His way of walking was still the same. I wondered if he could feel me staring at him, if he too thought about the previous night, my near escape, our last embrace.
I was rudely shaken out of my thoughts after we had taken only a few steps when all at once the two houses we had occupied erupted with sounds of tramping feet and smashing glass. The guards from the guardhouse and the barracks—some three hundred of them—swarmed into the Governor’s House and the Kornilov house where the suite had been lodged. It seemed only seconds until they poured back out again, carrying clocks, books, furniture, and icons—anything that was not fixed in place. Six men even mounted the carriage we were supposed to ride in and whipped the horses to a frenzy, so that they took off at a gallop, scattering dust all over us.
“Those are our things! That was Mama’s icon!” Olga said.
“That was the carriage we were supposed to take!” Tatiana yelled.
“There is no personal property now. You are fortunate you are being allowed to take anything other than the barest necessities.” Rodionov’s smug expression made it evident that far from condemning the actions of his men, he fully condoned them. I saw Sasha’s neck go red. At least he did not—
“Oh!” I cried out, seeing a man struggling to get out of the door with an armload of booty from the Governor’s House that included Sasha’s balalaika. I had begged to be allowed to take it, but they would not let me, and now it was being stolen.
The thief staggered quite close to us so that Sasha could not avoid seeing the instrument. Sasha couldn’t acknowledge that the balalaika was his, or he would risk exposing his connection to me. I thought I saw the vein in his neck pulse and his jaw tighten, but he could do no more than just watch the fellow take it away.
“Well, it appears you will have to walk to the dock,” Rodionov said, once the looting had stopped. Tatiana kept a firm hold on the handles of Alexei’s wheelchair. For a moment I thought the commissar was going to insist that Alexei also walk, but no one who saw my brother would have thought him remotely capable of such a thing at that time. He hardly had the energy to react to the thievery of the guards, other than to sigh and look down at Joy, who was curled up in his lap.
The streets were lined with curious people. No one said anything or made a move to approach us as we passed—I supposed the armed guards were enough to prevent that. And unlike our earliest days in Tobolsk, no one made the sign of the cross as Alexei passed either. Nowadays, people were likely to be shot on the spot for such displays of counterrevolutionary zeal.
We’ll see Mama and Papa and Mashka soon
, I kept repeating to myself.
We’ll all be together again. We can be strong together. Sasha will find a way to help us all escape
. I had to believe it. I had to persuade myself that I hadn’t given up my only chance of freedom.
Single file, with Tatiana pushing Alexei, we walked onto the gangplank to the
Rus
. I couldn’t help remembering what hopes we’d had on the way to Tobolsk. Rather than constricting, the journey had felt freeing. We had started out with a sort of pattern of life that didn’t disagree with us. It was only over time that things had changed so much for the worse. Our circumstances had been strangled around us so slowly that each added restriction merely adjusted my sense of what was normal, until it was almost impossible to imagine living any other way.
Now, I think it’s the going back, the retracing of our steps, that reveals how far we have fallen. We are confined and kept out of sight, with only small portholes through which we can see the Siberian countryside passing by. Rodionov told us it is for our safety, but he said it with such glee that I didn’t believe him. And we have been told we cannot lock our doors at night, while Alexei and the tutors and suite must lock theirs. What can it mean?
And what about Sasha?
I only see him when he happens to be among our immediate guards. When the others aren’t looking, our eyes meet now and again in a way that gives me hope. We cannot speak to each other, and so I try to put as much as I can into every shared glance without looking for very long, willing him to see the love I have for him. I begin to understand how much he risked for me. Perhaps if I were someone else, I might have taken the chance. But in a life like mine, where the only bonds of affection are to my family and to a man who has been one of our captors almost as long as he was my friend before that, there is no choice. Without those people, I am only a tiny fraction of myself.
But I still hold out hope that in this frightening world where anything bad could happen any moment, something good might just as easily occur. Sasha almost succeeded in getting me safely away. Maybe he will think of something else in Yekaterinburg, for all of us.
Spring in Siberia is breathtaking. Even the small view we have from our cabin windows can’t entirely shut it out. Delicate flowers blanket the meadows, and the wind smells sweet coming down from the Urals. I wish I could change us all into the wind, so that we could blow away where no one could harm us, and mingle together, not separate but one, forever.
It is night now, and tomorrow we reach Tyumen, where we will board a train. One day on the train, and then we will be with the rest of the family again. We will be whole, we will be OTMA.
My sisters are asleep. One of the guards is playing a balalaika. I wonder for a moment if it is Sasha, if he reclaimed his simple instrument and brought it onto this boat to serenade me, to sing us to the end of our journey. I know from all I have heard that life in Yekaterinburg will not be easy. But I am ready. Right now, as the waters of the river rock me in my bunk, I cannot believe that I do not belong to Russia, like the soil itself. There will be a solution, one that will keep us all together and keep us in Russia. I hear the tune and I recall a nursemaid singing me to sleep.
May God protect us. May God protect Sasha. I will dream of him every night for as long as I live.
The imperial family remained together under terrible conditions in Yekaterinburg for nearly two months, from May 23 until July 16, 1918, when Yekaterinburg was on the point of being retaken by the Whites—the resistance loyal to the tsar—aided by Czech troops. The official report stated that the family, their suite, and their attendants were awakened and told to dress, that they were going to be moved again but first to go to a basement room for a photograph. Once they were all assembled, the guards opened fire on them and assassinated the tsar, the tsaritsa, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei, along with Dr. Botkin, Chemodurov, Anna Demidova, and possibly one other servant. All the children had sewn jewels in their clothing, and the bullets apparently glanced off them, making it necessary for the guards to fire repeatedly and use their bayonets before they perished.
For many years it was not known for certain where or how the remains of the family were disposed of. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an amateur archeologist told the authorities about a mass grave he had discovered in the 1970s and kept secret—perhaps because he suspected whose remains were there and didn’t want anyone to disturb them. DNA tests confirmed that the nine people in the grave included five of the Romanovs and four retainers, but that still left two family members unaccounted for.
A second grave was discovered nearby in 2007. It had the remains of two more Romanov family members, which were analyzed and determined to belong to the tsarevich and either Marie or Anastasia.
Despite this seemingly conclusive evidence, some people doubt the validity of the tests. They assert that the finding of the second grave was a little too convenient, and with such fragmented and scattered remains, some have argued that it’s impossible to say for certain that every member of the tsar’s family was in those two graves—especially since distinguishing among the sisters using DNA evidence is very difficult.
Nonetheless, the Russian Orthodox Church declared the entire Romanov family saints in 2008.
As for the other members of the family and the suite, Prince Dolgorukov and Countess Hendrikova had been imprisoned and shot long before, as had Nagorny, Trina, and a young servant who attended the grand duchesses. The valet Volkov managed to escape. Baroness Buxhoeveden—Isa—perhaps because she was not of Russian descent, was also given her freedom, and Lili Dehn survived as well. Pierre Gilliard and Mr. Gibbes escaped execution, returning to their native countries. However, the Bolsheviks did not spare the other members of the imperial family that they could find, including the tsaritsa’s sister Elisabeth, widow of one of the tsar’s uncles, and a devout and selfless nun in a convent. She, along with several others, was thrown into a well while still alive. The Bolsheviks threw hand grenades after them to finish the job.
The only living being known to have survived that night in Yekaterinburg was Joy, Alexei’s spaniel. Sidney Gibbes found her wandering lost and forlorn around the yard by the house, crying for her master. She was taken to England to live out her days and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Despite the massacre, a few members of the imperial family and the nobility managed to escape to foreign countries. Anya Vyrubova lived a long life in Finland. Grand Duke Cyril, a first cousin of Nicholas, had a court in exile in Paris. Vyrubova, Volkov, Gilliard, Buxhoeveden, Lili Dehn, and Count Benckendorff all wrote memoirs of their time with the Romanovs.
An aura of mystery persists, however, concerning the execution of the imperial family. For years, a woman named Anna Anderson tried to pass herself off as Anastasia, but she was discovered to be a fraud. In all, two hundred people have claimed to have descended from the murdered Romanovs since that night in 1918. None of their stories have held up to scruitiny.
Did Anastasia survive beyond that fateful night? Was there a Sasha to protect her and help her get away? That is a question that may never be answered. Whatever and however it happened for Anastasia, I like to think she had a full life and experienced love in her seventeen years of documented existence.
I was pretty scared to write in the first person from the point of view of a real historical character, especially one who has ignited the imaginations of so many people since that tragic day in 1918. But something about Anastasia called to me. Maybe it was that she has always been referred to as “one of the children” when in fact, although she was the youngest daughter, she was seenteen years old when she died. Her oldest sister was twenty-three—no longer a child by any standard. The thought of what it might have been like to have the real emotions of an adolescent at such a turbulent time took hold of me and would not let go.
While putting myself into the mind of a privileged, sheltered, lively, and intelligent adolescent proved to be a rewarding challenge, I felt a deep obligation to adhere as closely as possible to the events as they occurred at the time. The almost overwhelming amount of first-hand documentation of the lives of the imperial family was a boon to my research. Having said that, I found ample areas of doubt and shadows, especially in regard to Anastasia and her sisters. These accounts tended not to focus on Anastasia very much, as if all there was to know about her was that she was part of that ill-fated family.
In the process of constructing a novel (which is, after all, fiction), it is important to consider the pace and structure of the story. I have tried to follow the actual historic events but have taken the novelist’s prerogative of creating scenes that might have happened when they serve to illustrate an important point: the sullen mob at the train stop near the beginning, Anastasia and Mashka’s visit to the village near Mogilev. The girls did visit villages when they went to see their father, but I have not been able to discover which ones or what they did there.
The months of Anastasia’s captivity were dreary and difficult, the bonds gradually tightening around her family as events in Russia led inexorably to their conclusion. For the sake of my plot, I have gently rearranged one or two things that occurred during their time at Tobolsk so that they make more sense to the story. Most of what I detail did actually happen according to the remaining accounts, just not in the exact order. Where different versions of the facts contradict each other, I simply chose what worked best in my story.
Sasha and one or two servants are the only characters who came entirely from my imagination. Everyone else—including the pets—had documented roles in the family’s life.
For anyone wishing to dig more deeply into this fascinating time period, I can do no better than to recommend The Alexander Palace Time Machine, a wonderful Web site that includes the full text of several of the existing memoirs, a wealth of pictures, detailed descriptions of the Alexander Palace—even an accounting of all the possessions confiscated by the authorities when they finally took over the palace. It’s an incredible labor of love and a testament to an enduring fascination with the doomed imperial family. Visit
www.alexanderpalace.org
and prepare to spend hours looking at what Bob Atchison has made available to anyone with an interest in what happened or might have happened to the Romanovs.
Finally, do I think Anastasia survived the massacre at Yekaterinburg? Very unlikely, given the circumstances. And even if by some miracle Anastasia had survived the massacre, she would be 108 years old by now. Nonetheless, I will always allow myself to hope that something happened to preserve her from the terrible fate the rest of her family suffered. I can’t bear to think of her suffering, and I hope she’s up there enjoying the romance I gave her in the pages of this book.