The Resurrection of the Romanovs: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and the World's Greatest Royal Mystery [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Others have and will comment here on the story of a minor ruse that grew into a worldwide legend that is adroitly recounted in this book. But I want to discuss this book for what I think is its most remarkable aspect: a tour-de-force deconstruction of how false history can be invented by letting the desire, sometimes almost unconscious, for a certain outcome dictate the presentation and interpretation of evidence.

Greg King and Penny Wilson were ideally suited to this task. Not only were they accomplished historians of late imperial Russia, but both thought for years that Anna Anderson might really be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, supposedly massacred along with her family in 1918. More than most other advocates for the view of Anastasia's survival, they were deeply versed in the myriad evidence that had been put forth for almost ninety years in support of this claim. But the 1990's began to unsettle the picture, as discoveries of bodies in a remote Russian forest and DNA testing of those bodies and of tissue samples of a now-deceased Anna Anderson deepened the doubts surrounding Anderson's famous claim.

In light of this emerging evidence, King and Wilson began to show their mettle as historians and to reassess their own long-held convictions. As this process brought them to serious doubt of Anna Anderson's claim, there was one hurdle they still could not easily clear. Since 1920 there had been claims that Anna Anderson, who was originally dubbed "Miss Unknown" by Berlin police who fished her out of a canal after a suicide attempt, was, in fact, known by some to be a Polish woman who had come to Berlin seeking work in the wartime factories then being staffed largely by women. But, while Anna Anderson might be no Grand Duchess, King and Wilson felt there had to be some other missing piece to the puzzle that would preclude her being a Polish factory worker. And they set out to find it.

What they instead found was a remarkable manipulation of evidence that had begun almost immediately upon Anna Anderson's emergence into the limelight of royal pretender status. This manipulation of evidence was deliberately cynical in some hands but more often guilelessly inadvertent in others. However, as the romance of the prospect that a pretty, 17-year-old princess had mysteriously been saved from a brutal political massacre seized the world's imagination, the manipulation of evidence acquired a life of its own. The cumulative effect was that comments haltingly made, opinions heavily caveated, affidavits for limited purposes were all seized upon as proof positive that the crusty, eccentric little woman being toasted in the press and hosted and then housed by a growing array of high society was most certainly a missing Russian Grand Duchess. Through a process of repetition of this purported evidence, with each step further removed from the original sources, the conviction set in among many that Anna Anderson's identity was a matter of conclusive proof.

What King and Wilson, in fact, found as they revisited the early sources and put fresh eyes on them was something else entirely. Small amounts of often anecdotal information in favor of Anderson's claim had been hyped massively by the press and acolytes. Much larger amounts of countervailing information, gathered with more rigor for the more disciplined purpose of determining the truth instead of a hot-selling headline, had been dismissed by a popular postwar imagination that needed a lost princess more than it needed a reminder that Russia was now irreversibly in the hands of a communist dictatorship.

The process that King and Wilson deconstruct in this book by which myth can morph into history is not only fascinating. It is an object lesson to all students of Russian history right now.

Russia is moving toward the brink of becoming a failed state, with a population in steep decline, regions along the border with a China bursting at the seams emptying themselves of Russians, a breakdown of the old soviet system of dodgy public services being replaced with nothing but press manipulation by a governing cabal holding onto power for the sake of power itself. With government policy failing on front after front, Russian leaders are doing their best to romanticize a past, the vision of which they hope will hold an ugly present at bay.

This new book by Greg King and Penny Wilson should be read not only by those who want to witness the spinning of a popular legend of missing royalty from the fabric of poverty and mental instability. It should be read by those who want to understand how the study of history, when put in the service of romantic desire, can be the most deceptive of studies.

Too many books on this topic since Kurth's 1983 biography of "Anna Anderson" have simply recycled previously published material. Once again, King and Wilson have done a huge amount of original research, uncovered much that is new, and tried to reconcile conflicting data from different sources. There are still at least two sources which remain inaccessible to all authors and researchers in 2010. One is the investigation carried out by Helmut Zahle and now held in a Danish Royal Family Archive. The second is material compiled by Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich and apparently now in the hands of claimant to the Russian throne (Grand Duchess) Maria Vladimirovna.

Even if all this material were available, the conclusion about "Anna Anderson" by the authors and by informed readers would be the same. Disappointments are minor, such as the lack of any further pre-1920 photographs of Franziska Schanzkowska. Anyone who is interested in a mystery, or the fall of the Russian Empire, and appreciates the detective work and writing skills of King and Wilson should go out and buy this book, which is compelling reading.

King and Wilson lead their readers through the complex maze of truth, lies, expectations, and trauma that made up the legend of Anastasia. Starting with the actual Anastasia, the least wanted of the last tsar's five children, the readers learn the scant facts about the 17 year old teenager who was murdered by the Bolshevik secret police along with her family in 1918. Nearly instantly, rumors of her survival start fermenting in Siberia, making their way throughout Europe. Less than three years later, a woman is pulled from a canal in Berlin. That woman's story, Anna Anderson, makes up the second and largest part of The Resurrection of the Romanovs. Although much of this has been presented before, it has frequently appeared either as evidence for Anderson's being the Grand Duchess or an imposter. By presenting Anderson's story objectively, the authors are able to show how Anderson was able to slowly learn her "part", which started simply as a desire for attention by pretending to be Anastasia without an intention to continue the impersonation for the rest of her life. Recognition of t her claim or the lack thereof became a royal litmus test for nearly 40 years. Anderson finally died in 1984 without ever proving or disproving her identity as Grand Duchess Anastasia. By far the strongest part of the book is the final section of the book, revealing Anna Anderson's true identity as Franziska Schanzkowska. King and Wilson show how class prejudices prevented even well educated royals and historians from comprehending how a "Polish peasant" who was in fact a Kashubian of minor nobile descent was able to impersonate the dead Russian Grand Duchess for most of her life. It turns out Schanzkowska wasn't the adventuress many imagined but rather was a complex and damaged individual rejected by her own mother. A fascinating read, solidly researched and eloquently told, this is a must have for anyone who wants to know the truth about the legend of the lost grand duchess.