Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova, the youngest daughter of Russia’s last Tsar, whose alleged survival became one of history’s most enduring mysteries.

In the early hours of July 17, 1918, in a basement room of a drab house in Yekaterinburg, Russia, eleven people were gunned down by a Bolshevik firing squad. Among them were Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia; his wife Tsarina Alexandra; their four daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia; their hemophiliac son and heir Alexei; and four loyal servants who had chosen to accompany their captors into exile. The execution was brutal, chaotic, and deeply incompetent. Bullets ricocheted off jewelry sewn into the daughters' clothing. Bayonets finished what guns could not. The bodies were loaded onto a truck, driven into the forest, stripped, doused with acid, and dumped into a shallow mine shaft. When that proved too shallow, they were moved again, burned, and buried in a second secret grave. The Bolshevik government announced the death of the Tsar but initially denied killing the rest of the family. The uncertainty created a vacuum — and into that vacuum stepped one of the most audacious impostors in modern history.

For more than sixty years, a woman known as Anna Anderson convinced millions of people — including members of European royalty — that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, the youngest daughter of the murdered Tsar, who had miraculously survived the basement massacre and escaped to the West. Her story generated dozens of lawsuits, inspired books and films, and became one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century. It took the invention of DNA testing to finally prove that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia at all, but a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. The real Anastasia, it turned out, had died in that basement in 1918 — just as the historical record had always suggested. But for six decades, the world was not so sure.

A Dynasty in Its Death Throes: The Fall of the Romanovs

The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for over three hundred years when Nicholas II ascended to the throne in 1894. He was not a cruel man, by the standards of autocrats, but he was stubborn, deeply religious, and profoundly unsuited to the task of governing a nation in the grip of revolutionary upheaval. His wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna (born Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), was fiercely protective of her family and increasingly dependent on the mystic Grigori Rasputin, whose apparent ability to ease the hemophilia of the young heir Alexei gave him extraordinary influence over the imperial household.

Anastasia Nikolaevna was born on June 18, 1901, the fourth and youngest daughter of the Tsar and Tsarina. She was known within the family as "shvibzik" — Russian for "little imp" — a nickname earned through her mischievous, energetic, and sometimes rebellious personality. She was bright, lively, and beloved by those who knew her, but as the youngest daughter of a Tsar who desperately needed a male heir, she occupied a position of limited political significance. The real weight of dynastic expectation fell on her younger brother Alexei, whose hemophilia — a bleeding disorder inherited through the maternal line from Queen Victoria — was the private agony that shaped the family's inner life and contributed to their growing isolation from the Russian people.

World War I destroyed whatever remained of the Tsar's authority. In March 1917 (February by the old Russian calendar), bread riots in Petrograd escalated into a full-scale revolution. Nicholas, commanding Russian forces at the front, was forced to abdicate. The Provisional Government placed the imperial family under house arrest, first at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, then at the Governor's Mansion in Tobolsk, Siberia. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks — who had seized power in the October Revolution — transferred the family to Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains, and confined them in a merchant's house requisitioned for the purpose. It was renamed the House of Special Purpose.

• March 2, 1917 — Tsar Nicholas II abdicates; the 300-year Romanov dynasty ends
• March-August 1917 — Imperial family held under house arrest at Tsarskoye Selo
• August 1917 — Family transferred to Tobolsk, Siberia
• April 1918 — Bolsheviks move the family to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg
• July 17, 1918 (approx. 2:00 AM) — The entire family and four servants executed in the basement
• July 1918 — Bodies transported to Koptyaki forest, stripped, burned with acid, and buried
• 1920 — Anna Anderson discovered in Berlin; begins claiming to be Anastasia
• 1979 — Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov locate the mass grave
• 1991 — Nine of eleven bodies recovered; DNA identifies them as Romanov family
• 1994 — DNA proves Anna Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska
• 2007 — Remaining two bodies (Alexei and Maria) discovered nearby

Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, known for her mischievous spirit and infectious laughter before the revolution shattered her world in 1917.

The Basement: What Really Happened on July 17, 1918

The Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg was a two-story merchant's dwelling that had been surrounded by a high wooden palisade. By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion — a force of former prisoners of war fighting against the Bolsheviks — was advancing on Yekaterinburg, and the Bolshevik leadership feared the Romanovs might be liberated. On the night of July 16-17, Yakov Yurovsky, the commandant of the house, received orders from Moscow to eliminate the entire family.

At approximately 2:00 AM on July 17, Yurovsky awakened the family and their servants and told them to dress and come downstairs, citing unrest in the town and the need to move them to a safer location. They were led to a small basement room with a single barred window. Chairs were brought for Alexandra and Alexei. Then Yurovsky entered with a detachment of armed men and read a brief statement: the family was to be executed by order of the Ural Regional Soviet. Nicholas had time to say "What?" before the firing began.

The execution was a catastrophe of incompetence. The room was small; the echo of gunfire was deafening; smoke filled the air and obscured the targets. Several of the daughters survived the initial volley because of the jewels sewn into their clothing. Alexei, still alive, was shot repeatedly at close range. Anastasia was among the last to die — either from bullet wounds, bayonet strikes, or both. The entire process took roughly twenty minutes. When it was over, eleven bodies lay in a heap on the basement floor.

The Disposal and the Missing Bodies

Yurovsky and his men loaded the bodies onto a truck and drove north into the Koptyaki forest. Their initial plan was to dump the corpses down a mine shaft, and they did — but the shaft was too shallow, and the bodies were visible from the surface. Over the following days, they attempted to destroy the remains with acid and fire, then moved them to a second site and buried them in a shallow grave. According to Yurovsky's account, two of the bodies — those of Alexei and one of the daughters — were burned separately and buried at a different location. This detail, recorded in Yurovsky's report, would prove critically important decades later.

When the White Army captured Yekaterinburg later in 1918, investigator Nikolai Sokolov examined the site and found evidence of the execution and disposal, including burned clothing, bone fragments, and bullets — but no intact bodies. The absence of physical remains allowed rumors of survivors to flourish, and the Bolshevik government's initial refusal to confirm the deaths of the entire family only fueled the speculation.

Anna Anderson, the most famous Anastasia impostor, who convinced many she was the surviving Grand Duchess for over six decades until DNA evidence revealed she was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker.

Anna Anderson: The Greatest Royal Impostor in History

In February 1920, a young woman was pulled from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin after a suicide attempt. She was taken to the Dalldorf Asylum, where she refused to give her name or any information about her identity. She bore scars on her body and spoke Russian with a refined accent. A fellow patient at the asylum claimed to recognize her as one of the Romanov daughters. The woman neither confirmed nor denied the identification. Over the following months, she gradually allowed the story to take root: she was Grand Duchess Tatiana. Then she changed her mind — she was Anastasia.

The woman became known as "Fräulein Unbekannt" (Miss Unknown), and later as Anna Anderson — a name derived from Anastasia and the surname of a Russian family she claimed to have stayed with. Over the next sixty years, she would become the most famous royal claimant in modern history. She was recognized as Anastasia by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse (Alexandra's brother), who initially supported her claim, and by Princess Irene of Hesse, though both later retracted their identification. Other Romanov relatives, including Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (Anastasia's aunt), visited Anderson and firmly denied she was her niece.

Anderson's claim generated enormous publicity and a series of legal battles that stretched across decades. In the longest-running lawsuit in German legal history, she fought to be legally recognized as Anastasia, a case that would have entitled her to a share of the Romanov fortune. She lost. But the lack of a definitive ruling — and the continued absence of Anastasia's body — kept her claim alive in the public imagination.

In 1994, a decade after Anderson's death, DNA testing finally settled the question. Scientists extracted DNA from a tissue sample that had been preserved during Anderson's lifetime (a hospital biopsy) and from a lock of her hair. The results were unequivocal: Anna Anderson's DNA did not match the Romanov family. Instead, it matched the family of Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker born in 1896 who had disappeared from her home in Pomerania in 1920 — the same year Anna Anderson appeared in Berlin. The woman who had convinced millions that she was a Russian princess was, in fact, a Polish peasant who had seized an extraordinary opportunity.

• Anna Anderson (Franziska Schanzkowska, 1896-1984) — The most famous claimant; DNA disproved in 1994
• Eugenie Smith — An American woman who published a 1963 autobiography claiming to be Anastasia
• Natalya Bilikhodze — A Georgian woman who claimed to be Anastasia in the 1990s
• Over 200 additional claimants who came forward between 1918 and the 1990s
• None were ever verified; DNA evidence confirmed all Romanov children died in 1918

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Anastasia Romanov survive the execution?

No. DNA evidence has conclusively established that all five Romanov children died in the basement of the Ipatiev House on July 17, 1918. The nine bodies recovered from the first grave in 1991 included Anastasia's remains. The two bodies found in 2007 at a separate site nearby were identified as Alexei and Maria. The confusion arose because these two bodies had been burned and buried separately from the main group, as described in executioner Yakov Yurovsky's account.

Who was Anna Anderson?

Anna Anderson (1896-1984) was the most famous of over two hundred people who claimed to be surviving members of the Romanov family after the 1918 execution. Born Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker, she was discovered in a Berlin asylum in 1920 after a suicide attempt and gradually adopted the identity of Grand Duchess Anastasia. Her claim was supported by some members of European royalty and generated decades of legal battles. In 1994, DNA testing of preserved tissue samples proved she was not Anastasia but Franziska Schanzkowska, settling one of the most famous identity disputes in history.

How was the Romanov family identified?

The nine bodies exhumed in 1991 were identified through a combination of DNA analysis, dental records, and skeletal examination. The crucial DNA match came from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, who was a direct maternal relative of Tsarina Alexandra through Queen Victoria. His DNA matched the remains identified as the Tsarina and three of her daughters. The Tsar's remains were matched to living Romanov relatives. The 2007 discovery of the remaining two bodies completed the identification of the entire family.

Why did people believe Anna Anderson was Anastasia?

Anderson's claim gained credibility for several reasons: the absence of Anastasia's body from the known grave (because two bodies had been buried separately), the Bolshevik government's initial dishonesty about the execution, Anderson's physical resemblance to Anastasia (superficial, but persuasive to people who wanted to believe), and her knowledge of certain details about the imperial household that she may have acquired from published sources or from Russian emigres. The power of wishful thinking — the desire to believe that at least one innocent member of the family had survived — was perhaps the most important factor of all.