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Romanov Imposters and False Claimants: The Anastasia Imposters

Since the 1920’s, there have been hundreds of supposed claimants to members of the Romanov family, after their purported murders at Ekaterinburg in 1918.
Many of these were quickly dismissed, as evidence amounted against them. Often these women, spurred on by the fanatical media and tales of a lost fortune, had come from troubled backgrounds, such as that of factory-worker Anna Anderson, and Eugenia Smith, who had intrigued even Prince Rostislav Alexandrovich, a cousin of the real Anastasia, and one of surprisingly many noble people and royals who desperately hoped for something of a miracle to save their lost Romanov family, and the youngest daughter of the Tsar, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.

Pictured:

• Anna Anderson; created wordwide mayhem at her tale of a lost grand duchess. Perhaps the most famous of claimants, she spent most of her life in a state of mental collapse after her initial sucidie attempt in Berlin, leaving her with some form of memory loss on an already unsteady self-conscious. Anna took her claims to the High Courts, with the support of many royals, even those who had met the Grand Duchess herself, seeking the illustrious Romanov family fortune. She was dismissed by the surviving Romanovs, though her ability to recount such intimate details about the Imperial Family troubled those who had initially doubted her. She died in 1984, and was buried falsely under the name Anastasia Nikolaevna. In 1991 the bodies of the Imperial Family were excavated, and a sample of Anderson’s DNA was compared, thus striking her from any genuine bond to the family.
  
  
• Eugenia Smith was also one of many claimants to gain a large profile. Smith wrote a book on ‘her life’, recounting ‘facts’ about her life as a Grand Duchess, and how an unidentified woman saved her from the Ipatiev house. She was later uncovered when she migrated from Serbia to the United States, using the false name of a man who later told investigators he had never heard of her before. Smith even caught the attention of Prince Rostislav of Russia, the son of the Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, aunt, and cousin of the real Anastasia. He attempted to make contact numerous times, but she would suddenly cancel their meetings, claiming she was too nervous.
  
  In her later years, Smith distanced herself from earlier claims of Imperial origins. In 1984, Associated Press reported that she had refused to discuss her claims with them. When she was asked if she would like to provide a blood sample for DNA analysis, she also refused. Eugenia Smith died on January 31, 1997 at the purported age of 95 years.
  
  
• Eleonora Kruger was a Bulgarian woman who lived mostly unlike the other claimants. Eleonora never actually claimed she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, but as a language teacher she would recount to her students, stories of grand palaces, governesses and bathing in a golden bathtub. For a time until his death, she lived in a house with a workman named George, who incidentally suffered from hemophilia. Though the two never made any public statements regarding their heritage, the people who encounter the two together would often stare in wonder at their likeness to the Tsarevich and his sister. Eleonora died in 1954.
  
  
• Natalya Bilikhodze was yet another claimant of the youngest daughter to Tsar Nicholas II. She claimed that Anastasia was not shot, but fled to Georgia, where she later married. Bilikhodze had begun using the name Grand Duchess Anastasia in 1995. In 2002, presented her claim at a Press Confrence, by film. It was later revealed that the video had been made two years prior to that, and Natalya herself had died and been dead since 2000. In January 2001, a commission of experts at the Central Clinical Hospital studied tissues from Bilikhodze’s body and concluded that she was not related to the Romanovs.
  
• Nadezhda Vasilyeva was yet another claimant. Vasilyeva appeared in Siberia in 1920, as she was trying to travel to China. She was arrested by the Bolsheviks and was imprisoned. In 1934 she was moved to a prison hospital in Kazan, where she wrote letters to King George V asking him to help his “cousin” Anastasia. At one point she changed her story and said she was the daughter of a merchant from Riga. Later, she again claimed to be Anastasia. She died in an insane asylum in 1971. According to the head of the hospital in Kazan, “except for her claim that she was Anastasia, she was completely sane.”

[Source]

(via thefirstwaltz)

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