The mystery of Anastasia Romanov is one of history’s most intriguing tales.  Today, we’ll tell you about Anastasia Romanov and the horror that engulfed her family.

The Romanov family

The House of Romanov (Russian: oманов, IPA: [rmanf]) was the country’s second imperial dynasty. The Romanov Dynasty had 65 members in early 1917, 18 of whom were killed by the Bolsheviks. The remaining 47 members were deported to other countries. Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, a direct male-line patrilineal descendant of Alexander II of Russia, claimed the Imperial House of Russia’s leadership in 1924. The current pretender is Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, whose sole child George Mikhailovich is the heir apparent.

From left to right: Olga, Maria,Nicholas II, Alexandra, Anastasia, Alexei, andTatiana. Pictured at Livadia Palace in 1913

In official allusions to the Russian imperial house, the terms “Romanov” and “House of Romanov” were frequently employed. The Romanov boyars’ coat of arms was included in imperial dynasty legislation, and an official jubilee commemorating the “300th Anniversary of the Romanovs’ Rule” was held in 1913.

By special decree of the Provisional Government of Russia after the February Revolution, all members of the imperial family were given the surname “Romanov.” The morganatic descendants of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who assumed the surname Il’insky in exile, were the lone exception.

What happened to them?

Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich during the February Revolution of 1917. The latter refused imperial authority, opting instead to entrust it to the Provisional Government in the meantime, pending a democratic referendum. However, the Romanov dynasty’s dominion over Russia was practically ended as a result of this move.

Nicholas II and his family were placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace after the February Revolution. While numerous members of the imperial family were able to maintain good relations with the Provisional Government and eventually leave Russia, Alexander Kerensky exiled Nicholas II and his family to the Siberian town of Tobolsk in August 1917. The Provisional government was deposed by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution of 1917, and the Romanovs were relocated to Yekaterinburg in the Urals in April 1918, where they were housed in the Ipatiev House.

Nicholas II, his immediate family, and four servants were slain in the cellar of the Ipatiev House on the night of July 17, 1918, on orders from Yakov Sverdlov in Moscow and led locally by Filip Goloschekin and Yakov Yurovsky.

The family was told that they would be photographed to verify that they were still alive to the public. The family members were properly arranged and left alone for some minutes before the gunmen entered and began shooting. The first rounds did not kill the girls because bullets bounced off jewels sewed into their corsets. The gunmen tried to attack them with bayonets, but the stones stopped them. The gunman then allegedly shot each female in the head at close range, despite the fact that no physical evidence of head wounds was discovered until decades later. The Romanovs’ bodies were then hidden and transported numerous times before being placed in an unmarked pit until the summer.

DNA evidence was used to make tentative identification and the bodies were later given a state funeral under the nascent democracy of post-Soviet Russia.

AnastaSia – did she really survive?

One of the most famous mysteries of the twentieth century was Anastasia’s claimed survival. Several women claimed to be her, each with a different story about how she managed to survive the family’s murders.

The most well-known Anastasia impostor, Anna Anderson, first appeared in public between 1920 and 1922. She claimed that she pretended to die among the remains of her family members and servants, and that she was able to flee with the help of a kind guard who saved her from the bodies after noticing that she was still alive. Her legal quest for recognition, which lasted from 1938 until 1970, sparked a lifelong debate and was the longest-running case ever heard in German courts.

Anderson passed away in 1984 and was cremated. In 1994, DNA testing were performed on a tissue sample from Anderson found in a hospital and the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Empress Alexandra’s great-nephew. “If you agree that these samples were from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could not be linked to Tsar Nicholas or Tsarina Alexandra,” said Dr. Gill, who conducted the examinations.

One of at least 10 women who claimed to be Anastasia was Anna Anderson. Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith were two additional less well-known claimants. In 1919, a priest took two young ladies claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria into his home in the Ural Mountains, where they lived as nuns until their deaths.

Animation based on AnastaSia 

Anastasia is a 1997 American animated musical film distributed by 20th Century Fox and created by Fox Animation Studios. The film, directed by former Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, is based on the legend of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, who claimed to have escaped her family’s execution. It follows the narrative of Anya, an eighteen-year-old orphan who, in the hopes of locating her family, joins up with a pair of con men who want to profit from her resemblance to the Grand Duchess. Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters, Kirsten Dunst, and Angela Lansbury lend their voices to the picture. This animation is an adaptation of Anastasia 1956; the most famous film version on the mystery of Anastasia’s alleged survival.