Anybody hear about the guy in st,. Petersburg who claims to be the son of Alexei (son of Nicholas II)? He was supposed to take a DNA test last year to establish the truth about the story, but haven’t heard anything. I also understand that the Russian scientist that investigated the murder (of the Czar and his family) could’nt find the bones of Alexei or Anastasia-so (at least theoretically) one or both of them could have escaped.
The guy’s out of his mind. The whole family was killed, no one escaped. The reason two skeletons were missing (Alexei and either Anastasia or Marie) is because two bodies were burned in a pit near the mine where the rest of the family was dumped. Now, with DNA testing, the whole fascinating “what if?” game has been laid to rest. Sad, in a way, these things are always fun to think about, and it’s nice to imagine that one of those poor children might have escaped–but it just didn’t happen.
There is an interesting if not far-fetched tale of another purported Alexis.
This fellow lived his later years in Vancouver, Canada.
The claim was something to the effect that the czar’s son was not hit by the original flurry of bullets, and that one of the executioners held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, but that the gun was loaded with blanks. This caused the Tsaravetch to lose his hearing in that ear, but he otherwise survived and was smuggled out.
Yes, its far fetched. There was a website dedicated to this fellow’s tale, and his widow purportedly has asked for DNA testing to verify his claims.
SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”
Alexei suffered from severe hemophilia; a bump on the knee proved almost fatal to him several times. A blank shot in the ear (which would kill most people at point-blank range) would certainly have finished him off, as would any injuries he’d received that night. The Anastasia claimants at least had some believability (until the DNA tests), but there is simply no way Alexei could have survived.
Interestingly, there were also men claiming well into the 19th century to be the lost dauphin, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Before DNA testing, they also had a chance of being legit . . .
Hey Flora:
What was the deal with Anna Andersonm (claimed for many years to be Anastasia)? She always made the claim, and after her death a DNA test found she was an imposter. My question: from all accounts (she was interviewed by many of the Czars relatives, including a grand duchess) she was able to give incredible details about life at court, family info, etc., such that many were convinced of her claim. How did an uneducated refugee learn all of this stuff? Was she part of a plot to defraud the royal family (as was suggested in the 1956 movie)?
She really was a poser. There’s a recent book called The Search for Anastasia which you should read if you’re interested. There were some amazing coincidences regarding her, physically and placement-wise, and she was a quick study. Most of the information on Anastasia and the royal family was there for the studying, and she was coached along by people who desperately wanted her to be for real–not necessarily for finanical gain, but for emotional reasons. Also, Anna Anderson tended to keep her own mouth shut and let others do her talking for her. Turns out she was really a Polish farmer’s daughter whose real family had been saying for decades that she wasn’t Anastasia. It’s kinda sad that the mystery was taken out of all this by DNA . . .
It’s only kind of related, but last I checked, there is still a surviving claimant to the Russian throne, and a surprisingly good one at that (the bolsheviks weren’t as thorough as they thought there were). IIRC, the “crown prince” is Vladimir Romanov, who is Nicholas II grand-nephew, and a direct descendant (great-great-great grandson???) of Alexander III. Not sure if Vladimir has a family, but a few male heirs would make a valid claim existant for years to come.
Jason R Remy
“Open mindedness is not the same thing as empty mindedness.”
– John Dewey Democracy and Education (1916)
The guy who wrote Nicholas and Alexandra brought out a sequel of sorts called, approximately ** The Romanovs: The Last Years ** which dealt with (a) the fate of the Tsar’s immediate family during the Russian Revolution, (b) the assortment of pretenders-sub-1, including Anna Anderson, who claimed to be its survivors, and © the pretenders-sub-2, i.e., Romanovs who managed to be or get out of Russia. If I remember right, Vladimir is dead, and left the throne to his daughter Maria, who threw the rest of the Romanovs out of the royal family. Needless to say, they have another pretender.