In the winter of 1920, a woman was pulled from a canal in Berlin, alive and unwilling to say who she was. The asylum that took her in called her, for lack of anything better, Fraulein Unbekannt. Miss Unknown. For months she said nothing at all about her past, staring past the doctors who questioned her as though the question itself belonged to someone else’s life.
Then gradually, in fragments, she began to suggest something else: that she was not a nameless woman who had tried to drown herself, but a Russian grand duchess. Specifically, the youngest daughter of the murdered tsar. Specifically, Anastasia. By the time that claim reached Olga Alexandrovna, youngest sister of the last tsar of Russia, it had already survived five years.
It had survived doctors, minor aristocrats, and a growing circle of Russian émigrés who had convinced themselves the resemblance was real. It had also survived the doubts of others who had known the real Anastasia personally and saw no resemblance at all. The case simply refused to resolve itself one way or the other. For Olga, the stakes of that refusal were not abstract.
Anastasia was not simply one of five children murdered in a cellar she had heard about secondhand. She was a goddaughter Olga had held as an infant and watched grow into a particular, distinct little person long before any of this began. “My favourite goddaughter,” Olga would later say of her. “Anastasia, or Shvipsik, little one, as I used to call her.
She was such a generous child. ”
That was the girl being discussed at second and third hand in Berlin drawing rooms Olga had never set foot in. Not a rumor, not a case file, but a particular child with a particular nickname who was either alive somewhere in that city or being cruelly impersonated by someone who was not. By 1925, the pressure to settle the question herself had become difficult to resist.
Other relatives had already been to see the woman and come away divided, which only made the not knowing worse. Even Olga’s own sister, Xenia, had her own private opinion after a visit of her own. No two accounts, it seemed, described quite the same person. Pierre Gilliard, who had once tutored Nicholas’s children in the schoolroom at Tsarskoe Selo, agreed to accompany Olga on the journey along with his wife.
Gilliard was not a casual witness. He had spent years in that schoolroom. He knew Anastasia’s voice, the particular slant of her handwriting on a page, her small private habits, better than almost anyone still living who was not blood family. Between the three of them, Olga, Gilliard, and his wife carried more direct personal knowledge of the real Anastasia than any other group who had yet gone to examine the claim.
The train from Copenhagen to Berlin took the better part of a day. There was time on a journey like that to rehearse every possible version of what waited at the other end. The reunion. The disappointment.
The terrible middle ground of simply never being sure. There was time, too, to notice that none of the three people making that journey had said very much to one another since crossing the border. The nursing home was called the Maison de Santé. The patient inside it was by that point seriously ill with tuberculosis, thin in the particular way illness thins a face, softening the very features a visitor would need clearly in view to judge whether they matched a memory nearly a decade old.
The door opened onto a small room that smelled faintly of carbolic soap and the particular staleness of a sick room that had not had its window opened in some time. A woman lay in the narrow bed, her hair cropped short in the manner of a hospital patient rather than a grand duchess of Russia. Gilliard went in first. Olga followed.
Whatever the three of them had rehearsed on the train from Copenhagen, none of it survived contact with the actual person in that bed. Not because she looked nothing like Anastasia, but because at certain angles, in certain kinds of light, she looked disturbingly like she might. It is the case others who examined her over the years kept coming back to: not a clear no and not a clear yes, but a face arranged just uncertainly enough to keep the question open for anyone who wanted badly enough to keep asking it. Olga sat with her for a time in a chair pulled close to the bed.
She studied the shape of the jaw, the set of the eyes, the small physical details a person carries from childhood into adulthood, no matter how much illness or grief has worn the rest of the face away. She had, after all, watched this particular child grow from infancy. If anyone alive was equipped to see through either an uncanny resemblance or a desperate one, it was her. It did not last very long at all.
Anastasia had grown up speaking Russian at home and English with her governesses, switching between the two the way children raised in that particular household always did. German was not a language spoken in the imperial family at all, not by the children, not around them, not in the nursery, not in the schoolroom where Gilliard himself had once corrected their exercises in French and English both. The woman in the bed spoke only German. Not haltingly, not as a second language recalled under the stress of trauma, but fluently, as a native speaker does.
When Olga addressed her gently in Russian, the language Anastasia had used to argue with her sisters, to tease her brother, to write the small, cheerful letters Olga had once received from her as a child, the words produced nothing but incomprehension. Gilliard tried English next, the language of the schoolroom itself. Nothing. It was in its way a small detail.
It was also the kind of detail that does not survive cross-examination, however many decades the argument is allowed to run. A face can be argued about for years, softened by illness, distorted by memory, reshaped by hope on both sides of the bed. A language a person does or does not speak is a fact with almost no room to hide in. Olga stayed for as long as ordinary courtesy required, and not one minute longer than that.
She would later write to a friend with a bluntness she rarely allowed herself on the subject of her own family. “There is no resemblance,” she wrote, “and she is undoubtedly not a Romanov. ”
Five words to close a case that had taken five years, three witnesses, and a train across half of Europe to finally examine in person. What she did next says more about her than the verdict itself did.
Convinced, and grieving all over again for a niece who was after all simply and finally dead, Olga did not simply walk away and leave the woman to whatever fate awaited a penniless stranger dying of tuberculosis in a Berlin clinic. She sent her a scarf. She wrote her five separate letters in the months that followed, kind ones by every account, addressed to a woman she was now certain was not family and never had been, and who would go on claiming otherwise in one form or another for decades to come, to newspapers and courts and anyone else who would listen. Olga had just closed the door for good on the last plausible hope that anyone from that cellar in Ekaterinburg had walked out alive.
Her first instinct afterward was still to be kind to the stranger who had cost her that hope in the first place. She would say of the whole long journey only this: “I left Berlin with all hope extinguished. ” Not anger, not even the quiet satisfaction of having solved a mystery other people had failed to solve. Extinguished.
The word of someone describing a light going out, not a puzzle being completed. History would eventually agree with her, though not for another six decades. DNA testing on preserved tissue samples, conducted long after both women were dead, confirmed what Olga had concluded in a single afternoon without the benefit of any laboratory at all. The woman was not a Romanov.
She was in fact a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska, who had gone missing from her own family some years before the canal, the asylum, and the name Fraulein Unbekannt. That verdict, and the journey that produced it, came near the end of a life that had already crossed most of the distance between an empire and a farmyard. Olga Alexandrovna was born in June of 1882, announced to the world over the Baltic Sea by 101 cannons. She was the youngest child of Alexander III, emperor of all the Russias, a large, physically imposing man who preferred quiet family evenings to the pageantry of the court around him.
The family’s real home was Gatchina Palace, an enormous fortress of a building outside St. Petersburg with corridors long enough that a child could vanish down them for an entire afternoon. Of the emperor’s five children, it was Olga, the youngest, who was allowed closest to him. She rode with him.
She sat near him at dinner. When the emperor of all the Russias wanted an hour of peace at the end of a long day, it was his youngest daughter he wanted it with, not his ministers, and rarely his wife. Her mother was a different matter entirely. Maria Feodorovna, born a princess of Denmark, ran the imperial nursery with a formality that never quite thawed into warmth.
Between mother and daughter there remained for the whole of Olga’s childhood a kind of polite distance, the sort that is never spoken of directly and never entirely closes, no matter how many decades pass. Biographers who interviewed Olga late in her life noted the same thing. She spoke of her father freely, in specific and affectionate detail. She spoke of her mother carefully, in generalities.
Then in the autumn of 1894, her father was gone. Her brother Nicholas, a man Olga had always thought of as gentle, almost shy, entirely unprepared for the size of what was coming to him, became emperor of Russia at the age of 26. Olga was 12. Gatchina’s walls did not change.
Everything behind them did. The court that absorbed her in the years that followed ran on protocol the way other households run on habit: who curtsied to whom, who was permitted to sit, which daughters of which families would be presented in which season. A grand duchess did not simply grow up in that world. She was assembled by it, one lesson and one expectation at a time, for a future that other people had already begun arranging on her behalf.
There was one place in that enormous formal childhood that belonged to Olga alone. Her tutors had given her, alongside history and French and the correct way to enter a ballroom, an education in drawing. Of all of it, this was the one subject no one had chosen for her out of duty or dynastic necessity. And of all of it, this was the one she kept.
She was, by every account that survives her, unusually good at it. Flowers mostly, and the countryside around whichever palace the family happened to be occupying that season. No committee approved the composition. No minister reviewed the result.
It answered to her alone. It is worth pausing on this because almost nothing else in Olga Alexandrovna’s early life was hers to keep. In 1901 alone, she would be made honorary commander-in-chief of the 12th Akhtyrka Hussar regiment, a cavalry unit famous a century earlier for helping break Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Kulm, its officers still recognizable by their distinctive brown dolman jackets. It was a genuine honor, and a title she had not asked for.
A sheet of paper and a box of paints, on the other hand, belonged to no one but her. For nearly the whole of her youth, Olga Alexandrovna’s story is really the story of four men who took turns deciding what would happen to her. There was her father, Alexander III, who loved her and left her too soon. There was Nicholas, the brother who became tsar before either of them was ready for it, and who would go on to make two of the largest decisions of her adult life.
There was the husband chosen for her before she had any real say in the matter. And later there would be one more man, the only one in the end that she ever chose for herself. The first of those decisions arrived in the spring of 1900, when Olga made her formal debut in society, a full year later than tradition called for, delayed by her own account for as long as she could manage it. She hated nearly every moment of it.
Presented, examined, discussed, an 18-year-old grand duchess put on display for a court that had been quietly assessing her prospects since childhood. She would later describe the entire experience to her official biographer in a single unsparing sentence: “I felt as though I were an animal in a cage, exhibited to the public for the first time. ”
It was that same year that a distant cousin, Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg, began escorting her to the theater and the opera. He was 14 years her senior.
He had shown, by every account available to historians since, no prior interest in women at all, a fact that struck nearly everyone around the young couple except, it seems, their own mothers, who had been quietly arranging the match for some time. When Peter proposed the following spring, Olga did not see it coming. She had no rehearsed answer, no composed reaction. “I was so taken aback,” she admitted years later, “that all I could say was, ‘Thank you.
’”
The engagement was announced within days, and it startled the family nearly as much as it had startled Olga herself. Her brother Nicholas, informed by their mother, wrote back that he could barely believe what he was reading. “I cannot believe Olga is actually engaged to Petia,” he told her. “They were probably both drunk yesterday.
We both laughed so much reading your note that we have not recovered yet. ”
It is a strange thing to read now. The future tsar of Russia joking about his sister’s engagement in a private letter, with no idea at all what marriage to Peter of Oldenburg would actually come to mean for her. A wedding was arranged with the full machinery of the Russian court behind it.
A committee that included the tsar himself drew up the settlement: an annuity of 100,000 rubles a year and a further million rubles placed in trust for her. Government ministers attended. Foreign ambassadors attended. On the 9th of August 1901, at 19 years old, Olga Alexandrovna became Duke Peter’s wife in a ceremony of the kind only an empire like Russia could stage.
There were glittering gifts. There was a fine new title. Newspapers as far away as London described the ceremony in detail: the uniforms, the icons, the long procession of carriages. And waiting for the young couple afterward, gifted by the tsar himself, was a mansion of some 200 rooms on the Fontanka in the heart of St.
Petersburg, a house large enough in the most literal sense to lose a person in. She had no way of knowing yet just how true that would prove to be, or how long 15 years can feel inside a house with 200 rooms, and only one of them, in any real sense, hers. The mansion on the Fontanka was enormous, grand enough that Olga and her husband managed somehow to occupy almost none of the same rooms in it. Their bedrooms sat at opposite ends of the building, connected by corridors long enough that a servant carrying a message between them could take the better part of a minute to arrive.
Peter kept to his own wing, his own hours, his own quiet habits: a passion for literature, a weakness for the card tables, a fondness for solitude that had nothing to do with his young wife one way or the other. He was by every account left of him unfailingly polite, careful never to give the household staff or the wider court anything resembling a scandal to discuss. He was also, in any sense that mattered to a 19-year-old bride, barely present at all. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being married and having a house that large to actually be lonely in.
No shouting, no scenes, just two people moving through the same enormous rooms on entirely separate schedules for years at a stretch. Decades later, describing the marriage to her official biographer, Olga did not reach for drama. She reached for plain fact. “Never once were we husband and wife,” she told him.
It is, of all the sentences she left behind, one of the quietest and one of the hardest to read without wincing. It might have simply continued that way. Grand duchesses of Russia were not, as a rule, granted divorces for reasons of loneliness. But in 1903, two years into the marriage, Olga was introduced to a cavalry officer her own age, a captain named Nikolai Kulikovsky.
Whatever she had expected from the introduction, it was not this. “It was fate,” she said afterward. “I suppose I learned on that day that love at first sight does exist. ”
She asked her husband for a divorce not long after.
Peter refused, though in a strange concession that reads today like something out of a legal negotiation rather than a marriage, he told her he might reconsider the question in seven years’ time. Seven years is a long time to hold a door shut. It is a longer time to wait on the other side of it, especially when the man you actually love is by then being quietly promoted to captain of the Blue Cuirassier Guards and reassigned to a post in the provinces, as far from the capital and from her as his superiors could reasonably arrange. Olga did not fight the reassignment publicly, whatever it cost her privately.
There was no scandal that year, no headline, nothing a foreign newspaper could report. What there was instead was a young woman continuing to sit at official dinners beside a husband she barely knew, continuing to paint in whatever hours belonged to her alone, and continuing to write to a captain stationed somewhere she was not permitted to follow. She would say much later that these were the years she slowly learned that patience was not the same thing as acceptance. She had not accepted anything.
She had simply been given no other choice that anyone in her family was prepared to support. What finally moved the question was not persuasion. It was catastrophe. In the summer of 1914, an assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain of alliances that would pull the whole of Europe into war within weeks.
Olga did not wait to be told what her role in the war should be. Using what medical training she had picked up on her own, she went to the front as a Red Cross nurse. Not as a patroness cutting a ribbon at a hospital opening, but as a working nurse on 12-hour shifts, dressing wounds beside soldiers who had no idea whose hands were treating them. Her rank meant nothing on the ward.
Her hands, scrubbed and steady, meant everything. She paid to equip an entire hospital in Kiev out of her own funds, down to the linens and the medical instruments. She came under fire more than once, at distances army regulations did not generally permit for a woman of her rank. For it she was awarded the Order of St.
George, a decoration given for personal gallantry under fire, one of the very few honors in her life she had actually earned rather than simply inherited. It was around this time that the paintbrush she had guarded so carefully as a girl took on a second purpose. She began turning her watercolors into postcards sold to raise money for the Red Cross and for the soldiers under her care. The habit that had once been her only private refuge from a life she had not chosen had become, almost without her noticing the shift, one of the very few tools she had to actually help the people around her.
The war did what a decade of pleading never had. In October of 1916, worn down by his sister’s persistence and perhaps by the plain evidence of what she had become on the wards, Nicholas finally granted the annulment. Peter, for his part, did not contest it further. The following month, on the 16th of November, in a small church in Kiev rather than a cathedral in the capital, Olga Alexandrovna married Nikolai Kulikovsky at last, nearly 13 years after the day she first called it fate.
There was no committee, no prenuptial settlement drawn up by ministers, no echoing wing of empty rooms waiting for them afterward the way one had the first time. There was a church, a captain, and a woman who had finally been allowed to choose. She would have perhaps four months of anything resembling an ordinary marriage before the empire itself came apart around her. The empire did not end all at once.
It ended in stages, each one arriving at Ai-Todor a little later than it had happened everywhere else. By the spring of 1917, Olga’s brother had abdicated, and the family that had ruled Russia for three centuries was, in the eyes of the new government, simply another set of private citizens. Olga, her husband, her mother, her sister Xenia, and Xenia’s family retreated to Ai-Todor, an estate on the Crimean coast, chosen for its distance from Petrograd and for the mistaken hope that distance might still mean safety. It did not, not entirely.
A guard of some 20 soldiers and sailors was posted on the grounds before long, men who searched the house on the flimsiest of pretexts and treated its occupants, by every surviving account, with open contempt. When the dowager empress was once required to sign a statement identifying herself, the clerk offered her the title “the ex-empress Marie. ” She picked up the pen and corrected it herself: “the widow of Emperor Alexander III. ”
It was into this house arrest, hostile guards, and a family that no longer knew from one week to the next what its own legal status was, that Olga’s first child was born.
On the 12th of August 1917, she named him Tikhon. Her mother, writing to a relative shortly afterward, described the birth in words that say more about that entire year than any official record could: “Just last evening, when I felt completely lost, my dear Olga gave birth to a baby, a little son who brought such unexpected joy to my broken heart. I am very glad that baby appeared just at that moment when from grief and despair I suffered terribly. ”
A birth arriving exactly when a family most needed proof that something could still begin.
It would be the last unambiguously happy moment any of them would have for a very long time. In July of 1918, word came that Nicholas, the brother who had once joked in a letter about Olga’s sudden engagement, the brother who had after 13 years of asking finally granted her the annulment she needed to marry the man she loved, had been shot along with his wife and all five of their children in a cellar in a provincial city called Ekaterinburg. The family at Ai-Todor did not yet know all of the details. They knew enough.
Olga was 36 years old, not yet two years into the only marriage she had ever actually wanted, and the world she had been born into no longer had an emperor in it. There was every reason to think the guards watching Ai-Todor might do the same to everyone still inside it. The order for their execution had in fact already been discussed by local revolutionary committees, delayed only by the kind of bureaucratic infighting that in 1918 could still occasionally save a life it had no intention of sparing. It did not come to that.
In April of 1919, a British warship, the HMS Marlborough, arrived off the Crimean coast at the request of the British royal family to evacuate the dowager empress and whichever relatives chose to go with her. It was by any reasonable measure the safest way out of Russia that anyone in that family would ever be offered again. Olga’s mother boarded. Her sister Xenia boarded, along with Xenia’s husband and their children.
Olga did not. She had a husband the rest of her family still regarded quietly as beneath her. She had an infant son, not yet two years old. And in a year when almost nothing about her life was still hers to decide, she seems to have decided this much for herself: that she would rather take her chances finding her own way out alongside the man she had fought so long to marry than accept a rescue that came, as so much of her life always had, with someone else’s name already at the top of the passenger list.
It would be nearly a year, and a second son, Guri, born along the way in 1919, before Olga, Nikolai, and their two boys finally crossed into safety in February of 1920 and made their way to Denmark to be reunited with the mother who had sailed without her. In Denmark, Olga settled into a role no one had formally assigned her but that fell to her anyway: companion and secretary to a mother who had lost a husband, a son, and an empire. The dowager empress spent her days answering letters from Russian refugees scattered across half of Europe, all of them still addressing her out of habit or hope as though the throne still existed for her to help them from. Olga wrote the replies.
She sorted the requests for help from the requests for money, and both from a third kind of letter that had by the early 1920s begun arriving with troubling regularity: people, mostly strangers, mostly desperate, claiming to be relatives who were supposed to be dead. The Romanov family had by 1925 grown almost accustomed to impostors. There had been false Alexeis, false Marias. A man in America who claimed for a time to be Nicholas himself, quietly surviving under an assumed name.
Most such claims collapsed within weeks, unable to survive a single detailed question about the household they claimed to have grown up in. What set the woman in the Maison de Santé apart was simply this: she had not yet collapsed. Olga did not travel to Berlin expecting to be fooled. She did not travel expecting a miracle either, not exactly, though it would be dishonest to pretend that no part of her hoped for one.
She had buried a brother she never saw the body of, and a niece she never saw the body of either. In the strange arithmetic of unwitnessed death, a small, stubborn space remains open for the possibility that someone somewhere got the reports wrong. She left that space behind in Berlin. She did not go looking for it again.
There would be no more journeys to any nursing homes after that, no more letters answered with anything but a polite final decline whenever some new claimant surfaced in the years that followed, as they periodically did. Whatever hope had survived the cellar in Ekaterinburg, the revolution, and five long years of rumor did not survive one quiet afternoon in a room with a woman who could not ask, in either of the only two languages that would have proven anything at all, for so much as a glass of water. What Olga did with the years that followed was in its own quiet way the real answer to the question Berlin had finally closed. She stopped waiting for Russia to give her anything back.
There was no more inheritance coming, no restoration, no version of the future in which any of it was returned to her. She turned instead toward whatever she could still build with her own two hands, in whatever country would let her build it. Three years later, in 1928, the dowager empress died in Denmark, and Olga was for the first time since she was 12 years old no longer anyone’s daughter. She and Nikolai used what little remained of the family’s money to buy a dairy farm outside Copenhagen in a town called Ballerup.
There was no committee to approve the purchase. No minister reviewed the accounts. No one arranged it on her behalf, and no one needed to be asked for permission first. She raised her two sons there, kept the books, milked what needed milking, and returned in whatever hours the farm allowed her to the paintbrush she had never fully put down.
Flowers again, mostly, the same subject she had chosen as a girl at Gatchina, though no one was assigning her the lesson this time, and no one was grading the result. By 1948, with Soviet troops uncomfortably close to a Denmark that no longer felt safe, the family made one more crossing, this time to a 200-acre farm outside Toronto. Olga tended the poultry. Nikolai kept the cattle.
Of the long train journey west from Halifax, she would say only: “The immense spaces I saw deeply impressed me. I felt at home. Everything spoke to me of the vastness I had known in Russia. ” It is, of everything she ever said about exile, the closest she came to admitting what she had actually lost, offered characteristically as a compliment to her new country rather than a complaint about her old one.
The farm did not last forever. Failing health and the theft of some of the family’s few remaining jewels forced its sale in 1952. Olga, Nikolai, and their devoted companion Mimka moved instead into a modest house in Cooksville on the edge of Toronto, where Nikolai died in 1958 after 42 years of the only marriage either of them had ever actually chosen. The following June, Queen Elizabeth II came to Canada and asked that Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna join her for lunch aboard the royal yacht Britannia.
Neighbors hearing the news fretted over what a 77-year-old farmer’s widow should possibly wear to such a thing. Olga went shopping. She bought a new dress, and to whoever would listen, she made the whole event sound like considerably less trouble than everyone around her seemed to think it was. “All this fuss,” she said, “just to go see Lilibet and Philip.
” Katherine Kilae Mae, whose husband served as Ontario’s lieutenant governor, remembered it rather differently, watching Olga wait to board that day. “She looked nervous,” Kilae Mae recalled. “We were all afraid the queen might overlook her and she might be hurt. ”
The queen did not overlook her.
Olga died a year and a half later, on the 24th of November 1960, in a rented room on Gerard Street in Toronto, having outlived her sister Xenia by only a matter of months. The funeral filled a small Russian church to overflowing. Officers of the Akhtyrka Hussars, the regiment she had been made honorary commander of at 19 without being asked, stood guard beside the coffin of a woman who had spent 78 years being handed titles, thrones, husbands, and rescues she had never once been asked to approve. She left behind two sons, a modest house, a devoted companion named Mimka who would one day be buried near her, and something over 2,000 watercolors.
Flowers mostly, painted in whatever hours belonged to no one but her, across three countries and nearly seven decades, by the last grand duchess Russia ever had. There was no inheritance left to fight over. No mansion, no jewels, no throne to place a claim against. What she actually left behind fit easily into a few boxes: paintings of gardens in Denmark, gardens in Canada, and somewhere near the bottom, a few faded studies of flowers that no longer grew anywhere she had ever lived, done in the hand of a girl who once needed exactly one thing in her life: to belong to no one but herself.
Some of those paintings hang in museums now, gathered by a foundation that still bears her name. Most of them no one photographs at all. They sit instead in private houses in Toronto and Copenhagen and further afield, admired by people who could not tell you a single thing about Ai-Todor or Fraulein Unbekannt or a vast, echoing mansion on the Fontanka that once held everything except the one thing she actually wanted from it. They are simply paintings to those people.
Flowers, mostly, by a woman who once asked, more than once, in more than one country, to be called nothing else. Just Olga.
