Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, had abdicated in March 1917 following the February Revolution. Held under house arrest through the remaining months of revolution, he, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — and their son Alexei were transferred in 1918 to the Ural city of Ekaterinburg. The Bolshevik forces holding them there, under orders from Moscow, executed the entire family and their household staff in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918.
The execution was carried out in the basement of the house where the family was being held. Eleven people were killed: Nicholas, Alexandra, the five children, and four members of the household staff. The bodies were removed, mutilated in efforts to hinder identification, and buried in a wooded area outside the city. The burial was a Soviet secret for decades.
What was not a secret, at least not entirely: the execution. The Bolsheviks announced Nicholas’s death publicly and acknowledged that others had died, but the fate of the children — particularly the daughters — was never fully clarified in official communications. The chaos of the civil war, the deliberate Soviet suppression of the burial site, and the inherent human tendency to prefer hope to finality created a vacuum into which rumors could flow.
The most persistent rumor: that Anastasia, the youngest daughter, had survived. She was seventeen at the time of the execution. She was, from photographs, small and lively. In the stories that circulated through Russian émigré communities in the 1920s and beyond, she had survived through various means — shielded by jewelry sewn into her clothing that deflected bullets, taken in by a sympathetic guard, spirited away before or during the shooting. None of these accounts was sourced or verified. But they circulated, and they circulated persistently enough that when a young woman surfaced in Berlin in February 1920, claiming to be a Romanov survivor, she found an audience that was already primed to believe.