The convergence of the right scientific tools with available biological material in the early 1990s was what made the 1994 testing possible. Five years earlier, the paraffin tissue might have been available but the techniques for analyzing it might not have been sufficiently refined. The timing was significant.
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## The Question of Deliberate Imposture
One of the ethical and analytical hazards in discussing the Anna Anderson case is the tendency to move from the established fact of DNA exclusion to the implied conclusion of deliberate fraud — as if the DNA test had proven not just a biological result but a psychological one.
The DNA excluded Anderson from the Romanov maternal line. It supported the identification as Franziska Schanzkowska. It did not, and cannot, establish what Anderson knew about her own identity or what she believed.
The historical record of the case is compatible with several very different psychological narratives.
In one: Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska, knew exactly who she was, and built and maintained an elaborate imposture for sixty years out of whatever combination of desperation, calculation, and opportunity. The claim arose in a context where being an unidentified woman with psychiatric history offered limited prospects; being a possible Romanov princess offered rather more. The support structure that formed around her — housing, financial support, legal advocacy, a husband — made the maintenance of the claim materially advantageous.
In another: Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska who, following significant trauma (the grenade incident, the death of her fiancé, psychiatric institutionalization, the attempted suicide in 1920), genuinely came to believe in a constructed or confabulated identity. Dissociative conditions and the effects of severe trauma on memory and identity can produce beliefs that are sincerely held and deeply resistant to correction by external evidence.