She claimed to speak Russian poorly because the trauma had affected her memory and facility with the language. She was demonstrably more comfortable in German, which complicated the claim to Romanov identity since all the Romanov children were raised with Russian and English as primary languages. Her apparent lack of French — the standard language of aristocratic communication in pre-revolutionary Russia — was also notable to skeptics.
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## The Architecture of Belief: Who Said She Was Anastasia
The history of Anna Anderson’s claim is substantially the history of the people who supported it, because the claim itself rested entirely on human recognition and human testimony rather than documentary evidence.
A series of individuals who had known the real Anastasia — either directly or through proximity to the imperial family — visited Anderson in Berlin and in the various locations where she lived in subsequent years, and offered varying verdicts.
Among the notable supporters:
Tatiana Botkina, daughter of the imperial family’s physician Yevgeny Botkin (who was among those killed in Ekaterinburg), declared Anderson to be Anastasia after visiting her early in the 1920s. Botkina’s endorsement carried weight in émigré circles because her father had been present at the execution, and because she had known the children personally.
Gleb Botkin, Tatiana’s brother and Yevgeny’s son, became Anderson’s most persistent champion and the person most responsible for organizing and sustaining her public claim over decades. He had also known Anastasia as a child. He maintained his conviction despite accumulating contrary evidence and spent years pursuing legal recognition of Anderson’s identity in Germany and the United States. He arranged her 1928 trip to the United States and secured legal representation for her claim to the Romanov estate.