These two senses of identity are genuinely different. The first is about biology; the second is about lived experience. The DNA results are definitive about the first. They say nothing about the second.
This distinction matters not to soften the finding — the finding is clear — but to be accurate about what kind of finding it is. Science did what science does: it described the biological fact. The human question of who this woman was, in the full sense of that phrase, remains partly open, as it does for any person whose inner life is not directly accessible to those who come after.
She was not Anastasia Romanov. That is what the biology says, and it says it clearly. Who she was, beyond that — what the claim meant to her, how she lived with it, what she knew and what she didn’t know about herself — the record does not fully say. It says enough to close the legal and scientific question. It does not say enough to close the human one.
And perhaps that distinction — between the questions science can settle and the questions it cannot — is the most important lesson the Anna Anderson case leaves behind.