At all times in Russia there were enough people who illegally claimed the royal throne. As a rule, the news of the death of the crowned heads was followed closely by the rumor of their miraculous salvation. There were witnesses who claimed that they saw with their own eyes - a man lay in the coffin, only a little like the one who supposedly died, and the real emperor (heir, member of the royal family, and the like) was actually alive and well.
Numerous impostors
False Dmitry I, False Dmitry II, Emelyai Pugachev, Augusta Tarakanova, Elder Fyodor Kuzmich - this is not a complete list of people posing as the miraculously saved Russian rulers. Some of the impostors were attracted by the power, some were attracted by the untold royal treasures, some simply suffered from mental illness.
Over the past 90 years, the Romanov family, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918, has gained particular popularity in this sense. There has never been such a number of impostors who declared themselves the heirs of the emperor in Russia in its entire history. 11 people claimed the role of the tsar's son - Alexei, about 30 daughters - Anastasia and Maria. The reason for this was probably an impressive amount of money belonging to the royal family and allegedly kept in the accounts of foreign banks.
According to the official version, the emperor and his family were shot in the basement of the house of the engineer Ipatiev (special purpose house, DON - as it is called in all official documents) on the night of July 16-17, 1918. Then the bodies were brought by trucks to the mine and thrown there. After the unfortunate grenades flew - so that the members of the royal family would not be identified later. The next day, the mutilated bodies were removed from the mine and burned at the stake.
As the investigation proceeded, new speculations appeared about the miraculous rescue of the DON prisoners. The most weighty argument turned out to be the story of one of the executioners, who argued: after the powder smoke dissipated, it was discovered that the king's daughters were only slightly wounded. The reason for this was the diamonds sewn into the princesses' corsets. Jewelry and became a kind of body armor for poor girls. It follows from the testimony of the killers: as soon as they saw that one of the Romanovs was still alive, they were stabbed to death with bayonets. Numerous impostors have seized on this thread. Some claimed that the royal children pretended to be dead, and then simply fled from the truck on the way to the burial site. According to other versions, the Bolsheviks themselves, outraged by such a cruel reprisal, helped the tsar's daughters to escape. It is also knownthat the imperial family had backup families - the Filatovs and the Berezkins. They said that the graves found near Yekaterinburg contained the remains of one of these families.
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Anastasia or Anna?
The first in the list of "resurrected" is the youngest daughter of Nicholas II Anastasia. The most famous contender for this name was and remains Anna Anderson.
In 1920, a young girl tried to commit suicide in Berlin. She threw herself into the canal, but, fortunately, bystanders saved her life. The girl woke up in the hospital - a severe head injury led to amnesia. Once in the hands of Fraulein Unbekant ("unknown") a magazine accidentally came across, in which a photograph of the royal family was printed. Seeing the photos of people smiling happily, the patient cried out and sobbed. Her roommate noticed that one of the royal daughters is very similar to Fraulein Unbekant. Gradually, her attending physician managed to find out the details of the life of the unknown. It turned out that the Bolsheviks themselves helped "Anastasia" escape. During the conversations, the doctor believed so much that Anastasia was really in front of him that he decided to contact the relatives and friends of the royal family. Some of thosewho were very close to the Romanovs - for example, Nikolai's sisters Olga and Ksenia - at first recognized Anastasia. However, later they began to assert that the woman was an impostor. But the children of Professor Botkin, who also died in the basement of the Ipatiev House, - Gleb and Tatiana - believed Anna (or pretended to believe). The trial in this case lasted about 30 years. Seemingly irrefutable evidence was presented in favor of Anna Anderson: she spoke about such facts from the life of the royal family that only close people could know. Her handwriting was similar to that of Anastasia, a similarity in the structure of the auricle was established. Anna, like the Grand Duchess, suffered from curvature of the big toes. With all these coincidences, the applicant for the Russian throne did not speak Russian. The court did not believe in the evidence of her relationship with the Romanovs,although he did not make a definitive verdict that Anderson is not Anastasia.
Imposter # 1 died in 1984. After the remains of the royal family were found and identified, it was irrefutably proven that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanova.
Member of the stunt family
Natalia Belikhodze, a resident of Georgia, became fake Anastasia # 2. According to Natalya, when she was about five years old, her parents (Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna) gave her to be raised in the family of their godfather, Nikolai Konstantinovich Verkhovtsev, and instead of the Grand Duchess, the orphan Irene Vivaldi lived in the royal family. Most of the time "Anastasia" still spent in the palace with her sisters and brother, but when everyone was arrested, she was just in Georgia. Genetic examination revealed that this woman had nothing to do with the Romanovs. It may be true that Natalia was a member of the backup family.
Another impostor is Nadezhda Vladimirovna Ivanova-Vasilyeva. In 1934, in confession, the woman confessed to the priest that she was the daughter of the last Russian tsar. Soon, she received a denunciation to the NKVD. During interrogation, it became known that the "princess" allegedly maintains contact with relatives and friends of the imperial family, in particular with the maid of honor and closest friend of the empress Anna Vyrubova. Upon examination at the Serbsky Institute, it was found that on the body of the false Anastasia "… in the area of the lower third of both shoulder bones there are extensive soft scars, according to the conclusion of a specialist, of a gunshot origin …". Of course, they did not find out whether these scars were received during the execution in Don or other circumstances were to blame. The woman was sent to a mental hospital. Patients recall that she told some of the details of the execution of the royal family. Once she mentioned that in the basement of the Ipatiev house, women were sitting, and men were standing. An examination of the bullet holes carried out in the house did show that the shots were fired in two rows - top and bottom.
Ivanova-Vasilyeva committed suicide in 1971 in a psychiatric clinic on the island of Sviyazhsk.
Is Maria a Spanish princess?
There were slightly fewer applicants for the role of Maria Nikolaevna, the third daughter of the emperor, than for the role of Anastasia. Interestingly, the most famous of these impostors came from a very revered family in Spain. Her grandson, Prince Alexis de Durazzo, Prince of Anjou, published a letter written by his grandmother in 1982, in which she called herself Maria, daughter of Nicholas II. She described in detail the parting with the empress and sisters at the station in Perm. She pointed out that Alexandra Feodorovna persuaded the Bolsheviks to take Tatyana with them. Where Olga and Anastasia were sent - she did not specify. Maria was sent by train first to Moscow, and then, after negotiations with the King of Spain Alfonso, to Madrid. There she lived until her death in 1972, never once mentioning that she was the daughter of the king.
Unexpected details
At different times, there were several men posing as Tsarevich Alexei. The personality of one of them - Philip Semyonov - still causes controversy among people studying the history of the royal family. First, Semenov, like Alexei, allegedly suffered from hemophilia. Secondly, they had another common feature - cryptorchidism (undescended testicle). None of the candidates for the role of the crown prince had such a combination of hereditary diseases. Philip said that he was saved from death by some kind person. For several years the heir to Nicholas II lived under the surname Irin (abbreviation: "The name of the Romanovs is the name of the nation"). He was married four times, from his first marriage he had three sons: Yuri, Vladimir and Konstantin. According to Semenov, all his life he was persecuted and blackmailed by A. G. Beloborodoe (in 1918 - Chairman of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council), who knew the secret of the Tsarevich. For this reason, Philip had to change his last name. In 1949, Semyonov was examined by psychiatrists and declared insane. Philip Semyonov died in 1979.
Unexpected details of this case were published on September 5, 2007 in the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty: “In the late 90s, at the initiative of the British Daily Express, the eldest son Yuri donated blood for genetic testing. It was conducted by Peter Gil at the Aldermasten Laboratory (England). The DNA of the "grandson" of Nicholas II, Yuri Filippovich Semyonov, was compared with the English prince Philip, a relative of the Romanovs through the English queen Victoria. Of the three tests, two matched, and the third was neutral."
Source: Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 12. Olga Ermakova