Fake It 'Til You Make It

Anna Anderson

Some historical mysteries, regardless of how persistently we might try, can never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. As morning dawned on July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries. Just two years later, a woman calling herself Anna Anderson turned-up in Berlin claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, the youngest of the tsar and tsarina’s daughters. She professed that she had escaped from the basement where her family was slaughtered with help from two brothers named Tchiakovsky, and fled to Romania. She perpetrated this fraud until 1991, when the previously lost remains of the royal family were unearthed. Posthumous DNA testing proved Anna was not a member of the Romanov dynasty. Some have postulated that she was actually a Polish factory worked named Franziska Schanzkowska who had a history of mental illness.

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