Update On A Mystery

Just a brief update that concerns the Anna Anderson/ “Anastasia” article I posted.

http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2007/07/we-all-love-mystery.html

http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2007/07/some-additions-to-we-all-love-mystery.html

I read a small story in the newspaper from The Associated Press that in Russia, some bone fragments were found around the site where Bolshevik guards may have tried to dispose of two bodies of the Romanov children after the family’s execution. All but two bodies of the family and some servants were recovered in the early 1990s. The two missing bodies are Alexei, the Czar’s son, and either Maria or Anastasia, as there are disagreements about which daughter’s body was recovered earlier.

Accounts given about 80 or 90 years ago by a few of the Bolsheviks involved, stated that the guards tried to burn two bodies, but were not totally successful in destroying them. They claimed that they then decided to bury the remains, and that the location was not all that far from the burial site of the other bodies. The problem was, the Bolshevik accounts all agreed that Alexei was one of the bodies, but they differed as to which female body they attempted to burn. If I remember correctly, one account said the female body was that of Romanov daughter Maria, another account indicated that the body was that of Anastasia, and still another said that it was the body of the Empress herself, Alexandra. All of these differing accounts gave hope to Anna Anderson’s supporters that there was some conspiracy among the Bolshevik guards to cover up from their leaders the “fact” that two bodies were missing. Further, they reasoned that the guards’ stories showed that Anderson’s story of how she escaped could have been true.

In the early 1990s, when the mass Romanov grave was uncovered, indeed two bodies were unaccounted for. Anderson’s supporters were ecstatic, feeling that this showed that two Romanovs might well have escaped the execution. Even when the DNA showed that Anderson was NOT a Romanov, her supporters still wondered about the two missing bodies. According to the Associated Press story, besides the bone fragments, also recovered was a container that had held acid. The Bolsheviks’ accounts all stated that acid had been used to try to dissolve parts of the bodies and to disfigure them beyond recognition. The Russian Government has issued a statement that there is a strong possibility that the bone fragments are from the two missing Romanovs.