Celebrating Orgleburt Cowhauser, Roseville's 4H Club President

A famous Russian saying advises, “Trust, but Verify” (“Доверяй, но проверяй”/“Doveryai, no Proveryai.”) When I was an undergraduate in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the 1970s, a community of Czarist émigrés seemed to follow a different philosophy: “Trust, Don’t Verify” (“Доверяй, нe проверяй”/“Doveryai, nye Proveryai.”)—at least in the matter of Anna Anderson (Manahan), a.k.a. Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.

We University of Virginia students often saw Anderson and her husband, Jack Manahan, around town and, for a brief while, I lived two doors down from their beautiful home, which was then surrounded by waist-high weeds, garbage, and an estimated 60 cats. In 1974, I watched then-Governor Jimmy Carter engage in such a remarkably adroit and fluid conversation with a sizable audience that I left saying, “I think that guy will be the next president.” The only moment when Carter was speechless was after Jack Manahan asked him a bizarre, convoluted question about Watergate. (For more on the Manahans, read Jack & Anna: Remembering the Czar of Charlottesville Eccentrics” and watch this video.)

For decades, Anderson alternated between mental institutions and a circle of nobles and celebrities, including pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninov, who housed her for a while. She came to Charlottesville at the behest of Gleb Botkin, son of Czar Nicholas’s imperial physician, who was murdered along with the Czar and his family. Gleb Botkin had been the real Anastasia’s childhood playmate and swore till his death that Anna Anderson was that playmate. (Botkin was also archibishop of his own Church of Aphrodite.) Anderson attracted the devotion of Russian émigrés, clinging desperately to the belief that one Romanov had survived the hellish slaughter in Yekaterinburg.

But Anna Anderson was not Anastasia, but rather, Franziska Schanzkowska—a Polish factory worker. In 1991, DNA tests demonstrated that Anderson was not related to the Romanovs. A few years later, tests showed that she was related to the Schanzkowskis—a Polish working-class family. (Further tests in 2007 demonstrated conclusively that all seven Romanovs had died at Yekaterinburg.)

For some of Anderson’s enthusiasts, the DNA evidence was sufficient to cause 75+ years of scales to fall from their eyes. Some told interviewers that they finally understood why “Anastasia” could not speak Russian, why she had a German or Polish accent, why her nose was different from Anastasia’s, why she lacked considerable knowledge of the Romanov family and court, why various acquaintances of Anastasia had declared her an imposter in the 1920s, and why the Schanzkowskis had always said that she was their mentally unbalanced sister. How had intelliegent, knowledgeable people from the imperial family’s circle overlooked all of this glaring evidence? Because they wanted the beautiful young Anastasia to have survived, and they wanted Anna Anderson to be that child as an adult. And because Anastasia’s venerators had talked one another into believing an unbelievable fantasy. (Some czarist acolytes apparently still insist that Anderson was Anastasia and that the DNA tests should be discounted along with all of the other inconvenient facts.)