What is the legend of Anastasia?

Answer 1

On July 17, 1918, the Romanovs were lead to the basement of the Ipatiev House, a mansion in Ekaterinburg, Russia where they were held as prisoners. Bolshevik soldiers under the command of Yakov Yurovsky, were their prison guards. The Bolsheviks worked for the new Communist government that had been established after Nicholas was forced into advocating the throne. They were lead downstairs under the notion that fighting had broken out in the city and they were being taken to the basement to wait for a truck to take them to safety. The family was told to pose for a picture before they left and Yurovsky, a photographer before joining the Bolshevik army, moved them into place. Forty minutes later, a truck could be heard outside, but it wasn't meant to take them to safety, but rather to carry away their dead bodies. Yurovsky read aloud the death sentence, and fired point blank into the Tsar's chest three times. The rest of the firing was random and sloppily done. Slowly, the prisoners began to die, however, the four daughters were proving hard to kill. It turned out that they had sewn the family jewels into their blouses and they acted as bullet proof vests. The girls were eventually stabbed to death or struck in the heads. However, it was believed that one of them only pretended to be dead. The youngest daughter, Anastasia. She managed to escape through the assistance of a friendly guard, possibly Anatoly Yakimov. You won't find a lot about him, but he seems to be possibly the only guard that did not hate the Romanovs. However, that is only a hunch. All that is known is that she supposedly escaped through the help of a sympathetic guard. She made her way to Germany and undertook the name Anna Anderson. She was eventually put in a mental hospital after trying to kill herself, and later came out to the press that she was Anastasia Romanov. There was a lot of conflict over who she really was. Some said she was the real deal, others called her an imposter. Her story became the basis of many books and movies, and shined a lot of light on the Romanov family. When the bodies of the family were found after the fall of the Soviet Union, Anastasia's body was nowhere to be found, and the world turned to Anna Anderson's story once again. Sadly, this story is a fake. The real Anastasia died alongside her family. Her body was found a few years later and was eventually laid to rest alongside the rest of her family and declared a Saint in the Russian Orthodox Church. Her body is laid to rest at the Church of All Saints, built on the site where the Ipatiev House used to stand.