Some people became famous for doing great accomplishments in the past. Others became famous by doing nothing of note, merely being in the wrong place and born in the wrong time and coming to a tragic end. This is the case of the young Grand Duchess of Russia slain in the aftermath of Red October, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II Alexandrovich Romanov, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova (June 18 [June 5 in the Old Style calendar] 1901 – July 17, 1918).
Born in 1901, Anastasia's birth actually disappointed Nicholas at first because he wanted a boy (he already had three other daughters: Olga, Tatiana and Maria). A son would eventually follow — Tsarevich Alexei, with whom Anastasia was extremely close. Anastasia grew up with less of a pampered lifestyle; her mother expected her and her sisters to do their own chores and sleep in plain camp beds unless they were sick.
Anastasia possessed a bright and cheery attitude; her presence livened up the situation for everyone around her, particularly during the dark days of the Romanovs' captivity after the Revolution. She is also sometimes noted to be kind of a naughty prankster — one of her inherent nicknames was "Shvibzik", a corruption of the German "Schwipsig", which translates as "Little Mischief". One of her better-known pranks includes covering a rock with snow during snowball fights. While she held no malice towards her target, only trying to prank them to liven up the situation, people were going to remember that.
Anastasia and her sisters were also very cordial and friendly towards Grigori Rasputin, since he not only told good stories for them, but also seemed to be responsible for keeping her hemophiliac brother Alexei alive through his many bleeding episodes. Reportedly, when Rasputin passed away Anastasia cuddled with her sisters in sadness, remembering Rasputin as a good man. This innocent gesture, however, wouldn't win them any favor due to rumors of Rasputin's bad reputation throughout Russia — and in particular his alleged hold over their mother, Alexandra.
During World War I, Anastasia and her sisters did their part for the war effort; her eldest sisters Olga and Tatiana, as well as Alexandra, trained as Red Cross nurses and worked in a hospital in Tsarskoe Selo. Maria and Anastasia, too young to do so at the time — Anastasia was only thirteen when the war broke out — nevertheless were patrons of their own small hospital and visited the wounded regularly. Anastasia still kept her cheery attitude, and her sunny disposition lifted the spirits of the wounded soldiers she visited.
Then Red October happened, and everything that could go wrong did go wrong for not only Anastasia, but the whole Romanov family. Nicholas' shortsightedness about war management came home to roost, and this made people lose faith in him (not at all helped by his known friendliness with Rasputin). Nicholas abdicated for both himself and Alexei and he and his family were initially put under house arrest at the Alexander Palace before being transported to Tobolsk in Siberia and, ultimately, to the Bolshevik stronghold of Yekaterinburg. Anastasia tried to endure and sometimes her lively spirit still showed, including managing to put her head out of the window and when scolded by a soldier unsympathetic to her, she responded by sticking out her tongue. But the normal lively situation with her family became more and more somber as the Revolution wore on.
Until the fateful day of July 17, 1918, where the Bolsheviks decided that the Romanovs could not be allowed to live and stormed their final house arrest location in Yekaterinburg. They killed everyone in the household, servants included. Anastasia was last seen crouching near a wall, trying to cover her head in utter terror, but she was given no mercy, shot and stabbed to death like her family and everyone else within the house. Her last known act before meeting her death was reportedly taking pictures of herself and her sisters, predating the act of taking a selfie in the modern days.
What makes Anastasia considered as a tragic figure was that she had nothing to do with her father's mistakes, nor was she set up to succeed the House of Romanov (that duty was assigned to her younger brother Alexei); she and her siblings were normal, dutiful, sometimes mischievous children, and yet she was still set up for a brutal Undignified Death by her own people because she just happened to be a part of the family that was hated by the majority of the people due to the aforementioned mistake of the Tsar. This makes her one of history's prime examples of people who are sanctified after death as Too Good for This Sinful Earth — in her case quite literally, as she and her family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as Holy Martyrs.
But how is it that Anastasia in particular is so much more famous than her other sisters, or even the rest of her family? Even people who don't know anything about history, or have any idea who Tsar Nicholas II was, are likely to be vaguely aware of Anastasia, and know that she was a Russian princess. Well, for most of the 20th century and even into the 21st century there were persistent rumors that Anastasia survived. The legend of her escape entered into the Western cultural zeitgeist of Stock Unsolved Mysteries, in the same vein as Amelia Earhart and Roswell. See here for more details. The mystery was finally conclusively solved: she did not survive that day. The remains of most of her family were found in the 1970s and then authenticated by DNA testing in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. There was still some hope for a while after that that she may have survived since one of the younger daughters’ bodies was missing along with Alexei’s. However in 2007, bodies belonging to a teenage boy and girl were found nearby the original site and proved to be Alexei’s and the missing sister’s. The bodies were too old to determine with certainty if the female body was Maria’s or Anastasia’s but that finally accounted for all seven members of the family.
Appearances in fiction
Anime and Manga
- Blood+: It's hinted in one episode that Big Bad Diva impersonated Anastasia at one point. The manga spinoff Blood+ Adagio, reveals that Diva pulled a Kill and Replace on the original Anastasia with the help of Rasputin prior to the Revolution.
- Drifters: Anastasia is one of the main antagonists, part of the Ends serving the Black King , implied to be Jesus Christ, which also alludes to Anastasia's religion of choice and how the Russian Orthodox Church canonized her as a Saint. Like a lot of appearances that gave Anastasia the Adaptational Badass upgrade, she's capable of controlling blizzards.
Film — Animated
- Anastasia, the 1997 animated movie by Don Bluth, in which she's voiced by Meg Ryan. It heavily fictionalized the stories about Anastasia - or rather, the mystery about the most prominent imposter of Anastasia, Anna Anderson, linking the two stories together with fictional elements only slightly based on history. It also adds a talking bat and depicts Grigori Rasputin as an Evil Sorcerer out to destroy the Romanovs instead of being good friends with them (and Red October is never named nor is its ideology specifically brought up). It spawned a few Mockbusters on the same base story too.
- The stage adaptation of the film took pains to be more accurate to history by removing all the supernatural elements, including Rasputin, and depicting more of the political situation in the Soviet Union at the time instead of attributing the entire revolution to a curse.
Film — Live-Action
- In the 1956 Anastasia, she is played by Ingrid Bergman in her comeback to the U.S. big screen.
- In the 1971 Nicholas and Alexandra, she is played by Fiona Fullerton.
- In the 2020 Netflix film Anastasia: Once Upon a Time, where she's played by Emily Carey, she's sent to The '80s through a magical portal by Rasputin to save her from the Bolshevik Revolution. No, really.
Literature
- Peter Kurth's 1983 history bio, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson
- Sarah Miller's novel The Lost Crown tells the story of Anastasia and her three sisters from the beginning of World War I in 1914 to their executions in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
- Bryn Turnbull's historical fiction novel The Last Grand Duchess is centered on Anastasia's eldest sister Olga, but Anastasia herself is a major supporting player.
- The Royal Diaries include a fictional diary written by Anastasia in the years leading up to her execution.
- Triumph of a Tsar, an Alternate History novel, features Anastasia as a supporting character to her brother Alexei (the titular Tsar). She appears regularly throughout the first half before being Put on a Bus after marrying Prince Henry of the United Kingdom, son of King George V and Queen Mary, and moving to England. Tsar Alexei II and Tsarina Ileana name their last child after her.
Live-Action TV
- Jennifer Dundas played her in Part 1 of NBC's two part 1986 miniseries Anastasia:The Mystery Of Anna
- Patricia Kovacs played her in HBO's 1996's bio drama Rasputin
- She and her family were featured in The Crown Season 5 episode, "Ipatiev House", where they were brutally executed by the Bolsheviks. The scene accurately depicted the details of how the Romanovs died such as the bullets being deflected from the children because they had sewn jewels into the lining of their undergarments and the Bolsheviks guards resorted to bayoneting them instead.
- History of the World Part II, on its segments in the Russian Revolution, features Dove Cameron as an Anastasia who is basically a digital influencer a century too early ("Hey guys, it's your friend Anastasia! #LastRomanov As you know, my whole family was murdered in the Revolution...").
- She makes a cameo in The Lost Prince alongside her parents and siblings, which features the Romanovs' historical 1909 visit to the Isle of Wight. In a deviation from history, she and her sisters are portrayed as older teenagers; in reality Anastasia was only seven at the time, and even her eldest sister, Olga, was only thirteen.
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder features her in the fifth book of the Reign of Winter adventure path, Rasputin Must Die. Unlike history, she survives and follows the player characters back to Golarion, and ends up ruling the winter-locked region of Irrisen, where most of the rest of the adventure path takes place. The 2nd edition book Lost Omens: World Guide confirms this outcome as canon.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed: Chronicles: Russia features the events at Red October, where Anastasia was saved by Nikolai Orelov (but he was unable to save her sisters, much to her grief) and temporarily gained acrobatic skills by being possessed by a Chinese Assassin to survive her would-be killer. In the end, she herself decides to discard her name and takes on the identity of Anna Anderson.
- Fate/Grand Order: Anastasia is a Caster class Servant; her history received a little tweak that the Romanovs were a family of Magus and contained the monstrous spirit known as Viy, who eventually took revenge on her murderers by haunting them for life, dooming them to a life of terror, after Anastasia was finally able to summon it before her death. As a Servant (the real deal here, since there is a very little chance of Anna Anderson entering the Throne of Heroes), Anastasia is capable of utilizing her magus heritage to cast various magic, but she is most fond of ice conjuration. She's also one of the chief antagonistic Servants in the first Lostbelt under the Crypter Kadoc Zemlupus, where her core has been twisted such that she became much more nihilistic than her normally cold but defrostable self, though this version still has some of her kinder nature including being in mutual love with Kadoc. One of her skills is also a reference to her nickname "Schwipsig", and once you get past her cold self, you can see that Anastasia is still fond of playing pranks. Much of her cheerful self can be seen in her Summer Archer version (though she's also adding even more pranks in there).
- Shadow Hearts: Covenant has Anastasia as a playable character. She has familial issues, but she's ready to defend Russia from the evil hands of Rasputin, who is actually possessed by the demon Asmodeus. After Rasputin is defeated, she joins Yuri Hyuga's party for good to keep Russia (and the rest of the world) safe; and it's implied she is in love with a Japanese swordsman named Kurando Inugami. In battle, she uses mechanical Fabergé eggs as weapons; and by taking pictures of enemies, she can view their data as well as use their abilities.
