Anastasia: A Century's Mystery

the only one of the sisters who never knew the meaning of shyness, even as a baby she could entertain grave old men and important political figures at her parents’ dinner table with her astonishing remarks and admirable mimicry. Ladies who came to see the Empress never suspected that hidden somewhere, the youngest daughter of the Tsar was watching their every peculiarity, and that later it would all come out when the family were alone.

The Tsar’s sister and Anastasia’s aunt, Olga Alexandrovna, remembers: “Oh the fun we had when we heard duplicated the fat Countess Kutuzova, one of my mother's ladies-in-waiting, complaining of a heart attack brought on by the appearance of a mouse! Very naughty of Anastasia, but she was certainly brilliant at it!”

Her French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, remembers Anastasia as “the family clown, freely dispensing her own kind of dead pan, sarcastic humor. The whole family would crack up at her jokes. Nobody was safe from her smart and brutal tongue.”

One was never sure what to expect in Anastasia Nikolaievna's presence. Russian court memoirs are filled with anecdotes of her pranks, tales of her lively imagination and her mercurial personality. Privately, among those of her cousins who survived the Revolution, she is committed to memory as “a nasty little girl,” a hair-puller, a leg-biter and a tripper-up of servants. As a small child, she would go as far as kicking and pinching if she didn’t get her way, yet this fault corrected itself rapidly as she grew older. Tricks and pranks became her way of releasing the pent-up energy. When playing hide-and-go-seek with the son of the Imperial physician, Gleb Botkin, she would take off her shoes and place them at the edge of some palace curtains, then hiding nearby to watch poor Gleb get fooled for the umpteenth time by her clever plot. Once, she hid under a table at a State Dinner Party, only to be escorted out and scolded by her father. An enfant terrible in every sense of the word, she is called “roguish, almost a wag” by Pierre Gilliard, a tomboy by her aunt. Fond of her aristocratic station, she played jokes on some of the century’s best and brightest, the adventures ending usually with the Tsar himself coming to get her out of trouble.

When she laughed, she had the enticing way of never making contact

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