Fuck Yeah! Anastasia Nikolaevna

Anastasia, the youngest, had the liveliest intelligence of all four; whoever was sitting next to her had to be prepared for some unexpected question at any moment.

The idea that Anastasia had miraculously survived the brutal execution in Ekaterinburg burst upon a world traumatized by a decade of tragedies that marked the passing of the old order: the sinking of the Titanic, the horrors of the First World War, the fall of dynasties, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of communism. However unlikely, it spoke to natural human optimism, to the desire that somehow, Bolshevik bullets had failed to destroy an entire family.

Today, history views Alexandra as a lonely, frightened woman who listened to the wrong advice: Rasputin’s. Nicholas is remembered as a weak ruler, a kindly man who also listened to bad advice: his wife’s. And we are left to wonder what kind of woman Anastasia would have become had her life not ended so early and so tragically.

Some persons seem endowed with a peculiar and semitragic gift. They live out their lives and die, only to provide drama for the playwright or novelist. Theirs is not the stuff of life but the stuff of fiction. Such a woman was Anastasia, daughter of the last Russian Tsars, supposedly massacred at Ekaterinburg in July, 1918. She lived her life like a princess in a fairy tale, with her bumbling, bourgeois Emperor father the only false note in the royal symphony. Anastasia laughed and played and worked through the hours of her young life, touched with the magic of unreality, carrying a thousand years of august tradition upon her frail shoulders.

In the fairy tales, the princesses lived happily ever after. Anastasia lived in an all-too real world.

Officially, her life was snuffed out by Bolshevist guns in the Ekaterinburg cellar. If it was, she fell - I am sure - with dignity and grace, her silken shirts weighted with the jewels that would have bought her way to freedom.

The historical Anastasia vanishes here, reduced to a grotesque, red-stained doll lying limply across a sack of potatoes; and the infinitely more satisfying Anastasia of legend rises, phoenix-like, from her body.

─ New Romanov Evidence Can be Studied Without Reopening Investigation ─

The Russian Investigations Committee currently does not see any reason to resume the investigation into the murders of Nicholas II and his family based on the materials collected by White Guard investigator Nikolay Sokolov which were recently discovered in a Brussels church.

“There will probably be no initiatives from us to resume the criminal case. If the church files a request, we will decide what to do,” Vladimir Solovyov, senior investigator with the Main Criminalistics Department of the Investigations Committee who investigated the case involving the killing of the tsar’s family, told Interfax on Monday.

─ Synod of Bishops of the ROCOR Issues Statement on Royal Remains ─

During its regular session on June 14, 2012, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia deliberated on the matter of the discovery of the remains and other possessions relating to the martyrdom of the Royal Family which had been hidden in the walls of the stavropighial Memorial Church in Brussels.  

During renovations on St Job the Much-Suffering Church, which is also dedicated to the memory of Holy Royal Martyr Nicholas II, the Royal Family and all those martyred during that time of troubles, a sealed lead cylinder was discovered along with a glass tube with a handwritten document containing an inventory of the contents of the cylinder.  

─ Russian Orthodox Church To Clarify Stance on Tsar Family Remains ─

The Russian Orthodox Church is planning to clarify its position regarding the recognition of the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his family members who were murdered by the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said on Thursday.

Addressing members of the Holy Synod in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the patriarch said he had received “very important information” from New York about the circumstances of the tsar family’s murder in July 1918.

“I suppose these circumstances will help us define our position, including that related to the so-called ‘Yekaterinburg remains,’” the patriarch said, without specifying what kind of information he had obtained.

─ Where Some Envision Czar’s End, Church Sees Building Site ─

MOSCOW — Visitors from around the world have turned an isolated ravine in central Russia into a pilgrimage site in recent years. They arrive to gaze at the unadorned earth where the Bolsheviks, in one final act to defile the dynasty that they toppled, are believed to have dumped the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918.

But now the site is being threatened by an unlikely opponent: the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which to this day has not acknowledged that the bones retrieved there over the last two decades are those of the royals.