I Wish You Had Told Me Anastasia Romanov Didn’t Make It
By: Teasing The Dead
Tags: Disney, Romanov, Anastasia, Personal, History

Wait… I don’t elope with the kitchen boy?

I don’t remember the first time I watched the 1997 Fox Film Anastasia, but I do know that the chorus to Once Upon a December will eternally take up space in my heart and brain. The movie followed a typical Disney plotline that appealed to most kids (though she only became an official Disney princess this year, with the Disney-Fox merger). A witty, beautiful but amnesiac orphan yearns for “home, love, family” and along with the help of a handsome rapscallion and his paternally protective sidekick, she is reunited with her royal Grandmama and discovers she was a princess all along. A few gorgeous gowns are worn along the way, and we get to see dazzling but ghostly flashbacks with even more gorgeous gowns. The movie ends with the bad guy defeated, the princess getting her prince, and a perfect fade to black. While 5 year old me would have been pleased as punch to have watched the movie anytime I was given the chance, as soon as the movie ended I forgot all about it and went on doing whatever it is 5-year-olds do.

Years later, I was watching YTV, a Gen Z Canadian staple that had a constant rotation of cartoons, movies, and reality shows. They had a series called Mystery Hunters that I would force my younger sister to watch with me, otherwise the stories investigating haunted houses and urban legends made me too scared to go to the bathroom by myself (I was 8, so reserve your judgment). I vividly remember watching a rerun of a 2005 episode called “Princess Anastasia/Anna Anderson” which investigated whether or not Anastasia Romanov was executed along with the rest of her family in 1918. This came as a sick shock to me- you mean Anastasia was not only based on a true story, it was a historical revisionist fairytale for children based off of the life of an assassinated Russian Duchess? The episode delved into the details of her family’s murder. The 1997 movie was less in-depth. We know her siblings are not among the living, and something bad happens to them, but they look so happy in their glowing fuzzy ghost scenes! The movie neglected to include the fact that the beautiful sisters were shot at close range in a basement then stabbed until they stopped moaning. Maybe it didn’t go over well with test audiences. The TV show touches on the whole fake-grand-duchess-scheme and the most infamous Fake Anastasia: Anna Anderson. The show did a great job summarizing the murder and mystery surrounding Anastasia’s possible escape considering the fact that it was targeted towards Canadians ages 10–15 who were waiting for Grossology to come back on.

It was even better than the movie. Not only was “Princess Anastasia” real, but she was also potentially still alive. She would be well over a hundred years old, but potentially. The mystery of it all was too intriguing to be ignored. I asked my parents to use the computer room so I could do research. By research, I mean typing ANASTASIA ROMANOV into Wikipedia, even though my teachers had told me it wasn’t a reliable resource. I am somewhat baffled at my parent’s complete inability to monitor my computer activity. At the age of 8, I would hunker down in the squeaky office chair in front of the giant monitor, and do a google search for “Romanov murder”, scrolling through photos of the basement in which they were murdered- the blood scrubbed away, but giant chunks of plaster missing from the walls where the family had been shot at and stabbed.

I was obsessed. I wrote my third-grade speech for a public speaking contest our well-intentioned teacher forced us all to enter about Anastasia’s murder and spoke at the local legion. I’m not sure why the judges had a proclivity for morbid 8-year-olds interested in Russian murder, but I left with a medal. Not that I’m bragging, or anything. I took out all the books at my local library on the Romanovs, feeling so self-important that I by-passed the children’s section and took the elevator to the second floor, where the “grown-up books were”, which to me meant any books not intended for the ages 0–14.

I don’t know why a brutal murder appealed more to me than the Disney-ifcation of Anastasia’s story. But I do know it shaped me for the rest of my life. I pictured Anastasia laughing with her family. I saw her lying there with her sisters, pasting photos they had taken and coloured into their albums. I pictured them on their boat on summer vacation in matching sailor suits and I saw them running through beautiful hallways. My 8year old heart was full of empathy for a girl living in 1911. It was the first time I had considered the life of someone from another time period, and it brought history into focus for me. I was beginning to understand history as a concept. Up until then, it was dates I was forced to memorize in class. But it could be more than that- history was full of mystery, of beautiful palaces, of girls my age I maybe would have been friends with. I realized history was something I had always loved- stories. They just hadn’t been read to me properly.

Looking back now, the Romanovs were a very easy family to empathize with. It was a fairytale without the happy ending- a kind princess and her loving family are stripped of their royalty then brutally- and in my mind, unjustifiably- murdered. But there were nuances my young self was incapable of understanding. Why they had been murdered in the first place was something I did not comprehend. They were rich, extremely privileged, and lived in lavish palaces while their people froze to death. My heart ached for the murdered princess, but not for her people, who were so poor and hungry they revolted, while she spent her summers on a yacht.

I’ve worked hard to broaden my historical horizons outside of the stories of the privileged few since my first encounter with Anastasia on YTV. I want to tell the stories of those people who didn’t get Disney-esque films made about their lives. The people who participated in the revolutions rather than the ones who had been brought down by them. But these are things that come with maturity and education, which I simply didn’t have back then. But I had an interest, and that was enough.

I’m not saying you need to tell your children that this newly minted Disney princess was actually brutally executed in a basement along with her family. Maybe letting your eight-year-old look at crime scene photos isn’t the best move. But maybe we owe our kids more than the Disney (or Fox films) version of history. We owe them the “based on a true story” blurb before the movie starts, and let it be up to them if they want to ask about what the true story really is. The fact that I owe YTV as the catalyst for my career in heritage is a fun anecdote, but sort of depressing. History is already in our classrooms and in our books. It’s in Anastasia.

You just have to let them know it’s there.