Grandanor Society

Well, since I've made this little society called Grandanor, I guess I should tell you about it.  Let me see, if you don't mind a case history...

         "Grandanor: Remembering the Romanovs" is a little society that I made up by myself.  My name is Victoria Bostwell.  Grandanor is an acronym for Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna Of Russia.  The first Grandanor Organization was thought up in the 1930's by two supporters of HIH Grand Duchess Anastasia (a.k.a. Anna Anderson): an American, Mrs. Annie Burr Jennings, and the son of the family's doctor Evgevny Botkin, Gleb Botkin.  Both Gleb Botkin and Mrs. Jennings were in New York City at the time, and the world was in the "Anastasia" fad--cigarettes styled a l� Anastasia were available, and the Marcelle-Maurette play Anastasia (after which 20th Century Fox's Anastasia movies were formed) was being reproduced everywhere, and copied by dozens of authors.  Because of this trend towards the lost Grand Duchess, they decided, it was a ripe time to obtain money for Anastasia/Anna, who was desperately in need of it.  They started Grandanor, and it involved selling magazine subscriptions to people, who were to receive a small portion of the Romanov fortune when and if it was obtained.  However, Anna/Anastasia did not like it, and the idea died out.  The subscriptions were canceled, and the whole idea fell into the dustbin. However, I thought that Grandanor was a good name for my little society.  So...here it is.  Grandanor: Remembering the Romanovs is something you can join.  Its main objective is to advance the fact--or theory, whatever you want to call it--that Anna Anderson was Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna Romanova.  I also have another idea in mind: that everyone should know what the real story of Anastasia and the Romanovs is.        What is the real story?         The common theory is that on the night of July 16, 1918, in the Ipatiev House, Ekaterinburg, the entire Imperial family and their four remaining retainers--Trupp, Kharitonov, Dr. Evgevny Botkin, and maid Anna Demidova--were hurried down to the celler by Guard Commandant Yakov Yurovsky.  There, he ordered them to line up for a photograph.  He then called in not a photographer, but eleven Bolshevik sharpshooters, armed with bayonets, rifles, and revolvers.  Shot and bayoneted to death, the Imperial family's remains and that of their servants were carted off in a truck to be buried on the outskirts of the city.  The evidence "proving" this theory are nine bodies discovered in a mass grave outside of Ekaterinburg.  Eight were identified as those of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsaritsa Alexandra, Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Tatiana, Dr. Evgeny Botkin, Trupp, Kharitonov, and Anna Demidova.  The ninth body was that of a teenage girl, roughly eighteen.  Grand Duchess Maria was nineteen at the time; Anastasia was seventeen.   Some argued that it was Maria, others protested that it was Anastasia.   Whatever the case, the Russians accepted a Russian investigator's opinion--formed by superimposing photos of the glued-together skulls of the corpses onto photos of the family--that it was Anastasia.

        The world has accepted this opinion, and dismiss the others as dreamers, lunatics, or anything they choose.   However, proof points in only one direction. Witnesses, first and second hand, and the wrong proof "discovered" in 1919 for the family's murder, direct one to the fact that Anna Anderson, also Grand Duchess Anastasia, revealed: the four servants were shot in an executional style, and possibly the tsar and tsarevich with them.   Their bodies were hidden in a grave somewhere outside Ekaterinburg, and the family's clothing and possessions burned.  At the same time, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were taken secretly by train to Perm, 200 miles to the west and the second Bolshevik stronghold. (See my page on Anastasia.)  Anastasia escaped, and after the trail of the Romanov women leads to a few other small towns, we lose track of them.  With their bodies here for us to see, it is only sensible that they were abused and murdered by Red Army men and their corpses taken back to Ekaterinburg to be buried.  Even more evidence points to the claimant Anna Anderson as being who she said she was--Anastasia, not the Polish peasant girl she so little resembled.

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        Enjoy...and remember the family.  The senseless murder of their bodies and souls will not have been in vain if we can learn from it, and do something.   What can we learn?  Well, I think that we can learn that others might be suffering as well, just like them.  There are so many who are hurting the same, with the same feelings.  Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei.   Their blood cries out from the grave to help, to help others, the ideal that made them such a perfect family.  I am trying to make what little difference I can in people's pains, and to help them find the true peace that Anastasia was searching for.   I wish so terribly that we could turn back the clock, that we could do something to stop that horror.  But as we can't, my motto is, "If you can't turn back the clock, change the future."  You might find this a bit sentimental, a bit dramatic, or even think it hogwash if you will.  But it is what I believe is the truth, and I cannot stand by while their pleas are ringing in my ears.

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