The Perm stories have not been discredited. What has occured is that people have set these testimonies aside.
Because they were discredited. If they had not been, they would not have been set aside. Am I missing an argument thread here?
Greg King wrote in a post which I'll have to find said that he and Penny didn't find information which they found interesting enough to follow. Like others, it was their opinion at the time he wrote the post and the book that there were no survivors. However, they did include the fact that Anastasia may have survived for a time but not Alexei. [Note: It's been too long since I read these posts so I may not remember this as accurately as I should.]
Penny Wilson certainly speculated that as many as four of the people shot that night might have left the Ipatiev House alive, judging by certain descriptions given by the shooters and the forensic examination of the remains.
Most posters here think that an escape was impossible because they lean so heavily on Yurovsky, Ermakov and the other men who were the shooters of Nicholas II and at least eight others who were found in the mass grave in Pig's Meadow.
My clue is based a geat deal on the lack of bones which should have been in the grave but were not. Indicating to me that this was not the original grave for some.
The excavation of the remains was not carried out in the most careful manner, and there is evidence that the grave was disturbed in the 1970s. I believe you have speculated that the grave site might also have been disturbed under Stalin. If true, these incursions might have accounted for some of the missing bones. There was also a large amount of acid poured over the bodies. Several of the skulls show signs of intense punishment, and none of the bodies was encased in a coffin, or preserved in any way. All of these seem more probable than the idea that the grave site was not the original resting place.
Since most of these testimonies as well as evidence was destroyed not just by the Reds, it was also destroyed by the Whites, including men like Gilliard who admitted in AA's trial that he had destroyed important information/evidence.
"Most" of the testimonies? Greg King and Penny Wilson were certainly able to find a substantial number of corroborative testimonies when they wrote
Fate of the Romanovs. I find this book to be authoritative in nearly every aspect ---- they document their plentiful sources. If, for example, the story of the women being taken to Perm was credible, don't you think they would have included it as part of the "Fate" of the Romanovs? And please don't hedge by saying that you can't speak for them. Their book speaks for them, and their book clearly, graphically and effectively describes the family as being shot on July 16, 1918. They do not rule out the possibility of a survivor, but I think their description does rule out the idea that anybody went to Perm.
The reason I have to depend so much on the outdated book of Summers and Mangold is because they are the only ones who dug into the testimonies which are still in existence and placed them in a book I have read.
And yet you have presumably read
Fate of the Romanovs.
As far as I know, they did not fabricate the testimonies they entered into their book.
As I said in my previous post, no one thinks they "fabricated' anything. There were certainly rumors flying about in the late summer of 1918, and they tracked several of them down. The rumors turned out to be untrue, as rumors frequently do.
Like I said, I'll have to let others who know more about AA's life to make comments.
Okay. The descriptions of Anna Andersen's behavior throughout her life were culled from Peter Kurth's book, James Lovell's book, Summers and Mangold's
File on the Tsar and several other sources.
This is just a "out of the box" speculation and needs to be suggested and investigated to see just how "silly" or "impossible" this could have been.
The idea that a major operation was being run by the CHEKA without the knowledge/consent of the Soviet leadership is about as probable as the space alien theory that everyone was nattering on about a few weeks ago.
I'm not sure how many of you understand how entangled Felik D., the head of the CHEKA's, agents were in Europe. These agents had worked their way into very high positions even in the British SIS as well as their world of politics.
Lenin and Stalin in those early years had given Felik D. freedom with his agents, including the organizations called TRUST, the Lysma and other revolutionary "cells" [groups].
It was not uncommon for revolutionaries to infiltrate the factories like the one AA, if she was FS, was working.
Lenin and Stalin may not have known about AA and the reason behind the need of creating a false GD Anastasia.
What would the need be to create a false Grand Duchess Anastasia? A false Alexei, a false Nicholas, sorta kinda maybe, but a false Grand Duchess Anastasia?
Like the woman in My Fair Lady, AA must have had gone through a period of training to become a GD Anastasia claimant. Why? There was a great deal a commoner had to learn about being royal, Russian and enough of the various languages (High German, French, Enlgish and Russian) to fool people who knew the GD.
Again, I'll have to let others answer this because I don't recall this part of AA's life.
Okay, fine. Then let me tell you: she made mistakes, she mis-identified people, and she was not able to convince several people that had known the real Grand Duchess quite well that she was AN. How difficult was it to learn to "play the part"? I don't know; a lot of this stuff seems to rely upon people's willingness to suspend disbelief.
For example: there are some people that maintain she had the same brilliant blue eyes as the Tsar. Obviously a pretender to be Anastasia would have had to have blue eyes. But from there out, it gets a little murky. Adjectives like "sparkling" or "penetrating" or "expressive" are subjective in application.
Like I said, there are always the acceptions.
I agree. I don't think one can make a general statement about Anna Andersen's suicide attempt, if that in fact was what it was.
I think on one of these threads, people thought that some of the scars AA had were self inflicted.
I think the idea that she inflicted things like the head wound upon herself has been discredited.
I don't know.
My suggestions were possible reasons she may have been afraid if she was GD Anastasis or FS or AA (if she was not FS).
Since I'm not sure, yet, that AA was FS, then I really can't respond to your question, accept to say, whomever she was, anxiety had to have raised it's ugly head and could have caused all kinds of mental problems, one of which, I think, was probably depression.
AGRBear
The topic of this thread is "Why was AA afraid to be found?" I wish you would address the idea that she actually seems to have wanted to be found.
Simon
