Noble Blood - A Grand Duchess Above the Barber Shop

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

History is fascinated by the possible escape of Anastasia Romanov, the Grand Duchess killed alongside her family in the Russian Revolution. But there was a Grand Duchess that DID escape - Anastasia's aunt, Olga Alexandrovna, who would hold onto hope that her favorite niece escaped as well. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Noble Blood merch — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. If you were living in Eastern Toronto in the year 1960, you might have seen an old woman bustling in and out of a little apartment that she lived in above the local barbershop. She might have nodded at the patrons of Ray's Barbershop and Gerard Street East, which was located a short walk

away from Lake Ontario with a view to New York State across the water. The woman was a widow who spoke with boundless love for her late husband. She adored her grandchildren. She was an artist, often seen with a paintbrush in her hand. But this woman also had unusual guests come visit her from time to time. People whose bearing and dress appeared undeniably regal. Rumor had it that when Queen Elizabeth II visited Canada, the Queen herself invited the old woman onto the Royal Yacht. rumor had it that if you looked closely around the mouth, the old widow bore a slight resemblance to the queen. They were, after all, first cousins twice removed. And if you looked even closer at the old woman's face, you might have seen that she had a haunted look about her eyes.

Because this woman who lived above the local barbershop in Canada was no ordinary widow. She was Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the last living member of Russia's once fearsome Romanov dynasty. Not the only descendant, but the last person alive who had actually lived during the Romanov's 300-year reign. She was the final vestige of a lineage that had ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. Grand Duchess Olga was a decorated nurse who served on the front in World War I, a mother who escaped Russia while pregnant with a child in tow. But most of all, she was the last living remnant

of the dynasty that had ended in revolution and the gruesome murder of her brother's entire family, including, most famously, the little princess Anastasia. Grand Duchess Olga had called the young Anastasia the little one, and she had loved the girl with all of her heart. And Grand Duchess Olga had been deceived later in life by Anastasia's most famous pretender. And after all of that, there she was in Toronto at the end of her life. You can almost see her, aged 78 in 1960, The year JFK was elected president when Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker played on the radio,

it was there that Olga Alexandrovna lived and eventually died above the clippers and hair-shavings of the barbers' shop below. The public had been obsessed with the possible survival of the little Grand Duchess Anastasia, but the public largely ignored this other Grand Duchess of the Romanov's birthday. who was still living in their midst, the one survivor left behind. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The Grand Duchess Olga was born on June 13, 1882, at the Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg. She was the youngest and last child of her father, Tsar Alexander III of the Romanov dynasty, and her mother, Grand Duchess Dagmar.

Baby Olga's birth was heralded with a 101 gun salute, a sign of how cherished she would feel in her youth, before it would all get taken away with the revolution that was still decades in the future at this point. Olga had a very happy childhood. Her big burly father adored her and she adored him. He was everything to her, in her own words. Some observers even remarked that they were soulmates. Olga lived more simply than we might imagine of a Russian royal. Her biographer Ian Voris notes that she slept on a slim mattress with one hard pillow.

But then he goes on to tell us that she spent her days in a 900-room palace, so she still lived far more opulently than most. The resident palace ghost of Olga's childhood was Paul I, the first, the assassinated son of Catherine the Great. Even as a child, Olga was even keeled in the face of death. I never did see his ghost, she would later tell her official biographer, and it made me despair. I would have liked to meet him. Olga's beloved father was unusually doting and present for a czar of Russia, but he was also gone too soon.

After a shockingly short bout of kidney disease, he died in Olga's mother's arms in 18, 94 when he was 49 years old. Olga was only 12. It was the first of a long series of heartbreaks that fate had in store for her. Olga's brother took the throne as Nicholas II, 26 years old, and everyone agreed ill-prepared for the rule. He was to be the last czar of Russia and the end of the 300-year rule of the Romanov's. But Olga, didn't know that yet. She had her own personal problems to deal with. In 1901, just before her 19th birthday, the same year her niece, Anastasia, was born, Olga was attending a seemingly normal party. Suddenly, she was swept unceremoniously to a sitting room upstairs. Inside was Duke Peter

Alexandrovich, a distant cousin of hers who was 14 years older. Olga didn't understand what she was doing alone in a room with him, and what he did next made even less sense to her. In Olga's own words, I was just tricked. I saw old cousin Peter standing there, extremely ill at ease. He did not look at me. I heard him stammer through a proposal. I was so taken aback that all I could say was thank you. She had gotten engaged without realizing what was happening. The proposal was a shock largely because everyone at court, and across St. Petersburg, assumed that Peter was gay. He probably was. Olga's marriage to him would go unconsumated. Olga spent the night of her betrothal crying. The problem wasn't only that Peter had no interest in women. He was a gambler who, according to Olga's biographer, quote, loathed pets about the house, open windows, and walks. Seems like a fun guy. So poor Olga, once the beloved littlest daughter of her father, the Tsar, was married to a man who could not make her happy. She was so depressed that she lost her

hair for some time and had to wear a wig. Unable to focus on domestic bliss, Olga focused instead on a white villa she had built for herself. Called Olgino, it was where she spent her happiest times, out near the peasant classes, Olga discovered an interest in nursing and a passion for helping the poor and wretched. It was a passion that would hurt her years later when a woman in ill health pretending to be Anastasia would try to trick her. And perhaps Olga's life would have gone on that way, happy at her villa, lonely at home, if not for the fateful day in 1903, when she spotted Nikolai Kolokovsky. He was the tall man standing in a guards uniform at a military review,

and Olga, with all of the quashed love she had felt in her youth, rising up in her heart, met his eye. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Olga's life became a love story. Suddenly, she was a fairy tale princess meeting her prince charming. She described it as love at first sight. Quote, I was 22 years old, she said, and I loved for the first time in my life, and I knew that my love was accepted and returned. Of course, there was still the small matter of her being married.

Olga knew she needed to take care of that. So flushed with the urgency and passion of new love, she cornered her husband in the library at home, just as he had once cornered her at a party with his unwelcome proposal. She told her astonished husband that she was in love and she needed them to get divorced. Olga was surrounded by his books and backlit by the open door. Her husband had no sexual attraction to her, had never pretended to any, from the moment of their proposal throughout the two years thus far of their marriage.

She must have been flushed there in the library, requesting her freedom from him. I can imagine her excited round cheeks. the hair on her neck standing up. Though history does not remark upon her as a great beauty, to modern eyes she was beautiful. One photo of her as a young woman shows her with a delicate long neck encircled by a single strand pearl necklace, her expression somewhere between serene strength and coming fear, her long hair flowing down her back. There in the library, she stood facing her husband. But Peter, of course, said that they could not get a divorce right then. Maybe in time. Seven years, he proposed, a sabbatical that would waste the best years of her life with him.

Yet Olga's husband was calculating not cruel. A gambler to the last, he took on another kind of gamble, probably hoping for a win-win scenario. He appointed his wife's great love to be his own aid, moving Nikolai Kolokovsky into their house. Olga spent over a decade as a married woman who lived alongside a man who was the love of her life, a strange but not unworkable domestic drama. If only that had been the greatest challenge of her life.

During those years married to Peter, but in love with Kolokovsky, Olga did have familial love in her life as well. In particular, she took a liking to her brother, Nikki's children. The emperor, Nicholas II, had four daughters, and Olga's favorite was the youngest, like Olga had been herself. Little Anastasia, Olga said, was always my favorite. I liked her fearlessness, she never whimpered or cried even when hurt. She was a fearful tomboy. Goodness only knows which of the young cousins had taught her how to climb trees,

but climbed them Anastasia did even when she was quite small. Anastasia was feisty, bold, spirited. Olga lovingly called her, quote, the little one. Aunt Olga would take the little one and her sisters out to see the world beyond the palace gates. She delighted in Olga's impish talent for imitating palace guests, even as, inside Olga's own heart, she wondered whether she would ever get to have children herself. Her husband had never slept with her, and the man she loved lived in the home with them, but they could not share a bed. And then war came for the world, and the problem of marriage,

childlessness, and true love was shunted aside for Olga as it was for the rest of Russia. In 1914, she left to serve as a nurse on the front. It was astonishing. The Tsar's own sister, donning a nurse's uniform as the Great War raged, kneeling to apply a tourniquet, her hands splashed with wounded soldier's blood. And yet it's completely true. Olga had always had a soft spot for the infirm, even when her brother Nikki was losing favor with his people,

as Russia retreated and soldiers died and morale nosedived, she continued to care for the wounded. At one point, an angry fellow nurse attempted to kill the Tsar's sister by smashing a giant glass jar of Vaseline on her head. But Olga escaped intact. It was to be the story of her life. She escaped intact, even when her family did not. As the 1910s wore on, Olga's brother was becoming increasingly unpopular as Tsar. He could not please his people, but he was able to offer one final gift to his youngest sister. In 1916, he granted her the long-awaited annulment from her husband, Peter. She immediately married her longtime love Kolikovsky. But there was no grand Russian wedding for old.

She spoke her vows wearing a red cross uniform. Yet she felt that, quote, something like new strength came to me, and then and there in that chapel, standing beside my beloved Kukushkin, I resolved to face the future whatever it brought. That future was to be darker than she might have imagined. In the bitter cold of winter,

1917, the February Revolution succeeded in ending the the Russian monarchy. Olga's brother, Nicholas, abdicated the throne. It was a dangerous time to be a Romanov. Olga and her now husband fled south, but their train was intercepted and they were captured. Olga thought she was going to die. She was a dynastic Romanov, the non-creepy soulmate of her father, the late Tsar Alexander, a loving sister recently gifted the blessing, of love by her brother, who was being hunted by the revolutionaries. The soldier who held Olga and her husband in captivity did not make eye contact with her. He did not want to look at those he might have to murder. But the Soviets could not decide between Sevastopol and Yalta, whose duty it

was to chop off Olga's royal head. So Olga and her husband Nikolai were essentially placed under house arrest in Crimea, while Olga feared for the rest of her family. What had become of her brother, her nieces, the Sarvich, her only nephew, and what had become of the little one, Anastasia? Olga heard horrific rumors about what might have happened to her brother and his family,

but she didn't want to believe them. The emperor and his family had disappeared. Olga and her mother hoped against hope that they had, escaped, perhaps to England. If you want the story on that possible escape, go back to a very early episode of Noble Blood called Our Dearest Cousin Nikki. The Russian sky seemed dark, almost bloody. Olga gave birth to her first child, a son, essentially under house arrest. She was pregnant again when she and her husband managed to escape, this time to the Caucasus. They kept fleeing, facing extreme danger.

At one point Olga and her two boys were kicked out of a moving train into a freezing night. But Olga's story was to survive. At last, she and her little family wound up in Denmark, where they finally settled into their exile in 1919. Her mother, Dagmar, had been Danish. Only later would Olga really let herself hear about about the brutal end to her brother's family, the story that would enrapture the world.

They were brought into a basement by Bolshevik revolutionaries and shot, and then bayoneted, until they were all dead. The myth of the survival of the lost Romanov, Anastasia, is full of wild hope, painful delusion, Disney and Broadway musicals, but most of all, Pretenders. Anyone familiar with the historical stories about Anastasia's possible survival will be familiar with the name Anna Anderson. If you aren't an Anastasia enthusiast,

then you should know that Anna Anderson was the most famous of the women who came forward, claiming to be the beloved lost daughter, the sole survivor of the Russian Revolution, the miraculously enduring Anastasia. And the reason that Anna Anderson was the most famous imposter of all was in large part, the perceived acceptance of her as Anastasia by Anastasia's own dear Aunt Olga. In October of 1925, Olga left Denmark, not as a refugee this time, but as a seeker. She was headed to Berlin to visit a young, very ill woman who claimed, to be her niece, Anastasia. The young woman had been pulled from a canal in Berlin.

Olga found her very thin, frail in a hospital bed. Though the young woman seemed to understand Russian, she would speak only German. Still, she had the same joint problem that Anastasia had in her feet. She knew a nickname that only the imperial nieces would have known. And most of all, in the moment when the Grand Duchess Olga saw her, Olga told the Danish ambassador that her heart told her this was the little one. Or did she? So much of the truth of the story of Olga's meeting with Anna Anderson wound up recanted and changed later, perhaps in service of truth or perhaps out of embarrassment, which means that we can't be entirely sure what actually happened.

What's certain is that after meeting the girl, Olga did not dismiss her. She wrote five letters to the girl, imploring her to get well. She also asked her own people to investigate the matter more deeply, writing in a letter that she could not definitively say the woman wasn't Anastasia. So the question is, did Olga believe the pretender? History doesn't know. Olga's own memoirs were written after the fact, after Olga had decided to insist that she had never believed Anna Anderson and never had a moment's hesitation. But here's what I think. We have to remember who we're dealing with.

Olga Alexandrovna was, according to her granddaughter, quote, kindness itself to anyone in need. This was the daughter of the czar who found happiness of the czar who found happiness serving the peasants at her villa, the brother of the emperor who had worked as a humble nurse to wounded soldiers at the front, the woman who later in life would respond to every letter she received in Toronto, quote, be they from kings or crackpots. It's no surprise that Olga would give a frail wounded woman in Berlin the time of day, if only for a brief time, whether or not she believed she was her niece. And I think this too. When Olga was traveling to Berlin beside her husband,

all she could see was the little one in her mind. God, how badly Olga must have wanted the story to be true. Let Anastasia be alive for just a moment more, she must have been thinking, as she stepped into that hospital room. Let me for one moment pretend. Ultimately, both Olga and the world rejected Anna Anderson's claim, recognizing the younger woman for what she was, an imposter. Years later, DNA evidence would make that undeniable. It's hard to avoid noticing that one of the most interesting parts of Olga's life was the way it intersected with the life of a more famous person, Anastasia.

More famous because her tragic life, was cut short and cut short brutally at only 17. Olga escaped both her niece's fame and her fate. She was blessed with a long and mostly happy life. But after 25 contented years spent in Denmark on a dairy farm with her husband and children, the Romanov name did come to haunt Olga again. In 1948, fearing extradition to the court,

Kremlin after World War II, 66-year-old Olga and her family fled to Ontario. Her sons married women who were not from royal families, and Olga loved her grandchildren. She painted, charming and bright scenes of Russian folk life, replete with colorful flowers and teas. She was not above using her, quote, Nepo baby status as a Romanov to help place her paintings in galleries. Queen Elizabeth II owned nine paintings by her cousin Olga. Olga outlived her husband, but she loved him to the last. As her health deteriorated, fittingly, she was watched over by a former imperial guard who had also found himself in Canada.

Still, she carried the weight of her history. I always laugh, she said, for if I ever start crying, I will never stop. And at the very end, on November 24, 1960, at 79 years old, Olga died. The last living Romanov, who had been, quote, born in the purple, to a sitting emperor, died above Ray's Barbershop in Toronto. A reminder that history, with all its great heights and terrible falls, is never really far away. That's the story of Grand Duchess Olga, the last surviving Romanov, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to find out what

really happened to her little one, Anastasia. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories. and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one first. finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you've seen the Disney or Broadway musical, you are probably familiar with the legend of the survival of the young Romanov daughter, Anastasia. People love a story and a fantasy of a missing princess who managed to survive a massacre. It's fascinating. But what actually happened to Anastasia? For a long time, the world did not know for certain, and in that gap of knowledge, many pretenders stepped in with compelling stories people wanted to believe, including a young woman in Berlin named

Anna Anderson, who was institutionalized in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt, a woman who was, most likely, a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness. In 1991, DNA evidence that was discovered in Russia was analyzed and reported to the public in 1994, which proved definitively that the remains of Anna Anderson had no genetic overlap with the remains of Zarnikilis and his wife. Anderson had been an imposter. On top of disproving the pretender, it was also announced that Anastasia's bones had been discovered alongside her parents. So the saddest story of Olga's favorite niece was the true one. She had been shot and killed. Her remains identified. The discovery was made more than 30 years after Olga's death. So,

Olga never had to know for certain about the tragic fate of her little one. She could always hope. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Menke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Julia Melani, and Armand Cassam. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and Rima Il K. Ali with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.