The Lost princess: Anastasia, a Risky character

Abstract

Earlier this year the BBC version of Poliakoff’s The Lost Prince (2003) was played on Australian television. The film recreated the life of the last of the Russian Romonov princes, son of the Tsar. In the dramatically arresting execution scene, Bolshevik guards enter a cellar room and shoot down the last of the Romonov family. In my memory the victims are all in white: the Tsar Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, 13 year old Aleksey, the Tsarevich but most particularly, the four young women dressed in vulnerable white summer muslin dresses in the style of 1918. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and the youngest daughter Anna, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna Romonova, victims of the circumstance of their birth, are all shot. As each girl’s body is flung to the ground by the force of the bullet, the red blood stains the flimsy stuff that protects them. After the brutal carnage the family is annihilated of course – the bodies are still; no one is left alive. This shocking depiction, embellished by memory, re-awakened the traces of related childhood sensibilities.