Gabriel Jeroschewitz, August 2nd, 2025
And we, the observers, watch them. We watch them trying to maintain the fiction of their old lives.
We do not see the girl. We see the photograph, a brittle, sepia-toned ghost captured in 1915. We know the ghost is making a face. She has pulled her lips back to reveal a set of impossibly large, fake teeth, a cheap novelty item that must have felt wonderfully scandalous in the hermetic, gilded world of the Alexander Palace. Her eyes, dark pools of light, are crinkled with a joy so pure and unthinking it feels like a form of blasphemy from our vantage point, a century later. This is Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov. Or rather, this is the first vessel for her memory. A girl playing a fool, unaware that the universe is preparing a joke of its own, one with a punchline delivered in a dusty basement.
The horror is not in the image itself. The horror is in the system surrounding it, the invisible machinery of fate clicking into place just outside the frame. In that moment, she is trapped, not by revolutionaries, but by something far more insidious: the unyielding pressure of her existence. She is a Grand Duchess, a cog in an ancient, ornate apparatus of bloodline and divine right. Her laughter is a state-approved commodity. Her future is a pre-written ledger of diplomatic marriages and ceremonial duties. The fake teeth are a tiny, momentary rebellion against the crushing decorum, a brief, absurd gesture that says, I am here. I am a person, not just a title.
It is a protest that no one, least of all her, understood the weight of. It was simply a silly thing to do. Her sisters, Olga, Tatiana, and Maria, likely giggled. Her brother Alexei, frail and cherished, might have managed a weak smile. Her parents, the Tsar and Tsarina, would have seen it as another instance of their shpion—their little imp—being herself. They were all trapped in the same room, in the same palace, in the same story. A family portrait so suffocatingly perfect it was bound to crack.
And then, the system changed. The ornate, gilded cage was replaced by a plainer, more brutal one. The Revolution did not free them; it merely transferred them from one form of imprisonment to another—from the Alexander Palace to the Governor’s Mansion in Tobolsk and then to the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg—the House of Special Purpose. The name is a Kafkaesque masterpiece of bureaucratic dread—a place designated for a terrible function that could not be named outright.
In this new system, the rules were inverted. Their titles became curses. Their refinement was a mark of guilt. Their helplessness was the entire point. They were no longer symbols of power, but specimens of a bygone era, preserved under armed guard for a final, forensic examination. One can imagine Anastasia in those months, the impish light in her eyes dimming, not with fear, perhaps, but with a profound and bewildering confusion. The world had ceased to make sense. Why were the soldiers so angry? Why was the food so meagre? Why could they no longer walk in the garden without being watched? The questions were met with a blank, unyielding silence. The logic of their situation was as alien and nonsensical as a trial for a crime one was never told they committed.
And we, the observers, watch them. We watch them trying to maintain the fiction of their old lives. The Tsarina teaching her daughters to sew jewels into their corsets, a desperate, pathetic act of faith in a future that would never arrive. It was an act of profound absurdity, sewing diamonds into their undergarments as if they were smuggling not wealth, but their very identities, past an unseen checkpoint. They were preparing for an escape, but the only escape available was into myth.
The final night is the quietest nightmare of all. They are woken and told to dress. There is unrest in the town, they are told. They must be moved to the basement for their safety. It is a lie, of course, but it is a systematic, procedural lie. It has the hollow ring of officialdom. Down the stairs they go, a small, sleepy procession into the earth. The Tsar carries his son. The Tsarina and her daughters carry pillows, their dogs, and the secret weight of their diamonds.
In the bare room, they are arranged as if for another photograph. And for a moment, there is only the waiting. The silence is thick with unspoken questions. What happens now? It is the ultimate expression of their powerlessness. They are characters in a play who have been led onto a dark stage, awaiting a final line they will never get to speak.
Then, a man steps forward and reads from a piece of paper. The words are bureaucratic, cold—a verdict from a system that has condemned them. The ensuing chaos is not the clean stroke of an executioner’s axe, but a clumsy, horrifying mess—the cacophony of gunfire in the small space, the ricochets, the screams. The jewels sewn into the corsets are doing their one, final, absurd trick: deflecting the bullets, prolonging the agony. The system is malfunctioning, a brief, frantic struggle before its terrible purpose is fulfilled.
And in that noise, the girl with the fake teeth disappears.
But the story does not end there. The horror mutates. Anastasia is not allowed the dignity of a simple, tragic end. The desperate need for a fairytale resurrects her. The system of history ejects her from the basement and traps her in a new role: the lost princess, the survivor, the ghost who might still be out there. Women with haunted eyes and half-remembered stories step forward, claiming to be her. Anna Anderson became the most famous vessel for the world’s collective wish. She has forced the world to look, wonder, and hope for decades.
This is the second, more profound horror. Her identity, which she asserted with that silly face, is now a commodity. It is debated in courtrooms, romanticized in animated films with talking bats, and sold as a story of hope and resilience. The real girl—the one who loved jokes and dogs, who was trapped and confused and ultimately murdered in a cellar—is erased. She has become public property, an indifferent machinery of the world.
When the science finally arrives, it is as cold and impersonal as the verdict read in the basement. DNA analysis. A confirmation of bone fragments. The file is closed. The rumour is put to rest. Anastasia Romanov did not survive.
We are left, then, only with the photograph. The girl with the fake teeth. It no longer looks like a moment of joy. It looks like a mask. A frantic, silent scream of identity from a girl about to be swallowed by systems—royalty, revolution, history, and finally, by our own stories. We look at her, and she looks back, not at us, but through us. Her playful gesture has become a grimace, a reflection of the absurdity we all feel when confronted by the world’s vast, silent, and utterly senseless machinations. We feel exposed. And in that exposure, we recognize the hollow space where a person used to be.
