02/05/2025
Here we have what are the last known photographs of Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Alexei. It is 1918, and they are on the ship the Rus and making their way to join their parents and Maria in Ekaterinburg. Alexei and Olga's faces are pretty clear, and they are easily identifiable.
There seems to be a tendency to overread Olga's face. She looks so old! So thin! So sad! So melancholic! King and Wilson, in The Fate of the Romanovs, take it one step further. She's been traumatized by lewd behavior and some kind of attack! She's clutching at her handbag!
I was shocked when I read that, as that did not align with what I remembered of the photo. I decided to look at it again, to see if I had been wrong--I had not. This photo of Olga, in my opinion, really does not reveal much about her mental state at all. The poor photo quality makes her look paler and possibly older, but proves nothing.
In the next picture, we see Olga's back, Tatiana (with her face half-obscured), and Anastasia. Unfortunately, Anastasia is easily missable (not a word, but oh well) because she's little more than a shadow in this photo. The woman often labeled as Anastasia matches much better with Countess Anastasia Hendrikova--the same nose, the same profile. All of the Romanov sisters except Tatiana had an indent between their foreheads and noses, but this woman does not. She is not Anastasia Nikolaevna. No, she is Anastasia Hendrikova:
Countess Hendrikova
But this is the last photo of Anastasia. Between Hendrikova and Tatiana you can see her. She is also in profile, which matches neatly with her 1914 profile photo. While of course her face would have changed as she matured, the 1914 photo is perhaps the clearest picture of her profile:
Ok, so what about Maria's last known photograph? Unfortunately, it's this blurry little thing, taken at Tobolsk in 1918. Despite the blurriness of the photograph, you can see how Anastasia's face was beginning to take maturity, and how Maria's was developing further along the line of what I call her 1916 face (a fuller face with a wide mouth):
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