Tatiana Botkina

Infobox Person
name = Tatiana Evgenievna Botkina-Melnik


image_size =
caption = Tatiana Botkina, far left, with her father, Dr. Eugene Botkin, and brother Gleb at Tobolsk in 1918.
birth_date = 1898
birth_place =
death_date = 1986
death_place = Paris, France
parents = Eugene Botkin, father; Olga Botkina, mother.
spouse = Konstantin Melnik (divorced)

Tatiana Evgenievna Botkina-Melnik, (1898 - 1986), was the daughter of court physician Eugene Botkin, who was killed along with Tsar Nicholas II and his family by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918.

In later years, Botkina, along with her brother Gleb Botkin, was a major supporter of Anna Anderson's claim that she was the surviving Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.

Early life

Botkina was the third child and only daughter of Botkin and his wife Olga. Her parents divorced in 1910 under the strain of Dr. Botkin's devotion to the royal family and the long hours he spent at court and her mother's affair with a German tutor. Eugene Botkin retained custody of the children following the divorce. [Zeepvat, Charlotte, "Romanov Autumn," Sutton Publishing, 2000] Botkina's two elder brothers, Dmitri and Yuri, were killed in action during World War I. [King, Greg, and Wilson, Penny, The Fate of the Romanovs, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003, ISBN 0-471-20768-3, p. 62]

The Botkin children "were not intimate friends" of the imperial children, Botkina later recalled, but they did know them fairly well. They first met the imperial children in 1911 and, thereafter, sometimes played with them when they were on vacation in the Crimea. [Kurth, Peter, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, Back Bay Books, 1983, p. 138] Botkina also chatted on occasion with the younger grand duchesses during World War I, when Botkina served as a Red Cross nurse at a hospital in the Catherine Palace. [Kurth, p. 138]

Revolution

Botkina and her brother accompanied their father into exile with the Romanov family following the Russian Revolution of 1917. When the family was transferred from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, the Botkin children were not permitted to accompany their father. [Kurth, p. 139] When Botkina asked Ural Soviet commander Nikolai Rodionov for permission to join her father at Ekaterinburg, he replied, "Why should such a handsome girl as you are want to rot all her life in prison, or even to be shot?" Botkina insisted that the imperial family would not rot in prison. Rodionov told her they would probably be shot instead. He told her he would allow them to accompany the group as far as the Ekaterinburg station, but they would be arrested and sent back to Tobolsk because he would not grant them an entry permit to live in Ekaterinburg. In the end, the Botkin children decided to remain behind in Tobolsk. [King and Wilson, p. 137]

When Botkina heard the conclusion of the Sokolov Report, that the Tsar, his family and their servants had been killed, her sole consolation was the fact that her father had died trying to shield the Tsar. [Kurth, p. 139]

Exile

In the fall of 1918, Botkina married Konstantin Melnik, an officer of the Ukrainian Rifles whom she had known at Tsarskoye Selo. [Kurth, p. 137] [King and Wilson, p.505] They escaped from Russia through Vladivostok and eventually settled in Rives, France, in a town near Grenoble, where they raised their children. [Kurth, p. 137]

Botkina divorced her husband some years later and settled near Paris, where she lived the rest of her life. [Kurth, p. 296]

Relationship with Anna Anderson

Botkina was first persuaded to visit Anna Anderson in 1926, after hearing about her story from her relative, Sergei Botkin. Botkina was persuaded that the woman was truly Grand Duchess Anastasia after hearing her describe an event that Botkina said only she and the youngest grand duchess could have known anything about. Anderson appeared to remember that Botkina's father, Dr. Eugene Botkin, had personally undressed Anastasia and performed a nurse's duties for her when the grand duchess was ill with measles in the spring of 1917. "Only once then, it happened that my father tended the Grand Duchesses alone and performed nurses' duties for them," Botkina recalled in 1929. "This fact has never been published anywhere, and apart from my father I alone knew anything about it." [Kurth, p. 143]

She was a supporter of Anderson for the next sixty years and, like her brother Gleb, wrote her own memoirs about her friendship with the imperial family and her time in Russia.

Legacy

Botkina's son, Konstantin Melnik, and a great-granddaughter attended the funeral held on July 17, 1998 at Peter and Paul Cathedral in Moscow for the Romanovs, her father, Dr. Eugene Botkin, and for other victims who were assassinated eighty years earlier on July 17, 1918. [cite web | author= | year=1998| title="17 July 1998: The funeral of Tsar Nicholas II | work= romanovfundforrussia.org| url=http://www.romanovfundforrussia.org/family/funeral.html| accessdate= February 28| accessyear=2007]

Notes