Princess Xenia Georgievna of Russia

Princess Xenia Georgievna of Russia (22 August 1903 – 17 September 1965) was the younger daughter of Grand Duke George Mihailovich of Russia and Princess Maria Georgievna of Greece and Denmark. She is known for recognizing Anna Anderson as Grand Duchess Anastasia. Youth Xenia and her older sister Princess Nina Georgievna, who was born in 1901, left Russia in 1914 to spend the war years in England with their mother. In 1919, her father, his brother Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, and their cousins Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and Grand Duke Dmitry Konstantinovich, were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in St. Petersburg. Anna Anderson controversy In the summer of 1927, Xenia involved herself in the Anna Anderson/Anastasia Tchaikovsky affair by telephoning Gleb Botkin (son of imperial physician Eugene Botkin, who had been murdered along with the former tsar and his family in 1918) with an invitation for Anna to live as a guest at their luxurious estate in New York's Oyster Bay. Xenia explains her hospitality: "I had heard that Botkin was arranging to bring 'the invalid' to the United States through a newspaper organization. This bothered me because I had heard so many conflicting stories. It then occurred to me that I should take her myself and avoid all this proposed publicity. For if she were indeed an impostor it would save much unpleasantness for my family, and if she were the real Anastasia it was ghastly to think that nothing was being done for her.... This solution would be simple, so it seemed to me."