Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince John Constantinovich of Russia, reported that a guard brought a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the daughter of the Tsar. Helena Petrovna said she did not recognize the girl and the guard took her away. Although other witnesses in Perm later reported that they saw Anastasia, her mother and sisters in Perm after the murders, this story is now widely discredited. Rumors that they were alive were fueled by deliberate misinformation designed to hide the fact that the
Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich of Russia the great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I (from his father's side), also the great-great-grandson of the same Tsar Nicholas I (from his mother's one), the grandson of Tsar Alexander III and the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution Prince Dmitri was imprisoned along with his parents and grandmother the Dowager Empress at Dulber, in the Crimea. He escaped the fate of a number of his Romanov cousins who were murdered by the Bolsheviks when he was freed by German troops in 1918. He left Russia on 11 April 1919, at the age of seventeen, aboard the Royal Navy