tatiana botkine melnik

Tatiana Evguenievna Botkin spent her early childhood in St. Petersburg. After the appointment of her father, Eugene Sergueievich Botkin, as physician to the Tsar, her family settled in Tsarskoie Selo, first at the Catherine Palace and then on Sadovaia Street, very close to the park of the Alexander Palace. She received a careful education and spoke four languages fluently (English, French, German and Russian). Eugene Sergueievich Botkin, who supervised the hospitals that the Empress had opened at the Alexander Palace to treat the seriously wounded in the war, transformed his house into a hospital for convalescents and Tatiana Botkin served there as a nurse. During the February Revolution, Eugene Botkin shared the imprisonment of the Tsar and his family in the Alexander Palace, while Tatiana continued her studies to become a teacher. When the prisoners were sent to Tobolsk by the provisional government, a decision supported by Gutchkov, Eugene Botkin's own cousin, Tatiana remained in Tsarskoye Selo while she organized her passage and that of her brother Gleb Botkin to Siberia.

In Tobolsk, Tatiana lived in the house opposite the imperial family's residence but was not allowed to visit them. She corresponded with the Emperor's daughters through papers rolled up in the hem of her father's coat. When her father decided of his own free will to follow the imperial family to Yekaterinburg, Tatiana Botkin was refused permission to accompany her father: "You are too young to die" the political commissar told her. The assassination of his father and the imperial family caused her great pain.

Before making the decision to "leave his children orphans", Eugene Botkin had written to a young officer of Cossack origin, who served in the Siberian hunters, Constantin Semionovitch Melnik, asking him to watch over his daughter. Constantin Melnik was in Ukraine at the time. He crossed Russia on foot to reach Tobolsk, his officer's epaulettes in his pocket. To better fulfill his promise to Doctor Botkin to protect his daughter, Constantin Melnik married Tatiana. He then joined the Kolchak army where he carried out counter-espionage and the fight against the Cheka, serving as a colonel. In order to rally the ataman Semenoff to the cause of the White Armies, Constantin Melnik left by armored train for Vladivostock, taking with him his wife and his young brother-in-law, Gleb. It was from there that he continued the fight, with the late support of the Cossack ataman. The two spouses left the city by the last boat, that of the Serbian delegation. They took refuge in Yugoslavia then in France, but their marriage did not withstand the rigors of exile and they divorced.

Tatiana and Constantin had three children: Tatiana, Hélène and Constantin Melnik, the coordinator of the French secret services during the Algerian war, geostrategist, publisher and writer.

During the Second World War, Tatiana's brother Yuri was imprisoned by the Nazis and then executed. Her mother died of malnutrition in Berlin in 1945.

In 1926, like her brother Gleb in 1928, Tatiana Botkine identified, in Anna Anderson, Anastasia Nicolaïevna Romanov, fourth daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, whom she supported unwaveringly until her death.

A few years before her death at the age of 88, helped by her granddaughter Catherine Melnik-Duhamel, she wrote her memoirs under the title "Au temps des Tsars", in April 1980. This work, which ended with the end of the civil war, was followed by a second, which dealt with exile: "Anastasia retrouvée", Paris, Grasset, 1985.