The twisted Romanov tale

One of the more beautiful songs of Pat Boone contained as part of the lyrics the following lines. “xxx Beautiful stranger, step down from your star

I only know I love you so, whoever you are xxx”. I learned much later after my elementary years that this song entitled “Anastasia” was written by Paul Francis Webster and Alfred Newman as the main theme song of a 1956 movie starring Ingrid Bergman. Believe me, I still play the vinyl containing that song up to the present time.

If a legend were to be written here, Anastasia was one of the children of Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra of the Russian Romanov dynasty. While history recorded that the Bolsheviks executed the czar, the czarina, and their children in a basement in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918, the 17-year-old Anastasia somehow survived. Actually, the rumor began because the Bolshevik executioners hid the bodies of the Romanovs leaving the public unsure of their fate. It thus came about that, in 1920, one Anna Anderson, showed up in a German hospital, claiming that a sympathetic soldier helped her, Anastasia, the beautiful stranger in Pat Boone’s song, escape the bloody cellar where her family was shot.

I write here of Anastasia as a daughter of the Romanov dynasty in Russia. It must be this Romanov that was mentioned in the impeachment hearing of Vice President Sarah Zimmerman Duterte Carpio. I heard Senator-judge Raffy Tulfo and prosecution second witness Atty. Jeremy Lotoc, a regional director of the National Bureau of Investigation, stating that Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte was the very first person to use the term Romanov. Mainstream media widely reported that during a "Hakbang ng Maisug" rally in January 2024, Mayor Baste publicly warned President Marcos Jr. to "think of the Romanovs".

History tells us that the Romanovs were the rulers of Russia then. They were the administration, so to speak. If we project them to our present political context, the Romanovs were as the Marcoses are now. Nicholas II was the head of their state where Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is our president. If Tulfo and Lotoc were correct in their declarations that Baste warned BBM of a Romanov scene, it could be that the Davao City mayor wanted Marcos to remember that Czar Nicholas II was overthrown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin. It would seem that the mayor knew of a kind of probable uprising like the one where the Bolshevik Party successfully created the world's first communist state. Perhaps because the Romanov story that crystallized a brutal Russian civil war was not relevant to the grave threat issue in the impeachment of the vice president, it was not pursued to its logical end in the impeachment trial.

To me the real Romanov tale got twisted by a manifestation of a lawyer in the Vice President Carpio defense team. The twist, meaning the exact opposite, could be discerned when the defense counsel said; “xxx Operation Romanov is in place, and the threat against their lives (the Dutertes) is real xxx”. Grrr.