Tatiana Evgenievna Botkina-Melnik,, 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.
Background
Botkina was the third child and only daughter of Botkin and his wife Olga. Her parents divorced in 1910 under the strain of Doctor Botkin"s devotion to the royal family and the long hours he spent at court and her mother"s affair with a German tutor.
Career
Eugene Botkin retained custody of the children following the divorce. Botkina"s older brother Dmitri was killed in action during World War I.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the fall of 1918, Botkina married Konstantin Melnik, an officer of the Ukrainian Rifles whom she had known at Tsarskoye Selo. 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, Doctor 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.