Anastasia Hendrikova

Countess Anastasia Hendrikova
Anastasia Hendrikova, left, with fellow lady in waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, right.
Born	23 June 1887
Died	4 September 1918(1918-09-04) (aged 31) Perm, Russia
Parent(s)	Count Vassily Alexandrovich Hendrikov and Princess Sophia Petrovna Gagarine

Countess Anastasia Vasilyevna Hendrikova, (23 June 1887 – 4 September 1918), was a lady in waiting at the court of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. She was arrested by the Bolsheviks and shot to death outside Perm in the fall of 1918.

Like the Romanovs and their servants who were assassinated on July 17, 1918, Hendrikova and Catherine Adolphovna Schneider, the elderly court tutor who was killed with her, were canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981.

Hendrikova, who was nicknamed "Nastenka," was the daughter of Count Vassili Alexandrovich Hendrikov, Grand Master of Ceremonies of the Imperial Court, and his wife, Princess Sophia Petrovna Gagarine. She was a descendant of the sister of Catherine I of Russia, the wife of Peter the Great. Hendrikova was appointed a lady of waiting in 1910. She acted as a "sort of unofficial governess" to the four grand duchesses.

Hendrikova was devoted to the Romanov family and followed them into exile after the Russian Revolution of 1917, going with them first to Tobolsk and later to Ekaterinburg, even though she was worried about her own family.

Hendrikov's sister, nicknamed "Inotchka," was ill with tuberculosis. "The two sisters were all the world to each other," wrote her fellow lady in waiting, Baroness Sophie von Buxhoeveden, recalling how Hendrikova's "dark eyes glowed" when she heard news about her sister. "And it was from Inotchka's bedside that Nastenka had rushed back to Tsarskoe Selo on the news of the revolution to join the empress in her danger. Now she seldom had news."

Buxhoeveden thought Hendrikova was aware of the danger that she was in. Hendrikova had "so fixed her thoughts on approaching death that it had no terror for her," Buxhoeveden wrote in her memoirs. "She was very pretty and looked younger than her twenty-eight years, but she welcomed the thought of death, so weary had she become of life and so much detached from earthly interests. I felt her drifting away to higher planes."