The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Along with Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, the Bolsheviks massacred seventeen other Romanovs, including eight of sixteen grand dukes living at the time of the revolution, five of seventeen grand duchesses, and four young princes of the blood. After this carnage, there remained the dowager empress, eight grand dukes, and twelve grand duchesses, four of whom were foreigners who received the title on marrying Russian grand dukes.

  By 1919, the largest concentration of Romanov survivors was in the Crimea, where a cluster of family summer palaces provided familiar places of refuge. The tsar’s mother, Dowager Empress Marie, was at the Imperial palace of Livadia, overlooking the Black Sea resort town of Yalta. With Marie was her daughter Grand Duchess Olga, accompanied by Olga’s new husband, Colonel Nicholas Kulikovsky, and their infant son, Tikhon. Nearby, Marie’s older daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia, her husband, Grand Duke Alexander, and six of their seven children were at the palace of Ai-Todor. Also nearby, in his own palace, was Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, commander in chief of the Russian Army at the outbreak of war. Nicholas Nicholaevich’s brother, Grand Duke Peter, was with him, along with their wives, the Montenegrin sisters, Grand Duchesses Anastasia and Militsa. Grand Duke Nicholas had no children, but Grand Duke Peter’s twenty-one-year-old son, Prince Roman, was present.

  For eighteen months, while the Russian civil war swayed back and forth, the band of imperial refugees sheltered uneasily in these comfortable but insecure surroundings. Their suspense ended in April 1919, when the British battleship HMS Marlborough arrived in Yalta and offered to remove the dowager empress. Marie refused to depart unless the British agreed to embark all the Romanovs, their servants, and a number of others who wanted to go. When the large warship sailed for Malta, her broad decks were crowded with Russians, none of whom would see their country again. From the Marlborough, the refugees scattered across Europe and the world. The dowager empress returned to her native Denmark, where her nephew Christian X was king. Eventually, Grand Duchess Xenia, separated from her husband, moved to London, where she lived from 1936 to 1960 in a small mansion provided by the British Crown and named, appropriately, Wilderness House. Grand Duchess Olga and her husband remained in Denmark until after the Second World War, when they moved to Canada. After her husband died, Olga moved in with a Russian couple in an apartment over a barbershop in Toronto. She died there in November 1960, seven months after the death of her sister, Xenia.

  Another family of Romanovs survived because the revolution found them at their summer estate in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. This was Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the German-born widow of Nicholas II’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, and her two younger sons, Grand Duke Boris and Grand Duke Andrew. Each of these men was accompanied by his mistress; Boris by Zinaida Rachevsky and Andrew by Mathilde Kschessinska, the former prima ballerina who, before Nicholas II’s marriage and assumption of the throne, had been the tsar’s first and only mistress. Once out of Russia, both grand dukes married their companions and settled down in Paris and its suburbs.

  Their elder brother, Grand Duke Cyril, his English-born wife, Grand Duchess Victoria, and their two young daughters were the only Romanovs who left Russia by a northern route. This was not difficult because they left in June 1917, when the moderate Provisional Government was still in power. They asked permission of Alexander Kerensky, then a leading minister, received their papers, boarded a train in Petrograd, and departed for Finland. Later that summer, while they were still in Finland, their son Vladimir was born. Grand Duke Dimitri, the twenty-six-year-old murderer of Rasputin and a first cousin of both Nicholas II and Grand Duke Cyril, left Russia by an extreme southerly route. He had been exiled to the Caucasus for his role in the assassination, and soon after the tsar abdicated he escaped over the mountains into Persia.

  Over the past seventy-five years, the surviving Romanovs have subdivided into five subclans, each named, in Russian fashion, for a patriarch. They are the Mikhailovichi, the Vladimirovichi, the Pavlovichi, the Constantinovichi, and the Nicholaevichi. The Mikhailovichi, descended from Michael, a son of Tsar Nicholas I, are closest by blood to Tsar Nicholas II and also the most numerous. These were and are the children and grandchildren of Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia and her husband, Grand Duke Alexander, a son of the aforementioned Michael. Xenia had seven children, born around the turn of this century Her eldest child was Irina, who married one of Rasputin’s assassins, Prince Yussoupov. The Yussoupovs settled in Paris, where they lived for almost fifty years until they died. They had one child, a daughter, who had a daughter, who has a daughter. It was Yussoupov’s granddaughter Xenia Sfiris who provided a blood sample to Peter Gill which helped him to identify the femur of Nicholas II.

  Grand Duchess Xenia also had six sons. These boys and young men grew up in the West, living first with their mother in Denmark and London, then scattering to Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, Chicago, and San Francisco. Germany, the usual source of Romanov brides, was barren for this purpose after the First World War, so these youthful princes married young women from the aristocratic Russian families they knew—Kutuzovs, Galitzines, Sheremetyevs, Vorontsov-Dashkovs—the oldest and most glittering names of the Russian nobility. Xenia’s sons were well spoken, well mannered, well educated, and well tailored, but not ambitious or energetic. “They spoke six languages,” says Rostislav Romanov, whose father, also named Rostislav, was one of the six brothers. “But nobody ever said anything, so they were always referred to as being silent in six languages. I remember taking my father to see his brother Nikita. They said hello to each other and the conversation died. Another day one of Nikita’s sons suggested, ‘Why don’t we drive over and see Uncle Rostislav?’ Nikita said, ‘Why? I already know him.’ ” Grand Duchess Xenia’s youngest son, Prince Vassily, who was born in 1907 and left Russia at twelve, spent most of his adult life in Woodside, California, near San Francisco. He raised award-winning tomatoes and held a number of jobs, including selling (and delivering) champagne and wine. His private joke was to arrive at the back door of the estate of a friend, deliver the cases ordered, then put on his coat and tie, go around to the front door, ring the bell, present his card, which announced Prince Vassily of Russia, and ask whether madame was at home.

  Prince Vassily died in 1987, and Xenia’s grandchildren now are men and women in their sixties and seventies. The men, all referred to in society and the press as Prince Romanov, have followed varied careers. Prince Andrew, who served as a Royal Navy seaman on the arctic convoy route during World War II, is a painter who lives in Inverness, California. Prince Michael, whose grandfathers both were grand dukes, has spent most of his life as a film director in France and now lives in Paris and Biarritz. Prince Nikita, a historian with a Ph.D. from Stanford, lives in New York, as does his brother Prince Alexander. The youngest and most active of these princes is Rostislav, who speaks English with a wholly American accent. This is unsurprising, as he was born and grew up in Chicago, went to an American prep school, and was graduated from Yale. In New Haven, none of his classmates cared that he was a Romanov, and he himself cared mostly about crew. Today, he is a London merchant banker commuting daily from Sussex to Waterloo Station. Although he has worked in England for fourteen years, the British Royal family—like his Yale class—has not noticed his presence. Rostislav does not mind. He is an Anglophile. He does not want to go back to Russia except to visit. “Life in this country suits me,” he says.

  After Nicholas II’s sisters, nephews, and nieces, the tsar’s closest surviving relatives were the Vladimirovichi, then comprising his four first cousins, Grand Dukes Cyril, Boris, and Andrew and their sister, Grand Duchess Helen, all children of Nicholas’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir. In normal times, the near-simultaneous deaths of a tsar, his son, and his brother, as happened in 1918, automatically would have promoted the eldest of these cousins, Cyril, who was forty-two in 1918, to the Imperial throne. In 1918, however, there was neither empire nor throne, and, consequently, nothing was automatic. Su
ccession to the Russian throne followed the Salic law, meaning that the crown passed only to males, through males, until there were no more eligible males. When an emperor died and neither a son nor a brother was available, the eldest eligible male from the branch of the family closest to the deceased monarch would succeed. In this case, under the old laws, this was Cyril. After Cyril stood his two brothers, Boris and Andrew, and after them the only surviving male of the Pavlovich line, their first cousin Grand Duke Dimitri, the son of Nicholas II’s youngest uncle, Grand Duke Paul. Nicholas II’s six nephews, the sons of the tsar’s sister Xenia, were closer by blood than Cyril but were ineligible because the succession could not pass through a woman.

  Cyril, living in France, was cautious about putting forth his claim as pretender. The Dowager Empress Marie would not believe that her son and his family were dead and refused to attend any memorial service on their behalf. A succession proclamation by Cyril would have shocked and deeply offended the old woman. Further, there was another, not very willing pretender: Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, former commander in chief of the Russian Army, was from the Nicholaevichi, a more distant branch of the Romanov tree, but, among Russians, he was far more respected and popular than Cyril. Nicholas Nicholaevich was forceful and Russia’s most famous soldier whereas Cyril was a naval captain, who, having had one ship sunk beneath him, refused to go to sea again. Nevertheless, when emigre Russians spoke to Grand Duke Nicholas about assuming the throne in exile, he refused, explaining that he did not wish to shatter the hopes of the dowager empress. Besides, Nicholas agreed with Marie that if Nicholas II, his son, and his brother really were dead, the Russian people should be free to choose as their new tsar whatever Romanov—or whatever Russian—they wished.

  In 1922, six years before the death of Marie and while the old soldier Nicholas Nicholaevich still had seven years to live, Cyril decided to wait no longer. He proclaimed himself first Curator of the Throne and then, in 1924, Tsar of All the Russias—although he announced that for everyday use he still should be addressed by the lesser title Grand Duke. He established a court around his small villa in the village of Saint-Briac in Brittany, issued manifestos, and distributed titles. Although, technically, his daughters and son were princesses and a prince, he—in his new capacity as tsar—elevated them to grand duchesses and grand duke. When his cousin Grand Duke Dimitri supported his claim, Cyril responded by ennobling Dimitri’s American wife, Audrey Emery, as Princess Romanovsky-Ilyinsky; in 1929, Dimitri and Audrey passed this name and princely title to their infant son, Paul.

  Cyril was sixty-two when he died in October 1938 in the American Hospital in Paris and passed his claim to his twenty-one-year-old son, Vladimir. This young man, privately tutored at home and then in a Russian lycée in Paris, spent his summers tinkering with motorcycles and zooming them down the narrow roads of Brittany At one point he spent six months working in a machine shop in England, in order “to experience the life of a working-class person.” In 1946 he moved to Madrid, and two years later, at thirty-one, he married a Georgian princess, Leonida Bagration-Moukhransky. Leonida had previously been married to an older, wealthy, expatriate American, Sumner Moore Kirby, by whom she had a daughter, Helen. In 1937, twenty-three-year-old Leonida divorced Kirby. He remained in France during the Second World War, was seized by the Gestapo, and died in a German concentration camp.

  For the four and a half decades of their marriage, Vladimir and Leonida lived quietly. They occupied a villa in Madrid during the winter, moved to Saint-Briac in the summer, and maintained an apartment in Paris. Occasionally, they visited New York, where monarchist friends rented limousines, gave dinners, and listened while Vladimir addressed them in impeccable English, Russian, French, and Spanish. I met him several times on these occasions. He was a handsome, pleasant, soft-spoken man, who, in the tradition of royalty, said little that was remarkable. His real passion was for machinery: the construction and operation of cars, motorcycles, and helicopters. He was neither scholar nor historian; when his boyhood friend Alistair Forbes prodded him to investigate the Anna Anderson identity, Vladimir replied amiably, “Oh, yes, Ali, I daresay all you say is true, but I shan’t let you see the papers I have on the subject, so let’s talk of something else.” Vladimir had no occupation other than being pretender, and most people assumed that the couple was supported by Helen Kirby, who had inherited her father’s American fortune and lived with her mother and stepfather.

  Grand Duke Vladimir and Leonida had only one child, Maria, born in 1953, when her mother was thirty-nine. In 1969, when it was obvious that he would never have a son, Vladimir acted to ensure that the succession would remain within his line. He issued a manifesto which proclaimed, to the chagrin of most other Romanovs, that upon his death his daughter would become Curatrix of the Throne. Maria had been brought up to fulfill a significant dynastic role. She was educated in Madrid and Paris and eventually spent several terms studying Russian history and literature at Oxford University. In 1978, she married a Hohenzollern prince, Franz Wilhelm of Prussia, a great-grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Before their marriage, Franz Wilhelm converted to Orthodoxy, took the Russian name Michael Pavlovich, and was awarded the title of grand duke by his new father-in-law. In 1981 Maria and her husband produced their only child, George, whose grandfather also gave him the title of grand duke.

  Vladimir never expected to return to Russia as tsar, although he frequently announced that he was ready. By the time of glasnost and perestroika, he was seventy, and when Yeltsin was elected president he had reached seventy-four. Suddenly, events accelerated. A few weeks after Yeltsin’s inauguration in July 1991, the president and the pretender exchanged letters. That autumn, the city of Leningrad voted to take back its name St. Petersburg. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, invited the Romanov pretender to attend the celebration. Vladimir and Leonida flew to the former Imperial capital and looked down from a balcony of the former Winter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum) on sixty thousand people filling the Palace Square. Subsequently, when Vladimir entered a room to hold a press conference, three hundred journalists, Russians and foreigners, rose to their feet. Five months later Vladimir flew to Miami to give a speech to fifteen hundred business and financial leaders. Answering questions during a press conference, he slumped in his chair and died soon afterward. Two days later Yeltsin signed a decree permitting the first funeral mass for a Romanov in Russia in three quarters of a century. On May 29, 1992, Vladimir was buried in a vault in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg.

  Vladimir’s status as pretender to the Russian throne appeared to have been endorsed by Sobchak and perhaps even by Yeltsin, but it was hotly contested by the majority of Romanovs. The schism that has divided the family—that plagued Vladimir while he was alive and today bedevils his daughter—did not begin with either of them. It began with Vladimir’s father, the first pretender, Grand Duke Cyril.

  The Russian Law of Succession to the throne, established by Emperor Paul in 1797, set five criteria for succession: First, the monarch must be Orthodox. Second, the monarch must be a male as long as there are any eligible males in the Imperial house. Third, the mother and wife of a male monarch or male heir close in the line of succession must be Orthodox at the time of marriage. Fourth, the monarch or heir must make an “equal marriage” to a woman from another “ruling house”; an unequal marriage to a woman of lesser rank, even a woman from the highest level of the aristocracy, disqualified that couple and their offspring from reaching the throne. Fifth, the future monarch could marry only with the permission of the reigning tsar. (Unlike Britain, Russia did not make a woman’s previous divorce an impediment to her marrying into the Imperial family or even eventually becoming the consort of a tsar.) Grand Duke Cyril failed to meet two of these requirements: Neither his mother nor his wife was Orthodox when she married. And Cyril married without the permission of—indeed, in defiance of—Tsar Nicholas II.

  Cyril’s mother, Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, a German princess
from Mecklenburg-Schwerin, had insisted on remaining Lutheran when she married Cyril’s father, Grand Duke Vladimir. She remained Lutheran for thirty-four years after her marriage. In 1908 she realized that, because of the illness of the little Tsarevich Alexis, her husband and her son Cyril were close in line of succession to the throne. In order to promote their chances, Marie Pavlovna belatedly converted to Orthodoxy. By then, however, Cyril’s affairs were wretchedly tangled on other accounts. As a young man he had fallen in love with his cousin Victoria Melita, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. But the old queen, constantly arranging marriages for her dozens of progeny, decided that Victoria Melita should marry her grandson on another side, Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. Victoria Melita, although she was in love with Cyril, obeyed her grandmother. Her marriage to Ernest was unhappy—Ernest’s feelings about women were ambivalent—and Victoria Melita began spending weeks at a time with Cyril in Russia and Germany. From a distance, Cyril’s appeal for the Hessian grand duchess is difficult to understand; he was described by Victoria Melita’s sister, later Queen Marie of Rumania, as “the marble man … extraordinarily cold and selfish … he seems to freeze you up and has such a disdaining way of treating … people.” Nevertheless, within months of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, Victoria Melita and Ernest were divorced, and she looked forward to marrying Cyril.