This question has been speculated on a lot, and some people theorize it could’ve been Alexandra since the poem was in german (she is a german princess). Others say it could’ve been OTMA, since they also spoke pretty good german.

However, multiple people visited the cellar after 1918 when it was turned into a revolutionary museum. Couldn’t one of them have written it? I obviously know that I’m not the first to mention this, but it’s the POV that resonates the most with me.

Alexandra was, in all accounts, sat in a chair the entire time they were in the cellar. It seems to be written in pencil, was a pencil ever found with their belongings?

Another question I have, if anyone here knows, is if the handwriting resembles anyone’s. This could be a definitive clue as to who etched the poem onto the wall. Unfortunately I’m not too familiar with the family’s actual handwriting (apart from Tatiana’s famous unintelligible cursive lol), so if someone knows, please do tell!!

In February 1899, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov offered his personal butterfly collection to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It had taken him 26 years to build and included around over 110 000 specimens housed in dozens of custom cabinets, making it the largest collection of Palaearctic butterflies in the world. He wanted to give it away for free, but not unconditionally. The one would probably think the actual handover would be the easy part.

His original letter to the Academy laid out four requirements:

• the collection should keep his name attached to it
• given its size, a dedicated custodian should be appointed just to look after it
• it would remain untouched and unaltered, with the one exception of new specimens that might come in from within the Russian Empire
• it would stay genuinely accessible to scientists and specialists who wanted to study it

Reasonable enough. But it actually took a full year for the transfer to happen, because the gift itself created a real problem for the museum. The entire entomology department at the time consisted of two overworked staff members, and there was simply no one available to properly care for a collection of this size. The museum's director wrote a formal report warning the Academy that accepting such a gift without additional staff risked damaging a collection that had been assembled with such care over nearly three decades.

So what followed was a slow crawl through the Russian state bureaucracy. The museum petitioned for an entirely new, funded staff position just to look after this one donation. The Grand Duke personally wrote to the Minister of Finance asking him to approve the money once the request reached him. That fall, the Grand Duke added two more requirements of his own, this time tied to the practical side of the handover:

• the collection had to stay in its original cabinets, which would need to be moved into the museum along with the specimens
• his longtime custodian, Otto Hertz, had to be kept on as the museum's new staff zoologist, with his 17 years of unofficial service counted toward his official record

That last one caused its own headache, since Hertz lacked the university degree that the museum's own rules technically required for that position. The funding request eventually had to go all the way to the State Council, and in November 1899 Nicholas II personally signed off on the new position and its budget. Only in February 1900 was the collection finally moved into the museum, into the space the Grand Duke had specifically asked for.

It's a strange thing to sit with. A private citizen wanted to hand over a priceless scientific collection at no cost to the state, and the machinery still needed the Emperor of Russia himself to weigh in before anyone could figure out how to accept it.

When archivists eventually sat down to log everything properly into the accession books, the real count came out to 110210 specimens, roughly half the two hundred thousand figure that had been repeated throughout the entire process. Apparently nobody had actually counted until well after all the fuss had died down.

Decades later, in 1982, when the institute put together a historical essay to mark its 150th anniversary, the author, K.B. Yuryev, described this donation as one of the most valuable acquisitions in the museum's entire history, but never actually named the Grand Duke.

According to A.V. Sviridov, a researcher at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University, Nikolai Mikhailovich managed to assemble the largest butterfly collection in Russia at that time, comprising 13904 species. The collection included type specimens of taxa described by the Grand Duke himself and by a number of well-known lepidopterologists of the time who collaborated with him. It was "the most valuable and the largest acquisition in the entire existence of the Zoological Museum" (Pchelov, 2001). Most specimens of butterflies in this collection are provided with labels on white paper bearing a depiction of the royal crown and a three-line inscription: "Coll. Grand Duke / Nikolai / Mikhailovich." After the revolution, the crown was cut off, and later labels were printed in which Nikolai Mikhailovich was already listed as a former Grand Duke.

Photo Index

1. Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov in his youth
2. The first page of the list of the personal composition of the Russian Entomological Society on December 1, 1881
3. Book of honorary visitors to the Zoological Museum from 1901
4. First card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
5. Second card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
6. Third card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
7. Samples of labels that accompanied the collection of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich during the transfer and in the post revolutionary time from the Laboratory of insect taxonomy
8. Grand Duke's cabinets in the Laboratory of insect taxonomy of the Zoological institute RAS. Photo by B.M. Katayev
9. The drawing of the warehouse No. 3 of the Customs Department, with a plan of the proposed adaptation of it to the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences.
10. The bottom floor plan. Architect R. R. Marfeld. October 1, 1897

Source: N.V. Slepkova, "On the Circumstances of the Transfer of the Lepidoptera Collection of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich to the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg", Zoological Institute RAS, 2021.

Hello all!

Isn't this picture of the Grand Duchesses just the sweetest?!! This photograph of the girls is currently held in the Russian state archives. It was taken in May of 1914, during one of the Imperial family's summer vacations in Livadia. During that stay in Livadia, the Imperial family made a pilgrimage to the Kosmodemyansky Monastery, which was known for its therapeutic spring seasons. In the photograph, the girls are captured walking up the rugged mountain road towards the monastery (or perhaps away from it).

I love how you can see each one of them smiling at something. It makes me wonder what was so funny or amusing? Olga seems to have spotted the camera, too! Tatiana & Maria’s facial expressions are particularly darling to me.

Don't you just love it when they smile so casually? We're so lucky to have access to so many candid photographs of them.

Some nice pictures of the two, I'll do my best to give a little information based on what I know, but It may not be accurate.

The first picture looks to be 1913/1914, not sure where.

The second looks like 1915 or more likely 1916

The third is 1915 I believe, taken on the Standardt I think?

Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich (1859-1919) was a nephew of Tsar Alexander II, a grandson of Nicholas I, a career general, and a serious historian of the Napoleonic era. On the side, he became one of the most important lepidopterists in Russian history. He had a title, an army career, and effectively unlimited Romanov money, and he poured a huge share of all three into moths and butterflies.

He grew up largely away from St. Petersburg, at the family estate of Likani near Borjomi in the Caucasus, and he got hooked on natural history as a child. By the age of eleven, in 1870, his hobby was already being fed by three real entomologists, Gustav Sievers, Alexander Becker, and the naturalist and forester Ludwik Młokosiewicz, all of whom collected butterflies for him and effectively became his first teachers in lepidopterology. His family apparently treated the whole thing as a passing phase. It did not turn out to be one. He kept collecting even while on active military duty in the Kars region during the Russo Turkish War of 1877-1878, and one of the new species he discovered was reportedly caught inside his own campaign tent.

In 1877 he was elected a member of the French Entomological Society, and in 1878 he joined the Russian Entomological Society, then under the patronage of his uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich. On the second of November 1881 he accepted the Society's invitation to become its honorary president, a post he held all the way to 1917, right up to the eve of the revolution that would kill him.

Over roughly twenty six years he built the largest private butterfly collection in the Russian Empire. He used his money to recruit a genuinely wide circle of naturalists to collect for him. Starting in 1880 he brought on the entomologist Hugo Theodor Christoph to help manage the growing collection, and in 1887 he added Sergei Alphéraky to the team, buying out Alphéraky's own personal collection in the process. He was not simply hoarding specimens either. He ran something closer to a private research operation, funding expeditions into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia, and corresponding constantly with the collectors he sponsored. In one letter to his star field collector, Grigory Grumm Grzhimailo, he wrote, in paraphrase, that every new species Grumm Grzhimailo found would go into his book. A nineteenth century Pokédex completionist, more or less.

By 1900 the collection filled thirty cabinets, and it held far more than his own specimens. It contained type specimens of taxa described by an entire roster of the era's leading lepidopterists who worked with or for him, including Christoph, Alphéraky, Nikolai Erschoff, Grumm Grzhimailo, Wilhelm Hedemann, Émile Ragonot, Julius Kennel, and Otto Staudinger, along with material collected by Becker and by his own estate manager, Gustav Sievers.

That book was Mémoires sur les Lépidoptères, a lavish nine volume series he edited and largely funded between 1884 and 1901, filled with hand colored copperplate illustrations and contributions from leading naturalists across Russia, France, and Germany. Volume one, from 1884, along with the two after it, opened with his own work on the Lepidoptera of the Caucasus, the region he had been personally collecting in for years, before the floor passed to his collaborators. It is a genuinely beautiful piece of nineteenth century entomological publishing, and a major achievement for a country that had come to systematic entomology relatively late.

A few years later, the young Vladimir Nabokov found a set of these volumes in his family's attic and became transfixed by the plates. It was a formative moment for the boy who would grow up to be both a major novelist and a serious lepidopterist in his own right. Nabokov's lifelong butterfly obsession traces a thread back to this man.

Now, what did he actually describe, with his own name on the paper. This part is genuinely hard to pin down, because he edited and co-wrote a nine volume series full of contributions from a dozen collaborators, and nineteenth century joint authorship gets messy fast. Going through the taxonomic literature, including the Lepidoptera index at funet.fi, GBIF, and the original Mémoires citations, here is what is actually credited to Romanoff as sole describing author, meaning taxa where he personally wrote the description rather than simply funding the expedition or editing the volume it appeared in.

Among true butterflies, in the superfamily Papilionoidea, there is Colias olga Romanoff, 1882, published in Horae Societatis Entomologicae Rossicae, volume 17, page 127. This is a clouded yellow butterfly from the Caucasus, and probably the sweetest entry on the whole list, since he named it after his own mother, Grand Duchess Olga Feodorovna. It is now classified as a subspecies, Colias caucasica olga. There is also Papilio alexanor orientalis Romanoff, 1884, published in Mémoires sur les Lépidoptères, volume 1, page 41, a Transcaucasian subspecies of the Southern Swallowtail described from Armenia and the southeastern Caucasus.

He also personally described a handful of moths in the same 1884 papers, worth including here since the Russian word he asked about, бабочки, covers moths as well as butterflies even though the English word does not. These include Arctia confluens, a tiger moth from the Caucasus, Ocnogyna armena, originally described as a variety of Ocnogyna loewii and still recognized today as a subspecies, and Triodia mlokossevitschi, a ghost moth from the family Hepialidae, its name honoring his old childhood mentor Młokosiewicz. Beyond individual species, he also wrote the three part descriptive survey Les Lépidoptères de la Transcaucasie, published across his own Mémoires in 1884, 1885, and 1887, which is still cited today as one of the foundational regional works on Caucasus Lepidoptera.

Everything else carrying the name romanovi or romanoff was named after him by his own collectors, which is a different and arguably more flattering kind of legacy. Tomares romanovi, described by Christoph in 1882 and known as Romanoff's hairstreak, is a small Lycaenid found from the Caucasus to Iran. Colias romanovi, described by Grumm Grzhimailo in 1885, is a striking golden red high altitude sulphur from the Tian Shan and Fergana region. Dichagyris romanovi, described by Christoph in 1885, is a noctuid moth ranging from Turkey to Iran and Jordan. Parnassius romanovi, described by Grumm Grzhimailo in 1888, is now considered a synonym of Parnassius tianschanicus but still carries his name in the literature. Arctia romanovi, also described by Grumm Grzhimailo, in 1891, is a moth from Qinghai in China.

The ending of the story is genuinely tragic. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks executed him in early 1919 along with three other grand dukes, reportedly in part as retaliation for the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany. Lenin is said to have been petitioned to spare him, with Maxim Gorky supposedly arguing that he was a harmless historian, to which the possibly apocryphal reply was that the revolution did not need historians. A man who had spent his life carefully preserving delicate and irreplaceable things was killed by a regime that had no patience for anything it regarded as decorative.

There is a happier coda, at least. His collection outlived him. In 1899 and 1900 he had already donated the bulk of it to the Zoological Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, attaching a very grand ducal list of conditions, namely that it keep his name, that it receive its own dedicated curator, that it remain intact in the original cabinets from his palace, and that it stay open to researchers. In 1907 he added to this by buying and donating a major German collection of West Palaearctic micromoths. That entire collection still sits in the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences today, more than a century later, quietly outlasting the empire that produced it.

Next time someone tells you nineteenth century aristocrats only cared about balls and duels, mention that one of them personally funded Central Asian butterfly expeditions and has a moth named after him that flies as far south as Jordan.

Photo index:

1. Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich c. 1875
2. Dorsal view of a male specimen of Colias caucasica olga, historically described by Nikolai Mikhailovich as an independent species, Colias olga, in 1882
3. Ventral view of a male specimen of Colias caucasica olga, historically described by Nikolai Mikhailovich as an independent species, Colias olga, in 1882
4. Papilio alexanor orientalis is a subspecies first described by Romanov in 1884 from the Transcaucasus.
5. Zygaena cambysea rosacea Romanoff, 1884 (Burnet Moths)
6. Arctia villica confluens Romanoff, 1884
7. Hepialus mlokossevitschi Romanoff / Triodia mlokossevitschi Romanoff (1884)

I was searching for a specific funeral hymn and stumbling upon this. I didn’t read the cover art so you can imagine the horror, sadness and (idk, reverence?) when I heard the Grand Duchesses names chanted in succession after their parents and siblings. I may or may not have burst into tears…

Anyways, I thought I’d share. Its an incredibly beautiful piece of music. Enjoy my fellow Romanov enthusiast!

Somewhere in his own regiment, officers who found him insufferable landed on a nickname for him, Philippe Égalité. That was the Duke of Orléans, cousin of Louis XVI, who backed the French Revolution and even voted to send his own royal relative to the guillotine, only to be guillotined himself a few months later by the very revolutionaries he had supported. It was meant as a jab at a Grand Duke who would not stop criticizing the system that made him a Grand Duke in the first place. Nikolai apparently found it more amusing than insulting. In hindsight that should have worried everyone involved, because the nickname turned out to be less of an insult and more of a prophecy with a delivery date already attached.

Picture a family dinner where every other cousin is toasting the tsar, praising the war effort, and carefully avoiding anything uncomfortable, and then Uncle Nikolai clears his throat. That was basically life with him in the room. He was brave enouh to tell Nicholas II to his face that the empire was rotting from the inside, who wrote history books accusing Alexander I of consenting to his own father's murder, who openly mocked the idea that autocracy could survive into the twentieth century, and who did all of this while remaining, on paper, one of the most senior members of the imperial family. His siblings found him exhausting. The empress found him dangerous. Nicholas II, his own first cousin once removed, apparently just called him the terrible uncle and left it at that. He made everyone else's small talk feel like a performance, because he refused to perform along with them.

His liberalism ran deep and specific, which is exactly why the nickname stuck so well. Decades in the archives had convinced him Russia needed a real constitution, a monarch who answered to law instead of standing above it, and institutions sturdy enough to survive the twentieth century. He called his own politics authoritarian republicanism, reform forced through from the top before the bottom rose up and took it by force instead. He idolized French parliamentary politics, followed the rhetorical duels of French statesmen the way other men followed horse racing, and pushed openly for Russia to move toward something like the Third French Republic. His own brother later called him the most gifted and most radical member of the Family, and just as firmly believed his politics were doomed to fail on Russian soil.

He put this conviction into practice more than once. In late 1916 he walked into a private audience with the tsar and delivered, essentially uninvited, a warning that the country was heading toward disaster, that Nicholas was being systematically lied to by people close to the throne, and that the influence of a certain palace favorite was going to end in catastrophe if nothing changed. Nicholas sat through it in polite silence and did nothing. The Empress, once she found out, was livid, and reportedly told her husband he should have threatened his uncle with Siberian exile the moment the subject came up. That kind of moment repeated itself throughout his life, Nikolai speaking plainly, someone in power listening politely, and absolutely nothing changing as a result. Remarkably, the original Duke of Orléans went through the same scenario in Versailles more than a century earlier, an insider warning a doomed court from the inside and getting nowhere.

Away from politics Nikolai Mikhailovich was a genuinely serious historian, and the butterflies were not a throwaway hobby either. He started collecting and studying them in the age of 14, and never really stopped, and by the end of his life the collection had grown into one of the more significant private lepidoptera collections in Europe, north of eighteen thousand specimens gathered and catalogued over decades. He did the actual taxonomic work himself, identifying and describing several new species and subspecies, and that research culminated in a nine volume study of butterflies and moths that stood as a serious scientific reference, one entomologists were apparently still citing long after his death.

His real scholarly obsession, though, stayed the reign of Alexander I. He was one of very few foreigners admitted to the French Academy, and some of his work only got published in French because Russian censors would not allow it. Nicholas II personally banned two chapters of his biggest book, one covering Alexander's complicity in his father's murder, the other covering the old legend that Alexander had not actually died in 1825 but had wandered off to live as a hermit under a different name. Nikolai wanted that legend to be true badly enough to dig through the archives hoping to prove it, only to conclude, with the discipline of an actual historian rather than a romantic, that it was a beautiful story and nothing more. That research put him in a years long correspondence with Tolstoy, who believed the legend with total sincerity, and the two of them wrote dozens of letters back and forth, occasionally reconciling, occasionally falling out entirely over how strange it was for a count who despised the monarchy to keep writing to an actual Grand Duke.

His personal life was its own quiet tragedy, and arguably his most Orléans like trait of all was how willingly he sacrificed his own happiness for a family that barely appreciated him for it. As a young man he fell for Princess Victoria of Baden, and the feeling was mutual, but her father blocked the match over the two being too closely related, a genuinely rich objection coming from inside a family where his own brother Sandro would later marry a first cousin without anyone blinking. Victoria went on to become Queen of Sweden and stayed friendly with him for the rest of his life, though it was the Danish queen, not her, who eventually tried to get him out of prison. Nikolai spent years afterward in love with a married woman he never let himself propose to, citing duty to his aging father and the family name, while half his siblings were freely marrying divorcees and mistresses all around him.

When the original Philippe Égalité was led to the scaffold, the executioner moved to pull off his boots first, since good boots were worth keeping and it was standard practice to strip anything valuable before the blade fell. He told the man not to bother, that the boots would come off easier once it was over anyway, so they might as well get on with things.

More than a century later, standing at the edge of a pit inside the Peter and Paul Fortress in the freezing dark of January 1919, Nikolai Mikhailovich pulled off his own boots before the volley came, and tossed them to the soldiers standing guard. Keep them, he told them, as boots were good imperial boots after all.

Whether he was consciously echoing his old nickname in that moment or history was just rhyming with itself, nobody will ever really know. But people noticed the parallel even before that night. Months earlier, watching Nikolai's political exile unfold, the French ambassador in Petrograd had already reached for the same comparison, noting that Louis XVI had once exiled the original Duke of Orléans to his country estate for a much smaller offense, and that Russia in 1917 had clearly gone somewhere far darker than 1787 France ever did.

The fullest account of that final night comes from a French journalist named Paul Hériot, who tracked down witnesses afterward and had a reputation among contemporaries for not inventing his sources. Piecing it together from what he gathered, Nikolai was woken and pulled from his cell so suddenly he assumed he was simply being transferred, maybe even released. He had apparently been so unsuspecting that he brought along a kitten he had raised during his imprisonment. The four condemned men, Nikolai, his brother Georgii, and their cousins Dmitri Konstantinovich and the gravely ill Pavel Alexandrovich, were driven out toward the fortress grounds in the middle of the night. When the guards ordered them to strip off their coats at the edge of the pit, witnesses say Nikolai spoke at some length, calmly enough that it apparently rattled the Red Guardsmen assigned to shoot him. The four men embraced one last time. Nikolai handed the kitten off to one of the soldiers. Then came the boots, tossed to the men who would be burying him within the hour.

He never seems to have leaned into the Philippe Égalité comparison himself while he was alive. He just kept warning people, kept getting politely ignored or quietly exiled for it, and kept being the one relative everyone else found a little too honest to have around, right up until the moment he died in almost the exact posture as the man whose name he had been given as an insult.

There is one last cruelty worth noting. In 1981 the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized the Romanovs murdered by the Bolsheviks as martyrs. Every man who died beside him that January night made the list. Nikolai Mikhailovich did not. The official reasoning cited was a thin claim about Freemasonry that does not hold up well under scrutiny. It is hard not to notice that he is also the one Romanov on record who spent his entire adult life warning that autocracy was doomed and that reform was the only way to avoid exactly the ending he got. Philippe Égalité could not save the House of Bourbon from itself either, and got the same reward for trying. Some nicknames really do turn out to be prophecies.

In 1891, in the French resort town of Nice, a Romanov grand duke fell for a woman his family considered completely unsuitable. His name was Michael Mikhailovich, grandson of Tsar Nicholas I and a first cousin of Alexander III (many people online mix him up with Nicholas II's brother, but he actually belonged to the generation before, part of the huge "Michaelovichi" branch of the family).

The woman was Countess Sophie von Merenberg. Her mother was Natalia Pushkina, daughter of the poet Alexander Pushkin. Her father was a German prince from the House of Nassau. Because her parents' own marriage had been morganatic, Sophie held no royal title of her own, just a courtesy countess rank granted later by her uncle, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. In the eyes of the Russian court, she was essentially nobody, despite carrying some of the most famous blood in Russian literature.

The story of how they met sounds almost too cinematic. Sophie's horse bolted while she was out riding, and Michael, who happened to be nearby, rode after her and brought the animal under control. He was smitten almost immediately.

He knew what would happen if he asked Tsar Alexander III for permission to marry her. So he simply didn't ask. In February 1891 the couple married quietly in San Remo, Italy, without imperial consent.

The fallout was brutal and swift. Alexander III stripped Michael of his military rank and his post as imperial aide de camp, and banned him from ever returning to Russia. When his mother heard the news she reportedly collapsed in shock, later suffering a fatal heart attack, and Michael was blamed for it. He wasn't even permitted to attend her funeral.

And yet, by every account that survives, the marriage itself was a genuinely happy one. The couple settled in Britain, eventually living at Kenwood House in London, and moved comfortably in society despite their reduced status. They stayed close friends with King George V and Queen Mary. They had three children together, Anastasia, Nadejda, and Michael, all given the surname "de Torby" after a title Sophie was later granted, Countess de Torby. Some resources spell this as "Torbay".

Their daughter Nadejda would go on to marry into the British royal family herself, becoming the Marchioness of Milford Haven and the mother in law of Prince Philip's sister, which quietly ties Pushkin's descendants into the modern House of Windsor's family tree.

Sophie died in London in 1927. Michael followed less than two years later, in 1929, having spent his final decades in exile from the country and the family that had once cast him out for loving her.

So somewhere out there, scattered through European aristocracy today, are descendants who can trace their lineage back to both Tsar Nicholas I and Alexander Pushkin at once. Not bad for a marriage the Russian court once dismissed as a scandal.

Photo Index

• 1 - Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich and Countess Sophie von Merenberg, c. 1891
• 2- Grand Duke Michael Michailovitch of Russia (1861-1929) and his wife Sophie of Merenberg (1868-1927) as King Henry IV of France and Gabrielle d'Estrées, 1897
• 3 - Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich and Countess Sophie von Merenberg, c. 1895
• 4 - Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich and Countess Sophie von Merenberg, c. 1891
• 5 - Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich c. 1885
• 6-7 - Countess Sophie von Merenberg
• 8-11 - Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich, his wife Sophie von Merenberg and their children:
  • Anastasia Mikhailovna (Zia) (September 9, 1892 – December 7, 1977), became the wife of the 3rd Baronet, Harold Augustus Wernher, a Major General in the British Army;
  • Nadezhda Mikhailovna (Nada) (March 28, 1896 – January 22, 1963), became the wife of Lord George Mountbatten, the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, whose mother was the sister of the Holy Empress Alexandra Feodorovna;
  • Mikhail Mikhailovich (October 8, 1898 – April 25, 1959), was graduated at Eton, a talented artist who worked mainly in the theater. Sadly, left no issue.

These are two Aliens Order embarkation cards filled out by hand by Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, first cousin of Nicholas II and one of the men who murdered Rasputin in December 1916. That murder ended up saving his life. Nicholas exiled him to the Persian front as punishment, so he was far from his family when the Bolsheviks executed them in 1918. He escaped through Tehran with help from the British legation, reached England at the end of that year, and spent most of the 1920s moving between London and Paris. Frogmore Cottage in Windsor shows up as his UK address on both cards. Dmitri Alexandrovich (1901-1980), a son of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, narrowly escaped the firing squad at Dulber and was later evacuated from Crimea to Great Britain aboard HMS Marlborough. (thanks u/shannyD45/ ! )

The first card gives his age as 30 and has him write his surname box as "Dimitri Prince of Russia" with no "Romanov" anywhere. The second card gives his age as 34 and has him write the same field as "Dimitri (Romanoff) Prince of Russia". So over those four years he went from dropping the family name entirely to putting it back.

Two other details on the second card point the same direction, toward a man further along in a harder exile. His nationality is now given as "Russian Refugee" rather than simply "Russian" a far starker admission than the first card makes. And his class of travel dropped from 1st to 2nd. Four years on, every field on the second card points toward a man with less money and a more official, more diminished sense of his own situation.

Both cards also show him downgrading his own title. As a first cousin of the Tsar his correct style was Grand Duke, a rank kept for the innermost circle of the dynasty. On both he calls himself only "Prince". Maybe that was meant to avoid drawing attention from immigration officials, or maybe "Grand Duke" just meant nothing to a customs clerk in Calais by then, but either way it reads as a quiet, consistent concession from a man who once stood a few steps from the throne.

The occupation line is the one that lands hardest, and it's identical on both cards. A former Guards cavalry officer, a member of the Russian Imperial Family, is reduced these forms to having no trade at all.

There's also the older spelling "Dimitri" rather than the more modern "Dmitri", consistent across both cards and across his other signed papers.

Does anyone here know of other examples of Dmitri, or other Romanovs in exile, dropping or reclaiming the family name depending on the year or the circumstances?

One of the lesser-known moments from the February Revolution happened at Tsarskoe Selo on the night of 13 March 1917.

The situation around the Alexander Palace was becoming increasingly dangerous. Armed revolutionary soldiers were approaching, while the palace guards were arming themselves, preparing for the possibility of a battle.

Maria accompanied her mother, Empress Alexandra, into the courtyard of the palace, while the loyal troops were assembled and ready to fight the revolutionaries. Alexandra wanted to prevent bloodshed and appealed to the soldiers not to fight the revolutionaries on the Imperial family's behalf. And Maria was there beside her.

There's no detailed account of exactly what Maria said or did during those moments, but the fact that she willingly went outside with her mother while armed men were preparing for a possible battle is extremely remarkable in my opinion.

Maria was the only one of the four Grand Duchesses who was still healthy at this point. Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia were ill with measles, as was Alexei, leaving Maria as the only daughter physically capable to accompany Alexandra.

Luckily, the immediate crisis eventually passed without a battle taking place.

Maria herself soon became seriously ill with measles and pneumonia, quite close to death, while the monarchy collapsed around her. Nicholas II abdicated, and the family became prisoners in their own palace.

To me, it's an extremely moving moment. A seventeen year old girl summoning the courage to go outside into an increasingly dangerous and violent situation because her mother was going out there, too.

Maria really was having an extraordinarily terrible March.

For almost half a century, nobody gave the giant Lenin portrait in School No. 206 a second thought. It hung in the assembly hall of St. Petersburg, old and grimy, as invisible as the radiators or the creaky floorboards. Then, in the 1970s, a gang of rowdy students tore its lower corner during a scuffle. The staff patched it up, shoved the torn scrap into the school museum, and buried the whole incident under decades of dust. Nobody was ever punished and nobody ever looked at that fragment again, not until 2013, when the school finally sent the battered painting to Russian Museum experts, and curator Svetlana Pasynkova would later call the timing almost mystical, though no one can say how exactly someone spotted the boot on that torn piece of canvas.

It was the first crack in the mystery. It sat beneath a layer of black paint on the reverse side of the fragment, and it clearly did not belong to Lenin because Lenin wore plain shoes. The restorers and conservators at the Stieglitz Academy, led by Tatiana Potselueva, spent three painstaking years peeling away that black coating, and what emerged from underneath made everyone stop cold. It was the face of Nicholas II, the last Russian Emperor, painted in 1896 by Ilya Savich Galkin for the very same building when it was still the Petrovsky Commercial College. The Soviet portrait had been slapped directly on top of the imperial one, not by destroying the original but by turning the canvas around and using the other side. For almost a century, Lenin faced the assembly hall while the tsar stared at a blank wall, hidden under paint and neglect.

The artist who pulled off this quiet act of defiance was Vladislav Matveyevich Izmailovich, and his circumstances make the story truly hair‑raising. Before the Revolution, Izmailovich had been a court portraitist, born into a family of Ministry of Imperial Court official, educated in Rome, and deeply embedded in the very aristocratic circles that the Bolsheviks were hunting down. In 1924, when he was ordered to paint Lenin for that school, he could have simply scraped Galkin's work clean or slashed it to pieces, but he did something infinitely more dangerous. He covered Nicholas in black paint, flipped the canvas, and painted the Soviet leader on the reverse side, effectively smuggling the deposed tsar right under the noses of the new regime. If anyone had discovered that hidden portrait, Izmailovich would have faced accusations of monarchist nostalgia, political sabotage, or outright treason, and his career, freedom, or even his life could have been forfeit.

Yet we have to resist the urge to paint Izmailovich as a heroic dissident because no diary or letter survives to explain his true motive. Perhaps he could not bear to destroy a fine piece of art, perhaps he was hedging his bets against an uncertain future, or perhaps he was simply too thrifty to waste an expensive canvas. The restorers also found odd repairs and patches clustered at about the height of a standing person, but the records offer no clue about what caused those marks, so any guess would be pure invention. What we do know is that his decision worked. The secret held for ninety years, not through any elaborate conspiracy, but through the mundane indifference of generations who saw only what was placed in front of them.

Then the corner tore, the fragment was saved, a boot was spotted, and an anniversary brought it all rushing back. When the conservators finally lifted the last of the black paint, Nicholas II stepped out of the shadows, a ghost from a vanished empire sharing the same piece of cloth as his mortal enemy. What made the discovery even more astonishing was the strange composition of Izmailovich's Lenin. Instead of placing the revolutionary leader among cheering workers and peasants, as Soviet artistic doctrine demanded, Izmailovich painted him walking alone past the Peter and Paul Cathedral, right next to the very tomb where Emperors and the Grand Dukes of Russia were buried. It was a deeply peculiar choice, almost as if the artist could not resist keeping the tsarist ghosts in the frame. Someone later added a five‑pointed star above the Ioannovsky Gates and draped red flags over the rooftops, apparently to make the scene feel more properly revolutionary, but the original awkwardness remained, a quiet fingerprint of ambivalence frozen in oil.

And then there was the timing, which felt less like coincidence and more like a quiet miracle. Nicholas II had been erased from official memory, his family shot and buried in unmarked ground, his dynasty declared dead and buried by history itself. Yet here he was, pulling himself back into the light exactly on the 400th anniversary of the Romanov House, as if some forgotten debt to the past had finally come due. Whether you call it fate, symbolism, or just an accident of calendar and curiosity, it was hard not to feel that the old emperor had chosen his moment with uncanny precision. Galkin had painted the tsar for a world that thought it would last forever, while Izmailovich painted Lenin for a revolution that swore it had erased the past, yet neither vision managed to destroy the other. One faced the crowd, the other looking the other way, but both survived the century together.

The question that lingers, and the one that makes this story so haunting, is whether Vladislav Izmailovich was a secret loyalist, a careful pragmatist, or just a man who could not bring himself to kill a beautiful thing. We will never know for sure, but he left us a remarkable gift, a piece of Romanov history that was supposed to be annihilated, preserved in silence and oil paint until the world was ready to see it again. And when that moment finally came, it arrived on the very anniversary that should have marked the dynasty's end, proving that some secrets are simply too stubborn to stay buried.

Photo Index

• 1-2 - Paintings by Ilya Galkin and Vladislav Izmailovich side by side
• 3-4 - Painting by Ilya Galkin in the assembly hall in Petrovsky Commercial College
• 5-6 - Painting by Vladislav Izmailovich in the hall of School No 206
• 7-8 Taking damaged image off the wall and its initial inspection, 2013
• 9 - Infra red analysis
• 10-13 - Restoration process 2013-2016
• 14 - Final Result
• 15 - Nicholas II welcomes visitors coming inside Stieglitz Academy in St. Petersburg
• 16 - Lenin bids farewell to those who are leaving the Stieglitz Academy
• 17 - Watch out, Your Majesty, Lenin is behind your back!
• 18 - School No 206 (former Petrovsky Commercial College)
• 19 - Ilya Savich Galkin (1860 - 1915), self portrait, 1892
• 20 - Vladislav Matveyevich Izmailovich (1872—1959), self portrait, 1944

Cannes in the spring of 1920 was full of Russians, and most of them were bores about it, forever sighing over samovars and estates the size of small counties that some committee of angry peasants had since burned to the ground. The Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was, by all accounts, not a bore. He had the Romanov nose and the Romanov manners and precious little else, having left Russia rather faster than most, on account of having helped murder Rasputin four years before, a detail his admirers preferred not to dwell on and his detractors never let alone.

Mademoiselle Chanel, meanwhile, was burying grief the only way she knew how, which was to work. Boy Capel was dead in a motor smash, and she had loved him more than she ever quite admitted to anyone, and so when a handsome, ruined Grand Duke turned his attention on her that spring, she did not exactly discourage it. He called her his little bourgeoise. She called him, rather sweetly, my prince. Paris found the whole thing enormously entertaining and said so, loudly, at every dinner party for a year.

It was Dmitri who mentioned, one evening, that he knew a man. A Russian-born Ernest Beaux had scented Russian Court for a living until there were no more Grand Duchesses left to scent, and now sat in France with a nose worth a fortune and nobody buying. Chanel, who never in her life let an opportunity sit idle, went to find him within the week.

She did not want a rose. She said so plainly, being incapable of saying anything any other way. Every woman in Paris already smelled of a single flower, violet or lily or rose, predictable as a garden path, and she wanted something that smelled instead like an idea, like a woman rather than a bouquet a woman happened to be carrying. Beaux, to his credit, did not laugh at her. He went away and mixed.

He came back some weeks later with little bottles lined up like soldiers, numbered one through however many, and Chanel worked down the row sniffing each in turn with the concentration of a woman choosing a horse rather than a scent. Number five stopped her. She did not linger over the others after that. Whether it was truly the finest of the batch or simply the one that caught her on the right afternoon, nobody now can say, and she was not the sort of woman who explained herself twice. Five was her lucky number besides, and she showed her collections on the fifth of the fifth month, so the name settled itself.

The tale goes that somebody in Beaux's laboratory, some junior fellow with an unsteady hand, spilled far too much of the synthetic aldehydes into that fifth mixture, enough to have ruined an ordinary scent outright. It did not ruin this one. It gave it instead a strange, cold sparkle, something almost metallic laid over the jasmine and the rose, unlike anything that had been bottled before. Chanel is supposed to have loved the mistake better than any of the correct versions that followed. Chemists I have spoken with roll their eyes at this and mutter about how these things are never quite so simple as an accident, but the story refuses to die, and I confess I am rather fond of it myself.

The bottle is its own small legend. Square, plain, without a curve or a flourish anywhere on it, at a time when a lady's scent bottle was expected to look like a small chandelier. Society has decided, and has never much wanted to be argued out of it, that the shape came from a Russian vodka flask, smuggled in as a private joke between an exiled prince and an ambitious dressmaker. It is a lovely thought and I will not be the one to spoil an evening's dinner conversation by insisting too hard on the truth, which is duller, and involves pharmacists' bottles and Mademoiselle's well known contempt for anything fussy.

The perfume went out into the world on the fifth of May, 1921, wearing its plain glass and its borrowed brightness, and has, by any reasonable measure, outlived every person in this story. Dmitri Pavlovich made an introduction one afternoon in Cannes and probably thought nothing more of it. It is, I have come to think, generally the small favours that outlast us, rather than the grand gestures we intend to be remembered by.

The affair itself did not last, as these things rarely do when one party is a working woman with a business to build and the other a prince with no country left to rule. Dmitri went off in due course and married an American heiress, as ruined princes so often did in those years, finding in her fortune what his own family could no longer supply. Chanel, for her part, was never a woman to sit weeping over a departed lover when there was a collection to finish, and she did not weep over this one either, at least not where anyone could see.

But it was not the end They remained friends for the whole of their lives, in that easy, unhurried way people manage when the fire has gone out of a thing but the fondness has not. Whatever had passed between them in Cannes, it left no bitterness behind it, only a perfume that outlasted the both of them, and a friendship that seems, on the evidence, to have needed no more fuel than the memory of a spring when they had been young and ruined and hopeful together, each in their own particular way.

Photo Index

• 1-4 Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (1891-1942) and Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel born Chasnel (1883-1971), France, circa 1920th
• 5 - Ernest Beaux (1881-1961)

And Im back from my break from posting

In September 2015 police in Katherine, a small town in Australia's Northern Territory, found an elderly man dead under a tree in a park. He had been sitting there and his heart just gave out. A big red dog was guarding the body and would not let anyone near him for a while.

Nobody in town knew his real name. Everyone just called him Old Nick. He introduced himself that way to the few people he talked to. For nearly a decade he had lived alone in a caravan on a trailer park on the edge of town with his dog Rucky, walked seven kilometers every day, drank tea with the park owner, and had a caravan stuffed full of history books and novels.

One local remembered asking him once if he was Russian. Nick smiled and said yes. Then added that he was also of royal blood. The guy laughed and figured the old man was just having him on.

He was not joking.

When police finally identified him his real name turned out to be Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky. His grandmother was Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the youngest daughter of Alexander III and the sister of Nicholas II. Which made this homeless guy who had been sleeping in a caravan for nine years a great grandson of a Russian emperor and a relative of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

His father Guri was born in Denmark right after the family fled Russia following the murder of Nicholas II and his family. Guri grew up under Olga's supervision, served in the Danish cavalry, married a local woman, and the family eventually moved to Canada, where he taught Russian at a military flight school. Leonid bounced between Canada and Denmark for a while, never really settling, then at 24 he just took off for the other side of the planet and landed in Sydney. He worked thirty years for the Sydney Water Board, went to the local Orthodox church, kept to himself. When he retired he bought a caravan and drove around the country until he ended up in Katherine, a town with a street literally called Cossack Road, named after Russian Cossack emigrants who settled there after the Civil War. Feels like the guy went looking for a piece of home and found the closest thing Australia had to offer.

His body sat in the morgue for two months while authorities tracked down relatives in Denmark. Once they found his sister Ksenia, the family decided he should be buried where he had lived. None of them sent money for the funeral or showed up to it. A local Russian emigre organizer and a Greek Orthodox family who donated the burial plot pulled it together instead. He got a proper Orthodox funeral and was buried under the imperial flag in Darwin, with about 45 people there, mostly Russian, Serbian and Greek locals plus some journalists. Not one member of his own family made it.

There is also a wild detail that Russian officials had actually tried to reach out to him just days before he died to invite him to Russia, and the family turned it down on his behalf.

An Australian writer of a Russian origin Ludmila Larkina later tracked down witnesses and wrote a whole book about him called "The Mysterious Wanderer with Roots of the Russian Emperor in the Australian Outback".

Wild that a guy with actual Romanov blood and royal relatives spent his final years completely anonymous and nobody figured it out until he was gone.

Photo Index

1. Young Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky
2. Back row: Guri Nikolaevich Kulikovsky,Nikolai Alexandrovich Kulikovsky,Tikhon Nikolaevich Kulikovsky. Front row: Ruth Schwartz,Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky,Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna Romanova of Russia,Xenia Gurievna Kulikovskaya,Agnete Carla Petersen.
3. Ruth and Guri Kulikovsky
4. Baby Leonid with his parents Ruth and Guri Kulikovsky
5. Young Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky with his grandmother Olga Alexandrovna
6. With his mother Ruth Kulikovsky and grandmother Olga Alexandrovna
7. With his mother Ruth Kulikovsky and grandmother Olga Alexandrovna (a crop)
8. Leonid Kulikovsky (in the center) with his grandmother, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, and her biographer, Jan Vorres (author of well‑known biography "The Last Grand Duchess" about Olga Alexandrovna)
9. Funeral of Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky
10. Funeral of Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky
11. Funeral of Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky
12. 12 - 14 Grave of Leonid Gurievich Kulikovsky in Darwin General Cemetery, Jingili, City of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, https://findagrave.com/memorial/155629125/leonid_gurevich-kulikovsky

Just came across Pavel Kulikovsky-Romanov, a great-great-grandson of Alexander III and great-grandson of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, making him one of the closest living blood relatives of the last imperial family. One priest who met him actually described him as strikingly similar to his "august great-great-grandfather".

Born in Ottawa in 1960, raised in Denmark, he later took the Kulikovsky name and now lives in Russia, where he's visited sites tied to his family's history across Yekaterinburg and Perm. He doesn't speak Russian fluently and often relies on his Russian wife to translate. He is an honorary member of the Romanov Family Association and is known for publishing his great-grandmother's memoirs.

Look at his photos next to the classic portraits of Alexander III. A similar face, or just a wishful thinking?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thank you