Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (Maria Pavlovna of Russia)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna | |
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 Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Elder
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| Born | May 14, 1854 Ludwigslust, Germany |
| Died | September 6, 1920 Contrexéville , France |
| Occupation | Royalty |
| Parents | Friedrich Franz II of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Augusta of Reuss-Köstritz |
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- For other uses, see Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia or Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia (1890-1958)
Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, known as "Miechen" or "Maria Pavlovna the Elder" (May 14, 1854 - September 6, 1920) was born Marie Alexandrine Elisabeth Eleonore of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, daughter of Grand Duke Friedrich Franz II of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Augusta of Reuss-Köstritz.
She married the third son of Alexander II of Russia, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia (April 22, 1847 - February 17, 1909) on August 28, 1874. She was engaged to someone else when she met Vladimir, but broke it off as soon as she met Vladimir. It took three more years before they were permitted to marry. Miechen, who was Lutheran, refused to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. Tsar Alexander II finally agreed to let Vladimir marry her without insisting on her conversion to Orthodoxy. [1] Miechen remained Lutheran throughout most of her marriage, but converted to Orthodoxy later in her marriage, some said to give her son Kirill a better chance at the throne. They had four sons, Alexander Vladimirovich, who died in infancy;Kirill Vladimirovich, Boris Vladimirovich, and Andrei Vladimirovich, and one daughter, Elena Vladimirovna. [2] She was the grandest of the grand duchesses, and formed an alternate court in the later years of the reign of her nephew Nicholas II [3] Along with her sons, she contemplated a coup against the Tsar in the winter of 1916-1917, that would force the Tsar's abdication and replacement by his son, with Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich as regent. [4] In seeking support for the coup, she famously told Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko that the Empress must be "annihilated." [5]
The Grand Duchess held the distinction to be the last of the Romanovs to escape Revolutionary Russia as well as the first to die in exile. She remained in the war-torn Caucausus with her two younger sons throughout 1917 and 1918, still hoping to make her eldest son Kirill Vladimirovich the Tsar. As the Bolsheviks approached, the group finally escaped aboard a fishing boat to Anapa in 1918. Miechen spent fourteen months in Anapa, refusing to join her son Boris in leaving Russia. Still, she refused to leave when opportunities to escape through Constantinople presented themselves because she would not suffer the indignities of delousing. She finally agreed to leave when the general of the White Army warned her that his side was losing the civil war. Miechen, her son Andrei, Andrei's mistress Mathilde Kschessinska, and Andrei and Mathilde's son Vladimir (Vova), boarded an Italian ship headed to Venice on February 13, 1920. [6] Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia encountered Miechen at the port of Novorossik in early 1920. "I felt proud of her," Olga recalled later. "Disregarding peril and hardship, she stubbornly kept to all the trimmings of bygone splendour and glory. And somehow she carried it off ... For the first time in my life I found it was a pleasure to kiss her."[7] She made her way from Venice to Switzerland and then to France, where her health failed and she passed away on August 24, 1920, surrounded by her family.[8] Her family managed to smuggle some of her magnificent jewels which have since passed down to the British Royal Family.[9]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Charlotte Zeepvat, The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album, Sutton Publishing, 2004, p. 45
- ^ Paul Theroff (2007). "Russia". An Online Gotha. Retrieved on January 5, 2007.
- ^ Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, p. 388
- ^ Massie, p. 388-390
- ^ Massie, p. 389
- ^ John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs, Perseus Books Group, 1999, pp. 228-232
- ^ Zeepvat, p. 215
- ^ Perry and Pleshakov, pp. 263-264
- ^ Perry and Pleshakov, pp. 263-264
[edit] References
- Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, Dell Publishing Co., ISBN 0440163587
- John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs, Basic Books, 1999, ISBN 0-46502462-9
- Paul Theroff, An Online Gotha
- Charlotte Zeepvat, The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3049-7
