Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia

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Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia

Born April 24, 1906(1906-04-24)
Pavlovsk, Russia
Died January 11, 2001 (aged 94)
Nyack, New York
Parents Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna.

Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia, (Russian: Вера Константиновна; April 24, 1906 - January 11, 2001), was the youngest child of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia and his wife Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna. A great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, she was born in Imperial Russia and was a childhood playmate of Nicholas II’s younger children.[1] She lost much of her family during World War I and the Russian Revolution. Princess Vera, who was twelve years old, escaped revolutionary Russia, fleeing with her mother and brother George to Sweden. She spent the rest of her long life in exile, first in Europe and from the 1950s in the United States.

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[edit] Early life

Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia was born at Pavlovsk on April 24, 1906. She was the youngest child among the ten children of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia and his wife Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna, born Princess Elizabeth of Saxe-Altenburg. Vera Constantinovna spent her first year in fabulous splendor on the last period of Imperial Russia. Her father, a respected poet, was a second cousin of Tsar Nicholas II.

Princess Vera was eight years old when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated and World War I broke out, in the summer of 1914. Vera was with her parents and her brother George in Germany visiting her maternal relatives in Altenburg at the start of the war. The conflict took them by surprise, trapping them in Germany, an enemy country. It was thanks to the intervention of the German Empress, Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein that they were allowed to return to Russia.[2] Vera’s older siblings joined the Russian army in the military effort, and her favorite brother Oleg was killed in action. She was considered too young and was not allowed to attend her brother's funeral. Her brother’s death was just the first of many family misfortunes.

The following year, her father died of a heart attack in her presence. In a letter to her brother, she later described how she was sitting with her father in his study, when Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich began gasping. Princess Vera managed to push open a heavy door between her parents' studies, pushing aside several heavy plants that stood in front of the door, and ran to her mother crying that her father couldn't breathe. Her mother ran after her, but the grand duke had already died.[3]

[edit] Revolution

During the Russian revolution, four of Vera’s brothers were imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. Only Prince Gabriel was eventually released. Three of her brothers (John, Constantine and Igor) were killed at Alapaevsk, along with other Romanov relatives, in July 1918. During the chaotic rule of the Provisional Government, and after the October Revolution, Princess Vera, her mother, and her brother George, remained at Pavlovsk. [4] For a time, they lived a precarious existence, and her mother was forced to secretly sell family heirlooms to provide for the family.

Twelve-year-old Princess Vera escaped to Sweden aboard the Swedish vessel Ångermanland in October 1918 with her mother, her brother George, and her young nephew, (Prince Teymuraz Constantinovich) and niece (Princess Natalia Constantinovna Bagration-Mukhransky) when they were permitted by the Bolsheviks to be taken by ship to Sweden, via Tallinn to Helsinki and via Mariehamn to Stockholm, at the invitation of Queen Victoria of Sweden. At Stockholm harbor, they met Prince Gustaf Adolf, who took them to the royal palace.

[edit] Exile

Princess Vera lived with her mother and her brother George for the next two years in Sweden, first in Stockholm and then in Saltsjöbaden. As Sweden proved too expensive to live in, they moved to Belgium by invitation of Albert I of Belgium. Later Elizabeth Mavrikievna and Princess Vera moved to Germany, settling in Altenburg, the former duchy of Vera's uncle, Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Altenburg. Princess Vera lived there for thirty years, except for a couple of years when she lived in England. Her mother died of cancer on the 24th of March 1927 in Leipzig. Prince George moved to the United States and died in New York City in 1938. Princess Vera lived in Germany through the difficult years of World War II. [5]

For many years, as she later recalled, she was haunted by the events of the Revolution.[5] She would later recall: "I used to have the same dream, as if I stood with my back to a pit and they were going to shoot me...my awakening was not less terrible than the dream itself, because I was constantly afraid to open my eyes and see that they had really come to take me to the execution ".[5]

At the end of World War II, when the Soviet forces occupied the east part of Germany, Princess Vera fled to Hamburg. She belonged to no country, as she only had an ambiguous Nansen passport, which gave her the ability to travel but no protections of statehood. [5] Despite this, she refused to take the protection offered to her by various European countries, considering herself Russian. [5] " I didn't leave Russia", she once declared, " Russia left me "[5]

In 1951 she moved to the United States.[5] For the next decades she lived in New York, where she was very active in charities; but she regarded some of the émigré community, and some of their pretensions, with skepticism. She did not have the nostalgic idyll of many émigrés, but rather the memories of her childhood and her lost family. [6] The constant stream of visitors she regarded with some amusement and found rather trying. She did not care for those who would speak in awe-struck tones of the late Imperial family; she would often relate stories of their humanness and misbehavior. For her, the children of the last Tsar remained her childhood playmates, not distant figures for adoration. [6] She also regarded the canonization of the Romanovs, including her brothers and uncle, as a puzzling, peculiar move by the Church. Princess Vera wrote four short articles about her life for a magazine "Kadetskaya pereklichka" published by Union of the Russian Kadets in New York.

Princess Vera retained a certain aura of living history, being the last surviving member of the Romanov family who could remember Imperial Russia.[7] Her two brothers and sister who managed to escape Russia all predeceased her. Prince Gabriel died in 1955, leaving no heirs, as did her brother Prince George, the victim of an early death at the age of 33 in 1938. Her sister, Princess Tatiana, eventually took holy orders and became an Orthodox Nun. She died in Jerusalem in 1970.

Princess Vera died at the Tolstoy Foundation's elderly care home in Nyack, New York on January 11, 2001, at the age of 95. She was buried next to her brother Prince George Constantinovich at the cemetery of the Russian Orthodox Monastery of Novo-Diveyevo in Nanuet, New York. Of all the members of the Romanov family in Imperial Russia, only her niece Princess Catherine Ivanovna outlived her. Princess Vera never married and left no children. In the spring of 2007 the Pavlovsk Palace, where she was born, held an exhibit about her and her family, commemorating what would have been her 101 birthday.

[edit] Ancestors

Ancestors of Princess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ King & Wilson , Gilded Prism, p. 132
  2. ^ King & Wilson , Gilded Prism, p. 154
  3. ^ Zeepvat, Charlotte , The Camera and the Tsars, p. 185
  4. ^ King & Wilson , Gilded Prism, p. 164
  5. ^ a b c d e f g King & Wilson , Gilded Prism, p. 190
  6. ^ a b King & Wilson , Gilded Prism, p. 191
  7. ^ Paul Theroff (2007). "Russia". An Online Gotha. Retrieved on March 4, 2007.

[edit] Bibliography

  • King, Greg, and Penny Wilson. Gilded Prism. Eurohistory, 2006. ISBN 0-9771691-4-3
  • Zeepvat, Charlotte, The Camera and the Tsars, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3049-7.
  • Catalog of an exhibition held at the State Museum Reserve Pavlovsk Palace and Park, Princess Vera Konstantinovna, Petronii, St Petersburg, 2007.