Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia

Early life

He was born at the family estate, Ilyinskoye (Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast), as the second child and only son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and a first cousin of Nicholas II of Russia. Dmitri's mother, Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna, was a daughter of George I of Greece and Olga Konstantinovna of Russia.

His mother, Alexandra, was seven months' pregnant with him when while she was out with friends, she jumped into a boat, falling as she got in. The next day, she collapsed in the middle of a ball from violent labour pains brought on by the previous day's activities; Dmitri was born in the hours following the accident. Alexandra slipped into a coma from which she never emerged. Although doctors had no hope for Dmitri's survival, he still lived, with the help of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, who gave the premature Dmitri the baths that were prescribed by the doctors, wrapped him in cotton wool and kept him in a cradle filled with hot water bottles to keep his temperature regulated. "I am enjoying raising Dmitri," Sergei wrote in his diary. Alexandra died shortly after Dmitri's birth. She was only 21, and the cause was almost certainly preeclampsia.

Dmitri and his sister Maria lived in St Petersburg with their father until 1902, when Grand Duke Paul married a divorced commoner, Olga Pistolkors, and was banished from Russia by the Emperor. He was not allowed to take the children with him into exile, so they were sent to live with their uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (the Empress's sister), in Moscow. The loss of their father and the sudden move to Moscow caused the children great distress. In her memoirs, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (the Younger) describes Grand Duke Sergei as a stern disciplinarian, and his wife, Grand Duchess Elizabeth as a cold and unwelcoming presence.

On 4 February 1905, Grand Duke Sergei, who had recently resigned from the post of Governor General of Moscow, was assassinated by Ivan Kalyaev, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Kalyaev, armed with a homemade bomb, had aborted his first attempt to kill the Grand Duke when he spotted Dmitri and Marie with their uncle in his carriage. His uncle's death was only one of several assassinations that robbed Dmitri of close family members. After Sergei's death, Grand Duchess Elizabeth undertook to raise her niece and nephew on her own, thus making them part of a rare female-headed household. Maria Pavlovna continued to have some feelings of anger toward her aunt, whom she would blame for her overly hasty marriage to Prince William of Sweden in 1908, but Dmitri formed a very strong bond with Elizabeth and came to admire her personal fortitude.

Maria Pavlovna's wedding to Prince William took place at Tsarskoe Selo in 1908, and then, she had departed for Sweden with her husband. Elizabeth Feodorovna stayed on for time at Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo as guests of the Emperor and the Empress. It was during this period that Dmitri began to form a close bond with Nicholas II, looking upon him as a surrogate father. He would join on him on his daily walks and seek to spend as much time with him as possible. Nicholas, in turn, treated Dmitri very kindly. He seems to have loved the young man's free spirit and sense of humor, a welcome diversion from the stresses of his daily life. Dmitri wrote several letters to his sister during his stay with Nicholas and Alexandra, describing how much he was enjoying himself there.

In 1909, Dmitri left his aunt's care to move to St Petersburg with his head tutor and companion, G.M. Laiming. He lived at his father's vacant palace and then at the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, which he had inherited from Grand Duke Sergey and would become his principal residence before the Russian Revolution. He prepared to enter the Nikolaevskoe Cavalry School. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a cornet in the Horse Guards Regiment, which his father had once commanded and in which he had been enrolled at birth. He is reputed to have been a very good equestrian, and he competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, coming seventh. Before World War I, he instigated the idea of a national Russian sports competition, the very beginning of what under Soviet rule became the Spartakiad.

Killing of Rasputin

A few days before the night of 16/17 December (OS), Rasputin had been invited to the Moika Palace at an unseemly hour, intimating Felix Yusupov's attractive wife, Princess Irina, would be present. She was really away in Crimea, staying with her parents-in-law. Yusupov, who had visited Rasputin regularly in the past few months for treatment, went with Stanislaus de Lazovert to Rasputin's apartment in Dmitry's car. A soundproof room in the basement in the east wing had been specially prepared for the killing. Waiting on another floor were the fellow conspirators: Dmitri, politician Vladimir Purishkevich and army officer Sergei Mikhailovich Sukhotin.

"Dmitry received Yusupov's suggestion with alacrity, and alliance was welcomed as indicating that the murder would not be a demonstration against the dynasty." They had planned to burn Rasputin's possessions and call from the train station a popular restaurant to ask if Rasputin was in. Sukhotin put on Rasputin’s fur coat, his rubber boots and gloves. He left together with Dmitri and Lazovert into Purishkevich's car, suggesting Rasputin had left the palace alive. Because Purishkevich's wife refused to burn the fur coat and the boots in her small fireplace in Purishkevich's ambulance train, the conspirators went back to the palace with the mentioned items. When the body was wrapped in a curtain, the conspirators drove toward Krestovsky Island and, at about 5 a.m., threw the corpse from a bridge into the Malaya Nevka River into an ice hole. They forgot to attach weights so that the body would sink deep, dropped his fur coat over the railing with the chains, and drove back, without noticing one of Rasputin's goloshes, a rubber boot (size 10), was stuck between the piles of the bridge.

His own letters and diary entries, at times written under emotional duress as he relived events that would as always disturb him greatly, support the conventional historical account of the assassination. His frankness, his tone, and the details that he provides all speak to his credibility on this topic. His final break with Yusupov in London in 1920 is well documented in letters exchanged between the two men, none of which has ever been published. The originals are all part of the Ilyinsky family collection, along with Dmitri's diaries, and have been woefully, almost incredibly, neglected by scholars. Dmitri, who, as an adolescent, had envisioned Nicholas II as a 'man of action' and admired him greatly, was devastatingly disillusioned by the Tsar's attitude and behavior during the war years. Like many other grand dukes, he unsuccessfully tried to warn Nicholas of Russia's imminent peril. The assassination was, in his conception, a patriotic act and one of desperation, but he almost immediately regretted it and would later describe on several occasions in his letters and diaries the disgust and remorse that he felt about his own involvement in the affair. Yusupov was, in 1920, offered a chance to speak about the assassination in a US lecture tour, the profits from which would go to the Red Cross, and it was his interest in pursuing the tour that proved to be the last straw in his relationship with Dmitri.

Exile

The direct result of his involvement in the December 1916 assassination was to be exiled to Persia, where he served briefly under General Nikolai Baratov in the Persian city of Kazvin. After the February Revolution, Baratov had to ask Dmitri to leave since there were rumblings from the lower ranks, and his safety could not be guaranteed. Ronald Wingate entertained Dmitri when he passed through Najaf. In Tehran, he lived briefly with General Meidel, then the head of the Persian Cossack Division, before being taken in by the British Minister to Tehran, Sir Charles Murray Marling, and his wife, Lucia.

Marling became an important father figure to Dmitri, and the relationship there established between Dmitri and the entire Marling family would prove to be a close and enduring one. It was Sir Charles who, by persuading the British Foreign Office in 1918 that Dmitri would become the next Emperor of Russia, gained his admission to England after many previous rejections.

He was the only Romanov permitted to live in England, but he moved to Paris after two years. Dmitri's sister, Marie, had, like many aristocratic Russians in exile, found a niche for herself in the rising Paris fashion industry by founding a business called "Kitmir" that specialized in bead and sequin embroidery and did much work for Chanel. Dmitri himself found work as a Champagne salesman.

Throughout his life, Dmitri would always enjoy the companionship of strong-willed and highly intelligent women, both as lovers and as platonic friends, perhaps a holdover from his adolescence when two strong-willed and intelligent women, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, had loomed so large in his life. He would often have strong but overlapping relationships, as, for instance, with Natalia Brasova and the ballerina Vera Karalli, both of whom he saw in 1915 and 1916. (He would be reunited with both women in exile and would briefly resume his relationship with Karalli.) His diaries chronicle relationships with many of the most fascinating women of his day, but the affair for which he was most remembered was with iconic fashion designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, whom he first met in pre-World War I Paris. Their relationship lasted about a year, beginning in spring 1921 with an off-season stay in Monte Carlo where they tried to live as discreetly as possible since neither was as yet sure where the relationship was going and what the future would hold for Dmitri in particular. Rumours that Dmitri was gay or bisexual have never been substantiated, and they are firmly contradicted by his own letters and diaries.

Dmitri married an American heiress, Audrey Emery, in 1926 morganatically, and she was granted the title Her Serene Highness, Princess Romanovskaya-Ilyinskaya by his cousin, Grand Duke Cyril. Dmitri and Audrey were divorced in 1937.

In the late 1920s, Dmitri became involved with the Union of Young Russians [Союз Младороссов], which, in 1935, became the Young Russia Party. It was a Russian nationalist group influenced by Italian fascism, formed with the express purpose of establishing a "Soviet monarchy" in Russia. He joined this group as a stand in for Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich,who, as pretender to the throne, could not affiliate himself directly with any political organisation or party. In 1935, Dmitri gave a series of speeches to Young Russia chapters throughout France. Over the course of the next few years, however, he grew very disillusioned with the group, and he ultimately broke with it entirely. He loathed Hitler and National Socialism, and he spoke out publicly against Hitler in January 1939. Young Russia's founder, a White Russian émigré of Georgian heritage, was arrested by authorities in Vichy but was allowed to emigrate to the US, where he was active in Russian Orthodox Church affairs. After World War II, he returned to Russia. That led to syspicions that he had been a Soviet agent, but no proof has ever been obtained, and his lifelong devotion to the Church would seem to make that unlikely. Dmitri reputedly rebuked later advances from Hitler to lead exiled Russian nobles within the German army against the Bolsheviks with the firm statement that nothing would induce him to fight against fellow Russians. However, Dmitri was by then in no condition to fight at all anyway.

Death

Despite the popular conception of Dmitri as a frail man who had suffered all his life from chronic tuberculosis, he was for most of his life a very active sportsman, excelling at polo, horse racing, tennis, and bobsledding. His doctors in London and Davos estimated that he first contracted tuberculosis around 1929, which ran a chronic course, but he had not had it previously. He entered Sanatorium "Schatzalp" on 2 September 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, and remarked in a letter to his sister that he had never before spent a single night in any kind of hospital or medical institution. His cause of death remains unknown since there is no cause listed on his death certificate, and all of Schatzalp's medical records were destroyed after the conversion of the sanatorium into a hotel in the 1950s. His son believed he had died of tuberculosis, and his cousin Prince Michael Feodorovich of Russia cited uremia, and his New York Times obituary cited uremia as well. Rumours of murder sprang up locally but have never been substantiated, and there was no police investigation.

He was laid to rest in the Waldfriedhof, Davos. In the late 1950s, his remains were transferred to Mainau, in Lake Constance, where they now lie beside his sister's in the Bernadotte family crypt.

Son

The two had a son, Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, who grew up in France, England and the United States; he served as a US Marine in the Korean War. In 1989, he was elected Mayor of Palm Beach, Florida, and thus became the only Romanov descendant known to have held elected public office. Following the fall of communist Russia in 1991, a delegation of Russian royalists approached him and asked him to assume the title of Tsar, which he declined.