Revolution and Death
After the Bolsheviks seized power, he and his family faced a terrible ordeal. Their properties were confiscated, they lived under constant harassment, and in March 1918 his son Vladimir Paley was exiled to the Urals, where he was executed on 18 July 1918 in a mineshaft near Alapayevsk.
In August, 1918, he was arrested and taken to prison in St. Petersburg. His health, already bad, declined sharply, and his wife did all she could to have him released. Her efforts were useless: on 29 January 1919, Paul was moved to St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress, and in the first hours of the following day he was shot there, along with his cousins Grand Dukes Dimitry Konstantinovich, Nikolay Mikhailovich and Georgy Mikhailovich.
They were buried in a mass grave in the Fortress, the Bolsheviks having refused the distraught Princess Paley the right to bury her husband. His body and those of his three cousins were found in 2011 .
Read more about this topic: Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the words revolution and/or death:
“Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)
“Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)