Revolution
At the fall of the Russian monarchy with the February Revolution in 1917, Prince Andrei moved with his siblings and their parents to his father's property in Crimea, Ai-Todor. A large group of members of the Romanov family concentrated there, trying to escape the disturbances in the rest of the country. At first they lived undisturbed while the Russian Provisional Government was in power.
It was during this turbulent period that Prince Andrei began a relationship with Elisabetta Ruffo-Sasso (1886–1940) dei duchi di Sasso-Ruffo dei principi di Sant' Antimo, a young widow. They had met in St Peterburg in 1916. She was a daughter of Fabrizio Ruffo, Duke of Sasso-Ruffo and Princess Natalia Alexandrovna Mescherskaya (herself a descendant of a famous family of the Stroganovs). Elisabetta had a daughter (Elisabeth Alexandrovna Friederici) from her first marriage to Major General Alexander Alexandrovitch Friederici (1878–1916) (they had married in 1907). When Elisabetta became pregnant, they married on 12 June 1918 in the family chapel at Ai-Todor in the presence of his family, including his grandmother the Dowager Empress. Prince Andrei was twenty one years old and his grandmother had thought him too young for marriage but his parents, Grand Duchess Xenia and Grand Duke Alexander, gave their permission. It was not possible during this time for them to make any contact with Prince Andrei's uncle, the last reigning Emperor, Nicholas II of Russia, who was being held in captivity in internal exile. A month later, this last reigning Emperor, Nicholas II of Russia, was killed with his wife and children while there were held captive in Yekaterinburg on 16/17 July 1918. In later life Prince Andrei rarely spoke of them as he found the memories too painful.
The situation of the Romanovs in Crimea deteriorated after the successful Bolshevik coup of November 1917. For a time Prince Andrei was imprisoned along with his parents, grandmother the Dowager Empress and a large number of other Romanovs relatives at Dulber, a palace in Crimea that belonged to Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich of Russia. In 1918 Russia and Germany were still at war and when German troops invaded the peninsula, they liberated the Romanovs in captivity. In December 1918, Prince Andrei left Russia with his wife Elibeta Ruffo Di Saint Antimo, who was pregnant with their first child, and his father, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Marlborough in order to attend the Paris Peace Conference, looking support in western Europe for the White Army.
Read more about this topic: Prince Andrei Alexandrovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word revolution:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“I have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers, father and son, to the late King to this his son. For ... it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and then back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; then to the Long Parliament; and thence to King Charles, where long may it remain.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)