Early Life
Born on 6 October 1914, in Tiflis, Georgia, Russian Empire as Princess Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani (Russian: Princess Leonida Georgievna Bagration-Moukhranskaya; Georgian: Leonida Giorgis asuli Bagrationi-Mukhraneli), she was a daughter of Prince George Bagration of Mukhrani and his Polish wife Helena Sigismundovna, née Nowina Złotnicka (1886–1979). She descended patrilineally from former Kings of Georgia. Her mother’s family belonged to the untitled Polish aristocracy, although one of Leonida's two lines of descent from Georgia's penultimate king Erekle II (Heraclius II) is through her mother, a descendant of the king's daughter, Princess Anastasia, who married an Eristavi prince. The other ancestral line derives through the marriage of another of the king's daughters, Princess Tamara, to Ioane Bagrationi, 18th Prince of Mukhrani.
The Bagration family's genealogy traces back at least to the medieval era in its male line and hundreds of years further back as rulers in the female line. Leonida's grandfather, Prince Alexander Iraklijevich, was born in 1853 in Georgia's historical capital Tbilisi, then part of the Russian Empire, and was killed by Bolsheviks at Pyatigorsk in 1918 during the Russian revolution. Fearing for their lives, the family took refuge in Constantinople, then spent eight months in Germany before returning to Tbilisi, now capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, to re-claim a portion of property which, as émigrés they risked losing to total confiscation. Although the family made repairs to their home and Leonida would recall her grandfather's insistence that they continue to dine formally on silver plate to retain their sense of propriety, they were eventually deprived of all but two rooms of their old palace and subjected to harassment. Thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky, who had enjoyed the patronage of the Bagrations, in 1931 they once again fled the Soviet Union, going into exile in Spain. The family moved to France, where Leonida's grandmother and relations had already settled.
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