Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia - Exile in Denmark

Exile in Denmark

On Good Friday 1920, Olga and her family arrived in Copenhagen. They lived with the Dowager Empress Maria, at first at the Amalienborg Palace and then at the royal estate of Hvidøre, where Olga acted as her mother's secretary and companion. It was a difficult arrangement at times. The Dowager Empress insisted on having Olga constantly at her beck and call. Never reconciled with the idea of her daughter marriage to a commoner, the Empress was cold towards Kulikovsky rarely allowing him to her presence. At formal functions Olga was expected to accompany her mother alone. The Empress also found Olga’s young sons too boisterous.

During this period a number of Romanov impostors claimed to be her dead relatives. Defying the advice of her family, Grand Duchess Olga traveled to Berlin in 1925 to meet Anna Anderson, the best-known Anastasia impostor. Olga was initially either open to the possibility that Anderson was Anastasia or unable to make up her mind. However, within a month she made up her mind writing to a friend, "There is no resemblance, and she is undoubtedly not Anastasia." She felt pity for the distress young woman, but declared that Anna Anderson was an impostor.

The Dowager Empress died on 13 October 1928 at Hvidøre. During the next couple of years, Olga lived at Rygard in Holte while looking for a permanent new home. With her share from her mother’s inheritance, in 1930 Olga purchased Knudsminde, a farm in Ballerup about 15 miles (24 km) from Copenhagen.They kept horses, in which Colonel Kulikovsky was especially interested, along with Jersey cows, pigs, chickens, geese, dogs and cats. For transport they had a small car and a sledge. Tihon and Guri (age thirteen and eleven, respectively when they moved to Knudsminde) grew up on the farm. Olga run the household with the help of her, now elderly, faithful lady’s maid Emilia Tenso (Mimka), who had come along with her from Russia. The Grand Duchess lived with simplicity working in the fields, doing household chores and painting.

Her farm-estate became a center for the Russian monarchist community in Denmark and many Russian emigrants visited. She maintained a high level of correspondence with the Russian émigré community and former members of the Russian imperial army. In the 1930s, the family took annual holidays at Sofiero Castle, Sweden, with Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden and his wife, Louise. Her sister Grand Duchess Xenia spent two months at Knudsminde with some of her family in 1938. Olga began to sell her own paintings of Russian and Danish scenes, with exhibition auctions in Copenhagen, London, Paris, and Berlin. Some of the proceeds were donated to the charities she supported.

Neutral Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany on 9 April 1940, and was occupied for the remainder of World War II. Food shortages, communication restrictions, and transportation closures followed. As Olga's sons, Tikhon and Guri, served as officers in the Danish Army, they were interned as prisoners of war, but their imprisonment in a Copenhagen hotel lasted less than two months. Tikhon was imprisoned for a further month in 1943 after being arrested on charges of espionage. Other Russian émigrés, keen to fight against the Soviets, enlisted in the German forces. Despite her sons' internment and her mother's Danish origins, Olga was implicated in her compatriots' collusion with German forces, as she continued to meet and extend help to Russian émigrés fighting against communism. On 4 May 1945, German forces in Denmark surrendered to the British. When economic and social conditions for Russian exiles failed to improve, General Pyotr Krasnov wrote to the Grand Duchess, detailing the wretched conditions affecting Russian immigrants in Denmark. She in turn asked Prince Axel of Denmark to help them, but her request was refused.

The Soviet Union wrote to the Danish government accusing Olga and a Danish Catholic bishop of conspiracy against the Soviet government. With the end of World War II, Soviet troops came close to the Danish border, and the surviving Romanovs in Denmark grew fearful of an assassination or kidnap attempt. Olga decided to move her family across the Atlantic to the relative safety of rural Canada.