Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia - War and Revolution

War and Revolution

On 1 August 1914, just before the start of World War I, Olga's regiment, the Akhtyrsky Hussars, appeared at an Imperial Review before her and the Tsar at Krasnoe Selo. Kulikovsky volunteered for service with the Hussars, who were stationed on the frontlines in Southwestern Russia. With the Grand Duchess's prior medical knowledge from the village of Olgino, she started work as a nurse at an under-staffed Red Cross hospital in Rovno, near to where her own regiment was stationed. During the war, she came under heavy Austrian fire while attending the regiment at the front. Nurses rarely worked so close to the frontlines and consequently she was awarded the Order of St. George by General Mannerheim, who later became President of Finland. As the Russians lost ground to the Central Powers, Olga's hospital was moved eastwards to Kiev, and Michael returned to Russia from exile abroad.

In 1916, Tsar Nicholas II officially annulled the marriage between Duke Peter Alexandrovich and the Grand Duchess, allowing her to marry Colonel Kulikovsky. The service was performed on 16 November 1916 in the Kievo-Vasilievskaya Church on Triokhsviatitelskaya (Three Saints Street) in Kiev. The only guests were the Dowager Empress Marie, Olga's brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander, four officers of the Akhtyrsky Regiment, and two of Olga's fellow nurses from the hospital in Kiev.

During the war, internal tensions and economic deprivation in Russia continued to mount and revolutionary sympathies grew. After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in early 1917, many members of the Romanov dynasty, including Nicholas and his immediate family, were detained under house arrest. In search of safety, the Dowager Empress, Grand Duke Alexander, and Grand Duchess Olga traveled to the Crimea by special train, where they were joined by Olga's sister Grand Duchess Xenia. They lived at Alexander's estate, Ay-Todor, about 12 miles (19 km) from Yalta, where they were placed under house arrest by the local forces. On 12 August 1917, her first child and son, Tikhon Nikolaevich was born during their virtual imprisonment. He was named after Tikhon of Zadonsk, the Saint venerated near the Grand Duchess's estate at Olgino. Although Tikhon was the grandson of an emperor and the nephew of another, neither he nor his younger brother Guri received any title as his father was a commoner.

The Romanovs isolated in the Crimea knew little of the fate of the Tsar and his family. Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children, were originally held at their official residence, the Alexander Palace, but the Provisional government under Alexander Kerensky relocated them to Tobolsk, Siberia. In February 1918, most of the imperial family at Ay-Todor was moved to another estate at Djulber, where Grand Dukes Nicholas and Peter were already under house arrest. Olga and her husband were left at Ay-Todor. The entire Romanov family in the Crimea was condemned to death by the Yalta revolutionary council, but the executions were delayed by political rivalry between the Yalta and Sevastopol Soviets. By March 1918, the Central Power of Germany had advanced on the Crimea, and the revolutionary guards were replaced by German ones. In November 1918, the German forces were informed that their nation had lost the war, and they evacuated homewards. Allied forces took over the Crimean ports, in support of the loyalist White Army, which temporarily allowed the surviving members of the Romanov family time to escape abroad. The Dowager Empress Marie and, at her insistence, most of her family and friends were evacuated by the British warship HMS Marlborough. Nicholas II, however, had already been assassinated and the family assumed, correctly, that his wife and children had also been killed. Unknown to her, Olga's childhood confidant and brother Michael, the emperor's supposed successor, had been assassinated near Perm on 13 June 1918.

Olga and her husband refused to leave Russia, and decided to move to the Caucasus, which the White Army had cleared of revolutionary Bolsheviks. An imperial bodyguard, Timofei Yatchik, guided them to his hometown, the large Cossack village of Novominskaya. In a rented five-roomed farmhouse there, Olga gave birth to her second son, Guri Nikolaevich, on 23 April 1919. He was named after a friend of hers, Guri Panayev, who was killed while serving in the Akhtyrsky Regiment during World War I. In November 1919, the family set out on what would be their last journey through Russia. Just ahead of revolutionary troops, they escaped to Novorossiysk, and took refuge in the residence of the Danish consul, Thomas Schytte, who informed them of the Dowager Empress's safe arrival in Denmark. After a brief stay with the consul, the family were shipped to a refugee camp on the island of Büyükada in the Dardanelles Strait near Istanbul, Turkey, where Olga, her husband and children shared three rooms with eleven other adults. After two weeks, they were evacuated to Belgrade in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes where she was visited by Regent Alexander Karageorgevich, later King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. Alexander offered the Grand Duchess and her family a permanent home, but Olga was summoned to Denmark by her mother.