Family
The Princes Ioann, Gavriil, Konstantin, and Igor were all arrested after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Prince Gavriil was kept in Petrograd due to illness, but the other three princes were deported to Alapaevsk, a small town in the Urals. There they were imprisoned for some months, together with the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna (sister of the Empress Alexandra), the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (a cousin of KR), and Prince Vladimir Paley (the son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, another Romanov cousin). On the night of 17–18 July 1918 (24 hours after the murder of Nicholas II and his immediate family in Ekaterinburg), the Alapaevsk prisoners were slaughtered by their Bolshevik captors. Their bodies were recovered from an abandoned mine shaft by the White Army, and eventually reburied in the Church of the Martyrs near Beijing, China.
Prince Gavriil was eventually released from prison through the intercession of Maxim Gorki, who had tried (unsuccessfully) to save several other Romanovs from execution. Gavriil and his wife (whom he had married after the Revolution) emigrated and settled in Paris, where Gavriil died in 1955.
The widowed Princess Tatiana fled to Romania and later to Switzerland with her children. She eventually became a nun, and died in Jerusalem in 1979, where she had been Abbess of the Orthodox Mount of Olives Convent.
KR's wife and two youngest children, Prince George and Princess Vera, remained at Pavlovsk throughout the war, the chaotic rule of the Provisional Government, and after the October Revolution. In the fall of 1918, they were permitted by the Bolsheviks to be taken by ship to Sweden (on the Ångermanland, via Tallinn to Helsinki and via Mariehamnina to Stockholm), at the invitation of the Swedish queen.
At Stockholm harbor they met prince Gustaf Adolf who took them to the royal palace. Elizaveta Mavrikievna and Vera and Georgi lived for the next two years in Sweden, first in Stockholm then in Saltsjöbaden; but Sweden was too expensive for them so they moved first to Belgium by invitation of Albert I of Belgium, and then to Germany, settling in Altenburg where they lived 30 years, except for a couple of years in England. Elizaveta died of cancer on 24 March 1927 in Leipzig. Prince Georgi died in New York City in 1938. Princess Vera lived at Germany until Soviet forces occupied the east part of the country, she fled to Hamburg and in 1951 she moved to United States and died there in 2001, in Nyack, New York.
As of 2005, KR has at least ten living descendants: the three children of Princess Ekaterina (daughter of KR's son Prince Ioann) and her seven grandchildren.
Read more about this topic: Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“... a family I know ... bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Blackmail is one of the great pastimes of family life.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The agent’s steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)