Revolution and Death
Prince John fought in the First World War, was decorated as a war hero, and was at the front when the Russian Revolution of 1917 started. In April 1918 he was exiled to the Urals by the Bolsheviks, and later murdered in July the same year in a mineshaft near Alapaevsk, along with his brothers Prince Constantine Constantinovich and Prince Igor Constantinovich, his cousin Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, and other relatives and friends.
His body was eventually buried in Beijing, in the cemetery of the Russian Orthodox Mission, which was destroyed years later to build a park. His sister Princess Vera Konstantinovna, mother Grand Duchess Elizaveta Mavrikievna and wife Princess Helen Petrovna left Russia in April 1919 with help from the King of Norway. His daughter Princess Catherine Ivanovna, married Ruggero, Marquis Farace di Villaforesta (a descendant of the Medici family of Florence). Catherine lived in Buenos Aires and later in Montevideo, Uruguay where she died in 2007. His sister Princess Vera Konstantinovna, the youngest daughter of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, died in New York in 2001, almost 100 years old.
Read more about this topic: Prince John Constantinovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the words revolution and/or death:
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)