Revolution
By March 1917, the revolution had spread all over St. Petersburg. During this period Victoria discovered she was again pregnant, which worried her because of her previous miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, and besides she was almost forty one years old.
At the end of the "February Revolution" of 1917, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and political turmoil followed. Kirill led his naval unit to the Duma on 14 March 1917 and swore his loyalty to the Duma, hoping to restore order and preserve the monarchy. It was an action which provoked criticism from other members of the family, who viewed it as treason. Victoria supported her husband and felt he was doing the right thing. She also sympathized with the people who wanted to reform the government. Victoria wrote to Queen Marie of Romania in February 1917 that their home was surrounded by a mob, "yet heart and soul we are with this movement of freedom which at the time probably signs our own death warrant ... We personally are losing all, our lives changed at one blow and yet we are almost leading the movement."
At the fall of the monarchy Kirill was forced to resign his command of the Naval Guards, but nevertheless his men remained faithful and they continued to guard Kirill and Victoria's palace on Glinka Street. Close to despair Victoria wrote to her sister Marie, Queen of Romania that they had " neither pride nor hope, nor money, nor future, and the dear past blotted out by the frightful present; nothing is left, nothing."
Anxious for their safety Kirill and Victoria decided that the best thing to do was to leave Russia. They chose Finland as the best possible place to go. Although a territory of the Russian Empire, Finland possessed its own government and constitution, so in a way it would be like being in Russia and not being at the same time. They had already been once invited to Haikko, a beautiful estate, near Borgå, a small town on the south coast of Finland, not far away from Helsinki. The Provisional Government permitted them to leave, though they were not allowed to take anything of value with them. They sewed jewels into the family's clothing, hoping it would not be discovered by the authorities. They were permitted to board a train without incident in the first week of June 1917.
Read more about this topic: Princess Victoria Melita Of Saxe-Coburg And Gotha
Famous quotes containing the word revolution:
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)