Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia
Princess Vera Constantinovna | |||||
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Born | Pavlovsk Palace, Pavlovsk, Saint Petersburg Governorate, Russian Empire | 24 April 1906||||
Died | 11 January 2001 Nyack, Orangetown, Rockland County, New York, U.S. | (aged 94)||||
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House | Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov | ||||
Father | Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia | ||||
Mother | Princess Elisabeth of Saxe-Altenburg |
Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia, also Vera Konstantinovna (Russian: Вера Константиновна Романова; 24 April 1906 – 11 January 2001), was the youngest child of
Early life
Princess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia was born at
Princess Vera was eight years old when
The following year, her father died of a heart attack in her presence. In a letter to her brother, she later described how she was sitting with her father in his study, when Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich began gasping. Princess Vera managed to push open a heavy door between her parents' studies, pushing aside several heavy plants that stood in front of the door, and ran to her mother crying that her father couldn't breathe. Her mother ran after her, but the grand duke had already died.[4]
Revolution
After the death of her father, in 1916, Vera moved with her mother and her brother George to the
During the Russian revolution, four of Vera's brothers were imprisoned by the
Initially, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna was reluctant to leave Russia remembering her late husband's words, that if Russia was in need, it was a Romanov's duty to help. However, with their situation becoming increasingly dangerous, she accepted an offer made by her friend, Queen Victoria of Sweden, through the Swedish Ambassador Edvard Brändström, to travel to Sweden.[2]
From
Exile
Princess Vera lived with her mother and her brother George for the next two years in Sweden, first in Stockholm and then in Saltsjöbaden. As Sweden proved too expensive to live in, Elizabeth Mavrikievna wrote a letter to Albert I of Belgium, asking him to allow them to move to his country. In 1920 they relocated to Brussels where they were frequently ill. In 1922, Vera's uncle, Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Altenburg invited them to move to Germany.[2] Elizabeth Mavrikievna settled in the ancestral castle of her family near Leipzig, in the small town of Altenburg. Princess Vera followed her mother half a year later after spending sometime in Oberstdorf in the Allgäu region of the Bavarian Alps recuperating from tuberculosis.
Her mother died of cancer on 24 March 1927 in Leipzig. Left alone and without sufficient means of subsistence, Vera Constantinovna moved to Bavaria, with friends and shortly after relocated to London with her brother George.[2] When two years later, George moved to the United States, she returned to Altenburg. Princess Vera lived there for thirty years. Prince George died in New York City in 1938. Princess Vera lived in Germany through the difficult years of World War II.[6] During the War, she worked as a translator in a camp for prisoners of war. But German officials soon removed her from that position because she had tried to help fellow prisoners.[2]
For many years, as she later recalled, she was haunted by the events of the Revolution.[6] "I used to have the same dream, as if I stood with my back to a pit and they were going to shoot me...my awakening was not less terrible than the dream itself, because I was constantly afraid to open my eyes and see that they had really come to take me to the execution".[6]
At the end of World War II, in early 1945, American troops arrived in Altenburg.
Last years
In 1951 she moved to the United States,[6] where her main activity was to work for the Tolstoy Foundation, which provided aid to Russians in need.[2] For the next decades she lived in New York, and was very active in charities. In November 1952 Vera Constantinovna became involved in the work of the Russian Children's Welfare Society where she continued her work there until 1969.[2] At the same time, she volunteered at the Fund of Assistance to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.[2] She retired in April 1971.[2] She regarded some of the émigré community, and some of their pretensions, with skepticism. She did not have the nostalgic idyll of many émigrés, but rather the memories of her childhood and her lost family.[7] The constant stream of visitors she regarded with some amusement and found rather trying. She did not care for those who would speak in awe-struck tones of the late Imperial family; she would often relate stories of their humanness and misbehavior. For her, the children of the last Tsar remained her childhood playmates, not distant figures for adoration.[7] She also regarded the canonization of the Romanovs, including her brothers and uncle, as a puzzling, peculiar move by the Church. Princess Vera wrote four short articles about her life for a magazine "Kadetskaya pereklichka" published by Union of the Russian Kadets in New York in 1972.
Princess Vera retained a certain aura of living history, being the last surviving member of the Romanov family who could remember Imperial Russia.[citation needed] Her two brothers and sister who managed to escape Russia all predeceased her. Prince Gabriel died in 1955, leaving no heirs, as did her brother Prince George, the victim of an early death at the age of 33 in 1938. Her sister, Princess Tatiana, eventually took holy orders and became an Orthodox Nun. She died in Jerusalem in 1979.
Princess Vera died at the
Honours
- Imperial Order of Saint Catherine, 1st Class[8]
Archives
Vera Constantinovna's personal papers (including correspondence and photographs) are preserved in the "Romanov Family Papers" collection in the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford, California, USA).[9]
Ancestors
Ancestors of Princess Vera Constantinovna of Russia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Notes
- ^ King & Wilson, Gilded Prism, p. 132
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Vera Constantinovna, Kadetskaya pereklichka
- ^ King & Wilson, Gilded Prism, p. 154
- ^ Zeepvat, Charlotte, The Camera and the Tsars, p. 185
- ^ King & Wilson, Gilded Prism, p. 164
- ^ a b c d e f g King & Wilson, Gilded Prism, p. 190
- ^ a b King & Wilson, Gilded Prism, p. 191
- ^ "SAINTANNA.RU | Св. Екатерины". Archived from the original on 13 March 2012. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
- ^ "Romanov Family Papers". Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
Bibliography
- King, Greg, and Penny Wilson. Gilded Prism. Eurohistory, 2006. ISBN 0-9771961-4-3
- Zeepvat, Charlotte, The Camera and the Tsars, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3049-7.
- Exhibition Catalog, Princess Vera Konstantinovna. 100th birthday, Petronii, St Petersburg, 2007. (Russian)
- Princess Vera Constantinovna, Autobiographical articles Kadetskaya pereklichka. Кадетская перекличка No. 3 New York, 1972. (Russian)
External links
- Вера Константиновна in Russian