Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna Romanova. Photo from the 1900s Cinderellas become princesses in fairy-tales, but in real life a blue-blood princess can become a Cinderella—doing laundry, cooking dinner, and digging vegetable patches. Olga Alexandrovna, the last Grand Duchess of the House of Romanov and the younger sister of the Holy Martyr Tsar Nicholas II, lived through such a metamorphosis. The life of this wonderful woman is full of amazing adventures, tragic events, leviathan trials, humiliation, slander, and unbearable suffering and sorrow.
On June 1, 1882, the family of Emperor Alexander III and his wife Empress Maria Feodorovna welcomed their sixth and last child, their daughter Olga, their only porphyrogenite child, born during her parents’ reign. Before her, the family welcomed: Nicholas (1868–1918), Alexander (1869–1870), George (1871–1899), Xenia (1875–1960) and Michael (1878–1918). A salvo of salute from the Peter and Paul Fortress greeted the arrival of Princess Olga.
The life of this extraordinary woman is full of incredible adventures, tragic events, leviathan trials, humiliation, slander, and unbearable suffering and sorrow
The Imperial family was constantly under the threat of terrorist attack and therefore they lived in Gatchina, a suburb of St. Petersburg. Little Olga adored her father and he, despite his workload, tried to devote at least half an hour to his children every day. The children’s tutors followed the directive of Alexander III: “I don’t need porcelain, but healthy Russian children”. Thus, Olga and her sister Xenia were brought up in a simple and strict environment. The children slept on hard camp beds with horsehair-stuffed mattresses, rose early and took a cold-water shower daily. They had porridge boiled in water for breakfast. The only luxury they had in their rooms was icons in precious frames.
Olga (in the center) with her father, Alexander III, 1888. Standing behind (from left to right): Grand Duke Michael, Empress Maria Feodorovna, Grand Duke Nicholas (Nicholas II), Grand Duchess Xenia and Grand Duke George The sisters were educated at home. They were taught History, Geography, Russian, English and French, drawing and dancing. Special attention was paid to the children’s religious education.
“All of us were brought up in strict obedience to the canons of religion. Liturgies were served every week, while numerous fasts and every event of national significance was marked by a solemn prayer service; all this was as natural to us as the air we breathed,” recalled Olga Alexandrovna.
Grand Duchess Olga was very modest. Like her father, she was known for her simplicity of tastes, treating social entertainment with indifference, and preferring horseback rides and drawing. The young princess displayed vibrant artistic talents at a very young age. Teachers from the Academy of Fine Arts, such V. Makovsky, S. Zhukovsky and V. Vinogradov were invited to be her painting tutors. She would later recall about this period of her life in her memoirs:
“Even when I had geography and arithmetic lessons, I was allowed to hold a pencil in my hand, because I listened better when I made sketches of corn or wild flowers.”
In St. Petersburg, the Tsarevna founded the aid society for needy artists in memory of Academician K.Y. Kryzhitsky, her teacher. The funds obtained from exhibitions arranged in her palace went to assist struggling artists.
On October 29, 1888, when Olga was six years old, the family was on their way back from the Crimea. But when they reached the Borki station, the Imperial train suffered a dreadful derailment, blamed later on exceedingly high speed. The heavy iron roof caved in. Emperor Alexander III held the mangled roof of the carriage on his shoulders until all members of his family had climbed outside. Olga was thrown out of the window. When she saw how the carriages crumbled down, the horror-stricken Tsarevna took to flight in terror. She was caught and returned to her father, who carried her to the remaining undamaged carriage. This event broke the Emperor’s health: the stress has affected his kidneys, resulting in renal failure and death that followed on November 1, 1894.
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (on the right) with her bother Michael and sister Xenia. Around 1887. The death of her beloved father came as a shock to the twelve-year-old Olga. Despite her grief, she tried to support her brother—the young Emperor—and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, of whom she immediately became fond. Olga Alexandrovna and the Empress bonded over their mutual dislike of noisy entertainment and social life. Olga resented the unfair treatment of Alexandra Feodorovna by her relatives and always insisted that Sunny (“Sunny” was the German Princess Alice childhood nickname), brightened the life of her husband, Nicholas II.
During the Russo-Japanese War, popular unrest grew more intense. On the feast of Annunciation in 1905, terrorists opened fire on the Winter Palace. Shards of glass fell on the Dowager Empress and Olga.
When the Grand Duchess turned eighteen, the question arose of her marriage. Her mother found a groom for her. He was Duke (Prince) Peter of Oldenburg, fourteen years older than the bride and allegedly a homosexual, a drunkard and a gambler. On July 27, 1901, Olga Alexandrovna was wed to him. It was an unhappy alliance; offered none of the quiet family happiness she dreamt about.
“For the fifteen years of our marriage, the Duke of Oldenburg and I never had marital relations,” Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna would recall fifty years later.
She gave all her unspent love to her nieces, the daughters of Nicholas II. Beginning from 1906, she would take them to St. Petersburg every Sunday, where she arranged tea, games and dances with young people. She especially loved the youngest of the girls and her goddaughter Anastasia: “This child was so special to me, like my own daughter.” All her life, Olga Alexandrovna preserved in an old box the small gifts she received from Anastasia Nikolaevna: a silver pencil on a silver chain, a perfume bottle, and a hat brooch.
Among other members of the Imperial Family, Grand Duchess Olga was notable for extraordinary simplicity, accessibility, and democratic nature.
“At her estate in the Voronezh province, her life was even more plain and simple. She’d visit the peasants in their huts and coddle their children, etc.” wrote Protopresbyter George Shavelsky about Olga Alexandrovna.
She wrote as follows about her conversations with peasants in her Olgino estate:
“I saw how kind, generous and unbending they were in their faith in God... So, whenever I was in their midst, I felt truly human.”
Grand Duchess was a patron of many charitable institutions and organizations: orphanages, hospitals, schools, almshouses, and educational courses for women.
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna in a Hussar uniform of “her” regiment. Around 1905–1907 In April 1903, during a parade in Pavlovsk, Grand Duchess Olga saw Colonel Nikolai Alexandrovich Kulikovsky, who was in service at the Imperial Guard Cuirassier Regiment. Olga fell in love, and also felt that he was not indifferent toward her. When Olga Alexandrovna began to talk with her husband about divorce, he categorically refused. However, he wasn’t against her having an affair with Colonel Kulikovsky, giving her carte blanche. Such an option wasn’t acceptable to Olga Alexandrovna—she couldn’t afford to have an adulterous relationship. Olga pleaded with the Emperor to dissolve what was essentially a pro forma marriage, but she was met with blank refusal. There had been other morganatic marriages shortly before that in the Imperial family, and Emperor Nicholas II, attempting to avoid yet another family scandal, refused his sister Olga's request. Moreover, Colonel Kulikovsky was appointed Adjutant to the Prince of Oldenburg. Thus, Olga, her husband, and Nikolai Kulikovsky had to reside in the same palace for many years.
Ольга Александровна, 1915 г. At the outbreak of World War I, Colonel Nikolay Kulikovsky was assigned to command the Akhtyrsky Hussars in Rovno not far from the Polish-Austrian border. As Honorary Commander of the 12th Akhtyrsky Hussar Regiment, Duchess Olga followed her beloved to the front line as a sister of mercy. She worked in hospitals in Rovno, Lvov and Kiev. While in Kiev, using her own funds, she furnished the General Hospital. She worked as a rank-and-file nurse, never shrinking from dirty work. She traveled repeatedly to the active army and was awarded the St. George Medal for personal courage. Some of the wounded couldn’t believe that the sister of the Tsar himself was taking care of them. N.V. Sablin, Commander of Naval Guards Crew wrote:
“A delightful, genuinely Russian woman of captivating charm... Olga Alexandrovna is a dear comrade to our officers...”
In the fall of 1915, Olga Alexandrovna visited Petrograd and Tsarskoye Selo for the last time. She and the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna wept as they said their last goodbyes.
Some of the wounded couldn’t believe that the sister of the Tsar himself was taking care of them
In November 1916, she met with Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich for the last time when he came to visit his sister in the infirmary she worked. As she saw off her beloved brother to the station, she couldn’t hold back her tears and wept bitterly. At the same time, she met for the last time her older brother—Emperor Nicholas II, who came to inspect her hospital. Olga was shocked to see him looking so pale, thin and haggard. Upon parting, Nicholas II gave his sister a letter where he approved the decision of the Holy Synod that recognized the dissolution of her marriage to the Prince of Oldenburg. On November 4, 1916, Olga and Nikolai Kulikovsky were united in Holy Matrimony at the St. Nicholas Church in Kiev.
After the February Revolution, Olga Alexandrovna with her husband and her mother left for the Crimea. In August 1917, the couple’s firstborn, named Tikhon, was born in the Crimean estate of Ai-Todor. General A.N. Kuropatkin, who met Olga Alexandrovna in the Crimea in 1918, wrote:
For anyone “unfamiliar with her it would be hard to believe that she was Grand Duchess. They occupied a small and very poorly furnished house. She tended her baby, cooked and even washed the laundry herself... She invited me immediately into the house where I was treated to tea with jam and cookies of her own making. The simplicity of the furnishings, bordering on squalor, made her even more lovely and attractive.”
In 1918, terrible disaster struck the Romanovs. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, Olga’s beloved brother, was executed in June 1918 in Perm. A month later, life of the entire family of the last Russian Emperor was extinguished in Ekaterinburg.
The tribulations continued. In February 1918, the Imperial family narrowly escaped execution. The Yalta Revolutionary Council sentenced the entire Romanov family to death, and only a miracle of God saved them from the hands of the executioners—under the Brest Treaty, the Germans occupied the Crimea. The Romanov-Kulikovsky family decided to leave the Crimea for the then peaceful Caucasus, but the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna refused to join them. Olga Alexandrovna's family arrived in Novorossiysk by boat, where General Kutepov helped them to get to Rostov by attaching their private carriage to his train. After they came to Rostov, their hope to find help from A.I. Denikin, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Southern Russia, withered away; he refused to meet her, and through his adjutant announced that “the monarchy had ceased to exist.” Then, the Cossack Timofey Yashchik, Olga Alexandrovna's bodyguard, offered her to stay in his native Cossack village of Novominskaya, at the Kuban. To avoid being a burden to their hosts there, Nikolai Alexandrovich, an illustrious guards officer, had to labor as farmhand, while Grand Duchess went barefoot and pulled weeds. In the Kuban, Grand Duchess learned how to till the land, to grind corn, to make hay, and to bake bread.
In the Kuban, Grand Duchess learned to till the land and how to grind corn, make hay, and bake bread
Her second son Guriy was born there in 1919. But Olga Alexandrovna soon had to flee from Novominskaya. In the late fall of 1919, the Cossacks reported that Red army detachments were seen in the vicinity. At night, within half an hour, the Kulikovskys hastily wrapped the children in blankets and left the village. They boarded a train only to learn that the next station was already in the hands of the Reds. The loyal Cossacks who accompanied them helped the Grand Duchess and her sons to jump off the train. For two months, the family with two infants made their way toward the Black Sea coast.
In the fall of 1918, the former allies entered the Crimea and in the April of 1919 the Empress Maria Feodorovna with the family of her daughter Xenia emigrated onboard the British cruiser HMS “Marlborough” and settled in Denmark, at her nephew’s, King Christian X.
After the departure of her mother and sister, Olga Alexandrovna stayed in the Kuban for another year hiding with her infant children from their persecutors and experiencing hunger. There was a time when the couple thought that their youngest son Guriy wouldn’t survive. After their wanderings, the Kulikovskys again ended up in Novorossiysk where typhus was rampant. The Grand Duchess found shelter in the Danish consulate. This is where she was found by her childhood friend Vice-Admiral T.W. James. Before him appeared a petite woman in tattered clothes, with a crumpled scarf on her head and a baby in her arms. With his help, the Romanov-Kulikovsky family went into exile in November 1920.
“I couldn’t believe it that I was leaving my homeland forever,” Olga Alexandrovna would write in her memoirs. “I was sure that I would still return... I had a feeling that my flight was a cowardly act, even though I arrived at this decision for the sake of my little children. Yet still, I was constantly tormented by shame...”
Traveling through Turkey, Serbia, and Vienna, the Kulikovsky-Romanov family ended up at their relatives in Denmark and settled with the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, first in an annex of the Amalienborg palace and later at Villa Hvidøre.
They had to start their life in Denmark practically from scratch. In 1928, following the death of the Dowager Empress, King Christian expelled his cousin from Hvidøre. Nikolai Alexandrovich had to hire himself out as a stable hand to a local rich man. Four years later, the Grand Duchess succeeded in adjudging the Villa Hvidøre and in 1932, using the money received from its sale, the Kulikovsky family purchased a small farm in Ballerup, twenty-four kilometers from Copenhagen, where they engaged in agriculture.
“It was a modest farmstead, but for us it became our hearth and home. Hard labor awaited us, but I was ready for anything.”
Nikolai Alexandrovich grew crops for sale, while Olga Alexandrovna painted pictures in her spare time—also for sale. Throughout her life, the talented artist painted over two thousand paintings. The funds received from the sale of paintings allowed her to support her family and do charity work.
Her sons grew up, went to serve in the Danish army and married Danish girls, but they always attended a Russian church and celebrated all the Orthodox feasts.
The money received from the sale of paintings allowed her to support her family and do charity work
During World War II, Olga Alexandrovna helped her fellow countrymen with food and clothing. She would give asylum to Russian prisoners of war regardless of their political beliefs. In 1948, the Soviet authorities accused Olga of “aiding the enemies of the people” and demanded her extradition. Then the government of Denmark sent the family of the Grand Duchess to Canada.
The Kulikovsky family settled on a farm in the suburbs of Toronto. They lived very poorly. The reporters who visited them were astonished to find Olga Alexandrovna in shabby clothes and with a shovel in hand. But the Grand Duchess herself took pride in “looking more and more alike a Russian peasant. Papa would have understood me.” For the rest of her life, she would think of her brother—the Emperor Nicholas II—and his selfless deed in the name of Russia. She prayed “not for him—but to him. He is a martyr.” Her heart never stopped aching over the murdered royal family.
In the fall of 1951, when they no longer had strength to work on their farm, the Kulikovskys sold it and moved to a small house with a vegetable patch they could tend. They often visited a local church. The Russian Orthodox parish in Toronto was housed in a small church; its community was small and very poor. Using her meager means, Olga Alexandrovna helped by painting the icons and other paintings and then donating them to her parish. She also helped the Orthodox people in Soviet Russia.
“Olga Alexandrovna stayed in touch with many Russian Orthodox communities... Occasionally, she would send them small gifts, scraping up money from her budget,” wrote Ian Worres.
It should be noted that she sent help from her truly modest budget. One day, Queen Elizabeth visited Canada and invited her relative to meet her on her yacht. Olga Alexandrovna was alarmed, as she had nothing to wear. She had to spend thirty dollars to buy a new dress and a hat.
Queen Elizabeth invited her relative to meet her on her yacht. Olga Alexandrovna was alarmed, as she had nothing to wear
Exiled from her native Russia, Olga Alexandrovna never stopped loving it. If asked, “What was the main thing for her?” she would invariably reply: “The freedom of my dear Motherland.”
Not long before her death, the Grand Duchess began to compile memoirs that were redacted by Ian Worres, a native of Greece. She wrote the following there:
“It is my duty, both to history and to my Family, to speak about the true events connected with the reign of the last representative of the House of Romanov. Fate, so cruel to the members of my family, has probably deliberately spared me for so many years in order to give me a chance to protect my Family from so much slander and malicious gossip directed at them. I am grateful to the Almighty God for granting me this opportunity on the threshold of my grave...”
Grave of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna at the North-York cemetery in Toronto Before death, Bishop John (Shakhovskoy) of San Francisco administered Holy Communion to the Grand Duchess. Olga Alexandrovna died on November 24, 1960 at the age of seventy-eight, seven months after the death of her elder sister Xenia Alexandrovna. Standing guard at her coffin covered with the flag of the Russian Empire, were the officers of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna’s Akhtyrsky Regiment of which she had been made the honorary commander in the distant year of 1901. The last Grand Duchess of the House of Romanov was buried in the North York Russian cemetery in Canada, next to her beloved husband who had died two years earlier.
Like the Royal New Martyrs, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna taught us deep faith in God and deeds of mercy, compassion and service to our neighbor. Her son Tikhon Nikolaevich Kulikovsky wrote:
“She was also an example of unconditional and all-consuming love for Russia and Russians... Memory eternal to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna!”
