Hope for Russia?

Hope for Russia?
W.H.Chellis

The Times [London] Online September 22, 2006

Tragic Empress of Russia comes home to find the peace that eluded her in life
By Michael Binyon

The interment of Empress Feodorovna in the Peter and Paul Fortress represents Russia’s final atonement to its last tsarWITH royal ceremony and imperial pomp, Denmark will say farewell tomorrow to one of the most tragic figures in its royal history. Princess Dagmar, who became Empress of Russia and mother of the last tsar, died in exile in her native land 78 years ago. Now, following her last wishes, her remains are to be reinterred in a vault in St Petersburg beside her husband, Tsar Alexander III, who died in 1894. The ceremony in Roskilde Cathedral, 18 miles west of Copenhagen, will be attended by Queen Margarethe II of Denmark and her family, as well as officials from the Danish and Russian Governments and members of the Romanov family. The remains of the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna — as she is known in Russia — will then be taken by a Danish warship to St Petersburg where they will lie in state. A service will be held in St Isaac’s Cathedral on Thursday and she will be interred the next day in the vault of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where all the Romanov tsars are buried and where the bones of the murdered Nicholas II and his family were interred in 1998. It will be the culmination of Russia’s atonement to its last tsar. Dagmar’s story is extraordinary. She and her sister, Alexandra, daughters of King Christian IX, were two of the most eligible princesses in Europe and were to marry into the world’s greatest empires. Alexandra became the wife of Edward VII, while Dagmar sailed for the court in St Petersburg, converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was betrothed to Crown Prince Nicholas. He died months before the wedding and instead she married his brother, Alexander. Plunged into the fin de siècle turmoil of imperial Russia, she was a helpless witness to the hedonism, plotting and misrule at court. The sisters were almost identical; little wonder that their eldest sons looked so alike. But when the Revolution came, George V, fearful of public opinion in Britain, refused to save his cousin Nicholas II. It was only after his murder that he sent a warship to the Crimea to rescue Dagmar and her daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, in April 1919. The evacuation is described in a new biography of Dagmar by Coryne Hall, who has been invited to the ceremonies in Denmark and St Petersburg. As the Reds closed in, Captain Johnson, of HMS Marlborough, tried to hurry the royal refugees aboard. But the indomitable empress dallied. Her servants were loading 200 tons of luggage, box after box, and she headed for a chapel to pray. Finally persuaded to return to the improvised pier, she embarked, along with dozens of desperate servants. They sailed for Yalta en route to Istanbul and passed Livadia Palace, the tsar’s summer residence. As she stood beneath the White Ensign, tears streaming down her face, a troopship carrying the Imperial Guard on the way to fight the Bolsheviks passed by. The men burst out with the Russian imperial anthem. Stopping briefly in Malta, Dagmar finally arrived in Portsmouth and was taken to Marlborough House. But her time in London was not happy; she resented the loss of power, Britain’s indifference to Russian refugees and the lapses of protocol among the exiles. Fussy, difficult and wildly extravagant, “Aunt Minny” antagonised her British relations and soon left for Denmark, where she grieved over her lost family and empire, refusing to believe Nicholas was dead or the claim by a notorious pretender that she was Anastasia, the Tsar’s daughter and only survivor of the royal massacre. For three generations, Russia ignored her fate. But the mood is changing as the Government tries to heal the wounds of history, so that now Dagmar is going home at last. Little Mother of Russia by Coryne Hall, Shepheard-Walwyn, £14.95