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Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia (August 30, 1917 – April 21, 1992) was the Head of the Imperial Family of Russia, a position which he claimed from 1938 to his death. He was born 6 months after Emperor Nicholas II had abdicated.

Vladimir was born Prince Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia at Porvoo in the Grand Duchy of Finland, the only son of Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Princess Victoria Melita was a daughter of Prince Alfred of the United Kingdom (second son of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom), Duke of Edinburgh and Reigning Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Gotha and his wife Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, the fifth child and only surviving daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia and Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine.

Vladimir married Princess Leonida Georgievna Bagration-Moukhransky on August 13, 1948 in Lausanne. She was a daughter of Prince George Bagration of Mukhrani and his Polish wife Helena Sigismundovna, née Nowina Złotnicka (1886–1979). She descended patrilineally from former Kings of Georgia.

Her mother’s family belonged to the untitled Polish aristocracy, although one of Leonida’s two lines of descent from Georgia’s penultimate King Erekle II (Heraclius II) is through her mother, a descendant of the king’s daughter, Princess Anastasia, who married an Eristavi prince. The other ancestral line derives through the marriage of another of the king’s daughters, Princess Tamara, to Ioane Bagrationi, 18th Prince of Mukhrani.

The Bagration family’s genealogy traces back at least to the medieval era in its male line and hundreds of years further back as rulers in the female line. Leonida’s grandfather, Prince Alexander Bagration of Mukhrani, was born in 1853 in Georgia’s historical capital Tbilisi, then part of the Russian Empire, and was killed by Bolsheviks at Pyatigorsk in 1918 during the Russian revolution.

Pre-revolutionary Pauline Romanov House dictated that only those born of an “equal marriage” between a Romanov dynast and a member of a “royal or sovereign house”, were included in the Imperial line of succession to the Russian throne; children of morganatic marriages were ineligible to inherit the throne or dynastic status.

The family to which Princess Leonida belonged, the Bagrationi dynasty, had been kings in Georgia from the medieval era until the early 19th century, but no male line ancestor of hers had reigned as a king in Georgia since 1505 and her branch of the Bagrations, the House of Mukhrani, had been naturalised among the non-ruling nobility of Russia after Georgia was annexed to the Russian empire in 1801.

Yet the royal status of the House of Bagration had been recognized by Russia in the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk and was confirmed by Vladimir Kirillovich on December 5, 1946 as claimed head of the Russian imperial house. However the last ruling Emperor of Imperial Russia, Nicholas II, had deemed marriage in this family of Princess Tatiana Constantinova in 1911, as morganatic.

Some controversy therefore arises as to whether Vladimir’s marriage to Leonida was equal or morganatic, and whether his claim to the Imperial throne validly passed to his daughter Maria, to some other dynast, or to no one upon his death.

Following Vladimir’s public designation of his daughter as “curatrix of the throne”, in anticipation that she would eventually succeed him as head of the dynasty in exile, the heads of three of the other branches of the imperial family—the Princes Vsevolod Ioannovich (Konstantinovichi), Roman Petrovich (Nikolaevichi) and Andrei Alexandrovich (Mihailovichi) — wrote to Vladimir in 1969, asserting that the dynastic status of his daughter was no different from that of their own children (Vsevolod Ioannovich was childless, but Roman Petrovich had two sons by Countess Prascovia Sheremetyev, while Andrei Alexandrovich had two sons by Donna Elisabeth Ruffo of a Russian branch of the Princes di San Sant’ Antimo) and that his wife was of no higher status than the wives of the other Romanov princes.