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Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, Exile, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia, Head of the House, Pretender to the Throne, World War I
Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia (November 18, 1856 – January 5, 1929) was a Russian general in World War I (1914–1918).
Family
A very tall man (1.98m / 6′ 6″), Grand Duke Nicholas, named after his paternal grandfather, the Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, was born as the eldest son to Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaevich of Russia (1831–1891) and Duchess Alexandra of Oldenburg (1838–1900) onNovember 18, 1856.
His father was the sixth child and third son born to Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and his Empress Consort Alexandra Fedorovna (1798–1860). Alexandra Fedorovna was born Princess Charlotte of Prussia the daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Nicholas’s mother, Duchess Alexandra of Oldenburg, his father’s first cousin’s daughter, was a daughter of Duke Constantine Peter of Oldenburg (1812–1881) and Princess Therese of Nassau (1815–1871).
His maternal grandfather, Duke Peter of Oldenburg, was a son of Duke George of Oldenburg and Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna of Russia, daughter of Paul I of Russia and Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg.
Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg was a daughter of Duke Friedrich Eugene of Württemberg and Princess Friederike of Brandenburg-Schwedt.
After Grand Duke Paul (the future Emperor Paul I of Russia) became a widower in 1776, King Friedrich II of Prussia (Sophie Dorothea’s maternal great-uncle) and Empress Catherine II of Russia chose Sophie Dorothea as the ideal candidate to become Paul’s second wife.
Grand Duke Nicholas was the first cousin once removed of Emperor Nicholas II. To distinguish between them, the Grand Duke was often known within the Imperial family as “Nikolasha”: the Grand Duke was also known as “Nicholas the Tall” while the Emperor was “Nicholas the Short”.
On April 29, 1907, Grand Duke Nicholas married Princess Anastasia of Montenegro (1869–1935), the daughter of King Nicholas I, and sister of Princess Milica, who had married Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Peter. They had no children. She had previously been married to George Maximilianovich, 6th Duke of Leuchtenberg, by whom she had two children, until their divorce in 1906. Since the Montenegrins were a fiercely Slavic, anti-Ottoman people from the Balkans, Anastasia reinforced the Pan-Slavic tendencies of Nicholas.
Revolution
The February Revolution found Nicholas in the Caucasus. He was appointed by the Emperor, in his last official act, as the supreme commander in chief, and was wildly received as he journeyed to headquarters in Mogilev; however, within 24 hours of his arrival, the new Prime Minister, Prince Georgy Lvov, cancelled his appointment.
Grand Duke Nicholas spent the next two years in Crimea, sometimes under house arrest, taking little part in politics. There appears to have been some sentiment to have him head the White Army forces active in southern Russia at the time, but the leaders in charge, especially General Anton Denikin, were afraid that a strong monarchist figurehead would alienate the more left leaning constituents of the movement. He and his wife escaped just ahead of the Red Army in April 1919, aboard the British Royal Navy battleship HMS Marlborough.
On August 8, 1922, Grand Duke Nicholas was proclaimed as Nicholas III, Emperor of all the Russias by the Zemsky Sobor of the Priamurye region in the Far East by White Army general Mikhail Diterikhs. Nicholas was already living abroad and consequently was not present. Two months later the Priamurye region fell to the Bolsheviks.
In exile
After a stay in Genoa as a guest of his brother-in-law, Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, Grand Duke Nicholas and his wife took up residence in a small chateau at Choigny, 20 miles outside of Paris. He was under the protection of the French secret police as well as by a small number of faithful Cossack retainers.
He became the symbolic figurehead of an anti-Soviet Russian monarchist movement, after assuming on November 16, 1924 the supreme command of all Russian forces in exile and thus of the Russian All-Military Union, which had been founded in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by Gen Pyotr Wrangel two months prior.
The monarchists made plans to send agents into Russia. Conversely a top priority of the Soviet secret police was to penetrate this monarchist organization and to kidnap Grand Duke Nicholas.
They were successful in the former, infiltrating the group with spies (OGPU later lured the anti-Bolshevik British master spy Sidney Reilly back to the Soviet Union (1925) where he was killed). They did not succeed however, in kidnapping Grand Duke Nicholas. As late as June 1927, the monarchists were able to set off a bomb at the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.
Grand Duke Nicholas died on January 5, 1929 of natural causes on the French Riviera, where he had gone to escape the rigors of winter. He was originally buried in the church of St. Michael the Archangel Church in Cannes, France.
In 2014 Nicholas Romanov, Prince of Russia (1922–2014) and Prince Dimitri Romanov (1926–2016) requested the transfer of his remains. The bodies of Nicholas Nikolaevich and his wife were re-buried in Moscow at the World War I memorial military cemetery in May 2015.