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By Root 687 0

Dmitri and his sister, Marie, were placed with their aunt and uncle. Grand Duke Sergei loved his young charges, but the relationship became strained as they grew older. When this uncle was assassinated by an anarchist’s bomb in 1905, Dmitri was sent to a military academy; he was fourteen. The men he loved—his educational supervisor, his father and the tsar—through personality or circumstance, were all to thwart Dmitri’s need for a man he could unreservedly admire. As an intelligent young patriot, he combined traditionalism with what he saw as open-mindedness. Although wishing to serve his country in some significant way, Dmitri also felt inadequate to the task because of a lack of self-assurance.

In 1916, he was one of those involved in the conspiracy to murder the “holy man” Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the tsarina had become deplorable. After hours of black farce, the assassins rolled Rasputin up in a curtain, tied it with rope and then dumped him in the river Neva through a hole in the ice. When discovered, Rasputin had survived poisoning and gunshot wounds, finally to die by drowning. Dmitri’s efforts at improving the situation in his country were largely frustrated. Camouflaging his shyness and any depth of character behind his good looks and the persona of a charming playboy, he always found it difficult to be taken seriously.

Rasputin’s murder led to Dmitri’s exile to an army unit on the Persian front. Thus, when most of the Russian royal family—including his father, brother and aunt—was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, Dmitri was one of those few who escaped the slaughter. Throughout his life, great privilege had served him ill in his loss of every figure of significance, save his sister, Grand Duchess Marie. A life already filled with such loss may have inhibited Dmitri in the formation of close attachments aside from his sister.

Making his way to Britain from Tehran at the end of the war, Dmitri was permitted to take up residence. Here he studied in preparation for his possible future role as tsar. He also continued socializing, with a noted predilection for actresses and ballerinas. Dmitri’s sister described his life before the revolution:

He had had a large fortune with very few responsibilities . . . unusually good looks coupled with great charm, and he also had been the recognized favorite of the Tsar . . . there was no young prince in Europe more socially conspicuous than he was, both in his own country and abroad. He walked a golden path . . . His destiny was almost too dazzling.2

Dmitri’s breathtakingly privileged and yet isolated upbringing had left him badly equipped to make the changes necessary for a successful new life in the West. Like most of his fellow Russian aristocrats, in the revolution Dmitri had lost not only virtually his entire wealth, but he had also lost caste, to a devastating degree.

Marie described the aristocratic émigrés’ social lives: “the atmosphere that settled down around us had almost nothing to do with the people or the interests of the country we were living in; we led an existence apart.”3 All had lost family, and narrowly avoided death. And while they had usually been reduced to near-poverty, they didn’t speak of their losses or “the harrowing tales of our escape from Russia. Everyone tried to make the best of his present situation . . . We managed even to be gay in a detached, inconsequential sort of way.”4

While Dmitri appeared to have adjusted to his new life, it was as if the energy involved in escaping (and losing) one’s country had left him, like many fellow émigrés, so emotionally reduced that he was unable, really, to begin his life again. Although many were still young, they had effectively withdrawn, living an impoverished version of their old lives. A few even allowed their transformation into celebrity pastiches of their previous selves: modeling clothes for couturiers or film acting, their noble blood touted as the draw. Only recently, Dmitri Pavlovich had turned down a lucrative film contract with Hollywood.

Meanwhile, in 1919, he had arrived