Oldest relative of last Russian Emperor Prince Dimitri Romanov dies in Denmark

PARIS, January 1. 2017 Prince Dimitri Romanov, the oldest relative of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, has died in Denmark, his wife Princess Feodora said. The prince was 90. According to his wife, last week he was taken to hospital due to a dramatic decline in health.

"Dimitri Romanovich died at hospital on the evening of December 31," Princess Romanova said.
Dimitri Romanov was born on May 17, 192n Cap d'Antibes, France, where his parents lived in emigration. His father, Roman Petrovich Romanov, was the second cousin and godson of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.

A historian and a writer, Prince Dimitri lived in Denmark for the recent years where he headed a Romanov family’s charity foundation aimed at helping Russian hospitals and orphan homes. In October 2016, he came to Moscow for the last time to receive the Order of St. Alexander, a Russian state award, for his great contribution to the spread of the knowledge of Russia’s historical and cultural heritage.

Update MOSCOW, January 2. 2017 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences over the death of Prince Dimitri Romanov, the oldest relative of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II. The 90-year-old prince was taken to a hospital in Denmark last week suffering from serious health problems, his wife Princess Feodora said. He died on the evening of December 31.

"Accept my most sincere condolences over the death of Dimitry Romanovich Romanov. He was one of our most outstanding compatriots and, as the oldest in his family, he was by right the head of the Romanov Family Association," the Russian prime minister said in a telegram to Princess Feodora, published on the government’s website. "During our meetings in person I realized again and again that he never distanced himself from Russia and always helped his motherland with real deeds," the telegram reads. "The Prince helped Russian hospitals and orphanages, was engaged in searching and returning cultural values to Russia, helped to preserve historical knowledge, first of all the heritage of the Russian Emperor’s family."

Dimitri Romanov was born on May 17, 1926, in Cap d'Antibes, France, where his parents lived in emigration. His father, Roman Petrovich Romanov, was the Emperor’s second cousin and godson. A historian and a writer, Prince Dimitri lived in Denmark for the recent years where he headed a Romanov family’s charity foundation aimed at helping Russian hospitals and orphan homes. In October 2016, he came to Moscow for the last time to receive the Order of St. Alexander, a Russian state award, for his great contribution to the spread of the knowledge of Russia’s historical and cultural heritage.

Source: Tass

Douglas Smith - Former People, The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries’-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.

Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called “former people” and “class enemies“—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on.

Former People was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, was chosen Book of the Year by Salon, and won the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize sponsored by Waterstones in 2013. It is being published in ten foreign languages.

Source: douglassmith.info