Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov

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Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov, around 1880

Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov ( Russian Николай Михайлович Романов , scientific. Transliteration Nikolaj Michajlovič Romanov , born April 14, jul. / 26. April  1859 greg. In Tsarskoye Selo , † the thirtieth January 1919 in Petrograd ) was a Russian general of the tsarist army , Historian and entrepreneur. The cousin Tsar Nicholas II wanted to reform Russia and became a victim of the October Revolution .

Life

Youth and military career

Nikolai Michailowitsch was the eldest child of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolajewitsch , fourth son of Tsar Nikolaus I and Grand Duchess Olga Fyodorovna, née. Princess Cäcilie von Baden- Hochberg, daughter of the Grand Duke Karl-Leopold of Baden-Hochberg .

He grew up with five brothers and one sister in Tbilisi , where his father resided as Governor General of Transcaucasia . He went to school there and began to be interested in butterfly research. He later served in a unit of the Russian Caucasus Army , with which he fought as a lieutenant in 1877 in the 10th Russian Turkish War .

In 1885 he graduated from the Academy of the General Staff and became a wing adjutant to the Russian Tsar. In 1895 he became the commander of a unit in Mingrelia . In 1897 he commanded the Caucasian Grenadier Division as major general . In 1901 he left the Russian army as a lieutenant general .

historian

He devoted himself increasingly to the science of history. His Russian portraits of the 18th and 19th centuries and a history of diplomatic relations between Russia and France from 1808 to 1812 were widely recognized . In 1909 he published a multi-volume biography of Louise von Baden, who later became Tsarina Elisabeth Alexejewna . In 1912 a biography of Tsar Alexander I was published. This was followed by a portrait of Queen Katharina von Württemberg , the former Grand Duchess Katharina Pavlovna.

He became an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Moscow Archaeological Institute . In 1909 the Tsar appointed him chairman of the Imperial Historical Society . 1910 he received an honorary doctorate from the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelms University , in 1914 by the University of Moscow .

He secured his financial independence by founding the first bottling plant for mineral water in the spa town of Borjomi in the Lesser Caucasus in 1906 . The Grand Duke successfully introduced the mineral water brand of the same name in Russia . It still exists today.

Reform politician

The Grand Duke was a liberal reformer. He used his privileged position to keep pushing the Russian tsar and his government to modernize. He advocated combining the tsar's sole rule with republican freedoms and institutions. In the First World War to the General Staff of the Western Front drafted, he warned, "this murderous war" will the "end of many monarchies and the triumph of world socialism" cause. After he lodged a written protest against Rasputin's machinations with the Tsar , he was banished from the imperial court and placed under house arrest on his estate .

Revolution Victims

After the February Revolution in 1917 , he was the first Russian Grand Duke to voluntarily renounce all dynastic privileges. He resigned from the chairmanship of the Imperial Russian Historical Society in the same year.

After the October Revolution in Russia he was exiled to Vologda . In July 1918 he was arrested and sent to the Petersburg remand prison. The President of the Russian Academy of Sciences , Alexander Karpinsky , and the writer Maxim Gorki campaigned in vain for his release. An attempt by the government of Denmark to buy the Grand Duke free for 500,000 gold rubles also failed.

On January 30, 1919 , the Bolsheviks shot him together with his brother Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich and two cousins, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich and Dmitri Konstantinovich , in the Petrograd Peter and Paul Fortress . In 1999 he was rehabilitated by the Russian state. In 2011, Russian archaeologists reported that excavations in the Peter and Paul Fortress likely found the graves of the grand dukes by chance.

Private

The Grand Duke remained unmarried. He had fallen in love with Princess Viktoria von Baden , but was not allowed to marry her, according to the rules of the Orthodox Church, because she was a first cousin.

Works

Monographs

  • The princes Dolgoruky, the employees of Emperor Alexander I in the first years of his reign . Schmidt & Günther, Leipzig 1902
  • Le Comte Paul Stroganov . Impr.nat., Paris 1905
  • Correspondence de l'empereur Alexandre Ier avec sa soeur la grande-duchesse Catherine, princesse d'Oldenbourg, puis reine de Wurtemberg . Manufacture des Papiers de l'Etat, Paris 1910
  • L 'Empereur Alexandre Ier: Essai d'étude historique . Manufacture des papiers de l'État, St.-Pétersbourg 1912
  • Les Rapports diplomatiques de Lebzeltern, Ministre d'Autriche, à la cour de Russie. Eksped. zagot. gosud. bumag, S.-Peterburg 1913

Journal articles

  • Quelques observations on the Lépidoptères de la partie du Haut-Plateu Arménien, comprise between Alexandropol, Kars et Erzéroum . In: Horae Soc. entomol. Horse. , 14 (1879): 483-495
  • Les Lépidoptères de la Transcaucasie. Irish party . In: Mémoires sur les Lépidoptères . Stassulewitsch, St.-Pétersbourg, Vol. 1 (1884): 1-92, pl. 1-5

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Les Russes pensent avoir retrouvé les restes de princes Romanov. Tribune de Genève, June 8, 2011, archived from the original on February 1, 2015 ; Retrieved February 7, 2013 (French).