Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia

Fate of Konstantin Konstantinovich's family after the Russian Revolution

Further information: Martyrs of Alapayevsk

The Princes Ioann, Gavriil, Konstantin, and Igor were all arrested after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Prince Gavriil was kept in Petrograd due to illness, but the other three princes were deported to Alapayevsk, a small town in the Urals. There they were imprisoned for some months, together with Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna, her companion, nun Barvara Yakovleva, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, his secretary Fyodor Remez and Prince Vladimir Paley. On the night of 17–18 July 1918 (24 hours after the execution of Nicholas II and his immediate family in Ekaterinburg), the Alapayevsk prisoners were executed by their Bolshevik captors. Their bodies were recovered from an abandoned mine shaft by the White Army, and reburied in 1920 at the Church of the Martyrs near Beijing, China.

Prince Gavriil was released from prison through the intercession of Maxim Gorki, who had unsuccessfully tried to save several other Romanovs. Gavriil and his wife, whom he had married after the Revolution, emigrated and settled in Paris, where Gavriil died in 1955.

The widowed Princess Tatiana fled to Romania and later to Switzerland with her children. She eventually became a nun in 1946, and died in Jerusalem in 1979, where she had been Abbess of the Orthodox Mount of Olives Convent since 1951.

Konstantin Konstantinovich's spouse and two youngest children, Prince George and Princess Vera, remained at Pavlovsk throughout the war, the chaotic rule of the Provisional Government, and after the October Revolution. In the fall of 1918, they were permitted by the Bolsheviks to be taken by ship to Sweden (on the Ångermanland, via Tallinn to Helsinki and via Mariehamn to Stockholm), at the invitation of the Swedish queen.

At Stockholm harbor they met prince Gustaf Adolf who took them to the royal palace. Elizaveta Mavrikievna and Vera and Georgi lived for the next two years in Sweden, first in Stockholm then in Saltsjöbaden. But Sweden was too expensive for them so they moved first to Belgium by invitation of Albert I of Belgium, and then to Germany, settling in Altenburg where they lived 30 years, except for a couple of years in England. Elizaveta died of cancer on 24 March 1927 in Leipzig. Prince Georgi died after surgery in New York City in 1938. Princess Vera lived in Germany until Soviet forces occupied the east part of the country, she fled to Hamburg and in 1951 she moved to United States and died there in 2001, in Nyack, New York.