Russian Legitimist Responds to a "Declaration"
of the Romanoff Family Association
The Russian Legitimist wishes to condemn a very misleading and hypocritical ‘declaration,’ dated 27 October 2022, by the so-called ‘Romanoff Family Association.’
Misleading because it is full of inaccuracies. Hypocritical because the declaration purports to rely upon the dynastic house laws. This is a bit rich: the ‘Romanoff Family Association’ has long ignored and denigrated these laws - and the two signatories of the declaration clearly do not understand them.
The gist of their declaration challenges Grand Duchess Maria’s position as grand duchess and head of the dynasty and her son’s position as grand duke and next in line to his mother as head of the dynasty. But Grand Duchess Maria’s position as dynastic head and his position as her heir are legal facts that derive directly from the house laws of the Russian Imperial House.
We apologise in advance for a longer discussion than we would wish, but for those of our readers who are sincerely interested in what the Russian dynasty’s laws actually specify, it is not possible to give a considered explanation in just a couple of paragraphs.
A question and answer format perhaps fits best here. We thank the authors of several essays on our website for the information recited below.
What is the ‘Romanoff Family Association’? The RFA today is a private organisation composed entirely of morganatic descendants of the Russian dynasty. Most RFA members are American or British. None speaks Russian. Some are not even Orthodox.
Morganatic descendants, by definition, cannot be members of the Russian dynasty. The dynasty has required for two centuries and still requires that members of the dynasty marry ‘equally’ (in other words, marriage to a spouse who is a member of a royal house - marriages to spouses who were commoners, even if from the highest nobility, were called non-dynastic, morganatic or unequal marriages) in order to transmit dynastic membership to the children of the marriage.
One can debate whether this Russian dynastic requirement of equal marriage is appropriate in the 21st century. But the rule still applies after two centuries, and only the head of the dynasty can amend it. The Austrian dynasty, the Habsburgs, kept their equal marriage requirement until the head of the house, Archduke Otto, dropped it in the 1990s. The Spanish dynasty had an equal marriage rule until King Juan Carlos abolished it in 2003.
Members of the Russian dynasty who survived the Revolution contracted dozens of marriages. In fact, all but four of these marriages were morganatic, which meant that morganatic descendants without any dynastic rights quickly outnumbered actual dynasts. The four marriages in compliance with the equal marriage rules were contracted by the three children of Grand Duke Kirill (head of the dynasty from 1918 to 1938) and by Grand Duchess Maria herself, Kirill’s granddaughter, in 1976.
The RFA was started by the late Nicholas R. Romanoff (1922-2014), son of the morganatic marriage of His Highness the late Prince Roman of Russia (a dynast). Nicholas R. Romanoff chafed at his morganatic status his entire life. A private letter of Felix Yusupov to his wife, Princess Irina of Russia (a dynast), lambastes Nicholas, then a teenager in Rome, for wrongly pretending to be a grand duke and dynast. In 1973, Nicholas’s father became the second most senior living dynast, directly after the head of the dynasty, Grand Duke Vladimir. It was thought that, if Vladimir had died before Roman, Roman, as new head of the dynasty, would have abandoned the equal marriage rule and elevated his two morganatic sons to dynastic status. But Vladimir outlived Roman by more than a dozen years.
After his father, having never become dynastic head, died in 1978, Nicholas formed the RFA. In the 1980s, he started to call himself Prince of Russia, a dynastic title which he had no right to, as a child of a non-dynastic marriage. When he became head of the RFA, he started to call himself the head of the Romanoff family. But the RFA was not the Imperial House of Romanoff. One cannot be the head of a dynasty if by law one is not a member of that dynasty. Nor was Nicholas even the most senior morganatic descendant, because the morganatic descendants of Grand Duke Dmitri (a dynast) were senior to him. An analogy to the RFA today is this: imagine if the morganatic lines of the Imperial House of Habsburg, such as the Hohenbergs and the Altenburgs, banded together and, in defiance of Archduke Karl, head of the Austrian dynasty, called themselves the Habsburg Family Association.
Who is Olga Romanoff? Olga Romanoff, who signed the declaration as RFA president, is the daughter of the morganatic marriage of His Highness the late Prince Andrew of Russia (a dynast) to Miss Nadine McDougall, a British subject. She lives in England. She takes after her British maternal forebears in that she is monolingual and does not speak a word of Russian. (Grand Duchess Maria speaks four languages fluently and makes do in several others. Her father, the late Grand Duke Vladimir, spoke five languages.)
Olga Romanoff’s familiarity with dynastic laws and usages is limited. As an example of one howler which escaped her English editors, her recent autobiography states that her father was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. She also wrote that her father, although an Imperial Highness, preferred to be known by the more modest title of Highness. This comment revealed that she was unaware that the junior dynasts, the Princes of the Imperial Blood, like her father, were Highnesses. Imperial Highness was reserved to Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, the senior dynasts.
In one interview, Olga Romanoff is quoted thus: ‘I have quite a normal life here at Provender, but I don’t know anything different from being a princess. It’s all I’ve known. I was a princess from birth.’ But, sorry, in law (if one pays attention to the dynastic laws), she is not an imperial princess. That is clear. The title of Princess of Russia is beyond her reach, because her mother was not royal.
The first two successive heads of the Russian dynasty in exile, Grand Dukes Kirill and Vladimir, gave the title of Prince or Princess Romanovsky to some of the morganatic children and spouses of dynasts. This was a noble princely title, not a dynastic title like Grand Duke or Prince of Russia. The name Romanovsky was intended to denote a blood relationship with the House of Romanoff. Some morganatic descendants receiving these noble titles later dropped the ‘-sky’ and started to call themselves Prince or Princess Romanoff. If Olga did receive one of these Romanovsky titles, then she is a (noble, non-royal) princess only by the grace of Grand Duke Vladimir. Thus, it ill behooves her to show hostility to his daughter and successor. If she did not receive a Romanovsky title, then she is not a princess at all and her ‘handle’ is self-assumed.
We note that Olga’s father, Prince Andrew of Russia, in the 1920s co-signed, with his father and several of his brothers, an oath of allegiance to Grand Duke Kirill as Emperor in Exile and to the latter’s son Grand Duke Vladimir as tsesarevich and heir. In 1938, when Kirill died, Prince Andrew also sent a letter recognizing Grand Duke Vladimir as the new head of the dynasty.
Who is Rostislav Romanoff? Rostislav Romanoff, who signed the declaration as RFA vice-president, is the grandson of one of the three morganatic marriages of His Highness the late Prince Rostislav of Russia (a dynast). Thus, like his cousin Olga, he cannot be a Prince of Russia. He is an American citizen who grew up in the United States and Britain. He does not speak Russian. He lived in Russia for a bit and presumably took some Russian lessons, but they were not a success.
His knowledge of dynastic usages is as peripheral as his cousin Olga’s. On his wedding invitation, for example, he referred to himself as His Imperial Highness Prince Rostislav. Again, the same cluelessness: even if he were legally a Prince of Russia, which he is not, he would be a Highness, not an Imperial Highness.
We know Rostislav is not a royal Prince of Russia. Is he a noble Prince Romanovsky? This depends on whether or not Grand Dukes Kirill or Wladimir gave the Romanovsky title to the descendants of the various morganatic marriages of Rostislav’s dynastic grandfather. (We know that in the 1920s Rostislav’s grandfather and his great-grandfather both signed an oath of allegiance to Grand Duke Kirill as Emperor in Exile and to the latter’s son Grand Duke Vladimir as tsesarevich and heir.)
What happened when a dynast contracted a morganatic marriage? The dynastic laws made clear that, when a dynast married a non-royal spouse, the children of the marriage had no right either to membership of the dynasty or succession to the throne. Nor by the way did they have the right to use the family name, Romanoff. Instead, the Emperor would give them new family names (such as Yurievsky, Iskander, Brassov and Paley) and new coats of arms, because use of the name Romanoff was limited to dynasts. This imperial Russian rule fell by the wayside in exile, because morganatic children born in the West took the family name of their fathers, Romanoff, under the local laws of France, Britain, the United States and other countries. (Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, however, adhered to the old rule, so that his morganatic son Paul, born in England, was called not Romanoff but Ilyinsky, the family name given to him by Emperor in Exile Kirill.)
As various essays on this website explain, the two marriages of Grand Duke Paul of Russia (d. 1919) illustrate how the marriage laws worked. His first wife was a royal, Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark. Because this was an equal marriage, his son was a grand duke and member of the dynasty, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Paul’s second wife was a commoner. Because this was a morganatic marriage, his son was not a member of the dynasty and had no right to the title of grand duke or the name Romanoff. Nicholas II gave this morganatic son a new family name (Paley), a new coat of arms, and the noble, non-royal title of Prince Paley.
The dynasty had become numerous in the years before the Revolution. The Grand Dukes were the senior dynasts. The Princes of Russia (Princes of the Imperial Blood) were the junior dynasts and distant in the line of succession. Nicholas II was willing to be lenient in allowing these Princes of Russia to contract morganatic marriages (given their distant place in the succession), but only on the condition that they renounce their rights to the throne. Nicholas II also reiterated that the children of such non-dynastic marriages would receive new family names and coats of arms.
The guidance on this was contained in a 14 June 1911 statement by Nicholas II’s Minister of the Imperial Court, which ended: “In relation to the categorization of marriages of Princes and Princesses of the Blood Imperial, the Lord Emperor has seen fit to recognize only two categories of marriages: (a) equal marriages, that is, those contracted with persons belonging to a royal or ruling house, and (b) unequal marriages, that is, those contracted with persons not belonging to a royal or ruling house, and He will not recognize any other categories.”
At the time of the 1938 death of Grand Duke Kirill, Head of the Imperial House, the number of morganatic descendants was growing. It was important to clarify who was a member of the dynasty and who was not. With the approval of Grand Duke Vladimir, the new Head of the Imperial House, the five most senior members of the dynasty after Vladimir issued a manifesto declaring Vladimir the new head of the dynasty and listing all living male dynasts in their order in the line of succession. This list contains all those who were born of dynastic marriages. All the many living morganatic children were pointedly omitted from the list. For example, Nicholas R. Romanoff (1922-2014) and his brother were omitted. Olga Romanoff was not yet born, but her two brothers were omitted from the list.
How has the succession passed after the Revolution? Because of the strict equal marriage rule, there are now just two living members of the Russian dynasty, Grand Duchess Maria and her son. Under the dynastic laws, the succession passes first by male primogeniture. If there are no more male dynasts, the succession then passes to the female dynast most closely related to the last Emperor. These laws, called the Pauline Laws, were promulgated by Emperor Paul I in 1797.
In January 1917, weeks before the fall of the monarchy, the line of succession after Nicholas II began as follows: Nicholas II’s son Grand Duke Alexei, 1st in line; Nicholas II’s brother Grand Duke Michael, 2nd in line; Nicholas II’s senior first cousin Grand Duke Kirill, 3rd in line; and so forth. By July 1918, Nicholas II, his son and his brother had all been murdered. Grand Duke Kirill then immediately succeeded as head of the dynasty.
When Grand Duke Kirill died in 1938, he was immediately succeeded by his only son Grand Duke Vladimir, who was head of the dynasty from 1938 to 1992. Vladimir was born of Kirill’s equal marriage with Princess Victoria Melita of Great Britain, daughter of Queen Victoria’s second son. Grand Duke Vladimir contracted a dynastic marriage with Princess Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani, a member of the former royal dynasty of Georgia.
By the late 1980s, there were only two male dynasts still living: Grand Duke Vladimir, Head of the Imperial House, and his cousin, His Highness Prince Vasily of Russia. Vasily died in 1989, and Vladimir, the last living male dynast, died in 1992. The succession passed then to the female line, in the person of Grand Duchess Maria, only child of Grand Duke Vladimir. Whether one considers the last emperor to have been Nicholas II or Grand Duke Vladimir, Grand Duchess Maria was the female dynast most closely related to both. She contracted a dynastic marriage in 1976 with His Royal Highness Prince Franz Wilhelm of Prussia. Prior to the marriage, Grand Duke Vladimir, Head of the Russian Imperial House, and his brother-in-law, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Head of the Prussian Royal House and the German Imperial House, entered into an agreement under which children born of the 1976 marriage would be primarily Russian dynasts and secondarily Prussian dynasts. The only child of the 1976 marriage is Grand Duke George of Russia, Prince of Prussia. He was created a Grand Duke by his grandfather in 1981 and became Grand Duke-Tsesarevich upon his mother’s succession in 1992 as head of the dynasty.
As to Grand Duke George’s son, HSH Prince Alexander Georgievich Romanoff, recently born in Moscow, his title is completely in accordance with the Fundamental State Laws of the Russian Empire and the Statute on the Russian Imperial Family.
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