Dmitry, Grand Duke Pavlovich

Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia was the grandson of Tsar Alexander II and a cousin to Tsar Nicholas II. Born eight weeks prematurely, his mother, Princess Alexandra of Greece, died as a result of complications from the birth. His father was killed by anarchists during the abortive 1905 revolution and he was sent to live with the Tsar’s family in the Imperial Palace.

The Grand Duke joined a guards regiment as an officer and showed expertise enough to be chosen to ride for Russia at the 1912 Stockholm Games. Although he finished in the top ten of the individual show jumping event, it is far away from the sporting field that he made his most important mark on history. In 1916 he was one of a group of conspirators that murdered Grigori Rasputin, it is even theorized that he may himself have fired one of the shots that eventually killed the “mad monk”. Because of his involvement in the murder he was sent to fight to Persia, thereby avoiding the fate of the Russian royal family at the hand of the Bolsheviks. He was smuggled away via Persia and India and eventually found safe refuge in London.

The Grand Duke had a reputation as a womanizer, counting the Duchess of Marlborough and Coco Chanel amongst his conquests, but also was reputed to have had a relationship with Prince Felix Yusopov, one of his fellow conspirators. He was later to marry Audrey Emery, an American heiress and their son, Paul, would go on to be mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.

During the thirties he had links to the proto-fascist Mladorossi Movement but refused the invitation when Hitler asked him to lead exiled Russian nobles in the German army to fight against the USSR. After suffering for a number of years with tuberculosis, he died in a Swiss sanatorium from acute uremia, although rumours abounded that he was the victim of a Nazi plot.