Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich of Russia


Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich of Russia was the fourth son and fifth child of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich of Russia and Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia. He was a nephew of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Early life

Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Romanov was born at the Gatchina Palace, near Saint Petersburg, Russia on 15 August 1901. He was the fourth son and fifth child among seven siblings. His parents, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, were first cousins once removed. Consequently, Prince Dmitri was the great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I while the great-great-grandson of the same Tsar Nicholas I, the grandson of Tsar Alexander III and the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II.
During the Russian Revolution Prince Dmitri was imprisoned along with his parents and grandmother the Dowager Empress at Dulber, in the Crimea. He escaped the fate of a number of his Romanov cousins who were murdered by the Bolsheviks when he was freed by German troops in 1918. He left Russia on 11 April 1919, at the age of seventeen, aboard the Royal Navy ship to attend to Malta where they spent nine months before settling to England.

Exile

In exile, Prince Dmitri lived between England and France. He had a varied career. In the late 1920s he emigrated to the United States where he worked as a stockbroker in Manhattan. He returned to Europe in the early 1930s. For a brief period in the 1930s, he managed Coco Chanel's shop at Biarritz.
It was through Chanel that he met a Russian aristocrat who worked as model for her fashion house: Countess Marina Sergeievna Golenistcheva-Koutouzova. She was the second daughter of Count Sergei Alexandrovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov and his wife Maria Alexandrovna, born Chernysheva-Bezobrazova. After the revolution, Marina and her family moved to Kislovodsk and later to Crimea, where her father served as head of the Yalta County. In August 1920 the family was evacuated to Istanbul and then to Paris. In the French capital, Marina began to work for Chanel.
Prince Dmitri fell in love with her and they married in Paris on 25 October 1931. The wedding attracted a lot of attention and the bride wore a Chanel wedding dress.
The couple had one daughter :
During World War II, Prince Dmitri served as a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After the war, he became secretary of the travelers club in Paris.
In 1947 he divorced Princess Marina who moved with their daughter to the United States. In 1949 she remarried Otto de Neufville, a descendant of a French-German aristocratic family. Marina Sergeievna Golenistcheva-Koutouzova died on January 7, 1969, in Sharon, Connecticut.
During the 1950s, Prince Dmitri studied wine-making and worked as the European sales representative for a whisky firm in London. As his ex-wife did, Prince Dmitri also remarried. His second wife was the Dowager Lady Milbanke, née Margaret Sheila MacKellar Chisholm. Born in rural New South Wales, Australia, she was married, firstly, to Francis St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough, and secondly, to Sir John Milbanke, 11th baronet. She married Prince Dmitri on 20 October 1954. No children were born of this marriage. The couple lived modestly in Belgravia, in central London. Princess Dmitri died October 13, 1969, and was buried in a chapel, near Edinburgh, next to her youngest son, Peter St. Clair-Erskine, who had died, at the age of twenty, in 1939.
Following the creation of the Romanov Family Association in 1979, Prince Dmitri was chosen as its first president serving until his death a year later in England.

Title and style

''N.B. After the Russian revolution members of the Imperial family tended to drop the territorial designation "of Russia" and use the princely title with the surname Romanov.

Ancestry