Russia’s Last Grand Duchess

Alexander III (1845-1894), Tsar of Russia, 1881-1894, and his wife, Empress Marie, had four children, two sons, Nicholas and Michael, and two daughters, Xenia and Olga.

Nicholas Romanov, who became Russian Tsar, 1894, the year his father died, lived in unbelievable opulence.
At the height of his power, the Imperial Palace outside St. Petersburg, where he was raised and ascended to power, had 900 rooms and 5,000 indentured servants.
Alexander III (1845-1894), Tsar of Russia, 1881-1894, and his wife, Empress Marie, had four children, two sons, Nicholas and Michael, and two daughters, Xenia and Olga.

Nicholas Romanov, who became Russian Tsar, 1894, the year his father died, lived in unbelievable opulence.
At the height of his power, the Imperial Palace outside St. Petersburg, where he was raised and ascended to power, had 900 rooms and 5,000 indentured servants.

It was here that Olga, 14 years younger than her brother Nicholas, grew up exposed to the intrigues of the infamous Mad Monk Rasputin who became the “spiritual advisor” to her sister-in-law.

After Olga married Peter of Oldenburg, this unhappy marriage was dissolved by her brother, one of the last acts performed as Tsar before he abdicated, 1917.
Soon after Olga, a woman of passion, married Lt. Col. Nicolai Kulikovsky, a commoner who completely swept her off her feet.

After Nicholas II and his entire family were brutally assassinated, 1918, Olga and her family were given asylum in Denmark.

Fearing Communist aggression and expansion in the Baltic at the end of World War II, after years of happiness she left Denmark, 1948, and immigrated to Canada with her husband and two sons.
Briefly farming near Campbellville, Ontario, the family settled, 1950, Cooksville (Mississauga), Ontario.

Olga became a member of Christ the Saviour Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Toronto, where her portrait, as Last Qrand Duchess of Russia, hangs in the Cathedral, today, and where her works as an artist embellish the beautiful interior iconostasis.

In 1960, after 10 years living in Cooksville, Olga was taken in by close Russian friends and died six months later, age 82, in an apartment above a hair dressing salon on Gerrard Street in Toronto’s east end.

The final resting place of Olga Romanov-Kulikovsky, the Last Grand Duchess of Russia (1882-1960), is York Cemetery, Toronto, Ontario.