87 Years After Fleeing Revolution, Russia’s Last Dowager Empress Returns
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MOSCOW — To the sounds of a 31-gun salute, the remains of Russia’s last dowager empress returned to her adopted homeland yesterday almost nine decades after she fled the Bolshevik revolution that claimed the lives of her son and grandchildren.
Mother of Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar, Maria Fyodorovna, will be laid to rest today after three days of commemorations that will force Russia to consider the bloody end of its imperial past.
Descendants of the Romanov dynasty gathered at the Baltic port of Kronstadt as the tsarina’s coffin, draped in the imperial flag, was brought ashore from a Danish frigate.
A military band played a 19th-century funeral march as Danish and Russian soldiers formed a guard of honor, marching side by side for the first time.
After a brief ceremony, the tsarina’s body was taken to the imperial summer residence at Peterhof, 20 miles southeast of St. Petersburg, where it will lie in state.
The solemn commemorations marked the culmination of years of negotiations between Moscow and Copenhagen to repatriate the Danish-born empress.
Born Princess Dagmar of the Danish royal house, Maria married Tsar Alexander III in 1866, arriving in Russia exactly 140 years before her remains were returned. She was to stay for more than half a century, becoming popular among ordinary Russians who admired her tact, beauty, and charitable works.
She was to outlive her husband, son, and at least three of her five grandchildren. Even though a Bolshevik firing squad executed Nicholas II and his family in 1918, she refused to leave the country that she had grown to love.
She was eventually persuaded to flee aboard a British cruiser sent by her brother-in-law, Edward VII, in 1919. She came to Britain but felt eclipsed by her sister, Queen Alexandra, and later moved to Denmark.
Refusing to accept the deaths at Yekaterinburg, she continued to write to her son and interviewed several women claiming to be her granddaughter Anastasia, said by some to have escaped the Bolsheviks. She died in 1928 and was buried at Roskilde, Denmark’s royal cathedral.
“This ceremony is a symbol of life in a new Russia,” the governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matviyenko, said.
