later, World War I began. World War I, revolution and second marriage At the outbreak of the war, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna trained as a nurse. With Princess Helen of Serbia, the grand duchess was sent to the northern front, at Instenburg in East Prussia, under command of General Paul von Rennenkampf. For bravery under airplane fire, she was awarded the St George medal. In 1915, after the Russian withdrawal from East Prussia, she took over a hospital at Pskov, where she worked as a nurse. For two and a half years, she treated and bandaged wounded soldiers and officers, even performing simple surgery herself. During the war, her relationship with her aunt improved and she visited her regularly at the convent Elizabeth had established. Maria Pavlovna was at Pskov when she learned that Dmitri had participated in the murder of Grigori Rasputin on 17 December 1916, she was stunned. "For the first time in my life," she wrote, "my brother appeared to me an individual standing apart from me, and this feeling of unaccustomed estrangement made me shiver." Maria signed a letter along with other members of the Imperial family, begging Nicholas II to reverse his decision to exile Dmitri to the Persian front. Two months later the February Revolution erupted and Tsar Nicholas II, Maria's first cousin, abdicated. Maria Pavlovna left Pskov for Petrograd joining her father and his family at Tsarkoe Selo. Earlier in the war, she had been reacquainted with Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Putyatin (1893–1966), the son of the palace commandant at Tsarkoe Selo, the tsar's country residence. They had met as children and, in the spring 1917, a happy affair began between them. In the summer they became engaged and, in love for the first time, Maria Pavlovna married Putyatin in the Pavlovsk Palace on . The couple spent the early months of their married life in Petrograd, living at first in Dmitri's palace. When the palace was sold, they moved to a small apartment with Sergei's parents. The successful Bolshevik coup of November 1917 surprised Maria Pavlovna and her husband in Moscow, where they had traveled to remove some of Maria's jewels from the state bank.<ref name = " Menzies 8">Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna of Russia (1890–1958), p. 8</ref> They returned to Petrograd with their lives, but without the jewels. Later on, Serge's parents retrieved Maria's diamonds. In the spring 1918, the couple moved