 Having grown up in the Russian Imperial court, Botkin fought in the Russian civil war on the side of the counter-revolutionary forces after his father, a physician to the royal Romanov monarchy, was executed by the Bolshevik government.Fleeing to Long Island in the United States, he began writing novels and non-fiction books, mostly set in his Russian homeland, before coming to believe in a female divinity and founding the Church of Aphrodite.He won the right to register it as a religious charter in the New York State Supreme Court.