Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia

Early life

He was born at the family estate, Ilyinskoye (Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast), as the second child and only son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and a first cousin of Nicholas II of Russia. Pavlovich's mother, Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna, was a daughter of George I of Greece and Olga Konstantinovna of Russia.
His mother, Alexandra, was seven months pregnant with him when, while she was out with friends, she jumped into a boat, falling as she got in. The next day, she collapsed in the middle of a ball from violent labour pains brought on by the previous day's activities; Dimitri was born in the hours following the accident. Alexandra slipped into a coma from which she never emerged. Although doctors had no hope for Dimitri's survival, he still lived, with the help of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, who gave the premature Dmitri the baths that were prescribed by the doctors, wrapped him in cotton wool and kept him in a cradle filled with hot water bottles to keep his temperature regulated. "I am enjoying raising Dmitri," Sergei wrote in his diary. Alexandra died shortly after Dimitri's birth. She was only 21, and the cause was almost certainly eclampsia.
Dmitri and his sister Maria lived in St Petersburg with their father until 1902, when Grand Duke Paul married a divorced commoner, Olga Pistolkors, and was banished from Russia by the Emperor. He was not allowed to take the children with him into exile, so they were sent to live with their uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (the Empress's sister), in Moscow. The loss of their father and the sudden move to Moscow caused the children great distress. In her memoirs, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (the Younger) describes Grand Duke Sergei as a stern disciplinarian, and his wife, Grand Duchess Elizabeth as a cold and unwelcoming presence.
On 4 February 1905, Grand Duke Sergei, who had recently resigned from the post of Governor General of Moscow, was assassinated by Ivan Kalyaev, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Kalyaev, armed with a homemade bomb, had aborted his first attempt to kill the Grand Duke when he spotted Dmitri and Marie with their uncle in his carriage. His uncle's death was only one of several assassinations that robbed Dmitri of close family members. After Sergei's death, Grand Duchess Elizabeth undertook to raise her niece and nephew on her own, thus making them part of a rare female-headed household. Maria Pavlovna continued to have some feelings of anger toward her aunt, whom she would blame for her overly hasty marriage to Prince William of Sweden in 1908, but Dmitri formed a very strong bond with Elizabeth and came to admire her personal fortitude.
Maria Pavlovna's wedding to Prince William took place at Tsarskoe Selo in 1908, and then, she had departed for Sweden with her husband. Elizabeth Feodorovna stayed on for time at Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo as guests of the Emperor and the Empress. It was during this period that Dmitri began to form a close bond with Nicholas II, looking upon him as a surrogate father. He would join him on his daily walks and seek to spend as much time with him as possible. Nicholas, in turn, treated Dmitri very kindly. He seems to have loved the young man's free spirit and sense of humor, a welcome diversion from the stresses of his daily life. Dmitri wrote several letters to his sister during his stay with Nicholas and Alexandra, describing how much he was enjoying himself there.
In 1909, Dmitri left his aunt's care to move to St Petersburg with his head tutor and companion, G.M. Laiming. He lived at his father's vacant palace and then at the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, which he had inherited from Grand Duke Sergey and would become his principal residence before the Russian Revolution. He prepared to enter the Nikolaevskoe Cavalry School. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a cornet in the Horse Guards Regiment, which his father had once commanded and in which he had been christopher78@example.com. He is reputed to have been a very good equestrian, and he competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, coming seventh. Before World War I, he instigated the idea of a national Russian sports competition, the very beginning of what under Soviet rule became the Spartakiad.

Death

Despite the popular conception of Pavlovich as a frail man who had suffered all his life from chronic tuberculosis, he was for most of his life a very active sportsman, excelling at polo, horse racing, tennis, and bobsledding. His doctors in London and Davos estimated that he first contracted tuberculosis around 1929, which ran a chronic course. He entered the Sanatorium "Schatzalp" on 2 September 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, and remarked in a letter to his sister that he had never before spent a single night in any kind of hospital or medical institution. His cause of death remains unknown since there is no cause listed on his death certificate, and all of Schatzalp's medical records were destroyed after the conversion of the sanatorium into a hotel in the 1950s. His son believed he had died of tuberculosis, and his cousin Prince Michael Feodorovich of Russia cited uremia, and his  New York Times obituary cited uremia as well. Rumours of murder sprang up locally but have never been substantiated, and there was no police investigation.
He was laid to rest in the Waldfriedhof, Davos. In the late 1950s, his remains were transferred to Mainau, in Lake Constance, where they now lie beside his sister's in the Bernadotte family crypt.

Son

The two had a son, Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, who grew up in France, Britain and the United States; he served as a US Marine in the Korean War. In 1989, he was elected Mayor of Palm Beach, Florida, and thus became the only Romanov descendant known to have held elected public office. Following the fall of communist Russia in 1991, a delegation of Russian royalists approached him and asked him to assume the title of Tsar, which he declined.