Roads to the Great War: A Russian Grand Duke's View of the War and the Coming Revolution

Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich of Russia (1866, Tbilisi, Georgia–1933 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France)

By Assistant Editor Kimball Worcester

The son of a brother of the Tsar Liberator, Aleksandr II of Russia, Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich and his five brothers were collectively nicknamed the “Mikhailovichi” (sons of Mikhail). His grandfather was Tsar Nikolas I, his great-great-grandmother Empress Catherine the Great. The grand duke was born and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, where his father, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, was the governor general of the province. This upbringing in the southern mountainous borderland away from the Imperial palaces in the north may have inspired the often contrary ideas of the grand duke in his later years; he appears to have been uncowed by convention.

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Partial Family Tree

Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich began his military career in the Imperial Russian Navy. By the time of the Great War, the grand duke had become enamored of aviation and was a fervent proponent of its military development in the Russian Empire. He was a founder of the Sevastopol Aviation Officer School and was chief of the Imperial Russian Air Service during the Great War. His promotion of the new military arm in Russia was an acknowledgement of its value for 20th-century warfare. The grand duke and his family, including his mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fëdorovna (mother of Tsar Nikolas II) were evacuated from Crimea in 1919 by HMS Marlborough.

This excerpt from his first memoir, Once a Grand Duke, is from the first edition, 1932. The grand duke died the following year.

Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich (L), Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich(top),
Tsarevich Nikolas Aleksandrovich (future Tsar Nikolas II) (R), and Prince George of Greece (bottom), (1880s). Romanov cousins; Prince George's mother was Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna.