Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark) - Revolution and Exile

Revolution and Exile

Revolution came to Russia in March 1917. After travelling from Kiev to meet with her deposed son, Nicholas II in Mogilev, Maria returned to the city. She quickly realized how Kiev had changed and that her presence was no longer wanted. She was persuaded by her family there to travel by train to the Crimea with a group of other refugee Romanovs. After a time living in one of the imperial residences in the Crimea, she received reports that her sons, her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren had been murdered. However, she rejected the report publicly as rumour. On the day after the murder of the Tsar's family, Maria received a messenger from Nicky, "a touching man" who told how difficult was the life of her son's family in Ekaterinburg. "And nobody can help or liberate them - only God! My Lord save my poor, unlucky Nicky, help him in his hard ordeals!" In her diary she comforted herself: "I am sure they all got out of Russia and now the Bolsheviks are trying to hide the truth." She firmly held on to this conviction until her death. The truth was too painful for her to admit publicly. Her letters to her son and his family have since almost all been lost; but in one that survives, she wrote to Nicholas: "You know that my thoughts and prayers never leave you. I think of you day and night and sometimes feel so sick at heart that I believe I cannot bear it any longer. But God is merciful. He will give us strength for this terrible ordeal." Maria's daughter Olga Alexandrovna commented further on the matter, "Yet I am sure that deep in her heart my mother had steeled herself to accept the truth some years before her death."

Despite the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917, the former Dowager Empress Maria at first refused to leave Russia. Only in 1919, at the urging of her sister, Dowager Queen Alexandra, did she begrudgingly depart, fleeing via the Crimea over the Black Sea to London. King George V sent the warship HMS Marlborough to retrieve his aunt. After a brief stay in the British base in Malta and later London, she returned to her native Denmark, choosing her holiday villa Hvidøre near Copenhagen as her new permanent home. Although Queen Alexandra never treated her sister badly and they spent time together at Marlborough House in London and at Sandringham House in Norfolk in Great Britain, Maria felt that she was now "number two". This was not surprising as Maria was merely a deposed Dowager Empress while her older sister was a popular Dowager Queen.

In exile in Copenhagen, Denmark, there were many Russian émigrées. For them, Maria still remained the Empress. People respected and highly valued her and often asked her for help. The All-Russian Monarchical Assembly held in 1921 offered her to become the locum tenens of the Russian throne. She declined the request - she would not like to interfere in political games and gave the evasive answer, "Nobody saw Nicky killed" and therefore there is a chance. She rendered financial support to the investigator Nikolai Sokolov who studied the circumstances of the death of the Tsar's family. They did not meet - at the last moment, Grand Duchess Olga sent a telegram to Paris requesting to cancel the appointment. It would be too difficult for the old and sick woman to hear the terrible story of her son and his family.