Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov. Graduate of the Academy of the General Staff, researcher of Asia, businessman, madman and kleptomaniac
Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov with his family (top right)
В previous article it was told about the youth of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov - the grandson of Nicholas I and the elder brother of the famous poet, who signed the initials K.R.
Today we will continue the story about Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, talk about his "treatment", extravagances, three wives, and successful business activities. And also about his granddaughter, Natalya Androsova, a motorcycle racer and participant in the Great Patriotic War, who in the second half of the XNUMXth century was very famous in the artistic and literary environment of Moscow, having been awarded the unofficial title of “Queen of the Arbat”.
"Treatment" of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich
As we remember, for stealing three diamonds from the salary of the icon, which his parents were blessed for marriage, Nikolai Konstantinovich was declared mentally ill and expelled from St. Petersburg forever. His name was now forbidden to be mentioned in official documents relating to the imperial family, and was deleted from the lists of the Horse Life Guards Regiment. He also lost titles, awards and inheritance rights.
Doctors recommended “to place His Highness in the southern climate of Russia” and engage him in agricultural activities - “beekeeping, sericulture, cattle breeding”, etc. In total, during his “treatment”, this Grand Duke changed 10 places of residence.
At first he was sent to Orenburg, he was accompanied by Lieutenant General Vitkovsky and doctor Timofeevsky. Here, in the winter of either 1877, or already 1878, he secretly married the 17-year-old daughter of the Orenburg police chief, Nadezhda Alexandrovna Dreyer, in the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Berdskaya. The synod recognized this morganatic marriage as illegal. Dreyer and his whole family were ordered to leave for Vologda, but the Grand Duke appeared at the station with a revolver in his hand and announced that he was ready to open fire - they say, I'm crazy, I still won't do anything. So the order of the Sovereign Emperor could not be fulfilled.
This marriage can hardly be called successful, because with a living wife, Nikolai Konstantinovich managed to get married with two more underage girls, but more on that later. In the meantime, everything went like in a fairy tale by Leonid Filatov:
“I admit my guilt.
Meru. Power. Depth
And ask me to send
On the current war.
No war - I will accept everything -
The link. Hard labor The prison.
But preferably in July,
And preferably in the Crimea.”
Meru. Power. Depth
And ask me to send
On the current war.
No war - I will accept everything -
The link. Hard labor The prison.
But preferably in July,
And preferably in the Crimea.”
The disgraced Grand Duke was sent to the Crimea, where they tried to treat him with “electricity sessions”, and he spent the rest of the time as follows: he slept until dinner, then read newspapers, then rode in a carriage and did gymnastic exercises on parallel bars, and also wrote a note “On relations of Emperor Paul I to the boyars. Then Nikolai was transferred to Samara, where in April 1880 he was again examined by Professor Balinsky and Dr. Dyukov, who had previously examined him.
At the insistence of Father Nicholas, Emperor Alexander II allowed the "sick" to move to the Pustynka estate, which was located about an hour's drive from the St. Petersburg Nikolaevsky railway station. He moved there in November 1880, where he was often visited by his younger brother Dmitry Konstantinovich and some other St. Petersburg aristocrats, and also periodically examined by I. M. Balinsky, mentioned above.
Nicholas tried to use the assassination of Alexander II (March 1, 1881) as an opportunity to return to Petersburg: he turned to his cousin Alexander III with a request to allow him to come to Petersburg in order to “pray to the ashes of the adored monarch”, and received the answer:
"How long I live, you will not see Petersburg."
This brought the disgraced Grand Duke out of himself, and he announced his refusal to swear allegiance to the new emperor, since "mad people are not sworn in."
And to Countess M. Kleinmichel, he said:
“I will put on the Order of St. Andrew, I will go out to the people, and the people will rise up and protect me.”
(Recall that he was officially deprived of all orders).
On March 28, 1881, Alexander III responded to these demarches of his cousin by ordering his arrest and placement in the Pavlovsk Fortress Mariental (BIP). However, it was soon recognized as undesirable "to put the Grand Duke now in the position of a state prisoner", since
“At the same time, legends will be created that will surround the Grand Duke with the halo of a martyr for the truth, perhaps a people’s mourner and intercessor, a hero of democratic institutions.”
And what would be better if Nikolai Konstantinovich were
"pity like an unfortunate patient, rather than sympathize and worship him like a victim."
As a result, in May 1881, a decision was made to transfer Nikolai to Turkestan, and he was ordered to be treated as "a private person, and not a member of the imperial house." He was ordered to live under the name of Colonel Volynsky, but later he arbitrarily appropriated the surname Iskander (with a hint of Alexander the Great, of course). Nadezhda Dreyer was allowed to accompany the Grand Duke. In 1899, another emperor, Nicholas II, granted this woman hereditary nobility and the surname Iskander.
N. K. Romanov (who here is very similar to Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov) and N. A. Dreyer
And the mother of the Grand Duke later sent him to Tashkent the very “Venus with an Apple”, which was described in the first article - a copy of the sculpture of Pauline Borghese with the face of Fanny Lear. Now this work by Tommaso Solari can be seen in the Tashkent State Museum of Art (and a smaller copy in the Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg). The Tashkent museum mentioned above also contains a collection of European and Russian paintings that belonged to Nikolai Konstantinovich.
Tashkent exile of Nikolai Konstantinovich
So, the disgraced Grand Duke was settled in Tashkent, and Alexander III allocated a huge sum of 300 rubles plus a monthly “disability pension” of 12 rubles for its arrangement. Let us point out for comparison that a skilled metallurgist at that time received 23–35 rubles a month, doctors and teachers - 80 rubles, a colonel - 325 rubles, a general in the position of commander of a division - 350 rubles, a governor - 1 rubles, a minister - 000 1 rubles. That is, the high-society dunce, who robbed his own parents, cost the Russian treasury like 500 ministers. There is nothing to say, but “Russia, which we have lost”, was good.
Tashkent Palace of Nikolai Konstantinovich on a postcard of 1909. In Soviet times, one of the museums was located here, and now it is used as a reception house of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan
Initially, Nikolai was not allowed to leave the city; in case of disobedience, the governor-general had the right to arrest him.
Later, he was forbidden to visit his seriously ill father. It was pointed out that “his arrival is not desirable and completely impossible,” and it was reported that Alexandra Iosifovna’s mother, younger brother Konstantin (a poet who published under the initials K. R., Nikolai’s official guardian) and sister Olga objected to the arrival.
I must say that in the future, Nikolai Konstantinovich, having received permission to leave Tashkent, organized several expeditions, financed irrigation work. Only on irrigated lands along the 100-kilometer Nikolaevsky (Romanovsky) Canal, by 1913, 113 (and according to other sources - even 119) Russian settlements and 2 estates of his personal estate "Golden Horde" were built (there were 10 estates in total). Investments in the construction of this grandiose hydraulic structure amounted to about one million rubles.
Canal in the Turkestan steppe
In Tashkent, through the efforts of Nikolai Konstantinovich, a zoo, a hospital for the poor and an almshouse were opened. He also established 10 scholarships for immigrants from Turkestan - for their study at Russian universities. The Grand Duke published a book in which it was proved that the Amu Darya changed the direction of its flow more than once and the reason was the economic activity of the local population (probably, a highly qualified specialist, whose name remained unknown, helped him in working on this book).
It turned out that the Grand Duke has good entrepreneurial skills. He cultivated cotton and built a cotton gin in Tashkent. He also owned the “Bazaars of the Grand Duke in the Hungry Steppe” (along the railway line), a soap factory, a kvass production enterprise, billiard halls, photo workshops, a circus, the first Khiva cinema in Tashkent and ... a brothel with a very peculiar name - “ Grandma's." I wonder which of his grandmothers he had in mind? All these enterprises, which brought a total income of up to 1,4 million rubles a year, were registered in the name of N. Dreyer.
But at the same time, the Grand Duke continued to play weird, constantly giving rise to gossip and extremely annoying with his extravagant, and often simply scandalous antics of relatives in St. Petersburg. So, in his luxurious palace, he occupied only one room with a low ceiling, in which half a dozen dogs were constantly with him, and he slept with them right on the floor. The barber ordered to shave his entire body - from the crown to the heels.
In the meantime, he seduced the minor daughter of Colonel Berkhman. In 1895, with his living wife, he married a 15-year-old Cossack girl Daria Eliseevna Chasovitina, and in 1900 he also married a 16-year-old high school student Valeria Khmelnitskaya. This "marriage" was the last straw. A special commission was sent to Tashkent to deal with the "arts" of Nikolai, which included psychiatrists P. Rosenbach, assistant professor at the Imperial Military Medical Academy, and V. Hardin, director of the Tvorkovskaya psychiatric hospital. The medical examination lasted 6 weeks, the conclusions were as follows:
“Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich is currently discovering the phenomena of a mental disorder in the form of a degenerative psychosis with a dulling of moral feelings ... There is no hope for the possibility of healing the Grand Duke, he cannot be given complete freedom, since the disease approaches in its form and degree to the care of a minor subject."
The doctors' diagnosis was as follows: "Folie morale" - "moral madness." At present, one would probably talk about pronounced psychopathy and sociopathy. Some believe that the cause of the periodic inappropriate behavior of the Grand Duke could be a manic-depressive syndrome.
The marriage of Nikolai with Khmelnitskaya was annulled, her family was deported to Tiflis, the Grand Duke was first transferred to Tver, then to Balaklava, but there he began to threaten "to flee to England to his friend King Edward." In 1904 he had to be sent to Stavropol. Only in 1906, thanks to the efforts of his sister Olga Konstantinovna, who became the Queen of Greece, he was allowed to return to his beloved Tashkent. Here he enthusiastically received the news of the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II: he ordered the red flag to be raised over the palace and sent a telegram of congratulations to the Provisional Government, which was "reproduced in all the newspapers."
Another member of the Romanov dynasty who betrayed his dynasty was the Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, who personally appeared at the residence of the Provisional Government with a red bow and, according to the testimony of the palace commandant V. N. Voeikov, told Duma Chairman M. V. Rodzianko:
“I have the honor to appear to Your Excellency. I am at your disposal, as are all the people. I wish the good of Russia."
And he assured that the Guards subordinate to him naval the crew will comply with all orders of the new government. He later self-proclaimed himself emperor in Munich. However, according to the laws of the Russian Empire, Kirill Vladimirovich had no right to the throne, since he was married to a divorced Lutheran cousin, Nicholas II even intended to deprive him of the rights of a member of the imperial family.
It was his impostor great-grandson, with the connivance of the St. Petersburg authorities, on October 1, 2021, scandalously married in St. Isaac's Cathedral with a certain Rebecca Bettarini, which caused clear associations with the plot of the film "The Crown of the Russian Empire". Many were shocked by the long veil of the bride with the image of the imperial double-headed eagle, which dragged along the ground and asphalt.
But back to Nikolai Konstantinovich and his wife.
The disgraced Grand Duke died of pneumonia after the establishment of Soviet power in Turkestan - on January 27, 1918. His morganatic wife N. A. Dreyer remained in Tashkent. They argue about the date of her death, most often they call 1929, it is believed that she died from the bite of a stray dog. The Swiss writer Ellie Meilart recalled meeting her at a bazaar in Soviet Tashkent:
“It was not possible to interview the wife of the Grand Duke. Her wavy hair was covered with a scarf, and her old face was powdered. The princess moved from counter to counter with a displeased look and an inquisitorial look. The princess was dressed in a gray jacket of excellent quality and a white dress with a selection, she leaned on an umbrella like a crutch, carrying a briefcase at hand. I could not take my eyes off her, but the Princess did not notice me. The princess did not buy anything, but only became more indignant because of the price of grapes.
But Meilart managed to take a photograph, which she placed in her book "Turkestan Solo":
N. A. Dreyer at the Tashkent Bazaar
"Queen of the Arbat"
The two sons of Nadezhda Dreyer and Nikolai Konstantinovich have special traces in stories have not left. The elder Artemy died in exile, the younger Nikolai died during the Civil War. But the youngest daughter of Nikolai, who was born in 1917, was a very famous lady in the USSR, albeit "in narrow circles."
Natalya Nikolaevna Androsova (the surname of her stepfather) became a master of sports in motorcycle racing and in the pre-war years she performed in the Moscow Gorky Park with the attraction “motor racing along a vertical wall”. She was seriously injured more than once, but sat on a motorcycle until 1967.
N. Androsova-Iskander
During the war she worked as a lorry driver. She carried bread to the front line, and sometimes snow for the construction of defensive barriers. At night, she was on duty on the roofs - extinguishing incendiary bombs. After the war, she married film director N.V. Dostal, whose most famous film is probably the film “We met somewhere” (filmed together with A.P. Tutyshkin) with A. Raikin in the title role.
In 1959, her husband died on the set of the film Everything Starts on the Road. She raised her husband's adopted children - these are directors V. N. Dostal (much better known as a successful producer) and N. N. Dostal (also a screenwriter and actor). N. Androsova had extensive connections in the artistic and literary environment, was friends with A. Vertinsky, E. Yevtushenko, A. Voznesensky, Yu. Nikulin, Yu. Nagibin, A. Galich, she was even called the “Queen of the Arbat”. Nagibin wrote about her:
“Which of the old Muscovites does not remember the legendary Natalya Androsova, who shook the wooden pavilion in the Park of Culture and Leisure with her frenzied motorcycle? The fearless beauty became the queen of the old Arbat, where she lived in the basement, only with the arrival of Bulat Okudzhava did the dual kingdom begin.
Natalya Androsova-Iskander, 1950s
She died in July 1999 and was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
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