The story of her marriage was one of the scandals of the time: her husband, Prince Peter of Oldenburg, was a Romanov cousin, widely believed to be homosexual. Her account is somewhat discreet, but the marriage was probably never consummated and she soon fell in love with a young officer, Nikolai Kulikovsky. Their relationship fascinated the imperial court, especially when the husband appointed the lover his ADC. A touching moment comes when Olga is finally granted permission to marry Kulikovsky, who was to remain the love of her life and by whom she had two sons. (The book’s editor is her great-grandson, who fills in the facts behind her reminiscences.)

She seems distant from politics, but she did meet Rasputin who struck her simply at a ‘typical peasant’. She writes:

The news that a revolution had broken out in St Petersburg came to those of us who worked in our hospital in Kiev like a veritable thunderbolt. We hadn’t heard a word, not even a rumour … we read the news over and over again and did not want to believe our eyes … None of us could foresee how it would disrupt our lives.

Olga certainly had a gift for understatement. The revolutionaries executed not only her brother Nicholas and his family, but Michael too, and many other Romanovs, including their widowed aunt, the Grand Duchess Ella, who had entered a convent after her own husband’s assassination in 1905. Olga escaped to the Crimea where she was variously harassed and protected. Finally she fled to Denmark, where these memoirs were written and first published. She lived through the second world war but, fearful of Stalin’s secret police, ended her days in Canada, dying in 1960.

This book is best read in conjuction with Nicholas and Alexandra’s letters, with Dominic Lieven’s life of Nicholas II, and the superb Court of the Last Tsar by Greg King. It will be most thoroughly enjoyed by connoisseurs of the private lives of the Romanovs.

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