quote:

Russia has held its first royal wedding since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution toppled the Romanov monarchy, with royals from across Europe attending the lavish ceremony in the city of St. Petersburg.

Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov, 40, tied the knot with his 39-year-old Italian fiancee, Rebecca Virginia Bettarini, at St. Isaac's Cathedral in the presence of dozens of royals.

Looks like a video of the entire ceremony is included. Didn't watch the whole thing but it starts with some great Russian Orthodox church music....groom definitely has the Tsar Nicholas II/King George V look.....

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia...edding/31488187.html

That was pretty cool. Thanks for posting! Fun fact: the wedding is official following the crowning, not the rings or the kiss.

How did Romanovs maintain or acquire wealth? Any history buffs?

Russian society operated under a serfdom, with the Emperor/Empress (Romanovs) at the very top of the pyramid. There wasn't really a distinction between state money and personal money as far as the emperor was concerned. It was a "trickle up" economy, where the serfs worked the land and lived in abject poverty, and the profits were given to the landowners and on up. This was one of the key reasons why Tsarist Russia was so receptive to communism. (And, in my opinion, a bit of a cautionary tale for us today.)

Russia was also immense, with a lot of natural resources. Their wealth came from agriculture, land value itself, industry (all of which was taxed at something like 25%, which went directly into the state/emperor treasury), and jewelry.

My question should have been how did they get themselves and their money past the revolutionaries? Have they been living in Russia since 1917?
Finding more of the story of the imprisonment of the Nicholas and his family and their murder. I suppose a cousin or two got out. Still looking.

Oh, got it. I'm honestly not sure about modern Romanovs, but I assume they stashed some of their money in foreign banks and hid some jewelry?

Certainly the Bolsheviks took most of it in 1917. I remember reading a book about the woman who claimed to be Anastasia (later debunked using DNA), and a portion of that book, if I'm remembering correctly, said that a lot of Romanov money in the form of gold was smuggled out when it became clear that Nicholas and Alexandra were going to abdicate.

"At the time of the executions, about a dozen Romanov relatives were known to have escaped the Bolsheviks, including Maria Feodorovna, the mother of Czar Nicholas II, her daughters Xenia and Olga, and their husbands. Of the 53 Romanovs who were alive in 1917, it’s estimated that only 35 remained alive by 1920." https://www.history.com/news/r...nts-imposters-claims

Was surprised that the wedding was permitted to occur in Russia.

Here's your expert on the Romanovs:

Robert K Massie

And The Lost Fortune of the Tsars by William Clarke

More than you ever wanted to know. Somebody got some money out. Some of the descendants are not exactly living in obscurity.

"Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster

A descendant of Czar Michael I, the duke inherited a fortune worth some $12 billion at the age of 25, becoming one of the world’s youngest billionaires when his father died in 2016. The duke is godfather to Prince George, who is currently third in line to the British throne. The duke is also descended from the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who squared off against Nicholas I during the latter’s reactionary reign." Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster. https://www.history.com/news/r...nts-imposters-claims

"BILLIONS, billions, who's got the billions? The gold, jewels, land, cash, art and palaces of the Russian imperial family had an estimated value of over $45 billion when the House of Romanov fell in 1917. A great deal of that wealth can be easily accounted for -- the Bolsheviks grabbed it. But enough to make dozens of people gloriously rich eluded their grasp and has been sought and claimed ever since."

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/0...ke-it-with-them.html

"The family still had a fortune in diamonds sewn into the underclothes of the Grand Duchesses, but that only added irony to horror: during their executions, bullets ricocheted off the diamonds and the poor girls had to be finished off with rifle butts and bayonets."

"But as Mr. Clarke recounts in "Fortune," the third and most fascinating section of his book, the real missing wealth was not in art, jewels or cash in foreign banks but in a billion dollars' worth of gold, some of which was en route to the Remington Arms Company to buy weapons for the White Army battling the Reds during the civil war that began in 1918. Bullion and billions have a way of disappearing in Russia. In 1914 Russia held the world's largest gold stock, but it had essentially run out of gold by late 1921. Something similar occurred at the end of the Soviet era "when the total gold and currency reserves dropped from $11 billion to zero in less than 18 months," Mr. Clarke writes. "Only $7 billion of this recent drain could be accounted for by normal trade transactions. The whereabouts of the remaining $4 billion remains a mystery."


Reminded me of the $$$$ that seems to have vanished during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Robert Ludlum or the like should write a thriller about the
fleeing Romanovs and a fictional British agent that gets a cut of the gold
for helping them.