Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia (Olga Alexandrovna Romanova, Ольга Александровна Романова ) (June 13, 1882 - November 24, 1960) was a Grand Duchess of Russia and the younger sister of Russian Tsar Nikolai II.

Born on June 13, 1882 in Alexandria Palace , Peterhof, Russia, she was the youngest daughter of Tsar Alexander III and his empress, Maria Fyodorovna, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark.

At age 19 her marriage was arranged to Prince Peter of Oldenburg but it ended in divorce. During World War I, she worked as a medical nurse on the Russian front and would marry Captain Nikolai Kulikovsky in November 1916, with whom she would have two sons, Tikhon and Guri.

Like her father, the Tsar, Olga preferred a quiet life to the grand banquets and lavish entertaining of the nobility. She played the violin and painted as a hobby for most of her life. After the 1917 Revolution, stripped of most of their possessions, she and her husband fled Russia, living in Denmark until 1948. They lived with her mother until her mother's death in 1928. While there, in 1925, Olga traveled to Berlin, Germany to identify the woman claiming to be Anastasia, daughter of her brother, the Tsar Nikolai II. Olga, after changing her mind numerous times, eventually decided that the woman, Anna Anderson, was not her niece, saying that "she is not who she believes herself to be."

Following World War II, Stalin's propaganda machine declared that Grand Duchess Olga had conspired with Germany against Russia during the war. With threats against her life, amidst the rising tensions of the Cold War, in 1948 she and her husband left Denmark, moving to Canada.

No longer young, she was 66, when she and her husband bought a rural property about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of the city of Toronto, Ontario. Although she lived with the horrific memories of her brother and his entire family's murder, Olga never lived with any delusions of grandeur or dreams of a Romanov return to power. When her husband passed away in 1958, she moved to a small house in Toronto where she died in near poverty on November 24, 1960. She is interred next to her husband in the York Cemetery, Toronto.

The funeral for the last Grand Duchess of Russia was attended by numerous Russian immigrants to Canada who arranged a dignified guard of honor.

Web Links

• The Kulikovsky Family Web site of the descendants of the Grand Duchess Olga.