RE: The Russian-language DVD by V. Motsardo on Queen Olga of Greece (née Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna) produced in 2006.
I also found it on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmjnzO3myZ4Perhaps this two-hour film has already been discussed here on the Forum, but I finally watched the DVD only recently. I thought that it was well done, and that it did a good job of resurrecting her memory for those in Russia. (It’s a pity that they didn’t put out a Greek or English version.) The film often cites the correspondence and diaries of Queen Olga, thus allowing the viewer to ‘hear her voice’.
Two episodes in the film revealed facts that I had not known before.
1)
In 1918, Prince George of Greece secretly made a trip to Russia in order to visit his mother, Queen Olga, who had remained there at the outbreak of WW I. (Queen Olga had tried to dissuade him from making the dangerous journey.) Prince George arrived on the eve of the Bolsheviks’ October coup d'etat. Being under the impression that the Russian Imperial family had been transferred to Moscow, Prince George traveled there from Petrograd. Once in Moscow, he discovered that they had actually been sent to Tobolsk. From Moscow he wrote to Queen Olga his observations on the horrors and destruction wrought by the Revolution. He thought of going to Tobolsk, but reconsidered, since the rumor was that the Imperial family would only be there temporarily, until they could be brought back to Moscow for a ‘trial’. He commented that it was impossible to know what to believe in the face of the many rumors and lies then circulating.
2)
Queen Olga of Greece and Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna were sisters-in-law and close friends. After the Revolution, both being in exile, they continued their correspondence of many years. The film cites the text of a letter written to Queen Olga by the Dowager Empress in the 1920s, in which Maria Feodorovna states that if God wills that she should die there, i.e., abroad and in exile, then she “does not wish in any way that her remains be taken to that land where such crimes were committed against her loved ones”.
Of course, one could argue that when her remains were finally returned and buried next to those of Tsar Alexander III, the land was no longer the USSR, but Russia again — yet one wonders how she would have felt about it all…
