AFTER Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was assassinated by Marxist revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev on 18th February 1905, his widow Elizabeth, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and the Tsar’s sister-in-law, went to see Kalyayev in jail.

Elizabeth understood only too well the grievances of Russia’s people. Her husband had once expelled twenty thousand Jews from the capital, and Elizabeth had warned him that such actions could only bring grief to their country, and to themselves.

But she understood, too, the futility of violence. She hoped that if Kalyayev would renounce it, her brother-in-law, the Tsar, might be persuaded to pardon him, and break the cycle. But Kalyayev was defiant.

Widowed and childless, Elizabeth now sold her possessions to found a convent and become a nun, nursing the sick and assisting the poor in Moscow’s slums.

But in 1917, the violence broke out again. Kalyayev’s Marxist confederates overthrew Tsar Nicholas, and took him, his wife Alix, who was Elizabeth’s younger sister, and their five children prisoner.