[1] The Russian imperial family was a frequent target for assassins, so for safety reasons the Grand Duchess was raised at the country palace of Gatchina, about 50 miles (80 km) west of Saint Petersburg.

Survivors claimed the Tsar crawled out from beneath the crushed roof, and held it up with "a Herculean effort" so that the others could escape;[3] a story subsequently considered unbelievable.

once my father showed me a very old album full of most exciting pen and ink sketches of an imaginary city called Mopsopolis, inhabited by Mopses [pug dogs].

[21] Peter asked for Olga's hand in marriage the following year, a proposal that took the Grand Duchess completely by surprise: "I was so taken aback that all I could say was 'thank you'," she later explained.

[22] Their engagement, announced in May 1901, surprised family and friends, as Peter had shown no prior interest in women,[18] and members of society assumed he was homosexual.

[26] Biographer Patricia Phenix thought Olga may have accepted his proposal to gain independence from her own mother, the Dowager Empress, or to avoid marriage into a foreign court.

[24] Olga took a dislike to her mother-in-law; although Eugénie, a close friend of the Dowager Empress, gave her daughter-in-law many gifts, including a ruby tiara that Napoleon had given as a present to Joséphine de Beauharnais.

[24] A few weeks after the wedding Olga and her husband travelled to Biarritz, France, from where they sailed to Sorrento, Italy, on a yacht loaned to them by King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

[28] In April 1903, during a royal military review at Pavlovsk Palace, Olga's brother Michael introduced her to a Blue Cuirassier Guards officer, Nikolai Kulikovsky.

9 January] 1905), Cossack troops killed at least 92 people during a demonstration,[45] and a month later Olga's uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, was assassinated.

[48] The public unrest, Michael's elopement, and Olga's sham marriage placed her under strain, and in 1912, while visiting England with her mother, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

[51] On 1 August 1914, with World War I looming, Olga's regiment, the Akhtyrsky Hussars, appeared at an Imperial Review before her and the Tsar at Krasnoe Selo.

[19] With the Grand Duchess's prior medical knowledge from the village of Olgino, she started work as a nurse at an under-staffed Red Cross hospital in Rovno, near to where her own regiment was stationed.

[19] As the Russians lost ground to the Central Powers, Olga's hospital was moved eastwards to Kiev,[54] and Michael returned to Russia from exile abroad.

[55] In 1916, Tsar Nicholas II annulled the marriage between Duke Peter Alexandrovich and the Grand Duchess, allowing her to marry Colonel Kulikovsky.

Allied forces took over the Crimean ports, in support of the loyalist White Army, which allowed the surviving members of the Romanov family time to escape abroad.

Just ahead of revolutionary troops, they escaped to Novorossiysk and took refuge in the residence of the Danish consul, Thomas Schytte, who informed them of the Dowager Empress's safe arrival in Denmark.

[65] After a brief stay with the consul, the family was shipped to a refugee camp on the island of Büyükada in the Dardanelles Strait near Istanbul, Turkey, where Olga, her husband and children shared three rooms with eleven other adults.

Olga thought the story "palpably false",[69] since Anderson made no attempt to approach Queen Marie of Romania (first cousin of both of Anastasia's parents), during her entire alleged time in Bucharest.

[69]Anderson stated she was in Berlin to inform Princess Irene of Prussia (sister of Tsarina Alexandra and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II) of her survival.

My own conviction is that it all started with some unscrupulous people who hoped they might lay their hands on at least a share of the fabulous and utterly non-existent Romanov fortune ...

[74] Anderson's biographer and supporter Peter Kurth claimed that Olga wrote to the Danish ambassador, Herluf Zahle, at the end of October 1925: "My feeling is that she is not the one she believes—but one can't say she is not as a fact".

As Olga's sons, Tikhon and Guri, served as officers in the Danish Army, they were interned as prisoners of war, but their imprisonment in a Copenhagen hotel lasted less than two months.

Despite her sons' internment and her mother's Danish origins, Olga was implicated in her compatriots' collusion with German forces, as she continued to meet and extend help to Russian émigrés fighting against communism.

[95] The surviving Romanovs in Denmark grew fearful of an assassination or kidnap attempt,[96] and Olga decided to move her family across the Atlantic to the relative safety of rural Canada.

[103] The farm was sold, and Olga, her husband and her former maid, Mimka, moved to a smaller five-room house at 2130 Camilla Road, Cooksville, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto now amalgamated into Mississauga.

Unable to care for herself, Olga went to stay with Russian émigré friends, Konstantin and Sinaida Martemianoff, in an apartment above a beauty salon at 716 Gerrard Street East, Toronto.

[116] Although she lived simply, bought cheap clothes, and did her own shopping and gardening, her estate was valued at more than 200,000 Canadian dollars (about C$2.03 million in 2023[117]) and was mostly held as stock and bonds.

Besides her numerous landscapes and flower pictures that reveal her inherent love for nature, she often also dwells on scenes from simple daily life ... executed with a sensitive eye for composition, expression and detail.

Her work exudes peace, serenity and a spirit of love that mirror her own character, in total contrast to the suffering she experienced through most of her life.