From his early childhood Konstantin Konstantinovich was more interested in letters, art, and music than in the military upbringing required for Romanov boys.

Konstantin Konstantinovich was unsatisfied, and left the navy to join the elite Izmailovsky Regiment of the Imperial Guard, where he served with distinction.

A talented pianist, the Grand Duke was Chairman of the Russian Musical Society, and counted Tchaikovsky among his closest friends.

The Grand Duke's artistic slavophilism and devotion to duty endeared him to both Alexander III and Nicholas II.

He was also made an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1902, with reference to his chairmanship of a Swedish-Russian surveying commission.

He was also a close friend of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna and wrote a poem about her expressing his admiration when she first came to Russia to be married.

He was also one of the few members of the Imperial Family to go to Moscow to attend the funeral of Elizabeth's husband, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who was killed by a terrorist's bomb.

The revised Family Law was intended to cut down on the number of persons entitled to salaries from the Imperial treasury.

Had it not been for the publication of Konstantin Konstantinovich's strikingly candid diaries long after his death, the world would have never known that this most prolific of Grand Dukes, the father of nine children, was tormented by his homosexual feelings.

Before leaving he kissed my face and hands; I should not have allowed this, and should have pushed him away, however I was punished afterwards by vague feelings of shame and remorse.

In Konstantin Konstantinovich's final years, he wrote of his homosexual urges less and less, whether from having reached some arrangement with his conscience, or from the natural advance of age and ill health.

The outbreak of World War I found Konstantin Konstantinovich and his spouse in Germany, where they were taking the cure in Wildungen.

Further information: Martyrs of AlapayevskThe Princes Ioann, Gavriil, Konstantin, and Igor were all arrested after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

Their bodies were recovered from an abandoned mine shaft by the White Army, and reburied in 1920 the Church of the Martyrs near Beijing, China.

Konstantin Konstantinovich's spouse and two youngest children, Prince George and Princess Vera, remained at Pavlovsk throughout the war, the chaotic rule of the Provisional Government, and after the October Revolution.

In the fall of 1918, they were permitted by the Bolsheviks to be taken by ship to Sweden (on the Ångermanland, via Tallinn to Helsinki and via Mariehamn to Stockholm), at the invitation of the Swedish queen.

Princess Vera lived in Germany until Soviet forces occupied the east part of the country, she fled to Hamburg and in 1951 she moved to United States and died there in 2001,[4] in Nyack, New York.