She was advanced by Vladimir and their daughter, Maria Vladimirovna, to be accepted as the legitimate Heads of the Romanov dynasty and de jure sovereigns of the Russian Empire.

The other ancestral line derives through the marriage of another of the king's daughters, Princess Tamara, to Ioane Bagrationi, 18th Prince of Mukhrani.

[2] Fearing for their lives, the family took refuge in Constantinople, then spent eight months in Germany before returning to Tbilisi, now capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, to re-claim a portion of property which, as émigrés they risked losing to total confiscation.

[2] Although the family made repairs to their home and Leonida would recall her grandfather's insistence that they continue to dine formally on silver plate to retain their sense of propriety, they were eventually deprived of all but two rooms of their old palace and subjected to harassment.

Vladimir was staying with his aunt, the Princess Beatrice, Duchess of Galliera, a first cousin of both the murdered Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.

[7] In 1946, Leonida's brother, Prince Irakly, married King Alfonso XIII of Spain's maternal niece, Princess Doña María de las Mercedes de Baviera y Borbon (1911–1953), obtaining Vladimir's recommendation that the Spanish pretender, Don Juan, Count of Barcelona, would accept the marriage as dynastic, which he did not.

In 1948 Vladimir, relying on his own earlier advice on the Bagrations' historically royal status,[8] chose to wed Leonida dynastically in Lausanne, Switzerland.

[citation needed] Leonida accompanied her husband when he made his only visit to Russia in November 1991, following the implosion of the Soviet Union.

But she did not attend the much-publicized 2009 wedding of her grand-nephew, Prince David Bagration of Mukhrani to Princess Ana Bagration-Gruzinsky, the heiress of King George XII of Georgia, celebrated at the restored Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi.

Nor did she re-locate her home from western Europe to Russia, although she visited the country repeatedly following her husband's funeral and burial in Saint Petersburg.