In 1948, they emigrated to Canada as agricultural immigrants, but within four years of their arrival they had sold their farm and moved into a small suburban house.

[4] The Grand Duchess was already married to Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg, who was covertly believed by his friends and family to be homosexual.

[5] A few days after her brief meeting with Kulikovsky, Olga asked Oldenburg for a divorce, which he refused with the qualification that he would reconsider his decision after seven years.

[7] According to a fellow officer, gossip about a possible romance between Kulikovsky and the Grand Duchess, based on little more than their holding hands in public, spread through high society.

When their brother, Grand Duke Michael, eloped with his mistress, Natasha Wulfert, the Tsar and Olga were scandalized along with the rest of society.

[9] Michael was banished from Russia, and the likelihood of the Tsar ever granting Olga's divorce, or permitting her to marry a commoner, looked remote.

[18] As a commoner, Kulikovsky was permitted more freedom of movement than the Romanovs, and was occasionally able to leave the estate in a pony-cart, which allowed him to run errands, obtain food, and seek news of the outside.

[21] As newspapers were banned and letters infrequent, the Romanovs under house arrest knew little of the fate of Tsar Nicholas and his family.

[24] When Germany surrendered to the Allies of World War I in November 1918, the German troops evacuated, allowing the surviving members of the imperial family time to escape abroad.

The British warship HMS Marlborough rescued the Dowager Empress Marie and some of her family from the Crimea but Grand Duchess Olga and Kulikovsky decided to stay in Russia and travelled to the Caucasus region, where the Bolsheviks had been pushed back by the White Army.

[26] In the Caucasus, Kulikovsky took a job working on a farm as he was unable to secure a military posting in the White Army because the commanding general, Anton Denikin, wished to avoid association with the Romanovs.

[27] In a rented farmhouse at the large Cossack village of Novominskaya Olga and Kulikovsky's second son, Guri Nikolaievich, was born on 23 April 1919.

[35] In 1925, Kulikovsky accompanied his wife to a Berlin nursing home to meet Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Olga's niece, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.

As Olga's sons, Tikhon and Guri, served as officers in the Danish Royal 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.

[43] With the end of the war, Soviet troops occupied the easternmost part of Denmark, and Olga grew fearful of an assassination or kidnap attempt.

They were housed in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace while arrangements were made for their journey to Canada as agricultural immigrants.

Their sons had moved away; labour was hard to come by; Kulikovsky suffered increasing back pain and disability, and some of Olga's remaining jewellery was stolen.

[52] The farm was sold, and Kulikovsky, Olga, and Mimka, moved to a smaller 5-room house at 2130 Camilla Road, Cooksville, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto (now amalgamated into the city of Mississauga).

At the end of his life he was sleeping on the sofa in the living room of the couple's Cooksville house, to avoid waking his wife.