His mother was his father's mistress, Olga Valerianovna Karnovich, who was still married to Erich Gerhard von Pistohlkors at that time.

[1] In 1902, Grand Duke Paul—-a widower after his short marriage to Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark, with whom he had two children before her premature death in childbirth-—wed Olga morganatically.

He spent his childhood in Paris and later graduated from the Corps des Pages, an aristocratic military school in Saint Petersburg.

[citation needed] In December 1914, he entered the regiment of the Emperor’s Hussars and fought with the Russian army in the First World War.

[citation needed] In the summer of 1917, he and his family were placed for a short time under house arrest by the Provisional Government, because of a poem he wrote about Aleksandr Kerensky.

They were brought and buried months later at the Russian Mission Orthodox cemetery in Beijing, China, the site of which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and is now a parking area.

His elder half-sister Maria described him extensively in her memoirs: "Volodia was an extraordinary being, a living instrument of rare sensitiveness which could of itself produce sounds of startling melody and purity and create a world of bright images and harmonies.