Princess Vera was eight years old when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated and World War I broke out, in the summer of 1914.

Vera was with her parents and her brother George in Germany visiting her maternal relatives in Altenburg at the start of the war.

[3] Vera's older siblings joined the Russian army in the military effort, and her favorite brother Oleg was killed in action.

In a letter to her brother, she later described how she was sitting with her father in his study, when Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich began gasping.

[2] During the chaotic rule of the Provisional Government, and after the October Revolution, Princess Vera, her mother, and her brother George, remained at Pavlovsk.

[2] From Kronstadt twelve-year-old Princess Vera escaped to Sweden aboard the Swedish vessel Ångermanland in October 1918 with her mother, her brother George, and her young nephews (Prince Teymuraz Constantinovich and Prince Vsevolod Ivanovich of Russia) and nieces (Princess Natalia Konstantinovna Bagration-Mukhransky and Princess Catherine Ivanovna of Russia) when they were permitted by the Bolsheviks to be taken by ship to Sweden, via Tallinn to Helsinki and via Mariehamn to Stockholm, at the invitation of Queen Victoria of Sweden.

As Sweden proved too expensive to live in, Elizabeth Mavrikievna wrote a letter to Albert I of Belgium, asking him to allow them to move to his country.

Princess Vera followed her mother half a year later after spending sometime in Oberstdorf in the Allgäu region of the Bavarian Alps recuperating from tuberculosis.

Left alone and without sufficient means of subsistence, Vera Constantinovna moved to Bavaria, with friends and shortly after relocated to London with her brother George.

[2] On hearing that, according to the Potsdam Conference, Altenburg was going to be part of the zone of Soviet occupation, Princess Vera fled on foot.

[2] With her cousin, Prince Ernst-Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, she had to walk 240 kilometers in 12 days, fleeing the advancing Soviet troops.

[6] In 1951 she moved to the United States,[6] where her main activity was to work for the Tolstoy Foundation, which provided aid to Russians in need.

Princess Vera wrote four short articles about her life for a magazine "Kadetskaya pereklichka" published by Union of the Russian Kadets in New York in 1972.

Princess Vera retained a certain aura of living history, being the last surviving member of the Romanov family who could remember Imperial Russia.

Princess Vera died at the Tolstoy Foundation's elderly care home in Valley Cottage, New York, on 11 January 2001, at the age of 94.

She was buried next to her brother Prince Georgy Konstantinovich at the cemetery of the Russian Orthodox Monastery of Novo-Diveevo in Nanuet, New York.