Foreign News: RUSSIA

Matters came to a head last week when the Bolshevik Government requested the banishment of the Dowager Empress of Russia, Marie Féodorovna, mother of the ill-fated Tsar Nicholas II.

Premier Stauning of Denmark informed the Russian Chargé d’Affaires that he declined in the name of the Nation to accede to the Bolshevik Government’s request. As the Dowager Empress has been living quietly in Denmark since 1917, and as she is a Danish princess, the refusal of the Premier was wholly comprehensible.

Princess Dagmar of Denmark left Denmark in 1866, at the age of 18, to marry the Tsarevitch at St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) under the name of Marie Féodorovna.

From 1881 to 1894, she was Empress of Russia as the consort of Alexander III, and during this time endeared herself much to the Russian people. After the death of Alexander she kept away from the Tsarskoe Selo (Village of the Tsar) and the Winter Palace, resided for the most part in Moscow.

The new Empress she had always disliked, principally because she was a German, and perhaps because she still harbored memories of the war of 1864, in which her father, King Christian IX, lost the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to the Austrians and Prussians. Later her abhorrence of the infamous Rasputin greatly augmented her detestation of the Imperial Court.

In 1917, after the abdication, she, like so many of the Imperial family, left the country secretly and returned to her native land, Denmark, where she has since been resident. When the ghastly news of the fate of the Tsar and his family convulsed the world with disgust and loathing for the Bolsheviki, she declined to believe that her son and his family were murdered. From that day to this, despite that unfortunate confirmation of the worst, she has remained steadfast in her belief that Tsar Nicholas still lives.

Thus, she will have nothing to do with the self-proclaimed Tsar, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovitch, first cousin of the late Tsar. To her, as to man}’ Russian royalists, he is merely the thoroughly despised “Cyrille Égalité,” the Prince who openly welcomed the Revolution after having plotted against the Tsar. With the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievitch, first cousin, once removed, of the late Tsar, she is on better terms and it is said that if she favored anybody for the succession it would be he.