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Irina’s father, the Grand Duke, was struck by the spectacle of the 1903 ball and how such an ostentatious show of wealth was perceived by the impoverished Russian people. One wonders what he thought of the lavishness of his daughter’s wedding.

Princess Irina wore Marie Antionette’s lace wedding veil and a tiara that was commissioned from Cartier. She broke tradition by wearing a modern wedding dress rather than a court dress. The Tsar himself gave the bride away at the ceremony.

Among the wedding gifts were a number of precious stones, including the tsar’s gift of 29 diamonds, ranging from three to seven carats. I did a little research on this. A diamond’s cost varies according to many factors like clarity and color.

In today’s dollars, the per carat cost ranges from $11,000 to $172,000, making each diamond range in value from $33,000 to $1.2 million.

Scarcely four months after the wedding, on June 28, a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo and the Great War erupted.

Felix was afraid to go to war. He managed to dodge military service because he was the only son. Like many countries, Russia had a law that exempted only sons from the service. Instead, the prince took a course in officer training but didn’t hide the fact he had no intention of joining the military.

Irina’s cousin and old friend Olga visited the couple in March of 1915, when Irina was pregnant. The Grand Duchess disliked her cousin’s new husband. She wrote that to her father about the impression he had made on her. “Felix is a downright civilian, dressed all in brown, walked to and fro about the room, searching in some bookcases with magazines and virtually doing nothing; an utterly unpleasant impression he makes—a man idling in such times.”

Olga’s disdain for Felix may have been due to the suffering she had personally witnessed. She and her sister, the Grand Duchess Tatiana, served as nurses with their mother, the Tsarina Alexandra during the early part of the war.

Princess Irina Felixovna Yusupova, Felix and Irina’s only child, was born on March 21, 1915. The joy that the birth of the child occasioned was a short respite from the troubles roiling Russia.

Princess Irina and her family existed in unchanged splendor, insulated from the horrors of war. But outside the walls of Moika Palace, the old Russia was passing away. The streets of St. Petersburg—now renamed Petrograd—no longer teemed with tradesmen. Most of them had gone to fight, leaving their wives, children, and elderly parents behind to the ravages of cold and hunger. The men in the streets were soldiers, including the wounded and convalescent.

At the urging of the Romanovs’ spiritual advisor, the tsar went to the front to take charge of the Russian army. Nature intended the mild-mannered Nicholas to be a country gentleman. He was ill-suited to lead a military operation, knowing next to nothing about strategy or practical day to day matters.

The tsar and his wife had never been popular. Alexandra was German by birth and, once the war was underway, people wondered were her loyalty lay.  The Romanovs didn’t understand the people they ruled over. They had no idea what their lives were like. Starvation, cold, and overwork were beyond the scope of their imagination.

The people were more charitable toward Nicholas’ blunders on the battlefield than his wife’s conduct at home. The spiritual advisor who directed Nicholas to lead the army remained in Petrograd and was a frequent visitor to the palace.

He was a Siberian peasant named Grigori Yefemovich, called Rasputin. He had a scandalous reputation which he lived up to at every possible opportunity. The lecherous Rasputin’s mysterious closeness to the tsarina was the subject of many rumors. When Rasputin bragged that he was directing state affairs, people were outraged.

All of this had nothing to do with Irina until her father-in-law, who was serving as the governor of Moscow, set a chain of events into motion. Troubled by rumors about Rasputin and the tsarina, Felix’s father wrote to Nicholas and urged him to order Rasputin off. The tsar fired him for his trouble. Felix was beside himself with anger.

By early 1916, the misery Irina’s father had foreseen—the new and hostile Russia—was upon them.

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