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English. Size: 8-1/2″ x 5-1/2″. 231 pages.

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NOTE: this book was originally published in 2021. This NEW 2026 edition features a beautiful sepia-colour cover and is available in a hard cover edition for the first time.

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Rumour was busy in her lifetime with amazing tales about the late Empress of Russia; how much or little truth lay behind such rumours was known only to her few closest friends, and one of the few was Lili Dehn (1888-1963).

Great-granddaughter of Prince Koutousoff, the famous defender of Moscow against Napoleon I, Lili Dehn was admitted, after her presentation at Court, into the home circle of the Tsaritsa, and a great friendship grew up between them. Her study of the Empress’s personality, habits, views, life as she led it, is intimate and illuminating.

Here is the truth about Rasputin, with new light on the legend of his alleged “power over” the Imperial Household, the inner reason for the scandalous reports circulated concerning him and the Empress, and a grim, enthralling account of his death and burial. Lili Dehn was the first person to whom the Empress came with the news of the Tsar’s abdication, and she witnessed his return after that supreme humiliation.

There are dramatic elements in the narrative of the early days of the 1917 Revolution; life at Tsarskoye Selo while the Tsar and his family were under house arrest in the Alexander Palace; and in the record of the writer’s own imprisonment and adventurous escape. The interest of the book is intensified by the letters written to Lili Dehn by the Tsaritsa from captivity in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. This revelation at first hand of the whole tragedy of the Empress, as a wife and a mother, and of all that led to the downfall of a great dynasty, makes a profoundly human appeal.

PHOTO: Lili Dehn with Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Crimea. 1913

Lili Dehn reflects on Russia’s much slandered Empress

“The first idea of writing this book occurred to me some time after my arrival in England. I had always known that the Empress had been grossly misrepresented in Russia, but I had not attached much importance to the fact, as I had seen the Revolutionary propaganda, and I fully realized the methods of the Revolutionaries in relation to the Imperial Family. I was, however, astonished and horrified to discover that the same ideas were current in the broad-minded and enlightened country which has afforded me and so many other fugitives such kindly sanctuary.

“If possible, I think the Empress has been more universally condemned in England than in Russia. I have scarcely heard her name mentioned without its being coupled with the degrading attributes of treachery, sensualism, hysteria, and religious mania. To one who knew her intimately and who loved her devotedly, such a state of things is unspeakably painful. I accidentally saw a film which was the grossest libel on her character and her personality, the mind of the producer having been apparently bent upon presenting the Empress as a combination of the chief forms of lurid wickedness which appeal to patrons of the cinema. I have also read novels about her which, whilst enraging me as mendacious chronicles, have considerably enlightened me as to the capacity for invention of which the human imagination is capable. More serious works have condemned the Empress in a courteous manner, but they have been none the less scathing in their judgment. Some writers, after the story of Ekaterinburg was authentically given to the world, have been more tolerant and more pitying in their censure, but it has been always censure. Therefore, in the face of such hatred and contempt for one at whose hands I have received nothing but kindness and love, I determined to write my impressions of the Empress as I knew her, both in the happy days and afterwards in those of war and unrest during the first dark weeks of the Revolution.

I reasoned, I trust with justice, that although the majority of people are always ready to believe the worst of anyone, there must be others who, in the spirit of fair play, would be willing to look on the reverse side of the picture. There must surely be friends and relations in England who would welcome facts which proved that the Empress had been true to her English upbringing and to the traditional right living of the descendants of Queen Victoria. English people seem to have forgotten, when the Empress was vilified on the screen and in cold type, that she was the daughter of Princess Alice, a name which is associated with all that is noblest and best in woman, a name which alone, one might have thought, would have pleaded for that of her daughter. But nothing protected her, not even the facts that her first cousin was King of England and that one of her sisters was married and living in this country. I knew the almost impossible task of rehabilitation which lay before me, but, as the task daily assumed greater proportions, love and pity for my beloved friend urged me to attempt.”

The Real Tsaritsa by Lili Dehn was first published in English in April 1922 in London by Thornton Butterworth Ltd., followed by a US edition later that year from Little, Brown and Company.

PHOTO: Lili Dehn (left), Anna Vyrubova (center) and Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna (right), having tea at Vyrobova’s house in Tsarskoye Selo .1907

Who was Lili Dehn?

Lili Dehn (born Yulia Alexandrovna Smolskaia; 1888–1963) was a Russian aristocrat, memoirist, and close personal friend of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna during the final years of the Russian Empire.

Lili was born on 9th August (O.S. 27th July) 1888, at the family estate in southern Russia, Revovka, the home of her ancestor General Mikhail Kutuzov, victor over Napoleon in the invasion of Russia in 1812. Her parents were Ismail Selim Bek Smolsky and Catherine Horvat. Both sides of her family had a long history in Russia. Her parents divorced when she was eleven and her mother later remarried. Her maternal grandmother then helped raise Lili.

Lili was educated by tutors at home and understood very little Russian as a child because her family spoke French. When she was a young girl, she loved listening to the popular stories of old Russia told by her maternal grandmother and her childhood nanny. Later she had an English governess. She loved her childhood estate, and every time she went to visit her uncle in Livadia, she took with her a bit of Revovka soil to remind him of home.

Lili married in 1907 in Yalta Carl Alexander “Joachimovitch” Akimovich von Dehn, a Russian naval officer whose family was from Tallinn, Estonia, Finland and Sweden. Dehn was an officer on the imperial yacht Standart and was a favourite of the imperial children. The Tsarina took an interest in Dehn’s new wife and became friends with her after the marriage.

The Tsarina was the godmother of the Dehns’ son, Alexander Léonid, born 9th August 1908 and nicknamed him “Titi”. Alexander was baptized according to the Lutheran rite, which was required by her husband’s family to maintain an inheritance. Alexandra remained troubled by the fact that her godson had a Lutheran baptism and insisted seven years later that the child be rebaptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Dehns granted her request.

Lili trained as a Red Cross nurse during World War I and treated wounded soldiers in a military hospital.

PHOTO: Lili Dehn in exile – year unknown

She was with the Imperial family at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and helped care for the Imperial children and the Tsarina’s friend, Anna Vyrubova, who was also Dehn’s distant cousin, during a measles epidemic. She witnessed the abdication of the Tsar and the imprisonment of the family by the new provisional government. Dehn left the palace and tried to persuade the provisional government to place the imperial family under house arrest in their own home because her son Alexander was dangerously ill.

Lili fled Russia aboard the ship SS Kherson with her mother and son via Turkey and Greece. They eventually reached England. The family first settled in England, where the von Dehns had two more children, Catherine, in December 1919, and Maria, in April 1923.

They later moved to her father’s estate, Hołowiesk near Bielsk Podlaski, in eastern Poland. Her husband died in 1932. After World War II broke out, Lili was forced to emigrate again and ended in Caracas, Venezuela, with her son Alexander and her daughter Maria. In 1958 she moved with Maria and her husband Kurt Happe to the United States and then to Rome

Lili Dehn died in Rome on 8th October 1963 at the age of 78. She was buried in the Testaccio Cemetery (grave No 820).

© Paul Gilbert. 4 August 2026