Princess Leonida Bagration
Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna of Russia
Photo portrait of Grand Duchess Leonida of Russia
Born	Princess Leonida Georgievna Bagration-Mukhrani (1914-10-06)6 October 1914 Tiflis,Caucasus Viceroyalty,Russian Empire (nowGeorgia)
Died	23 May 2010(2010-05-23) (aged 95) Madrid, Spain
Burial	2 June 2010 Grand Ducal Mausoleum,St. Petersburg
Spouse	Sumner Moore Kirby ​ ​ (m. 1934; div. 1937)​ Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia ​ ​ (m. 1948; died 1992)​
Issue	Helen Louise Kirby, CountessDvinskaya Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia
House	Bagration-Mukhrani
Father	Prince George Bagration of Mukhrani
Mother	Helena Złotnicka h.Nowina
Religion	Eastern Orthodox Church

Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna of Russia (Russian: Леонида Георгиевна Романова;néePrincess Leonida Georgievna Bagration of Mukhrani (Georgian: ლეონიდა გიორგის ასული ბაგრატიონი-მუხრანელი); 6 October [O.S. 23 September] 1914 – 23 May 2010) was the consort ofVladimir Kirillovich, Grand Duke of Russia.^[1]

Born on 6 October 1914, inTiflis,Georgia,Russian Empire as Princess LeonidaBagration of Mukhrani, she was a daughter of PrinceGeorge Bagration of Mukhrani and hisPolish wife Helena Sigismundovna,néeNowina Złotnicka (1886–1979). She descendedpatrilineally from former Kings ofGeorgia. Her mother's family belonged to an ancient untitledPolish nobility,^[2] although one of Leonida's two lines of descent from Georgia's penultimate kingErekle II (Heraclius II) is through her mother, a descendant of the king's daughter,Princess Anastasia, who married anEristavi prince. The other ancestral line derives through the marriage of another of the king's daughters, Princess Tamara, toIoane Bagrationi, 18th Prince of Mukhrani.

TheBagration family's genealogy traces back at least to themedieval era inits male line and hundreds of years further back as rulers in thefemale line.^[3] Leonida's grandfather, PrinceAlexander Bagration of Mukhrani, was born in 1853 in Georgia's historical capitalTbilisi, then part of theRussian Empire, and was killed byBolsheviks atPyatigorsk in 1918 during theRussian revolution.^[2] Fearing for their lives, the family took refuge inConstantinople, then spent eight months in Germany before returning to Tbilisi, now capital of theGeorgian Soviet Socialist Republic, to re-claim a portion of property which, asémigrés they risked losing to totalconfiscation.^[2] Although the family made repairs to their home and Leonida would recall her grandfather's insistence that they continue to dine formally on silver plate to retain their sense of propriety, they were eventually deprived of all but two rooms of their old palace and subjected to harassment.^[2][4] Thanks to the intervention ofMaxim Gorky, who had enjoyed the patronage of the Bagrations, in 1931 they once again fled the Soviet Union, going into exile in Spain.^[4] The family moved toFrance, where Leonida's grandmother and relations had already settled.

In France, Princess Leonida met Sumner Moore Kirby (1895–1945), a wealthy "Pennsylvanian Protestant".^[2] They were married inNice,France, on 6 November 1934. Sumner Moore Kirby had been born inWilkes Barre,Pennsylvania, the youngest of the two sons ofFred Morgan Kirby, a millionaire and business partner of one of theF. W. Woolworth Company heirs (Charles Sumner Woolworth) and wife Jessie Amelie Owen. Leonida was his third wife, he having been married from 1925 to 1931 to Doris Landy Wayland, with whom he had a daughter,Gloria Price Kirby (1928-2017). Kirby's second marriage, to Valentine Wagner, lasted from 20 January 1932 to 19 July 1934. Valentine Wagner's mother was born Princess Elisabeth Bagration, a member of the same family as Princess Leonida. Her father was Prof. Conrad Wagner. Kirby had no children of this marriage which. Leonida and Sumner Kirby had one daughter,Helen Louise Kirby, born inGeneva, Switzerland, on 26 January 1935. Their marriage was short-lived, they divorced after three years on 18 November 1937. Kirby died on 7 April 1945 in a hospital at Leau, near theBuchenwald Concentration Camp to which he had been deported from France after being arrested along with other U.S. and British civilians by theVichy France in 1944.

As war intensified, Leonida and her daughter relocated to officially neutralSpain. In 1944, Leonida's brother,Prince Irakli, also moved to Spain.

According to her published memoirs, Leonida first met Vladimir Kirillovich at a restaurant in France during World War II. But they did not see each other again for a few years, when both were making extended visits toSanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, where their hosts happened to be neighbors. Vladimir was staying with his aunt, thePrincess Beatrice, Duchess of Galliera, a first cousin of both the murderedEmperor Nicholas II andEmpress Alexandra Feodorovna.

On 13 August 1948 (civilly on 12 August 1948) at the Orthodox Church of St. Gerasimus, Lausanne, Switzerland, Princess Leonida wed for the second time, marrying religiously The Grand Duke, who used the pre-revolutionary Russian titleGrand Duke, the styleImperial Highness and claimed to be, from 1938 to his death, Head of the Russian Imperial House^[5] by virtue of being hereditary heir byprimogeniture to the throne of the Romanovs according to the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, as codified in 1906 and in force until overturned by theBolshevik Revolution of 1917.^[6]

As hisconsort she used the title Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna. By him, she had another daughter,Maria Vladimirovna, who claims to have succeeded her father upon his death in 1992.^[7]

In 1946, Leonida's brother,Prince Irakly, married KingAlfonso XIII of Spain's maternal niece,Princess Doña María de las Mercedes de Baviera y Borbon (1911–1953), obtaining Vladimir's recommendation that the Spanish pretender,Don Juan, Count of Barcelona, would accept the marriage asdynastic, which he did not. The Count of Barcelona, then Head of the Royal House of Spain, considered the issue of this marriage to be disqualified from the Spanish succession. The only son of this marriage was sponsored at his baptism by the Count of Barcelona but the latter's refusal to recognize his god-son as a Spanish dynast led to the Bagrations' alienation from the Spanish Royal Family according toGuy Stair Sainty. In 1948 Vladimir, relying on his own earlier advice on the Bagrations' historically royal status,^[8] chose to wed Leonidadynastically inLausanne, Switzerland.

The Grand Duke's marriage to Leonida Bagration remained controversial; some considered it to bemorganatic. Although the princess descended from theBagrationi dynasty which had ruled as kings of Georgia since the early Middle Ages, it had beendeposed and reduced to the status of Russian nobility for more than a century prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917.^[9] Leonida belonged to the senior surviving branch of that family, but the last Georgian king from whom she descended in the male line wasConstantine II who died in 1505,^[10] although other branches of the family continued to reign in theCaucasus as late as 1810. Besides, according to the Almanach de Gotha, as per the decision of Emperor Nicholas II made in 1911, thePrincess Tatiana Constantinovna of Russia had morganatically wedPrince Konstantin Alexandrovich Bagration-Mukhransky, a member of thesame branch of the House of Bagration into which Princess Leonida would later be born. Because theRussian Empire did not accord royal rank to the Bagrations at the time of the Russian Revolution, some Romanovdynasts in exile maintained that Leonida's daughter, Maria Vladimirovna, could not succeed to her father's claim to the Russian throne.^[11]

Leonida accompanied her husband when he made his only visit to Russia in November 1991, following the implosion of theSoviet Union. She was also at Vladimir's side the following year when he collapsed and died following delivery of a speech inFlorida.

She visited her own ancestral land with her nephewPrince George Bagration of Mukhrani in 1995 when he first visited Georgia as a royal pretender to that country'sabolished monarchy. But she did not attend the much-publicized 2009 wedding of her grand-nephew, PrinceDavid Bagration of Mukhrani to PrincessAna Bagration-Gruzinsky, the heiress of KingGeorge XII of Georgia, celebrated at the restoredHoly Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi.

Wealth inherited by her elder, unmarried daughter Helen Kirby (styled by Vladimir's declaration as "Countess Dvinskaya"), helped Leonida, her second husband and younger daughter maintain homes in the north of France and in Madrid. There, both Maria Vladimirovna and her only son,Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, were raised.^[12]

Leonida Georgievna died on 23 May 2010. She requested to be buried next to her husband Vladimir Kirillovich in theGrand Ducal Mausoleum, Saint Petersburg. She was the last member of the Romanov family born on the territory of theRussian Empire^[13] during the monarchy.

• House of Romanov Knight Grand Cordon with Collar of theImperial Order of Saint Andrew^[14][15]
• House of Romanov Former Grand Mistress Dame Grand Cordon of theImperial Order of Saint Catherine^[16]
• House of Romanov Knight Grand Cordon of theOrder of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker^[17][18]
• House of Romanov: Former Grand Mistress Dame of theOrder of Saint Olga, 1st Class^[19][20]

• Georgia: Dame Grand Collar of theOrder of the Eagle of Georgia (House of Bagration)
• Italy:
  • Sovereign Military Order of Malta: Dame Grand Cross of theOrder of Merit^[21]
  • Two Sicilian Royal Family: Dame Grand Cross of Merit of theTwo Sicilian Royal Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George^[22]

• Georgian monarchs family tree of Bagrationi dynasty of Kartli, the line of Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani's descent

• The Daily Telegraph: Grand Duchess Leonida of Russia

• 1914 births
• 2010 deaths
• House of Mukhrani
• Nobility of Georgia (country)
• Princesses from Georgia (country)
• Recipients of the Order of Queen Tamara
• People from Tbilisi
• People from Tiflis Governorate
• People from Georgia Governorate
• Emigrants from the Russian Empire to Germany
• Emigrants from the Russian Empire to Spain
• Emigrants from the Russian Empire to France
• People from Georgia (country) of Polish descent
• House of Romanov in exile
• Burials at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg
• Recipients of the Order of Saint Catherine

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