Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna of Russia before World War I broke out, Grand Duchess Anastasia visited her brother, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia, and his family in England. When many eagerly greeted the outbreak of war, after the Austrian ultimatum, she wrote to Tsar Nicholas II: ""I hope that the war will not happen and that we even can say ‘perhaps in a few days, we’ll all be together again'"". The conflict split her family. Her son was a reigning prince in Germany and her younger daughter was the Kaiser's daughter in law. On the opposite side, her brothers in Russia were fighting to defeat
Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich of Russia the great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I (from his father's side), also the great-great-grandson of the same Tsar Nicholas I (from his mother's one), the grandson of Tsar Alexander III and the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution Prince Dmitri was imprisoned along with his parents and grandmother the Dowager Empress at Dulber, in the Crimea. He escaped the fate of a number of his Romanov cousins who were murdered by the Bolsheviks when he was freed by German troops in 1918. He left Russia on 11 April 1919, at the age of seventeen, aboard the Royal Navy