Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani

Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna Romanova of Russia (Russian: Леонида Георгиевна Романова; née Princess Leonida Georgievna Bagration Mukhrani (Georgian: ლეონიდა გიორგის ასული ბაგრატიონი მუხრანელი); 6 October 1914 [O. S. 23 September 1914] – 23 May 2010) was the consort of Vladimir Kirillovich, Grand Duke of Russia, a pretender to the Russian throne. She was advanced by Vladimir and their daughter, Maria Vladimirovna, to be accepted as the legitimate Heads of the Romanov dynasty and de jure sovereigns of the Russian Empire.

Born on 6 October 1914, in Tiflis, Georgia, Russian Empire as Princess Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani, she was a daughter of Prince George Bagration of Mukhrani and his Polish wife Helena Sigismundovna, née Nowina Złotnicka (1886–1979). She descended patrilineally from former Kings of Georgia. Her mother's family belonged to the untitled Polish aristocracy, although one of Leonida's two lines of descent from Georgia's penultimate king Erekle II (Heraclius II) is through her mother, a descendant of the king's daughter, Princess Anastasia, who married an Eristavi prince. The other ancestral line derives through the marriage of another of the king's daughters, Princess Tamara, to Ioane Bagrationi, 18th Prince of Mukhrani. The Bagration family's genealogy traces back at least to the medieval era in its male line and hundreds of years further back as rulers in the female line. Leonida's grandfather, Prince Alexander Bagration of Mukhrani, was born in 1853 in Georgia's historical capital Tbilisi, then part of the Russian Empire, and was killed by Bolsheviks at Pyatigorsk in 1918 during the Russian revolution. Thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky, who had enjoyed the patronage of the Bagrations, in 1931 they once again fled the Soviet Union, going into exile in Spain. by virtue of being hereditary heir by primogeniture 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 the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As his consort 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. In 1946, Leonida's brother, Prince Irakly, married King Alfonso 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 as dynastic, 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 to Guy Stair Sainty. In 1948 Vladimir, relying on his own earlier advice on the Bagrations' historically royal status, chose to wed Leonida dynastically in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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

Leonida accompanied her husband when he made his only visit to Russia in November 1991, following the implosion of the Soviet Union. She was also at Vladimir's side the following year when he collapsed and died following delivery of a speech in Florida. She visited her own ancestral land with her nephew Prince George Bagration of Mukhrani in 1995 when he first visited Georgia as a royal pretender to that country's abolished monarchy. But she did not attend the much publicized 2009 wedding of her grand nephew, Prince David Bagration of Mukhrani to Princess Ana Bagration Gruzinsky, the heiress of King George XII of Georgia, celebrated at the restored Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi. Nor did she re locate her home from western Europe to Russia, although she visited the country repeatedly following her husband's funeral and burial in Saint Petersburg. 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, who remains active as the claimant to the throne of the Romanovs in exile, and Maria's only son, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich (born in 1981, his father is Maria's ex husband and distant cousin, Prince Franz Wilhelm of Prussia), were reared.

Leonida Georgievna died on 23 May 2010, after her health had rapidly deteriorated. She requested to be buried next to her husband Vladimir Kirillovich in the Grand Ducal Mausoleum, Saint Petersburg. She was the last member of the Romanov family born on the territory of the Russian Empire during the monarchy.