Lili Dehn

Yulia Alexandrovna von Dehn (; 8 October 1963), known as Lili Dehn, or Lili von Dehn, was a Russian aristocrat and memoirist. She was the wife of a Russian naval officer and a friend to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Dehn wrote a biography, The Real Tsaritsa, to refute rumors that were circulating in Europe during the 1920s about the Empress and Grigori Rasputin.

Early life Dehn was born Yulia Alexandrovna Smolskaia on her family's southern Russian estate, Revovka, a home of her ancestor General Mikhail Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon during the 1812 invasion of Russia. Her parents were Ismail Selim Bek Smolsky and Catherine Horvat. Both sides of her family had a long history in Russia, according to her memoirs. Her parents divorced when she was eleven and her mother later remarried. Her maternal grandmother helped to raise her.

She was educated by tutors at home and wrote that she understood very little Russian as a child because her family spoke French. As a young girl, she enjoyed listening to folk stories of old Russia told by her maternal grandmother and her childhood nurse. "The peasants at Revovka were extremely superstitious, and they believed implicitly in witches and warlocks," wrote Dehn. Later, she had an English governess. She loved her childhood estate and, whenever she went to visit an uncle in Livadiya, took a bit of dirt with her from Revovka to remind her of home.

She was not allowed to return to the Alexander Palace, and persuaded the government to place her under house arrest in her own home because her son Titi was dangerously ill. Her husband died in 1932. After World War II broke out, she was forced to emigrate again and ended in Caracas, Venezuela, with her son Alexander (Titi) and her daughter Maria. In 1958 she moved with Maria and her husband Kurt Happe to the US and then to Rome where she died in 1963 .

Her son, Alexander, died in 1974 in Caracas, Venezuela. Her daughter Katharina also died in Caracas, in 1987, and her daughter Maria died in February 2007 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. They all left children and grandchildren.