Lili 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.
16 Facts About Lili Dehn
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Lili Dehn's parents were Ismail Selim Bek Smolsky and Catherine Horvat.
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Lili Dehn's parents divorced when she was eleven and her mother later remarried.
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Lili Dehn was educated by tutors at home and wrote that she understood very little Russian as a child because her family spoke French.
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Lili Dehn 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.
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Lili Dehn married 1907 in Yalta, Carl Alexander Akimovich von Lili Dehn, a Russian naval officer whose family were Baltic Germans which came from Tallinn, Estonia, from Finland and from Sweden.
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Lili Dehn was an officer on the imperial yacht, Standart, and was a favorite with the imperial children.
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Lili Dehn wrote that Titi was baptized Lutheran, which was required by her husband's family to maintain an inheritance.
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Lili Dehn was skeptical about the holiness of the starets in making Grigori Rasputin and the Empress's reliance upon him, but wrote that Rasputin once prayed over her own son, Titi, when the child was dangerously ill and the boy made a quick recovery.
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Lili Dehn trained to become a Red Cross nurse during World War I and nursed wounded soldiers in a military hospital.
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Lili Dehn was with the imperial family during the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and helped nurse the imperial children and the Empress's friend, Anna Vyrubova, who was Dehn's distant cousin, through an outbreak of measles.
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Lili Dehn witnessed the Emperor's abdication and the family's imprisonment by the new provisional government.
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Lili Dehn left the palace with Anna Vyrubova to accompany her to the capital, following Vyrubova's arrest, and upon arriving in the capital, she was herself arrested.
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Lili Dehn 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.
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Lili Dehn wrote in her book that she blamed the Revolution on Jewish revolutionaries.
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Lili Dehn escaped Russia aboard the ship SS Kherson with her mother and son Titi via Turkey and Greece.