Your son, Tsesarevich Georgii Mikhailovich, is still unmarried. A natural question from a trendy magazine such as ours: what criteria are there in the choice for his future bride?
The most important thing is that my son’s future wife loves and respects him, that she understands his duties, and that she has his love and respect. From the outside looking in, it might seem that the life of a member of a dynasty is something out of a fairytale. But in fact, it is a heavy burden and an enormous responsibility. You no longer belong to yourself, and must do only that which is in the interest of your country, your people. And you do not ever even get the chance to go into retirement—the dynastic duty is a lifelong one. When Emperor Nicholas I learned that he would be ascending the throne, he told his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, “My dear, our good days are now all in the past.” And these words could just as easily have been spoken by any head of any dynasty. The failure of both spouses to understand this situation can only lead to tragedy, of the sort that happened with Diana, Princess of Wales.
In addition to all this, there are also limitations of a historical and legal nature that are placed on marriages in the dynasty. According to the presently operative dynastic law, my son must marry a member of a ruling or sovereign house. This stipulation was not originally a part of Emperor Paul I’s 1797 law of succession, but was added later to the Family Statute by his son, Alexander I, who obliged all his successors solemnly to observe that new requirement. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, this was necessary for the maintenance of the prestige of the dynasty and, consequently, of the entire country. At present, however, when the majority of European dynasties, including those that currently reign, have already abandoned similar regulations in their dynastic laws, such restrictions have for us lost all meaning. It was not for nothing that the faithful friend and spiritual father of my grandfather and father, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, as early as 1920, said that there would come a day when it would be necessary to return to the original law of Paul I, according to which only the permission of the Head of the Imperial House, and none of the subsequently added requirements, was necessary for a marriage to be recognized as legal. If my son’s chosen bride happens not to be from a ruling or sovereign house, the marriage will then require a change to the Family Statute, which only I can introduce and, in addition, would require also the blessing of the Orthodox Church since we are bound by a holy oath to observe the law of succession in its present form.