Alina Tukallo presented her fascinating and moving story of her Russian family roots at the ‘Lanterna di Genoa’ event in Genoa, Italy on 15 November, 2025. Mrs. Tukallo currently lives in Zurich, where she is a journalist. She has Finnish / Swedish ancestors, named Procopé, who are related to Aurora Stjernvall Demidova Karamzine, through her father’s brother. Her historical research work can be found on her Instagram channel.
Her story is shared with family, members and friends of the European Demidoff Association due to the enthusiastic reception its telling received from the Russian diaspora who attended the mid-November event in Genoa. We hope that you likewise will enjoy and be impressed with this moving historical tale:
***
My great-grandmother, on my father’s side, was the goddaughter of Tsar Alexander II. I had known this since childhood, but I also knew that our “royal” ancestry was not something to talk about in public. It needed to remain private and to be mentioned only at home. There was no fear anymore; it was not like the 1930s, when every male relative on my father’s side was sent to Gulag just for being of noble descent. However, a certain caution still remained.
I was born in a country where cathedrals had been turned into museums of atheism, where children pledged loyalty to Lenin, and wore blood red scarves tied around their necks. So I only vaguely understood what a ‘cross’ or a ‘goddaughter’ even meant. In my childish imagination, I decided that if my great-grandmother was not the Tsar’s daughter then, at the least, she must have had some other close connection to the Tsar’s family.
As a skinny, undersized child, I carried this secret with me to school, through snow and rain, through the dark courtyards of St. Petersburg, down Skorokhodova Street, and then to Uliza Mira, or "Peace Street”. A street that, in fact, was anything but peaceful, due to the nearby Missile College, where I would regularly pass groups of uniformed, armed young soldiers.
I carried this secret with me back and forth under the rule of Brezhnev, then Andropov, and then Chernenko. I do have to admit that it did give me wings and made me feel unique. I think every child has that feeling at some point when reflecting on their special history. However, things later changed.
People could finally speak openly about having relatives living in capitalist countries (we had Swedish relatives in the west and Polish ones in the Socialist Bloc), and to ask questions about their family roots and to actually secure proper answers. The ‘Council of Nobility’ was founded, and somehow, I ended up doing translation work for its leader, Prince Golitsyn. Suddenly, the once-taboo topic of nobility was not just acknowledged, it became trendy.
And so, my secret, my family legend, receded into the shadows, making room for a more factually based story. And to be fair, that story is intriguing.
***
Ljola, my father’s grandmother on his mother’s side, was born a year after her father, a fearless and disciplined officer, Herman Procopé, returned from the Russo-Turkish War. Herman and his brothers, Victor and Hjalmar, served in the ‘Leib Guard Finnish Regiment’, which traveled back from Constantinople by sea to a port city, Nikolaev (today in Ukraine). From there, after a grand parade attended by the Tsar, they took the railway to Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar`s residence. Their return followed a brutal year of hardship that involved marching through freezing mountain passes, suffering from typhoid and dysentery, and wearing their boots down to the point that their feet bled. But at last, they arrived back at the barracks, the soldiers’ home.
At the ‘Triumphal Arch’ on Moscow Road, the future Tsar Alexander III, and his wife, Maria Feodorovna, honoured their regiment by decorating their banners with laurel wreaths. Meanwhile, at the Novodevichy Convent, the abbot blessed them with an icon. As expected, the crowd cheered, shouting “hurray”, and tossing their caps into the air. Near Isaac’s Cathedral, where the clergy held a prayer service, the heroes marched through arches decorated with flowers, garlands, and flags. Their path to the ‘English Embankment’ was covered with flowers. Yet no place welcomed the elite regiment, the Tsar’s personal army, with as much fanfare as Vasilievsky Island. Houses were draped with banners and flags, while crowds filled the streets and courtyards. People gathered at windows, balconies, and rooftops, in short, everywhere, in a communal gesture of reverence while embracing each other. Many recognised the guardsmen by sight. One local, a merchant and shipowner named Nikolai Mikhailovich Grigoriev, had even donated a thousand rubles during the campaign to provide the soldiers with shoes, tobacco, tea, and sugar.
Colonel Herman Procopé, like many of his comrades who survived the brutal Balkan campaign, returned home a hero. During Christmas, medals and honours were distributed, and Herman received “The Gold Sword for Bravery." But the reward he valued most, and the one that made all his hardship worthwhile, was his young wife, Anna Nikolaevna.
Perhaps it was her love that carried him through the war, acting as both a prayer and a talisman. On the eve of the war, he had been strolling along Bolshoi Avenue near the regiment's barracks when he fell in love at first sight. A young woman walked by with her governess. She was nineteen while he was thirty-five. Her father, Grigoriev, was a wealthy shipowner and benefactor while her mother was a Greek beauty. Herman proposed and they married just before his regiment was mobilised.
In 1878 the regiment returned home, following the end of the war, and during the summer of 1879, the Procopé family welcomed a daughter, Ljola, baptized Elena. She became the goddaughter of Alexander II, the Emperor of Russia, Tsar of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland. To mark the occasion, the Tsar sent the child a christening gift, an oval silver-framed bas-relief on dark velvet.
As she grew up, Ljola became a bright student and a graceful young woman, delicate like a porcelain figure. Her uncle, Victor Procopé, who was a general in the imperial court, once suggested introducing her to the empress so she could become a ‘maid of honour’. However, her father refused, saying, "As long as I'm alive, that will never happen." He did not want his daughter caught up in palace intrigues and politics.
Ljola, however, had dreams of becoming a doctor. Instead, she became a devoted mother who was just as caring as her father, Herman, had been towards his soldiers, who loved him like a father. Her first child, Lily, was the eldest of five children born to Elena Kotyukhova (née Procopé).
***
The first husband of Lily, my father’s mother, was Yuri Borisovich Shmarov, a well-known genealogist, historian, and art expert. But beyond these distinctions, he had two especially valuable possessions: a unique collection of noble family portraits and rare books.
By then, the days of wealthy industrial and aristocratic collectors were long gone, and Shmarov’s income was no higher than that of an average Soviet citizen; there was no way it could be otherwise under Soviet socialism. To get his hands on a painting by François Gérard, Napoleon’s favourite court painter, he had to hustle, buy, sell, trade, and pull favours. He knew everyone in the art world, the dealers, antique shop resellers in Moscow, archivists, conservators, museum workers, and book collectors. And everyone knew him Yuri Borisovich, recalling Lily’s ancestors from the Procopé military dynasty, either bought or traded for a rare book entitled “History of the Leib Guard Finnish Regiment”, specifically the third of five volumes, and gave it to my father, Sasha (Alexander) Tukallo.
By the late 1950s, the country was still reeling from the revelations of Stalin’s Great Terror exposed at the 20th Party Congress. That was when Sasha learned about his family’s past and how Article 58 of the criminal code had been used to punish them for their noble origins.
Back in the spring of 1933, when Shmarov was arrested, government agents became especially interested in the photos on the shelf above the fireplace that featured portraits of Lily’s grandfather, Herman Procopé, and his brother Victor, both Tsarist generals in full regalia. The officers confiscated the portraits, and soon after, a group case was opened. Lily’s two brothers and her brother-in-law were arrested immediately, while Shmarov was labeled the group's leader.
Fearing further persecution, the family was forced to destroy any evidence of their past. The silver bas-relief once gifted by Tsar Alexander II was thrown onto a garbage heap. In family albums, cherished faces were crossed out, scribbled over, or cut away with nail scissors. Some photos were burned in the fireplace, while others, seized during arrests, ended up in government bonfires.
But the portrait of Herman Procopé made its way back to the family along with the "History of Leib Guard Finnish Regiment”. Sasha found his ancestor immediately; the book's age and value did not stop him from cutting out his great-grandfather's picture. After taking a photograph, he meticulously reattached the image using thin, nearly transparent strips of paper. Owning the history of the regiment felt as sacred to him as a believer holding the New Testament. He dove into accounts of the Russo-Turkish War, the brutal siege of Pleven, where Osman Pasha’s fifty-thousand-man army put up a fierce defense, and the battle at Gorny Dubnyak, a costly victory that finally forced the Turks to surrender.
He read that the night before that decisive battle, which left a third of the Finnish Regiment’s officers dead or wounded, the Tsar-Liberator addressed his guards: "God grant that more of you return. Each of you is dear to me." Later, as he reviewed the list of the fallen, many of whom he knew personally, he wept. Sasha further read about the bravery of Colonel Hjalmar Procopé, the regiment’s most admired officer, who led the first battalion. He and his two brothers, all colonels in the same regiment during the same war, were even numbered like emperors: Procopé I, Procopé II, and Procopé III.
At Gorny Dubnyak, they led an assault on a Turkish redoubt, a fort built on a hill. The open plateau in front of them had no cover, so no bushes, no rocks, so nothing to shield them from enemy fire. The redoubt loomed above them like a fire-breathing dragon, spewing smoke and bullets that cut down soldiers in rows.
Seeing that the trenches to his battalion’s left were abandoned by the Turks, Hjalmar quickly moved in with a few dozen of his bravest men. Emboldened by this small victory, he pushed forward again, this time leading a hundred volunteers toward the trenches right in front of the redoubt. Within minutes, nearly all of them were dead, and Hjalmar was mortally wounded.
The fallen soldiers were buried on beds of straw, their coats used as coffin lids. Years later, a monument was built near Gorny Dubnyak in Bulgaria to honour them. A small tribute, perhaps, but better than nothing.
Sasha read about the army’s brutal winter march through the Balkans, where survival mattered more than fighting the enemy. The soldiers' underwear and vests rotted away until they were threads. After rain or melting snow, the frozen Finns scattered hot ashes and burning coals on the floors of their tents. They lay on them for warmth, sometimes burning holes through their greatcoats. Boots, if a soldier was lucky enough to have them, were soaked in mud. When dried by the fire, they shrank painfully tight around the feet. Over time, they cracked, and eventually, the soles fell off.
He was thrilled to read about the regiment’s month-long stay on the mountain, later named ‘Finnland’s’ in their honour, and the ‘Battle of Philippopolis (Plovdiv)’, where the remaining Turkish forces fled into the mountains. The peace treaty that followed confirmed Russia’s victory. For this battle, Herman was awarded a ‘golden saber’.
Then came the crossing of the Maritsa River. "Ice lined the riverbanks, but the fast-moving current remained unfrozen. The water was waist-deep and freezing cold. Colonel Procopé, who was with the regiment’s supplies, was suddenly caught under enemy fire as the enemy shelled their crossing," Sasha read.
But then, Yuri Borisovich Shmarov asked for the book back. Maybe he got a good offer for it, or maybe he just forgot, but once Sasha handed it over to Yuri he never saw it again. What a loss!
***
Not long ago, after learning how much this book meant to my father, I looked it up online and ordered a reprint of History of theRegiment to our dacha in the Leningrad region, that part of Finland that was occupied during the Winter War. When it arrived, I tore open the package, revealing a brand-new copy, its pages still smelling of fresh ink, like an autumn forest.
As I flipped through the book, something strange caught my eye. It felt as if someone had already touched it. In one of the first chapters, hidden between the lines, I found a faint, hand-drawn mark: “Ensign Herm. Procopé.” Book annotations can say a lot about their owners, but despite searching carefully, I found nothing else.
Then, as I hurried through the pages, I suddenly stopped at a portrait, my ancestor. His head turned slightly to the left, looking past me. The delicate tracing paper framing his noble face erased all doubt. I was holding the very same ‘History of the Leib Guards of the Finnish Regiment’ that once belonged to the young, passionate Sasha Tukallo.
Not the original, of course. But its clone. After sixty years, the book had found its way back. What a victory.
***
St. Petersburg, 1905. Autumn leaves are already falling. The roads from Matveevskaya Church on Petrogradskaya to Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilyevsky Island are closed. A coffin rests on a cannon carriage, a tradition for full generals' funerals.
Behind it, soldiers of the Finnish regiment march in their ceremonial uniforms, their shakos bearing the inscription “For Philippopolis”. Eyewitnesses noted that the funeral felt unusually grand, almost festive.
Along with fresh flowers, silver-leaf wreaths were placed on the grave of Infantry General Herman Oskar Procopé.
Years later, when I started school, my grandmother, Lily, gave me one of those silver leaves as a keepsake. The road to my school ran along Skorokhodova Street. If I had not dutifully turned onto Uliza Mira (Peace Street) but had kept going straight to the dead end, I would have reached the houses overlooking Matveevsky Garden.
Once there was a church there where my ancestors' memorial service was held. But it was destroyed during the Soviet war against God. The ruins were left in place, piled in the center like a grave. Over time, grass and snow covered the remains, and as children, we used to sled down the hill without knowing what lay beneath.
Wandering through these streets of memory, like the cracked sidewalks of Petrogradskaya, my thoughts return to that mound, to my loved ones, and to the person I once was, no longer part of this world, fragile and vulnerable, dreaming on the way to school and back.
