A Russian nurse who volunteered for the front lines of the Russo-Japanese War ended up marrying a Siamese prince in secret, converting him to Orthodox Christianity, and becoming a princess in one of Asia’s most secluded royal families. Ekaterina Desnitskaya was born on April 27, 1886, in Lutsk, then part of the Russian Empire’s Volhynia region. Her father, Ivan Desnitsky, was a wealthy state counselor, but he died before she turned two. Her mother, Maria, moved the children to Kiev, where she passed away in 1904.
Ekaterina and her older brother Ivan became orphans at eighteen and twenty. They moved to Saint Petersburg together. Ivan enrolled at university, dreaming of a diplomatic career, while Ekaterina studied nursing. She had red braided hair, blue eyes, and porcelain-like skin, but those who knew her emphasized her courage and compassion over her appearance.
When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Ekaterina volunteered before turning nineteen. She dressed wounds in the trenches of Manchuria and assisted surgeons during operations. A hospital train carried her from Manchuria to Irkutsk. She survived a shell explosion and the shock of bombardment.
She returned from the front decorated with Saint George Cross medals, a person transformed by having faced death. Back in Saint Petersburg, she attended a salon hosted by a widow named Khrapovitskaya, a friend of the Desnitsky family. There, she found herself seated beside a young dark-haired officer with an unusual name: Chakrabongse. He was Prince Chakrabongse of Siam, son of King Rama V, the reformer who had met Tsar Nicholas II at Peterhof in 1897, had his royal jewelry made by Cartier in Paris, and became the first Asian monarch to tour Europe personally.
Since 1898, the prince had studied at the Page Corps in Saint Petersburg, an elite military school reserved for those close to the Russian emperor. He mastered Russian and English, reached the rank of colonel in the Russian army, and received the Order of Saint Andrew the Apostle. He was intelligent, polite, kind, and utterly alone in a cold foreign city. He was twenty-two, she was nineteen.
The prince proposed. He was honest with her: Siamese law allowed him to take multiple wives. But he swore she would be the only one. She agreed.
In the summer of 1906, the prince’s stay in Russia was ending. He was under the personal guardianship of Tsar Nicholas II and a subject of the King of Siam. Any public announcement of his intention to marry a Russian girl would have required consent from both monarchs, and both would likely have refused. His personal guardian and adviser, Nai Bum, repeatedly reminded him of the reality: differences in religion and culture, and the scandal a marriage without his royal father’s approval would provoke.
The prince listened and did as he pleased. He chose to marry in Constantinople, on the route home, far from Nicholas’s eyes and from any possible explanations. A descendant of an ancient Buddhist dynasty accepted Orthodox baptism for her sake, so they could marry in an Orthodox church. They were wed in Constantinople and spent their honeymoon in Cairo.
They sailed to Singapore, but the prince did not dare appear at the royal palace with a foreign wife immediately. He left Ekaterina in Singapore under the care of his loyal servants and went to Bangkok alone. For months, he prepared the ground: he introduced his older brother to Ekaterina and mentioned her to his father several times. King Rama V never formally accepted his Russian daughter-in-law.
She was not allowed into the palace. The young family was permitted to settle at Paruskavan Palace, a building separate from the royal residence. In essence, it was a golden cage. A young woman of twenty, in a strange country with a strange language and culture, tropical skies, unfamiliar food, and servants speaking words she did not understand.
The court did not accept her. Her mother-in-law, the queen, looked down on her. Ekaterina did not break. She learned the Thai language stubbornly, mastered local etiquette, studied court protocol, planned the palace’s interior design, and created a garden despite the heat and shortage of fresh water.
When the servants fell ill, she treated them. They began to love her for her humanity, not her position. She never complained in her letters to her brother Ivan, writing instead of the beauty of the tropics, her husband’s character, and everything new around her. On March 28, 1908, a boy was born at Paruskavan Palace: Prince Chula.
He had his father’s black eyes and his mother’s white skin. Remarkably, he was born on the same day of the week and at nearly the same hour as his father and his uncle, the future King Vajiravudh. The family took this triple coincidence as a sign. Shortly before his death in 1910, King Rama V finally came to see his grandson.
The boy with black eyes looked at him without fear and smiled. The king, who had ruled for forty years and fathered seventy-seven children, softened and granted Chula the title of Prince of the Blood. On October 23, 1910, Rama V died, and his eldest son took the throne. The new king formally recognized his brother’s marriage.
Ekaterina Desnitskaya moved from the conditional title of “Mom” to the full title of Princess Chakrabongse within the Siamese royal family. The family moved into the official royal residence. By then she spoke Thai fluently and knew every detail of court etiquette. She became friends with the king’s wife and was accepted as part of the family.
She had achieved what seemed impossible on her own, without support or allies, earning a place in one of Asia’s most closed royal houses. From 1911, the couple traveled extensively. The prince held senior military positions, commanded units, toured the country, and visited foreign states; Ekaterina accompanied him, sometimes together, sometimes apart. They built a white house on the shores of the Gulf of Siam that resembled a ship anchored on white sand, spending perhaps the happiest years of their lives there.
Seven quiet, warm years. Then everything changed. While Ekaterina was in China, the prince grew close to the young Thai princess Chavalit, who moved into his home. Siamese law permitted him multiple wives.
He had told Ekaterina this in Saint Petersburg long ago, at the beginning, when it seemed an abstract idea. Now it was reality. She could not accept it. She had given this man and this country everything: her homeland, her familiar world, her language learning, the isolation she endured, the court she won over, the son she raised.
She asked for a divorce. She received it, along with appropriate alimony. In 1919, she left Bangkok, determined never to return. She had to come back a year later.
On May 11, 1920, Prince Chakrabongse died suddenly at thirty-seven. Ekaterina attended the funeral, mourned him in her own way, buried him. She visited his grave daily in the royal pantheon in Bangkok. Then she left again, this time for good.
Her husband’s relatives did everything they could to keep her away from her son. Chula grew up in the royal court, surrounded by many uncles and aunts. His mother chose dignity over a losing battle and departed. The storms of the twentieth century carried her from Bangkok to Shanghai, where her brother Ivan, now a distinguished literary scholar, lived.
She stayed near him for a time. There she met Harry Clinton Stone, an American engineer whom she later married. They moved first to the United States, then to Paris, to the French capital’s outskirts. She spent the rest of her turbulent life there.
Ekaterina Desnitskaya died in Paris on January 3, 1960, at the age of seventy-three. Prince Chula, who had lost both parents, was placed under the guardianship of his uncle the king. He was sent to study in Britain, attending Harrow and then Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a passionate racing driver, traveled across Europe, and wrote a series of books about motor racing with his cousin Birabongse.
He married an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Hunter, settled in England, and had a daughter named Narisa, Ekaterina’s granddaughter. Narisa later co-wrote a book with her mother titled “Katya & the Prince of Siam,” published in several languages and the primary source for this story. Chula kept in touch with his mother, though he could not entirely forgive her for leaving the palace so abruptly. He outlived Ekaterina by only three years, dying of cancer in 1963.
Ekaterina entered the official history of the Siamese royal Chakri dynasty forever as Her Highness Catherine, wife of Crown Prince Chakrabongse and mother of Prince Chula. Paruskavan Palace, where she lived during her years of isolation, is open to tourists today. Her portraits hang in the living room, recognized as an integral part of a whole era’s history.