Ekaterina Desnitskaya — royal consort; nurse with roots in the Russian Empire
Ekaterina Ivanovna Desnitskaya, known in Ukrainian as Kateryna Desnytska and in Siam as Mom Katerin, was born on 27 April 1886 in Lutsk, in the Volhynia Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in north-western Ukraine. She was one of twelve children in a combined family of a wealthy household: her father, Ivan Desnitsky, chief judge of the Lutsk District Court, died when she was two, and her mother, Maria Khizhnyakova, sold the family property and moved the children to Kiev.
In Kiev she studied at the Fundukleyevskaya women's gymnasium, graduating in 1904, the year her mother died. She and her older brother Ivan then went to St Petersburg to live with their godmother, and she trained at a school of medical nursing. At a ball given by Nicholas II in March 1905 she met Prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath of Siam, a son of King Chulalongkorn, who had been educated at the Page Corps and held an honorary commission in the Hussars. She volunteered as a nurse in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War and received three medals. On her return he proposed, and she accepted on condition that she would be his only wife.
Since Russian priests would not marry an Orthodox woman to a Buddhist, the couple travelled in 1906 to Constantinople and were married in the Greek church of the Holy Trinity. In Siam she learned Thai and English within two years and was given the title of Princess of Phitsanulok, Mom Katerin Na Phitsanulok. Their son, Prince Chula Chakrabongse, was born on 28 March 1908 at the Paruskavan Palace in Bangkok. After King Chulalongkorn's death in 1910 her husband became heir to the throne, and the couple visited St Petersburg, where Nicholas II received them, and her relatives in Kiev.
The marriage broke down, and in 1919 they divorced; their son remained in Siam. Unable to return to Ukraine during the Civil War, she went to Peking, where her brother worked for the Chinese Eastern Railway, and worked with the Russian Benevolent Society and the Red Cross. She attended her former husband's funeral in Bangkok in 1920, later married the American engineer Harry Clinton Stone, and lived in China, the United States and Paris. She died in Paris on 3 January 1960. Her granddaughter Narisa Chakrabongse told her story in Katya and the Prince of Siam.
"Married Prince Chakrabongse in Constantinople in 1906 and lived in Siam until their divorce in 1919; afterwards Peking, the United States and Paris, where she died in 1960."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Lutsk, Volhynia Governorate (now Ukraine); raised in Kiev
Born in Lutsk in the Russian Empire in 1886 and educated in Kiev and St Petersburg, where she trained as a nurse and in 1905 met Prince Chakrabongse of Siam, a graduate of the Page Corps. Their son, Prince Chula Chakrabongse, was born in Bangkok in 1908.
Daughter of Ivan Desnitsky, chief judge of the Lutsk District Court, and Maria Khizhnyakova.
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Lutsk, Volhynia Governorate (now Ukraine); raised in Kiev. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.