Helene Dolgoruki

Helene Dolgoruki, more correctly Elena Pavlovna Dolgorukaya (Russian: Елена Павловна Долгорукая), married name Fadeeva (Russian: Фадеева) (1789-1860), was a Russian noblewoman who was the grandmother of both Sergei Witte and Madame Blavatsky.

Helene was the daughter of Prince Paul Vassilyevich Dolgorukov (1755 - 1837) and Henrietta Adolfovna de Bandre du Plessis (d. 1812).

In 1813 she married Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeyev (1789-1867) and the family resided near the village of Rzhishchevo, in the Province of Kiev, where the estate of the Dolgorukovs was located.

Helene's eldest daughter Helena Fadeyev married in 1830 the Russian nobleman Peter von Hahn, then a Captain of Horse Artillery in the Russian Army, who was more than twice her age. Soon after the wedding, the Captain received orders to join his regiment for service in the notably ruthless campaign to put down the Polish insurrection of 1831.

The girl-wife returned to her parents in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk), in Ukraine, and it was there that Helena was born, prematurely, on the night of August 12, 1831 (July 30, on the Julian calendar). A short time later, the two Helenas rejoined Peter and the family apparently travelled from one Army camp to another as he was reassigned. Three more children were to follow, one of which died as a baby. And in 1842 Helena Fadeyev herself died.

Shortly, after her daughter's death, in 1842 Peter sent the children, to live with her parents, who were residing at Saratov, where Andrei had been appointed Civil Governor.

Saratov was, a semi-Asiatic city on the Volga, two hundred miles north of Stalingrad. "The Governor's palace was a rambling eighteenth-century castle, honeycombed with underground passages." (G. Williams)

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