Prince Vladimir Nikolayevich Orlov (31 December 1868 – 29 August 1927), part of the Orlov family, was one of Tsar Nicholas II's closest advisors,Douglas Smith: "Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs" Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016"The Last Diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra", Yale, 1997Julia P. Gelardi: "From Splendor to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847--1928" St. Martin's Press, 2011 and between 1906 and 1915 headed the Tsar's military cabinet.
Biography
Orlov, who bore the nickname "Fat Orlov",Simon Sebag Montefiore: "The Romanovs: 1613-1918" Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016Virginia Rounding: "Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina" St. Martin's Press, 2012 may have introduced to the Tsar the motorcar in 1903,"WMF Report - The Imperial Garage - the Tsar and His Cars"Helen Nicholas: "Maelstrom", 2011 and was married to Olga, a daughter of Prince Constantine Esperovich Beloselsky-Belozersky.Paul Ham: "1914 The Year The World Ended", Random House, 2014 His son Prince Nicholas Vladimirovich Orlov (1891–1961) wed in 1917 Nadezhda Petrovna Romanov Orloff. Orlov competed in the 1900 Summer Olympics, in equestrian events.
Patron of engineers
As the head of the military cabinet, Orlov was a keen technologist interested in military applications of the motor car. He was the patron of Adolphe Kégresse, the brilliant mechanical engineer responsible for the Kégresse track. Orlov wrote in a letter to the Tsar on 15 May 1914:
Indeed, Kégresse continued as Head of the Mechanical Department of the Russian Imperial Garage at Tsarskoye Selo until the fall of the Romanovs caused him to flee to his homeland.
Fall over Rasputin Orlov continued his military duties until he was banished by the Tsar in 1915 to the Caucasus after losing the struggle for power to Rasputin. On August 19, 1915, after an unsuccessful attempt to discredit Rasputin and the Tsarina in a newspaper he and Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, First Deputy Interior Minister, were discharged from their posts,"Grigori Rasputin, the 'mad monk'" and four days later, the Tsar took supreme command of the Russian armies fighting on the Eastern Front of the First World War.F. A. HOLT, ed (1925) "AN AMBASSADOR'S MEMOIRS" By Maurice Paléologue As The Times correspondent Robert Wilton put it,
In exile Orlov, exiled by events subsequent to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and settled in Paris. Orlov died in Samois-sur-Seine and is buried in Paris, France.Vladimir Prince Orlov at Sports Referencefindagrave.com: "Vladimir Nikolaevich Orlov"
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