She was the largest and most luxurious Imperial Yacht afloat in her time, but The Standart would inevitably meet a similarly tragic fate to her owners. After 30 years in service to the Russian Empire, the Imperial Yacht was stripped of her elegance and converted to a Soviet minelayer for World War II and then became training ship until she was unceremoniously scrapped in an Estonia shipyard in 1963. These grainy black & white photos that capture a precious wink of time when the ill-fated Romanov family spent their summers vacationing aboard their floating palace, are all that’s left of the most magnificent royal yacht ever built.
