Boris Skossyreff

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Boris Mikhailovich Skossyreff (12 June 1896 – 27 February 1989) was a Belarusian adventurer, con artist and pretender who attempted to seize the monarchy of the Principality of Andorra during the early 1930s, styling himself King Boris I of Andorra. Skossyreff was born in Lithuania to a family of lower nobility from Belarus. Following the outbreak of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Skossyreff was able to seek political asylum in England, where he enlisted in the British army for the end of World War I. This was followed by his work in the British Foreign Office. He moved to the Netherlands in the mid-1920s, where he was in a list of Prominent Foreign Revolutionaries in 1924, prepared by the General Intelligence and Security Service, in which he was noted as an international swindler. Despite this, Skossyreff falsely claimed to have been working in the royal household of the Netherlands. Through his visits to Andorra, a co-Principality in the Pyrenees co-princed by the Bishop of Urgell and...

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