IN THE RURAL chumminess of western Marin County, he is Andy Romanoff, the affable artist who lives in a rambling old red-shingled house in Inverness.

But when he walks into the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia, tomorrow morning, he may well be greeted by an usher who says, "This way, Prince Andrew, the family is sitting over here."

It's not well known, largely because Andrew Romanoff, 75, is loath to bandy it about, but he is a member of the fabled dynasty that ruled Russia for 300 years. He would be fourth in line to the throne -- if the throne were still there.

Tomorrow he will join some 65 other dukes, grand dukes, duchesses, princes and princesses who have flown in from around the world for one of the more bizarre family funerals of the century.

Eighty years to the day after they were assassinated by the Bolsheviks in the city of Yekaterinburg, Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra, along with three of their five children and four servants, will be given as close to an honorable burial as the fractious politics of current-day Russia can muster.

The salute will be 19 instead of 21 guns, President Boris Yeltsin will not attend and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexis II, has snubbed the whole thing. The patriarch refuses to concede that, despite conclusive DNA testing, the bits of bone that will be in those coffins actually belong to the czar and his family.

But for the rest of the Romanovs -- most of the world spells it Romanov, though the official family association prefers Romanoff -- the burial will close an important chapter in the history of a dynasty that was torn apart and scattered around the world after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

And the stories of what later happened to the exiled royals and their court are just as interesting as the summary fate visited on Nicholas and his brood.

Some Romanovs ended up as investment counselors or bankers. Many married other European royals. Others became cab drivers in Paris or opened restaurants in the United States. One of the descendants, Paul Ilyinsky, ended up as mayor of Palm Beach, Fla., and joked the other day that he is "probably the only Romanov ever elected by the people in a democratic election."

The experience of Andrew Romanoff was a typical one.

"My grandmother, the Grand Duchess Xenia, was the sister of Czar Nicholas II, and after the assassination she was under house arrest in the Crimea with her seven children," Romanoff said the other day. Sometime near the end of 1918, the occupying German government allowed the family to escape Russia on the British warship, HMS Marlborough.

A HOME IN WINDSOR

"Grandmother was a first cousin of King George V, and so when she arrived in England she got a 'grace and favor' home on the grounds of Windsor Castle," Romanoff said. Romanoff was born in England in 1923 and went to an English boarding school. When Britain went to war with Germany, he joined the British Navy as an ordinary seaman, spending World War II fighting the Germans in North Africa and on the beaches of Normandy and escorting Russian supply convoys on the brutal Murmansk run across the Arctic Ocean.

After the war, he joined his uncle Vasili Romanov in Northern California, where the last Russian prince born in Russia before the revolution had happily settled into a career as a chicken farmer in Sonoma County. Vasili Romanov later moved to Woodside, where he died in 1989, having passed on to Andrew Romanoff the idea that being a royal meant little in America and that there was, indeed, life after imperial Russia.

"I've been a lot of things," Andrew Romanoff said, as he padded about his house, dressed in blue jeans, sandals and a white dress shirt. "I worked as a tree surgeon for a while, and I was in the shipping business in Hong Kong and Japan. I've been a carpenter, and now I'm an artist."

'OUT OF THE CLOSET'

For years, he did not like to talk about the royal side of his life -- "I try to have it there, in my life, but I don't dwell on it" -- but since the fanfare that erupted after the bones of the murdered czar and his family were exhumed in 1991, he has been a cooperative witness for historians and students who flock to his home, seeking more and more details of the legendary Romanov story.

"It's only in the last few years that he's come out of the closet on this," says his wife, artist Inez Storer. "He was always very reticent about it."

Storer said that when she and Romanoff were first dating, in the early 1970s, they went to see the movie "Nicholas and Alexandra," which details the bloody Romanov assassination and the events leading up to it.

"About halfway through," she said, "I glanced at him and he looked ghastly, completely rigid. I said, 'We can leave anytime,' and he said, 'No, my uncle said we have to see this, and we'll stay.' Afterward, he told me it was very painful."

And yet, as Romanov historian Robert K. Massie points out, that painful brush with history is an isolated incident for modern-day Romanovs, most of whom live ordinary lives devoid of any royal trappings.

'A SPLENDID ADJUSTMENT'

"If you try to figure out where the Romanovs sit in the world, it's like asking what happened to the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs or all the other descendants of emperors and kings," Massie says. "Those institutions didn't last, and the families went on. Someone like Andrew has made a splendid adjustment -- he has no pretension to being anybody other than who he is."

Massie, author of the best-selling "Nicholas and Alexandra" and "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter," says most members of the family have no interest in making any claims on Russia -- "all the sensible Romanovs regard themselves as figures of the historical past and not of a political future."

And when the possibility of squirreled-away royal treasure comes up, Massie says, "They don't have any money. If they have it, they either made it or married it. There was no money left after the revolution."

The other day, sitting in their kitchen, Romanoff and Storer winced at the mention of what it would cost to get their family to Russia and back this week.

In St. Petersburg, they will be staying at the Hotel Astoria, where the rooms go for about $1,600 a day, not unusual in the whacked- out economy of post-Soviet Russia, but a bit startling to a couple of artists from Inverness.

But they did manage to get around this.

"I heard -- I think it was from the travel agent -- that they'd give a rate to a Romanov," Storer said, laughing. "So they got it down to $320."