After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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Helen Rappaport is a historian specializing in the Victorian period, with a particular interest in Queen Victoria and the Jamaican healer and caregiver, Mary Seacole. One of the greatest skills a historian can possess is to make readers feel as if they have stepped back in time to witness the characters, places, and events they describe.

Perhaps the most fascinating of all the migrations of the turbulent European 20th century is that of the Russians who fled upheaval in their homeland and found their way to Paris. Readers will be swept up in the author’s leisurely yet informative narrative as she sheds new light on the lives of the four daughters. Paul was, however, a sad figure for many years, having lost his young wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, in 1891 after only three years of marriage, leaving him with two young children, Maria and Dmitri. The scandal of her adultery had found its fiercest critic in Nicholas’s highly moral wife Alexandra, who insisted that the countess should not be welcomed back at the Russian court for several more years.If he couldn’t be tsar in Russia, then at least he could play the grand seigneur to the hilt during his regular biannual visits to Paris, traveling there from St.

In exile, White Russian activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, and double agents plotted from both sides, to little avail. More about Russians in the arts, and the mourning of Russian emigres for relief from feelings of separation in the 1930s. Her love of all things Victorian springs from her childhood growing up near the River Medway where Charles Dickens lived and worked. Such had been their predilection, since the 1860s, for visiting under cover of darkness all that the Parisian underworld of eroticism, not to say vice, had to offer that the concept of La Tournée des Grands Ducs (The Grand Dukes’ Tour) had become a feature of the off-the-map Paris tourist trail. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents from both sides plotted espionage and assassination.Vladimir never quite came to terms with the fact that he was not emperor himself (though his wife certainly nurtured that hope for their sons after his death).

Petersburg, he kept volumes of recipes he had obtained from the best chefs in Russia, France, and Austria. So well known was he in Paris as a hard drinker and gastronome that Vladimir was nicknamed “Le Grand Duc Bon Vivant” and you could find filet de sole Grand Duke Vladimir on most menus there. She lives in the West Country, and has an enduring love of the English countryside and the Jurassic Coast, but her ancestral roots are in the Orkneys and Shetlands from where she is descended on her father's side. Many missed mother Russia in the end and this book does go some way to explain Russia, it’s people and history.By the late nineteenth century, so popular were the wealthy Russians in Paris that they were nicknamed “the Boyars. By focusing on one place and one stream of expatriates it illuminates many different aspects of cultural life in the last century. While their victim slumbered, his companions had helped themselves to all his personal possessions, including his clothes, leaving him only his white tie, which they tied round his neck before departing. Cries of “ Vive le bébé et la nounou” greeted even little Olga and her nanny as they drove in an open carriage down a Champs-Élysées festooned with decorations and artificial blooms in the chestnut trees. He was a most imposing if not frightening figure, as was his worldly and equally formidable German-born wife, Maria Pavlovna (originally, Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin).

Grand Duke Vladimir, Nicholas II’s most senior uncle (and, until the birth of the tsarevich in 1904, third in line to the throne), had been the focal point of an “avuncular oligarchy” that dominated court in the years up to the 1917 revolution. Petersburg his wife might be a shamed woman, a persona non grata, but in Paris Olga would become the meteoric star of French high society. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution — never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

La Balletta had, they complained, “cost the Russian people more than the Battle of Tsushima”—a naval debacle that had forced Alexis’s resignation. By 1903, having spent some time in Italy, Paul and Olga decided to make a base for themselves in Paris. Certainly, at least if Helen Rappaport’s barnstorming book After the Romanovs is anything to go by, they had some of the most amazing stories. My grandfather, Efim Mikhailovich Zotov was a Don Cossack who escaped in 1921 on one the rickety boats from Crimea to Constantinople. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs.