Following
the 1917 Russian Revolutions and the fall of the Romanov dynasty, tens of
thousands of Russian aristocrats, intellectuals, and military officers fled to
Paris, transforming the French capital into the center of the White
émigré community.
Life in
Exile
- From Opulence to Survival: Formerly wealthy nobles who had
once reveled in Belle Époque Paris as a playground of luxury arrived as
refugees. By the mid-1920s, around 43,000 to 50,000 Russian exiles lived
in the city.
- Menial Labor: Former princes and military
officers famously became known as "princely taxi drivers" or
worked in factories like Renault, while noblewomen—renowned for
maintaining their poise and appearance—worked as seamstresses, embroiders,
and models for fashion houses like Coco Chanel.
- Statelessness & Documents: After the Soviet government
stripped exiles of their citizenship in 1921, many relied on the newly
introduced Nansen passport issued by the League of Nations to
travel and work.
Key
Figures
- Grand
Duke Dmitri Pavlovich: One of the Romanovs who escaped the Bolshevik purge, he
famously had a romantic relationship with Coco
Chanel in the 1921s and helped introduce her to perfumer Ernest
Beaux (creator of Chanel No. 5).
- Prince
Felix Yusupov and Princess
Irina Alexandrovna: The wealthy nobleman (known for participating in the
plot to kill Grigori Rasputin) and his wife settled in Paris, where they
lived out their exile.
- Cultural and Literary Figures: Writers, poets, and artists
such as Ivan
Bunin, Vladimir
Nabokov, Marina
Tsvetaeva, and Sergey
Diaghilev (with his Ballets Russes) kept Russian artistic and
intellectual life alive far from home.
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After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris
28
September 2022
https://tocqueville21.com/books/after-romanovs-russian-exiles-paris/
A book
review of Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From
the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War (St.
Martin’s Press, 2022).
Paris is
“full of Russians at present.” That was how a recently-minted European
correspondent for the Toronto Star began his report
that appeared on February 25, 1922—by an odd coincidence almost one hundred
years prior to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack upon
neighboring Ukraine on February 24 of this year. The correspondent was an eager
young journalist and writer from the American Midwest, Ernest Hemingway, who
had only arrived in Paris the previous December. He went on to inform his
readers that the Russians were “drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of
hopelessness that things will somehow be all right … No one knows just how they
live except by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that
they brought with them to France.”
Most of
the Russians whom Hemingway had encountered were refugees fleeing the October
1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the civil wars that ensued after the Bolshevik
takeover in Russia. Many arrived without jewels, ornaments, heirlooms, or much
else. Describing “just how they lived” in Paris is precisely the task British
freelance-writer Helen Rappaport sets for herself in After the Romanovs:
Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War. Rappaport’s
work revolves around a series of portraits of the personal lives of several
dozen Russians who found themselves in Paris during the first four decades of
the twentieth century, with key personalities appearing and reappearing across
a loosely chronological narrative.
Between
October 1917 and mid-1921, Paris became the destination of choice for thousands
of refugees from Russia. By 1930, according to one source, the Russian
community living in Paris reached about 43,000 members, with another 9,500
living in the suburbs. Yet, as her sub-title suggests, Rappaport starts well
before the post-1917 surge in Russian refugees, during Paris “belle époque”—the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century up to
the outbreak of World War I. Vibrant manifestations of Russian cultural life
flourished during Paris’ belle époque. It was also a time when
ostentatious Russians—Romanovs as well as others of aristocratic stock and the
just plain wealthy—made the city their personal playground.
After
early chapters on the Russian impact in belle époque Paris, Rappaport’s
middle chapters, the heart of her story, show how the wave of émigrés arriving
in Paris in the years following the 1917 Revolution transformed the city and
its Russian community. Although “penniless and traumatized but grateful to have
escaped the Russian civil war” when they arrived, most Russians fared better
during the 1920s than the 1930s. During the latter decade, the worldwide
economic downturn not only fragilized the émigrés’ already fragile
circumstances but also gave rise to the view that they were stealing jobs from
the native French. Rappaport’s story ends with the German occupation of 1940,
as the lights in the City of Lights went out—or at least dimmed considerably.
Broadly
speaking, the émigrés Rappaport portrays fall into three groups: 1. The Romanov
family and aristocrats. 2. Artistic, intellectual, and cultural figures. 3.
‘Everyday’ Russians. Russians in Paris were known for being disputatious,
turning “quarreling into an art form,” Rappaport writes. They were too diverse,
though, to be labeled “White Russians” in the sense of uniformly monarchists,
political reactionaries or counter-revolutionaries who favored the restoration
of the Tsar. But one of the few threads linking the heterogenous community was
that almost all Russian émigrés were vehement and outspoken anti-Bolsheviks.
Numerous
Russians were otherwise apolitical. Some were socialists and liberal democrats
who had supported the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the Provisional Government
that came to power in March 1917, after the abdication of Romanov Tsar Nicolas
II. Despite internal differences, moreover, Russian émigrés in Paris remained
culturally and emotionally attached to Mother Russia, even though in the eyes
of most the Bolshevik regime had rendered their country unrecognizable.
Furthermore, almost all émigrés found themselves in difficult financial
straits. Rappaport gives special attention to the plight of former aristocrats
and nobles forced to eke out a living, a favorite subject of the press at the
time.
An
esteemed Russian general worked as a valet, opening car doors for rich
Americans.
The
book’s individual portraits are the fruit of Rappaport’s dazzling excavation of
a wide array of original source material, much of it focused on the Romanovs
and others from Russia’s highest social strata. Rappaport also draws on the
extensive paper trail created by Russian writers, artists, and cultural
figures, leaving a source gap for the everyday Russians who found themselves in
Paris—“few voices of ordinary Russians have been recorded,” Rappaport
indicates. In what is probably the book’s most original contribution, she
valiantly seeks to fill this gap.
Rappaport’s
narrative sometimes succumbs to the ‘TMI’ syndrome: ‘Too Much Information,’ the
often-irresistible tendency of authors to utilize too many of the details they
unearth, giving much of the book a gossipy flavor. But her book gained
unanticipated resonance earlier this year after Russia’s military intervention
in Ukraine, which triggered another wave of emigrants out of the Russian
neighborhood and into Western Europe, including France—a century after
Hemingway reported on the exiles who had arrived in Paris, fleeing the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
Russians
in Belle Époque Paris
Rappaport’s
initial focus on Russians during the Parisian belle époque of the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century serves as a valuable contrast to
the émigrés who lived more precariously and arrived in the years following the
1917 Revolution. The belle époque was, Rappaport writes, a “golden age
of rapprochement” between Russia and France, with Russian literature and
culture attracting great interest and attention throughout France. For Russian
aristocrats and those with considerable wealth, Paris in 1900 was the “capital
of Russia out of Russia,” a “home away from home, a safe haven in winter from
the bitter cold of the northern Russian climate and the rising threat of
revolution that was increasingly targeting their class.”
Romanov
grand dukes gained notoriety during the belle époque for taking
advantage of all that Paris had to offer, with the gossipy French press eagerly
following their salacious adventures and misadventures. Grand Duke
Vladimir—Tsar Nicholas II’s most senior uncle—stood out among them, earning the
sobriquet “Le Grand Duc Bon Vivant” for indulging in what Rappaport terms
“libidinous and sometimes violent behavior” while making little effort to hide
his “colossal appetite for food and wines, and his extravagant spending
habits,” which included lavish tips. Grand Duke Vladimir was also a generous
patron of the arts.
In a city
considered Europe’s cultural capital, Grand Duke Vladimir’s best-known
beneficiary, Sergey Diaghilev, dominated the Parisian cultural scene during the
twentieth century’s first two decades. In 1906, Diaghilev pulled together an
unprecedented cross section of Russia’s best artwork since the eighteenth
century. Until that time, icon painting had been the primary Russian art-form
known in France. Diaghilev also set out to familiarize Parisian audiences with
innovative new Russian music beyond Tchaikovsky, “the only Russian composer
with whom they were familiar.”
But
Diaghilev was best known for creating the magnetic dance company Ballets Russe,
which stormed the citadel of high Parisian culture by introducing an exotic
form of dance frequently described as “crazy” or “mad.” Diaghilev hired his
former teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as a conductor for the Ballets Russe and
introduced the Parisian public to Vaslav Nijinsky. Imparting a “new direction
and style” to the art of ballet with his “soaring flights,” Nijinsky elevated
the male dancer to an equal footing with the ballerina. His 1910 performance
for The Firebird Suite drove audiences into “raptures,” Rappaport
writes. The next day, Paris talked of nothing but the “soaring angel.”
Those
who made it to Paris were hopeful that the city would offer something better
than the harsh Bolshevik rule and civil wars back home. But survival in the
early 1920s was hard.
Russian
writers and artists of the belle époque era, forced to flee Tsarist
Russia in search of greater freedom of expression, frequented the legendary
cafés of Montparnasse more than a decade before Hemingway made Montparnasse his
own personal playground. Dubbed “penny universities” which taught “bohemian
lifestyle, contempt for the bourgeois, sense of humor and heavy drinking,”
Montparnasse cafés were refuge points for impoverished Russian writers whom
Rappaport describes as “rebels, misfits and down-and-outs”; and for creative
artists “long on talent but short on money and struggling to become
established.” According to a popular view at the time, the more “Bohemian” a
Montparnasse patron looked, the more likely he was to be Russian.
Paris
before World War I was also full of rival anti-Tsarist political groups and
factions: Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists, social revolutionaries, and
Jewish trade unionists. Vladimir Lenin, unlike the stereotypical disheveled
Russian revolutionary, lived conventionally with his wife and mother-in-law in
Paris from 1909 to 1912, where he kept a low profile and stayed away from
Montparnasse cafés. Focused obsessively on the cause of revolution in Russia,
Lenin “despised the sloppy, bohemian lifestyle of some of his fellow political
exiles” who in his view had allowed Paris to divert them “too easily” from the
cause.
After
World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, many aristocrats, writers and
artists headed back to Russia. Artist Marc Chagall left so quickly that he was
unable to lock his studio, leaving a stack of paintings inside which he never
saw again. A substantial number of the émigrés who remained behind in Paris
sought to enlist in the war. But it was the events of 1917 in Russia, beginning
with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March, followed by the Bolshevik
Revolution in November and ensuing civil wars, that precipitated the sweeping
transformation of the émigré community in Paris at the heart of Rappaport’s
story.
Fleeing
the Bolsheviks for Paris
The wave
of refugees arriving in Paris between November 1917 and March 1921 came from a
“much wider cross-section of [Russian] society, with loyalties to a wide range
of political parties, social classes, and religions,” Rappaport writes. Most
had left Russia through Odessa, in Crimea, sailing under abysmal conditions to
Constantinople. Those who made it to Paris were hopeful that the city would
offer something better than the harsh Bolshevik rule and civil wars back home.
But survival in the early 1920s was hard. The ‘help wanted’ ads in the
French press were “full of menial jobs that required none of the skills that
the cream of the former intelligentsia had to offer.” A “great deal of valuable
Russian talent and expertise failed to find an outlet.”
Because
of French employment regulations and the requirement of French nationality,
only a small portion of Russian doctors, dentists, lawyers, and university
lecturers were able to find work in their professions in Paris. Some
circumvented the rules by working exclusively for the Russian émigré colony.
French-speaking Russians sometimes managed to find jobs in banks and offices as
clerks and bookkeepers. Those with English language skills were able to work in
hotels and department stores with English-speaking clientele. An esteemed
Russian general worked as a valet, opening car doors for rich Americans. One of
the more enterprising Romanovs, Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, suddenly
destitute, found a way to exploit his single remaining asset: he was a “handsome,
seductive ladies’ man, and women fell for him with predictable regularity.”
One of
those women was Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who was then dominating the Paris
fashion world. The gossipy French press followed the affair closely while
dismissing Chanel as a “little shop girl.” Chanel No. 5, Coco’s most famous
brand, took off while she and Dimitri were linked romantically, making a
fortune for Coco. Dimitri’s lack of money probably doomed the relationship. He
was just like other dispossessed Russian grand dukes, Coco concluded,
“diminished, almost emasculated by their poverty in exile … tall and handsome
and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.”
Ivan
Bunin’s stories of “aging, solitary people in emigration” distilled the grim
realities of everyday life in Paris
Most male
refugees were forced to take “fairly low-grade and drab jobs,” such as washing
dishes, waiting tables, cleaning windows, working in factories or, especially,
driving a taxi. In an environment where just about everyone needed to find new
means to survive, Russian taxi drivers were the “aristocrats of the émigré work
force”; many were actual aristocrats. For women—sewing, millinery, and knitting
proved to be the “quickest, easiest and most immediate route of out of
poverty.” The economic plight of the émigrés arriving in Paris in the early
1920s was reduced to an aphorism: “The men drive taxis and women sew for a
living.”
Taxi
driving was “greatly to be preferred for the autonomy and independence it
allowed.” The French public, Rappaport indicates, perceived Russian taxi
drivers as more dependable than their French counterparts. The French
automotive assembly line became a mainstay for those Russian men not lucky
enough to land taxi-driving opportunities, especially at the Renault factory at
Billancourt. Paid only about two dollars a day in the late 1920s, at a time
when Ford workers in the United States were earning a stunning five dollars per
day, many Russian auto workers saw the assembly line as “only a stopgap on the
way to something better—in most cases, taxi driving.”
Women
gravitated to all levels of the fashion trade. One of the most enterprising was
Grand Duke Dimitri’s sister, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. Although destitute,
Maria was skilled at needle working and started fashioning clothes. After her
brother introduced her to Coco Chanel, she opened a shop with its own brand
name, and for a while sold exclusively to Chanel. Younger Russian women,
especially those from an aristocratic background, became fashion models. But
scores of Russian women earned a “pittance doing piecework at home.” In his
1933 work Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell described one
such woman living in the hotel where he resided who “worked sixteen hours a
day, darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while [her] son, decently
dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafés.”
In 1924,
France officially recognized the Bolshevik Regime, by then known as the Soviet
Union, much to the dismay of the Russian émigré community. Russian writers and
intellectuals were further dismayed that their French counterparts, whose
support and patronage they needed in their “fight against the communist
suppression of freedom of expression,” were all-too-often “fascinated by the
new, and politically fashionable, socialist experiment in Russia and keen to
champion what they saw as its progressive policies.” By the late 1920s, Russian
writers, in a “constant battle between a longing for the inspiration of Russia
and the need to be free,” encountered a “tide of indifference” in which their
work was viewed as “rooted in the past and reactionary.”
The most
prominent Russian writer in Paris was Ivan Bunin, a master of the short story
in the tradition of Anton Chekhov, whose stories of “aging, solitary people in
emigration” distilled the grim realities of everyday life in Paris. In 1933,
Bunin won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Russian to do so. It was
undoubtedly the “single most important event in the cultural and literary life
of the Russian emigration,” Rappaport writes, but an event that infuriated
Soviet authorities back in Moscow. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, a popular female
satirist who wrote short stories under the name Teffi, tuned into the “sense of
abandonment and despair shared by so many newly arrived Russians.” Teffi wrote
about “her dismay at how the emigration had divided rather than united people,
how hardship and uncertainty about their status had eaten away at them like a
malady and eroded the grandeur of spirt once admired in them.”
From Hard
Times to Worse in 1930s Paris
By 1930,
the “charm and seductive romance of ‘Russianness’ had begun to wear thin.” The
economic downturn following the 1929 stock market crash not only reduced the
need for foreign labor in Paris but also precipitated a “xenophobic backlash”
against émigrés, with right-wing, nationalist French politicians assailing
Russians as a “drain on resources at a time of economic hardship.” A volatile
period of strikes and demonstrations in 1930s Paris, followed by food
shortages, brought “painful reminders” of 1917 to the fearful emigrants, who
“prepared for another Armageddon.” Rappaport documents a wave of suicides which
overtook some of the community’s most vulnerable members in the latter portion
of the 1930s, the “only answer to dealing with the wounds of separation and
cultural disinheritance that stubbornly refused to heal.”
Upended
Anew
The
German occupation of Paris, which began in June 1940, was a grim time for the
Russian emigrant community, marked by “extreme poverty and hunger for most.” By
August 1940, “all the old émigré life of Russian Paris had been closed down
with the enforced disbanding of cultural, educational and charitable bodies.”
Some Russians remained but more sought to flee again, with Spain and the United
States being the preferred destinations. A few even went to Berlin to fight
against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Rappaport’s
account belies Hemingway’s notion of a “childish sense of hopelessness”
prevailing among the Russians who found themselves in Paris in the period
between the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the German invasion of France.
Rappaport uses the term “stoic endurance” to describe how everyday Russians
survived during their Paris years. “Stoic endurance” also aptly describes both
the resourceful adaptations of many Romanovs and the painful reflections of the
writers, poets and artists depicted in this fascinating account.
Cover
image: St.
Martin’s Press, 2022 (Fair Use)
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