How Russian emigres scratched out a living once they lost their world of luxury
When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris, he found a city crowded with Russian emigres who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution more than four years earlier. In February 1922, he observed: “They are drifting along . . . in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right, which is quite charming when you first encounter it and rather maddening after a few months.”
By then, the writing was already on the wall for those Russian exiles who chose to read it. Despite their hopes, dreams and expectations of returning home, the new “blood-red” regime, as they dubbed it, showed no sign of imminent collapse. Of the 50,000 displaced Russians who eventually settled in the French capital, only a handful would ever see their native land again. And as they lingered in the cafes on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, longing for a lost world of luxury and ease, their real task was to scratch out a living in this pinched and hostile new one.
British historian Helen Rappaport author most recently of “The Race to Save the Romanovs” in 2018 - has produced an engaging group biography of this melancholy crowd: “After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War.” She begins in the last years of the 19th century, when the czarist nobility treated the French capital as their Las Vegas - a place to spend lavishly and live indulgently. The last czar’s uncles, Grand Duke Vladimir and Grand Duke Alexis, were carousers-in-chief, regularly descending on the city in pursuit of food, wine and women.
After the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, plenty of those who had formerly traveled to Paris on luxury train cars embarked on a desperate and hazardous flight from the Red Army. South to Crimea and then across the Black Sea in rickety and overcrowded boats, Russian refugees soon filled the fetid slums of Constantinople. The lucky ones who had the means to travel on to France generally arrived with their funds exhausted.
Coco Chanel, who enjoyed a love affair with handsome Grand Duke
Dmitri Pavlovich, once the fourthrichest man in Russia, described him and his friends as “almost emasculated by their poverty.” A few of the better-educated exiles wrangled positions as bookkeepers or bank clerks. But mostly these former princes, army officers and high government officials found themselves working as taxi drivers, waiters or on factory assembly lines.
Rappaport is a mistress of the telling detail. Chanel, she reports, took pity on Count Sergei Kutuzov, former governor of Crimea, by making him head receptionist at her atelier on Rue Cambon. An entire company of ex-Cossacks staffed the Gare de l’Eastern time as porters and freight handlers. A Russian could be spotted among the workers who poured out of the Renault factory at Quai du Point-du-Jour at day’s end “by the fact he was generally cleaner and better dressed and even wore a tie,” she writes.