Don't let the main title mislead: this history begins well before the Romanov Tsars and Russian nobility were overthrown in 1917. Beginning with la Belle Epoque, there's a thorough discussion of the Russian princes who made their main homes in Paris while Tsars still ruled in their homeland. Your head will whirl with the names of Grand Dukes, Grand Duchesses, morgantic wives, mistresses, dancers, painters, impresarios. You will find yourself referring back often to the cast of characters in the front matter.
What you won't find is much reference to the last Tsar and his unfortunate family. We all know their fate.
The early chapters form a rich tapestry of the glittering pre-Revoluntionary Russian cultural outpost gaining its foothold in Paris. The importance of noble patrons for ballet, opera, theatre, and painting cannot be understated. Without their early money and influence behind impresarios such as Diaghilev, much of Russian culture might well have vanished forever in the flames of revolution sweeping Moscow, St. Petersburg & other cities, and its influence on modern ballet, theatre, and art lost. The already-emigrated smoothed the path for later, more desperate artistic emigres and guaranteed that their influence would survive. Imagine modern painting without Marc Chagall's iconic works? Yes, he later was forced to flee France ahead of the Nazi occupation but before that he'd already fled Russia for Paris. The artists of every stripe welcomed in Paris have left their mark in every cultural arena we now take for granted.
Those who came latest fared worst in their ability to smuggle out enough material wealth to survive on. Those without established wealthy relatives or patrons were soon competing against Tsarist Russia's military heroes for menial jobs like doorman, car washer, freight-handler, waiter. But even the richest of emigrees had to find ways to increase income or live in an ever-shrinking bubble of their remaining opulence. Nor, as the Russian diaspora spread out, were the French, or the British, or the Americans happy to welcome this influx of formerly wealthy or upper middle class workers. Then, as now, immigrants were seen as taking jobs from deserving locals. Resentment ran higher in some quarters than others, and newspaper editorials in many countries openly gloated, rather than commiserated, over the aristocrats, doctors, lawyers, and others thus humbled. For page after page, vignette after vignette, a life begun in a palace ends with death in a single small room on foreign soil.
The looming menace of WW2 put the final hammer down on the formerly glittering Russian emigre circles in Paris. Their artistic, educational, and philanthropic organizations were shuttered, their former patrons broke or fled or dead. Then came the Nazi occupation and those few Russians left with any influence turned their efforts to protecting their countrymen from the Gestapo. A thousand Russians were arrested in June 1941 alone. Many more fled. After that war the new emigre heartland was New York City, and around the world, more and more emigres began to shift their emotional identification from the old, barely remembered Tsarist Russia to the new, powerful Soviet Union.
All this is but a superficial recounting of what is a veritable hailstorm of similar stories gathered by Dr. Helen Rappaport, Fellow
of the Royal Historical Society and a specialist in Imperial Russian and
Victorian history, into this dense but readable recounting of one of Europe's largest and wealthiest emigrations.
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