After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris
by Helen Rappaport
St. Martin's Press, 2022

In her new book, After the Romanovs, Helen Rappaport brings forward the incredibly tragic and often haunting story of the Russian emigres who were forced from their homeland by the Bolsheviks, after the fall of the Imperial family, and the rise of Vladimir Lenin. More than a hundred thousand Russians crammed themselves shoulder to shoulder, severely overcrowding the Allied transport ships that came to the ports of Odessa to help evacuate the throngs of desperate Russians to Constantinople, which served as the hub for Russian immigration into Europe. The emotions on board the Allied ships heading for foreign shores were often fear and dread, laced with a sense of false optimism. A prominent Russian musician, Alexander Vertinsky, a passenger on board the HMS Rio Negro captured the ship’s unanimous sentiment, “All the palm trees, all the sunrises, all the sunsets of the world, all the exoticism of distant lands, everything that I saw, all that I admired, I would give for a single, cloudy, rainy, tearful day in my homeland.”

Russia’s wealthiest emigres would flock to Paris, drawn by the sheer opulence and luxury that was available to them there. The period between the 1870’s and the start of the First World War, referred to as the Belle Epoque, served as the heyday for the Russian elite in Paris. “ Everywhere in Paris, the tills of the exclusive parfumiers, furriers, fine art dealers, and antiques emporiums rang to lavish amounts of Russian money.”

The relationship between the Russian nobility and Paris high society can be traced back to 1717, when Peter the Great first visited the city and immediately fell in love with its magic. Upon his return to Russia, he modeled much of his new city of Saint Petersburg after the French capital. Under the reign of Catherine the Great, French would become the official language of the Russian court, and intelligentsia, and many aspects of France’s culture were adopted by members of Russia’s high society.

It wasn’t until the Russian revolution of 1917 that more than just the wealthy made their way to the streets of Paris. Artists, musicians, writers, and blue collar workers flooded the city, all in desperate need of employment. Having come with nothing but the clothes on their backs, many Russian emigres were literally starting their lives over again. Grateful for any work whatsoever, it became quite common for Parisians to be driven in taxis by counts, dukes, and princes of the old Imperial Russia, while their wives turned to the fashion industry, putting their years of needlework to use in Parisian fashion houses and shops.

Rappaport dedicates nearly half of her book to looking at the artist and musician emigres, such as Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Ivan Bunin, and the incredible impacts that they had on the cultural fabric of not only Paris, but of the world. However, not every emerging artist was able to create a name for themselves. “When one looks back over the literature of the Russian emigration in Paris it is hard not to be left with the impression of so many stunted careers, inhibited by an intense hardship that never allowed its exponents to flourish, chained as they were to menial work in order to survive.”

In “After the Romanovs,” Rappaport explains that much of the information regarding the Russian immigration to Paris is heavily slanted towards two groups, the wealthy and artists. When it comes to the daily struggles of ordinary Russian emigres in Paris, detailed information is much harder to come by. “Of those émigrés who left Russia after the 1917 revolution,” she writes, '“while we have a wealth of painful reflections on their predicament by writers and poets, so few voices of ordinary Russians have been recorded. But when they were, they were stoic and unself-pitying. They spoke most simply and eloquently of what they had left behind in Mother Russia. ‘What do I miss most about my old life?’ mused taxi driver Sergey Rubakhin when interviewed: It’s no big thing, in truth.... A real winter, perhaps, a real Russian winter, with 35 degrees below zero.... Here the winter is a joke.... And then, there’s the beautiful serenity of the Russian people ... who accepted everything and never complained, even when in misery. ‘Why complain? God is so high, and the tsar is so far.’”

The title After the Romanovs is one that could be slightly misleading to readers. While members of the extended Romanov imperial family do have roles within the story, this book is more specifically about the impact that Russian emigres had on the cultural fabric of Paris, as well as how they cultivated new lives for themselves there. Rappaport has written a book of truly grand scale, covering events from 1870 through the early 1930’s. After the Romanovs is at once a grippingly engaging story of triumph during tragedy, and a haunting tale of desperation and survival.

—Micah Cummins is a college student currently living in Greenville South Carolina.