High life | 17 January 2013

Gstaad

The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten billion. None of the counters was present at the birthday, however, given at the yacht club by Dino Goulandris for the head of the tragic Romanoff house, just many old friends who included some of Europe’s oldest and most royal families. No camel drivers, thank you very much, no Russian oligarchs, just Former People

, as Douglas Smith named his heartbreaking book on the final days of the Russian aristocracy. Buy that book (it was published last year in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and weep through it. Set in the maelstrom of the revolution (which was to prove once and for all that, when the lower elements of society prevail, the outcome is always a hundred times worse than what it replaced), this is a chilling tale of looted palaces, desperate flights, cold-blooded murder of innocents — especially women — and marauding peasants and so-called red soldiers butchering the helpless. Funny how little one reads about the cold-blooded murder of the Russian aristocracy, not that Hollywood has done much better. (There’s been a couple of bad films about Rasputin, showing the Russian prince who killed him as a drunken poof. Yusupov was homosexual but a gentleman and married to a great beauty.) For that matter, three million German women raped by Soviet soldiers in the aftermath of the second world war hardly get a mention. Two great families who survived the 1917 holocaust were the Sheremetev and the Trubetskoy — well, survived being a relative word.