‘The strangest of lives’: the plight of White Russians in Paris

During the years between school and my first job on a newspaper I worked briefly in Paris in an antique shop in the septième, owned by an ancient White Russian who had fled Petrograd at the end of 1917. She was a charming old woman, impeccably turned out and with beautiful manners. She was prone to quote Pushkin, flirt with young men and burst into tears several times a day. She shed a few even when she fired me for the understandable reason that I failed to sell any stock and knew next to nothing about antiques.

She claimed to be Countess Sonya X (she has living relatives), though I discovered much later that she had in fact been a countess’s maid and had somehow managed to get out of revolutionary Russia with some jewels, which she sold to establish herself in a business. Nobody knows exactly how she acquired them, but I am sure it was with charm and a smile. 

She was the stereotype of a White Russian émigré between the wars and would have fitted neatly into Helen Rappaport’s enjoyable book, with its gallery of chancers, dreamers and rogues. There are also great writers and artists, coquettes, gigolos, spies and superb business brains, all of whom made new lives as refugees from the nightmare of the Bolshevik takeover and civil war.

The book also helps us understand why there was a revolution in Russia – and glimpse a little of what is happening there now: wealth in the hands of an oligarch class; power held by a corrupt, out of touch autocrat in thrall to a semi-mystical ultra nationalism; the threat of violence everywhere; a war that may be unwinnable. It all sounds familiar.

Many of the players in this story never managed to escape their past even in the safety and relative comfort of Paris.