The Russian Revolution in the early 20th Century brought forward a welcoming new world for many and tore down a comfortable one for others.

My grandfather, Efim Mikhailovich Zotov was a Don Cossack who escaped in 1921 on one the rickety boats from Crimea to Constantinople.However, I have a friend whose Russian family ended up in Tunisia, and I was gratified for more information about that. Helen Rappaport is a historian specializing in the Victorian period, with a particular interest in Queen Victoria and the Jamaican healer and caregiver, Mary Seacole. After the Romanovs covers primarily the 1917-1940 experiences of displaced Russians in Paris with emphasis on former royalty. If he couldn’t be tsar in Russia, then at least he could play the grand seigneur to the hilt during his regular biannual visits to Paris, traveling there from St.

Olga, herself a most forceful personality, urged Paul to save her from the disaster of social ostracization, and with his brother Vladimir’s help, he managed to persuade Nicholas II to agree to granting Olga a divorce.The Russian discovery of the French capital in fact goes back to the time of the modernizing tsar, Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles. He was keenly intelligent and cultured, a man whose refinement thus raised him above the level of merely an “old buck about town. Of all the expatriate Russians who haunted Paris during the season at this time, none reveled more in all that the capital had to offer than the colorful, if not notorious, Russian grand dukes. Paul was, however, a sad figure for many years, having lost his young wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, in 1891 after only three years of marriage, leaving him with two young children, Maria and Dmitri. From 1902, however, there was one Russian grand duke who rose to the fore in Paris and, with his wife, became the focus of expatriate Romanov Russia in Paris during the pre–World War I years.

Her love of all things Victorian springs from her childhood growing up near the River Medway where Charles Dickens lived and worked. To avoid drastic changes (and in many cases, to preserve their lives) many aristocrats, artists, musicians, authors and various other intellectuals sought refuge in Paris which became a culture hub in Europe. Some, like Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The French couturier Charles Worth was a special favorite of the Russian grand duchesses, patronized for many years by the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna.

Grand Duke Vladimir was as lavish in his tips as his spending, even “adding a number of unmounted gems to the gold coin tossing” at Maxim’s on one occasion. Nicholas also laid the foundation stone of a bridge—Le Pont Alexandre III—in his father Alexander III’s honor.

Darkly handsome, with his “immense height … piercing eyes and beetling brows,” Vladimir was the most powerful of the grand dukes. The police were sent for and, wrapping the grand duke in a tablecloth, put him in a cab to take him to the police station. Grand Duke Vladimir, Nicholas II’s most senior uncle (and, until the birth of the tsarevich in 1904, third in line to the throne), had been the focal point of an “avuncular oligarchy” that dominated court in the years up to the 1917 revolution. The Exposition Universelle of 1867 brought a huge influx of twenty thousand Russian visitors into Paris. Alexis made frequent extravagant trips to Paris with Vladimir—so much so that it was a common joke in St.According to the tsaritsa’s close personal friend Baroness Buxhoeveden, “The Russian Sovereigns, from the moment they set foot on French soil, were the objects of an unceasing ovation”; on entering Paris, their reception “became positively delirious. Rappaport successfully traces those first Belle Époque artists and royals, those who were forced to flee with nothing during the revolution, and their experiences through World War I and beyond. So much so that by the beginning of the new twentieth century, Paris was fast becoming “the capital of Russia out of Russia”—for those with plenty of money. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty.