This is a book of survival, of innocence, foolishness and bravery as a class of people finds itself suddenly outcasts from those that they had exploited for hundreds of years. In the chaos of the Russian revolution, even before the seizure of power by Lenin, the very ground beneath a once powerful class was shifting and no one had any idea what the outcome of those movements would be.
For powerful aristocratic families (some who had owned up to 500,000 serfs) and for the poorest of the aristocrats, their world with it’s table of titles and addresses, it’s position above the law and its belief in the Czar would all be lost, almost without a whimper. They would suddenly find themselves thrown out of their houses and palaces, their valuables seized by the State and thrown onto resources that most of them had never dreamed they possessed. Despised as useless exploiters, they were often hunted down and shot or hung (if they were fortunate in their manner of death), while they tried to keep their families together often during a time when they were fleeing from town to town to stay ahead of the Red Terror. Throw into this mix the chaos caused by the Russian Civil War and it is easy to see how literally hundreds of thousands of “aristocrats” (a term used for the highest to the poorest of the species) were destroyed.
Some aristocrats decided to join the White armies, others believing that Russia needed to be purged, joined the Reds. If they had joined the Reds, it was no ticket to survival for they were always viewed as a danger to the new Soviet state. With the coming of the purges under Stalin, they were singled out after having led quiet lives for years, often in the service of the State; suddenly once again they were denounced and hunted, shipped to Siberia or executed. Even their children were targeted as the stain of the exploiters was believed to be passed on from mother and father to son and daughter.
In the end, ancient families who had served the Czarist state for better or worse were exterminated. Some were fortunate to flee to the West, ending up often as door men or waiters in the exile’s haunts. Even there, in France and other countries they could be murdered to sooth the paranoid images of the rulers in Moscow.
One reads this book and may question why the hatred of that class was so strong; everything they possessed or stood for was either destroyed or mocked and held up as an example of that classes uselessness. We must remember that for hundreds of years the aristocrats had exploited millions, bought and sold them like so many lumps of coat while living a life of unimagined luxury. Some aristocrats tried and did contribute to society, but they were a small handful against a tide of greed and cruelty. And so, they died, hunted and hated and because of their past sins, and millions more would have to pay a price as a bold new world was created which was more corrupt and crueler than what they had destroyed.
