What Did We Ever Do For the Russians? asks Laurie Graham

As anyone who has been in London recently must know, the city has become a Mecca for wealthy Russians. They want the best of British for themselves and their children, and not for the first time in Russia's history.

When I began researching The Grand Duchess of Nowhere I was already aware of a British presence in Russia during the 18th and 19th centuries  -  I remembered, for instance, being shown the former English Church on the Angliskaya Embankment of the Neva in St Petersburg  -  nevertheless I was surprised by just how a la mode we Brits had once been. The Germans may have been there in greater numbers, but we were the flavour of the day.

The ground was laid by Empress Catherine II's trade treaty with Britain. Industrialists emigrated to Russia and built factories there. They brought an energy and enterprise and technical expertise that Russia desperately needed. For the most part those men, like the grandfather of the novelist William Gerhardie, went native and made Russia their true home. In their wake came British merchants, shop-keepers, bankers, doctors (Scots medics were especially esteemed)), and tough-love nannies. Tsar Nicholas II chose one such for his four daughters. Though Nanny Eager was Irish by birth she has a definite look of cod liver oil and no nonsense about her.

 

When Nanny Eager arrived in St Petersburg in 1898 she would have found it well-provided with familiar things. There were at least four stores that called themselves The English Shop, vying with each other for the custom of wealthy Russians. Crosse & Blackwell piccalilli, Huntley & Palmer's ginger nuts, Pears' soap, Trumper's badger-hair shaving brushes. And for those difficult birthday gifts for friends who already have everything there was always Nichols and Plinke  -  a kind of Liberty's of its day  - established in St Petersburg before Faberge arrived and stole their thunder.

 

There was an English bookshop on Gorokhovaya Street and a subscription library attached to the English church. Burton ale may not have quite the cachet of champagne or Crimean wine but it was hugely popular in 19th century St Petersburg, and so was Newcastle coal, in spite of Russia's unimaginably vast sources of birch wood which also makes excellent fires.

English landscape gardeners were all the rage too, as were our coach-builders, and a Grand Duke's country estate was considered nothing without a string of English hunters in the stables and a pair of English hounds chewing on the legs of his brand new Maple's mail order mahogany sideboard.

What did we ever do for the Russians? Quite a lot it seems. And now we've come full circle.


The Grand Duchess of Nowhere was published by Quercus Books on October 2nd.

An Old Man and His Cat, by Laurie Graham

  The research for my new novel The Grand Duchess of Nowhere required me to untangle the vast network of the Romanov dynasty as it was in the early years of the 20^th century. There was much discussion with my editor about Russian names  -  to give people their full name with patronymic? Always? Sometimes? And then what about nicknames and diminutives? The Russians do love their diminutives. Compromises had to be made in the interests of being reader-friendly, and my solution, given that I am no Tolstoy, was to focus on just a few members of this very large family. Size apart, the Romanov family was much like any other. It contained roués and straight-shooters, the prim, the giddy and the seemingly normal. Factions were on no-speaks with other factions, and some of the rifts that appeared as the Revolution gathered pace and loyalties were tested were never repaired.  

The story of what happened to Tsar Nicholas II, his family and his closest retainers is well-known, though none the less chilling for being so often retold. But what about the rest of the dynasty? At the time of Nicholas’s abdication in 1917 there were more than fifty recognised Romanovs living in Russia, plus a number of semi-detached scions, principally morganatic wives and their children. Romanov men were never afraid to follow their heart rather than the rule book on suitable brides.  Of these fifty or so Romanovs the majority escaped into exile. But eleven of them suffered the same fate as the Imperial Family, and a recurring theme struck me as I researched their deaths: the Bolsheviks always executed their enemies in the dead of night.

The first Romanov to be killed was Tsar Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. In the family he was known as Misha. For just a day or two after Nicholas’s abdication he was Tsar Michael II. You see what I mean about names?  

In March 1918 Grand Duke or ex-Tsar Misha, pictured here with his beloved (but unapproved) wife Natalya Brasova, was exiled to Perm. His faithful friend and secretary, Brian Johnson, went with him and so, for a while, did Natalya and their son. Brian Johnson, by the way, was half English, half German, born in Russia, and was more generally known by his Orthodox name, Nikolai. See, names again?  Early on June 13^th, in the gloaming of a Russian white night, Grand Duke Misha and Johnson were driven to a forest clearing and shot. Their bodies have never been found though several searches have been made in recent years. You may find this link of interest.

A month after Misha’s death, on July 17^th 1918, in Yekaterinburg, the Imperial Family were woken from their sleep and murdered. The following day, in the town of Alapaevsk, a further six members of the Romanov family were killed:  Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (the Tsarina’s elder sister) with one of her fellow nuns, Varvara,  three Grand Dukes from the Konstantinovich branch of the dynasty, and 22 year old Vladimir Paley, a young poet and one of the morganatic offspring of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich. Here is a photograph of Vladimir in his cadet uniform.

In the dead hours of the early morning they were bundled into a cart, driven to an abandoned iron working and thrown down one of its shafts. What the fall failed to accomplish was finished off with grenades and bundles of burning brushwood. None survived.

There was then a six month hiatus before the final Bolshevik cull of Romanovs. Grand Dukes Paul Alexandrovich, Dmitri Konstantinovich, Nicholas Mikhailovich (aka Bimbo) and George Mikhailovich aka Gogi) had at first been detained under a fairly lenient form of house arrest in Vologda, free to associate with one another, but after the assassination of Nicholas and his family they were transferred to the Shpalernaya House of Detention in Petrograd (now St Petersburg).


On January 29^th 1919, long before dawn, they were brought by truck to the Peter & Paul Fortress. Grand Duke Paul was so frail he had to be carried to the place of execution and was shot where he lay on a stretcher. The other Grand Dukes had the briefest moment to embrace each other on the edge of the trench that had been dug to receive their bodies. For me one of the most poignant details of that scene -  four elderly men, taken from their beds, stripped of their shirts in sub-zero temperatures, and shown the grave that awaited them  -  is that Grand Duke Bimbo, the Romanov’s oddball intellectual, botanist, historian, enthusiast and prankster, had brought his cat with him from jail and his very last act was to entrust it to one of his executioners and ask him to care for it.

Here is Bimbo decked out for an official portrait. I'd like to think there was a cat just out of shot on that button-back chair or perhaps already making its scornful way out of the door.

This is recent history. There is abundance of photographs of all the people I’ve mentioned in this post and I studied those faces often as I was writing The Grand Duchess of Nowhere. But as novelists we’re always searching for the little human stories beneath the starched collars and corsets. For me, Grand Duke Bimbo and his cat were just one such.  

THE GRAND DUCHESS OF NOWHERE, Quercus Books, will be published on October 2nd.