Tamara Karsavina & Henry Bruce, Part 2, by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina in Le Spectre de la Rose, 
choerographed by Fokine, costume by Bakst, in Paris 1913.

Continuing the story of the British diplomat Henry James Bruce and Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who fell in love in St Petersburg in 1913. Eight months after they had witnessed the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin declared Britain an enemy of the Bolshevik government. Henry’s British Embassy colleagues fled from Moscow to Britain via the Crimea. But Henry went in the opposite direction, north to Petrograd, to rescue his lover and their 19 month old son, Nikita.

Read Part One of their adventure  here. 

Petrograd had been Tamara’s home all her life, but now she agreed with Henry that it was time they left. Although she had no political objections to the new order, communal life was stressful. The apartment in Millionaya Street, where she lived with Nikita and their cook, nanny and maid, was now shared with five families. Life was chaotic, with children playing in the shared passage, its ceiling criss-crossed with washing lines. Tamara’s cook Liza had been elected onto the house soviet committee but nobody knew who owned the house or to whom they should pay rent? 

Henry James Bruce at Eton in1899

Tamara had been with handsome, clever Henry for five years but now that Lenin had made peace with Germany, her dull husband, Vasilii Moukine, might return from fighting. He had agreed to divorce Tamara but the Bolsheviks had abolished both marriage and divorce. 

Postcard sent from Berlin in 1912 to Tamara,
written in French, the address translated into Russian

The chaos extended far beyond Millionaya Street. When Moscow became the capital in March 1918, Petrograd, formerly St Petersburg, was of little national or international importance and was now bankrupt. The canals, once busy with barges bringing food and fuel, were collapsing and choked with rubbish and sewage. Cholera and typhus had already killed several thousand people that winter. Although the population had halved, there was not nearly enough food. Most of the cab-horses had starved to death, and the electric trams no longer ran. Henry was compelled to walk to the former British Embassy where he found Captain Cromie, the Naval Attaché, the only British diplomat left. Cromie showed him coded telegrams which revealed that all routes south to the Crimea, east to Japan and west to Finland and the Baltic Sea were closed. Their only way out of Petrograd was north via Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, where British troops were stationed to reinforce the White Army. 

Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky in Jeux, by Debussy, in Sir Thomas Beecham's
Grand Season of Russian Ballet at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, June 1912.

However, they couldn’t tell where the front line of the civil war between the White and Red armies was located, only that it was getting closer every day. As a foreigner, Henry needed a permit from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to travel; and even Tamara needed permission from the workers’ soviet that now controlled the Marinsky Ballet. Another problem was that Tamara’s face was even better known than the Czarina’s or Lenin’s. For 15 years she had appeared to two thousand people at each performance in the Marinsky Theatre and she had toured all over Russia and Western Europe with Diaghlev's Ballet Russe. Postcards were sold of her posing as Giselle and Salome; and with Nikita on her lap. His thick curly hair and his mother's large dark eyes were unmistakable. If a reward was posted for their capture, they might easily be denounced to the authorities in exchange for a meal or a few logs of firewood. 

Famous all over Russia and Europe, Tamara Karsaviina
as  Zobeide on Sheherazade  by John Sargent, 1913.

After a tense week of enquiries, an unidentified woman telephoned the apartment. She had passes for a steam-ship departing the following morning. It would take them along the River Neva and through Lakes Ladoga and Onega north to Petrozavodsk, which was beyond the front line on the railway to Murmansk. Tamara packed two trunks, which was the most they risked taking without arousing suspicion. She found it a nightmare choosing what to include and after a desperate search failed to find the key to her bureau containing her personal letters and photos. They waited until three in the morning when it was dark enough not to be seen. Liza the cook and Katiousha her maid put aside their new revolutionary status and marked an ancient custom. They all sat in a circle in silence, then crossed themselves and quietly said goodbye. Tamara’s neighbour Prince Dolgorukov accompanied them to the pier on the Neva embankment. Henry spoke fluent Russian, French and German, and both he and Tamara had travelled all over Europe. But neither of them had travelled incognito, with a child, through enemy country before. 

Portrait of Tamara Karsavina by Henry J. Bruce, 1918.

The steamship was crowded with families anxious to return to their homes around the inland lakes before they were cut off by civil war. There were also young men eager to join the fighting – wherever the front line was now. A young Count told them that he planned to join the White Army, though it already had a surplus of officers and not enough soldiers. The Red Army had the opposite problem – too many private soldiers, who decided military strategy by vote. 

After five days the boat arrived in Petrodovask on the west coast of Lake Onega, where they planned to catch the steam-train north. Henry and the Count disembarked cautiously. The road leading up from the empty harbour to the railway station was shrouded in drifts of willow seed, stained with blood. A French officer told them that the streets were overlooked by snipers and the trains were full of Red Army soldiers, whose few officers could not control them. He advised them to return to Petrograd, even though the situation there had deteriorated even further. Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, had been assassinated in Moscow and Lenin had laid the blame on Britain. As a result, Captain Cromie had been killed defending the former British Embassy in Petrograd. They decided to remain on the boat which was heading to the north of the lake. The young Count went to search for food but was shot by a sniper within sight of the steamer. He managed to crawl back to the boat, his plans to join the White Army in ruins. 

Map of the route from Petrograd by steamer and cart to Lake Sumo, July 1918

Five days later their boat arrived in Povenetz, a village at the far north end of Lake Onega. There they were told of a disused post-road leading north-east for about 200 miles to the White Sea, and they hired a horse and cart. Tamara was forced to reduce their luggage to a few pictures, some blankets and a teaspoon which had belonged to the dancer Taglioni. She gave away most of Nikita’s clothes, and asked the captain to return their trunks to Petrograd. From Povenetz, they travelled slowly through the forest, crossing marshes and rounding lakes. Mosquitoes rose in huge clouds and swarmed around their heads. For several days they saw only the occasional peasant, shrouded in muslin, working in an isolated clearing. At night, they shared the floor of rough window-less huts, lit by rushes. They drank weak tea, and ate hard sausage. The local people were friendly, but knew nothing of politics or the movements of the Red Army. Twenty years of dieting and dancing with bleeding feet, had taught Tamara to ignore both hunger and pain, while Henry had been toughened up by British boarding school. Nikita, a pampered city child, clung to his mother and screamed. 
After six days and nights in the forest, they arrived at a slightly more prosperous village on the edge of Lake Sumo. They had just let the horses go for the night when they learned that the village had a soviet committee. Without realising it, they had crossed the line into Red Army territory. Worse still, a consignment of vodka had just arrived. In an effort to improve productivity in both factories and farms, the Tsar had passed a law, which the Bolsheviks had upheld, against distilling vodka. But with the increasing anarchy, it had been impossible to enforce. After a short, fitful sleep in a hut, the leader of the soviet, Commissar Solkov woke them and announced that rather than let them continue round Lake Sumo by cart, his men, who were all drunk, would row them across. He obviously didn’t trust this well-dressed man with a strange accent, his beautiful wife with soft hands, and their child who wore shoes. If they did not agree, then he would lock them up in a barn. Henry remained outwardly calm, guessing that the commissar would almost certainly set the barn on fire.

Postcards of Tamara Karsavina were on sale in Russia.
Here she is with Louloushka, her King Charles Spaniel.

Tamara pointed out that a storm was brewing, the lake was already rough and Nikita could not swim, whereupon he said, “It matters not if the little cur drowns.” At this Tamara was enraged and flew at him, screaming. She could cope with the new social order, but not with insults to her son. Henry thought it was all over. Despite their luck and fortitude so far, their escape seemed to be ending in disaster.
Will they get away? Find out next month.
Part Three, December 27.

Slaves, Fish, Crochet, by Vanora Bennett

I didn’t intend to go to the art exhibition now on at London’s centre for Russia-lovers, Pushkin House. I was there for a talk on something else Russian and cultural in the same room, to do with the novel I’m researching, and very interesting it was too. Yet, as I listened to the talk, I couldn’t help but be struck by the textiles hung on the walls. They weren’t particularly astonishing when you first came in. Their (brilliantly) bizarre wrongness took a while to sink in, and make you stare.

The artworks were big blanket-like knits in dingy colours, with dividing lines that made them look like brick walls (think Pink Floyd album covers), and with graffiti-like Russian words in bright wools sewn on. Slogan type words, only backwards, or upside down, or altered; or swearword type words.

On another wall there were some neatly crocheted multi-coloured shapes – the kind of sweet table-mat thing you can imagine a granny with a slightly wonky sense of colour working, over a nice cup of tea. But these shapes were Russian letters, and the letters were strung together in more words, and, again, they were quite subversive, altered, wrong versions of Soviet slogans.

It was definitely confusing to see all those very butch power words – the shorthand script of the Soviet elite who, in their 70 years in power, gave us Stalin and the Gulag and millions of deaths, and the brutal vocabulary of choice of the violent Russian underworld that flourished under them – re-rendered here in neat, fluffy, well finished plain-and-purl-and-a-bit-of-embroidery. If you ever wanted an illustration of the feminisation of history, this was it.

It was only after the talk was over, and I turned round and noticed the quietest exhibit of all, at the back of the hall, that I actually burst out laughing.

This one was a large white lacy oblong, with frilly edges – the kind of cosy, conservative decorative item one might expect to find on a wire, not quite covering a cobwebby dacha window somewhere, with snow outside and whichever kindly auntie had done the crocheting glancing proudly round at it as she passed more tea (possibly from a samovar). It looked the concentrated essence of a particular kind of Russian innocence – the get-away-from-politics-to-the-simple-life mood that makes country weekends in those little wooden houses so enchanting. At least, it looked that way until you looked more closely and saw, all mixed up with the intricate patterns, that its main decorative feature was the – wildly inappropriate - great shouty Soviet propaganda word, PRAVDA (TRUTH), also the name of the main Soviet-era newspaper, followed by a disconcerting question mark.

The pieces, it turns out, are the work of a young Moscow artist called Olga Bozhko.

The exhibition blurb says Bozhko “plays with ideas of memory and history as they are reflected both in the language of the streets and in the language of government propaganda. She is fascinated by the way everyday Russian language mutates alongside ever-changing Russian perceptions of history. Living and working in Moscow, Bozhko pays attention to the graffiti, advertising and government slogans which comment, often unconsciously, on Russian society today.”

“The works for installation were knitted by hand - a symbolically soft and feminine medium. The large size of the works imply a considerable investment of labour and time: we usually associate this type of labour with domestic craft, which sets out to ‘wrap’ home life in comforting, soft hand-made material. But the images and particularly the inscriptions on the works are unsettling. Some of them imitate brick walls covered with angry graffiti, others - net curtains - but with slogans woven in to them. In the context of the elegant early Georgian architecture of Pushkin House, they turn into politically-charged comments on the past and present of Russia.”

The one that struck me most wasn’t in the room at all. It was at the bottom of the stairwell.

It’s a large hand-knitted fishing net, in the red, white and blue colours of the Russian flag.

The inscription Bozhko has snuck into the middle of the net looks and sounds like the heroic early Soviet propaganda slogan, “Raby Ne My” – “We Are No Slaves”. Between 1917 and the onset of perestroika in the mid-1980s, this phrase always featured in the Soviet primary school literacy programme and as a result resonates today with generations of Russian-speakers.

By now, though, I knew better than to take Bozhko’s slogans at face value. So I looked again. Sure enough, she’d changed a few letters to give a very different message, “Ryby Nemy”, or “Fish Are Dumb” – the title of her exhibition.

“This play on words,” Pushkin House’s gloss on the show says, “shows how very subtle changes can disarm (and in fact then re-arm) a powerful propagandistic message. To Russian ears, the phrase ‘We are no slaves’ is associated with one of the grand ideological narratives of the last century; ‘fishes are dumb’ may be read factually or of course as a metaphor for silent shoals of people caught in nets of government propaganda.”

“I like these,” I said, with growing fellow-feeling. Bozhko seemed so clearly the visual equivalent of so many female historical novelists today – cleverly re-examining the past, using new methods and materials and values, emphasising some things more and de-emphasising others, poking a bit of quiet fun at some of the sacred cows of tradition, and generally filling in the gaps left by the male academicians who did the writing first time round.

“I don’t,” the man sitting next to me replied, in cross David Starkey style. “I decided that before you got here.”

But you might enjoy Bozhko's mocking girl challenge to the orthodoxies of modern Russian history if you are open-minded. Even if you're male.

See Vanora Bennett’s website