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.

Tamara Karsavina: Stravinsky's First Firebird by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina in the studio of Wilhelm-Alfred Eberlin.
His self portrait is on the shelf, 1910.

This is the story of a British diplomat and a Russian prima ballerina caught up in the October 1917 Russian revolution, and their dramatic escape with their love-child.
In old age, relatives sometimes reveal family stories that are not secrets, they have just not mentioned them before. In her eighties, my mother told me that her father’s cousin had been a British diplomat during the 1917 revolution, and his lover was a Russian ballerina who had first danced Stravinsky’s The Firebird. I wanted to know more, so my daughter Daisy and I flew to St Petersburg. We visited the Imperial Stage School, with its original practice rooms, and the Marinsky Theatre, unchanged since its construction in 1860. We also found their apartment, now the premises of the Russian Red Cross Society, and discovered archives no-one had seen since 1917.

Henry James Bruce (1880-1951) was brought up in a stately home in Northern Ireland, built by Italian architects for his ancestor the Earl of Bristol. Henry’s father, Sir Hervey Juckes Bruce preferred animals to humans. He kept a tame grouse and a hare loose in the house; and his own pack of fox-hounds. One evening at dinner he said to the dowager on his right, "May I peel this peach for you? It’s too ripe for the monkey." Henry was educated at Eton and Oxford. In order to pass his entrance exam into the Foreign Office, he picked up French prostitutes in The Strand and gave them lunch in exchange for conversation. His good looks, intelligence and charm helped his promotion in 1913, to Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in St Petersburg at only 35 years. In addition to being highly skilled in de-cyphering codes, he was also an accomplished painter and writer.

Henry James Bruce in 1907.

Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (1885-1978) spent eight years of her childhood coping with the strict and punishing regime of the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, boarding for 50 weeks of the year. At fifteen, she performed for Tsar Nicholas II and his cousin the German Kaiser, and when she graduated aged 17 her exceptional proficiency was noticed and she was appointed as a soloist at the Marinsky Ballet. She toured Europe with classics such as Giselle and Les Sylphides.

Graduation from Imperial Ballet School, Theatre Street, 

St Petersburg, 1902. Karsavina is on the far right, aged 17. 

Ballerinas were usually considered to be merely decorative but the Russian intelligentsia embraced Tamara. Her beauty, technical perfection and intelligence enchanted and inspired choreographers, composers and designers. As Nijinsky's first dance partner, Tamara worked with impresario Diaghilev, artists Benois, Picasso and Matisse, the poet Potemkin, and the choreographer Michel Fokine. In 1909, she introduced Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London and a year later inspired Igor Stravinsky to compose The Firebird . She influenced not only the theatre and dancing but also fashion, music and culture, all over Europe.

Rehearsal with Diaghlev's Ballet Russe company, probably 1910.
Seated at the piano is Stravinsky, Fokine is standing, Karsavina in centre in tutu. 

Henry and Tamara first met in 1913 at the Stray Dog Arts Café, a crowded cellar of Bohemian artists and poets. She danced barefoot among flowers to music written specially by Zelenski, played on an upright piano. Tamara had been having English lessons with the novelist Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), head of British propaganda in St Petersburg, who described Henry as "too handsome for his high intelligence". Henry and Tamara soon fell in love but she was already married to a dull aristocratic banker named Vasili Moukine. 

Vasili Moukine c 1915

In July 1914, Tamara danced in Debussy’s Daphnis et Chloe and Strauss’s Cleopatre at London’s Drury Lane. She was performing in Paris when war broke out that August. Determined to re-join the Imperial Ballet and Henry, she learned that the Russian border with Germany was closed, so travelled alone via Dover and Finland. In 1915 Tamara became pregnant and Moukine agreed to give her up, even though divorce was not possible under Russian Orthodox law. Despite the war in Europe, Tamara and Henry continued working in Petrograd, and lived together as a family, with baby Nikita.

Tamara Karsavina as Pharaoh's Daughter, circa 1904

On October 24, 1917, Henry wrote in his diary, “At 7 o’clock I left the Embassy to go to the ballet where I arrived peacefully by tram. The others [his embassy colleagues] arrived later, having all been arrested en route and taken to the barracks of the Pavlosk regiment, where they were apparently treated quite civilly and given a bit of paper to allow them to proceed.” The ballet that evening was The Nutcracker composed by Tchaikovsky in 1892, with Tamara as the Sugar Plum Fairy. “Tamara danced magnificently and had a tremendous reception. But the poor Marinsky was the ghost of itself, the stage half empty. After the ballet Tamara, Madam B and myself went by tram up to the Suviroff Square and proceeded to walk down the Millionaya, barred by pickets. The first person we met was a completely unperturbed Havery engaged in explaining to a soldier in his peerless Cockney Russian that he couldn’t help the soldier’s troubles; he had some letters to post, battle or no battle." Mr. Havery was the British Embassy messenger who had arrived in Russia 20 years earlier. Through thick and thin he ensured that embassy post was always delivered. In the preceding few days there had been intermittent gun-fire at night, but it was never clear who was shooting at whom.

“Everything had been quiet in the rest of the town, so we were surprised to find the Lord’s own holy racket going on round the Winter Palace, where the Government was putting up a last stand – field-guns, machine-guns, rifle fire, a destroyer from the river et tout le tremblement. Never heard such a row. Altogether the walk a very jumpy business.” They gathered that all the lift bridges across the River Neva were up, thus cutting off the north of the city, and a destroyer was pointing its guns at the Winter Palace, at the far end of their street. There was no electricity in their apartment and to take their minds off the sound of machine guns, they played cards by candlelight. “The last thing we heard last night was that everything is in favour of the Government and the Revolutionary Committee had been arrested. After supper I escorted Madame B home to a machine-gun obbligato and so to a very noisy bed.
“This morning early nobody knew what had happened, though it seemed pretty clear that the Government was down and out. This became increasingly clear as the day went on, until we heard that the whole town was in the hands of the Bolsheviks who had taken the State Bank, Telephone, etc.”  The next day Henry’s diary entry said simply, "Arrived safely at the Embassy to learn that Lenin was Prime Minister, Trotzky Foreign Minister."

Tamara Karsavina and Nikita Bruce in Petrograd, 1917

After the October Revolution, life grew steadily worse and everyone was a potential enemy. Despite Lenin’s great plans, there were still huge debts from the 1914 war; political and social anarchy; and a collapsed economy. During that winter, food became so scarce that after performances Tamara was presented with bags of flour, instead of flowers. Even so, she sometimes fainted after dancing. Tamara was no Tsarist: during the revolution in 1905, she and her friend, the dancer Anna Pavlova, had organised a dancers’ strike in solidarity with the factory workers. Tamara was threatened with dismissal, but saved by the Tsar's amnesty for strikers. She had welcomed the Tsar's abdication in March 1917, and she was relieved when the Bolshevik government insisted that the Marinsky should continue at the state’s expense. She was voted president of the Marinsky Theatre's Soviet Council, but nobody trusted anyone. The gilded imperial eagles in the theatre were ripped down, and the attendants' satin livery was replaced with military jackets. As part of the policy of the redistribution of decision-making, the carpenters chose the Marinsky’s programme. However their choices were based not on any knowledge of opera or ballet, but on which sets were easiest to construct. There was even talk of nationalising women, in order to re-distribute the beautiful wives of merchants among the factory workers.
In March 1918, fearing possible foreign invasion, Lenin moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, so all embassies had to move too. Three months later he declared Britain the enemy of the Bolshevik government, and British diplomats were ordered home, south via the Crimea. However, Henry travelled north to Petrograd to be with Tamara, and their 19-month-old son Nikita. In their spacious apartment in Millionaya Street, the ‘Park Lane’ of Russia, lived Nikita’s nursemaid, their Polish cook and Tamara’s old nanny. Now they also shared it with five other families, one to each room. There was only one kitchen and constant arguments between the women over the washing hanging in the passage. Water still flowed from the tap, but it was contaminated with cholera, and there was little fuel to boil it. The trees in the park had all been felled and even the wooden street cobbles had been dug up.
Because Nikita was half-British, and Tamara the lover of a British diplomat, they were both at risk of being denounced as enemies and imprisoned. As Tamara recalled 12 years later: “Rumours multiplied like microbes in a diseased body. Newspapers born overnight spread panicky informations and coined libels.” Tamara and Henry decided they had to leave Russia with Nikita as soon as possible. But all routes out of Petrograd were closed.
In the next instalment, find out how these lovers from opposing nations and clashing cultures, crossed lakes, marshes, forests and oceans, and survived revolution, capture and storms. 

Part Two is next month on November 27.

Tamara Karsavina in The Firebird, 1910.

Note: St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914. In 1924 it was changed to Leningrad, and back to St Petersburg in 1991.

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.