The polyglot Protest Potpourri descending so noisily upon every public place in the nation`s capital for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Reagan Gorbachev Summit this week has not, as you may have noted, included many high-cheeked ladies in diamonds and sables or gentlemen in white tie, sashes and enormous medals, shouting ”Bolsheviks are murderers!” or waving signs proclaiming ”Gorbachev is a Vulgar Peasant!”
The genteel absent protesters I refer to are, of course, the Russian nobility-or at least the descendants of those White Russian emigres who fled the motherland hotfoot after the rabble rose in 1917 and turned All Power over to that Truly Tacky Supreme Soviet.
And, on the whole, I think that the nobles` decision to shun this Epochal Event of the Reagan Administration if not the Millennium and confine their protest to hissing into their champagne glasses in the privacy of their drawing rooms is wise, and the world will be better for it. (And not just because it would look so outre to have ladies in tiaras rubbing protest signs with scruffy Afghans brandishing whatever it is that Afghans brandish.)
NOBLE AMIS
First I should say-as one must always say these days in talking about ethnic minority groups-that some of my best friends are Russian nobles. My chere amie the Alluring Alixe, the most gracious lady in Washington, is the granddaughter of a czarist duke who walked (and frequently ran) his way out of Russia. I know a Russian baroness d`un age certain, who, when not screaming in rage at otherwise genteel dinner parties about having spent her childhood in a Stalinist death camp in Turkestan, can be wonderfully charming.
The motherly Countess Tatiana Bobrinskoy, a czarist relation who runs the annual Russian Nobility Ball in New York, reminds me of my grandmother, whose own czarist official father sagely slipped his family out of the Empire after the first bloodletting in 1905.
And it should be acknowledged that it was the Russian nobility that first had its government overthrown and its way of life suppressed by the Dirty, or to be more tasteful, Appalling Commies.
And ”murderer!” is perhaps not too untoward a term to fling at the Bolshies. When he was overthrown after World War I, Germany`s Kaiser Wilhelm was merely exiled. The only dismemberment the Austrian emperor suffered was that of his empire. Czar Nicholas, his wife, their four beautiful daughters, their invalid son, the family doctor, a maid and their cocker spaniel were shot with revolvers, clubbed with rifle butts and bayoneted by the Bolshies, who then cut their bodies up into little pieces and threw them down a well
(the town of Sverdlovsk where this happened is named for the people`s patriot who masterminded this Halloween frolic).
THINNING OUT
The rest of the Russian nobility was not exactly patted on the wrist, either. The czarist haut monde was 100,000 strong (if a trifle effete) at the start of the revolution. Several million machine gun and rifle bullets later, they were down to 50,000. (The Russian Nobility Association, in fact, now counts only 200 members. As the group devotes most of its time to keeping out poseurs, interlopers and seemingly any Russian who can`t trace his ancestry back to Alexander Nevsky-such as restaurateur Prince Michael Romanoff, who was neither a prince, a Romanoff nor much of a restaurateur-the thinning numbers are explicable.)
After the aristocrats, the Appalling Commies turned to the mere masses, eliminating millions by the time Stalin-a vulgar fiend who ate sardines out of the can-finally kicked. Originally, the revolution wasn`t even communist, but a national uprising led by relatively moderate socialists, who subsequently had power stolen from them at gunpoint by the Appalling Commies. As promised, Lenin did hold an election-the first in Russian history. But when the socialists won overwhelmingly, he simply ignored the results.
But it`s still not really comme il faut to have the sabled countesses and bemedaled dukes screaming with all the others in Lafayette Park, because, if it weren`t for Their Set, there wouldn`t be need for any of this in the first place.
In czarist days, while the haut monde Russe were swilling champagne and vodka from crystal goblets and dancing the ”white nights” away at grand balls in St. Petersburg, not everyone was living so splendidly.
According to historian W. Bruce Lincoln, many of the empire`s 79 million peasants not only could not afford meat, but no cabbage either. There was no milk and half the children in many villages died every year. A doctor touring peasant villages on the eve of the revolution said, ”Those folks have become so poor that even the cockroaches have left.” Families shared their one-room huts with animals, and ”the filth and stench were appalling.”
Doubtless Truly Appalling-and not an ounce of Chanel within miles.
Although Raisa Gorbachev seems to have gotten her hands on a gallon jug.
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