Forever Russian: Memoirs of a Vagabond Prince

2013 by Georges Obolensky. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/12/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1477-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1475-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1476-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902546

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   The 1917 Soviet Revolution

And Its Disastrous Consequence

Chapter 2   My New Home

Chapter 3   Life with My New Parents

Chapter 4   Oncle Misha

Chapter 5   A Tsarist Paradise Lost

Chapter 6   The Lycée de Nice Years

Chapter 7   Oncle Misha’s End

Chapter 8   War

Chapter 9   A New Life

Chapter 10   Back to Europe

Chapter 11   Back to New Jersey

Chapter 12   Retirement at Last

Chapter 13   RUSSIA Since Stalin

Epilogue   A Love Story

T his book is dedicated to my beloved wife, Rhoda, without whose help, it would not have come to fruition.

W ithout the help of my editor, Gary Pool, this book would not have been finished. Thank you Gary for your help and advice which enabled me to complete my life.

INTRODUCTION

I    am Prince Yuri Yurevitch Obolensky. At this writing I am ninety years old, and this is the story of my life. I am descended from a well-known and ancient noble Russian family, who traces its origins back to the Varangian chieftain Rurik, founder of the Rurik Dynasty, which ruled over Kievan-Rus and Muscovy from 862 until the 16th century (CE). Rurik can quite arguably be called the first Tsar.

By the end of the 19th century, my family was well ensconced in Russian society as part of the ruling elite, controlling great wealth and vast country estates. In 1917, however, the entire social order was turned on its head and many of my family were forced into exile as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Although some biographical facts are inevitable, the first part of my account begins with two people very dear to my heart, namely my uncle Michael Obolensky, my father’s older brother, and his wife Anna. They were a happily married couple, both of noble Russian lineages, whose carefree and opulent existence in tsarist St. Petersburg changed drastically with the 1917 Revolution. This horrendous event put their personal lives in danger and eventually forced them to flee their cherished fatherland never to return. They decided to settle in the south of France, where I joined them in 1930 when I was ten years old and where I remained under their affectionate care and guardianship throughout my teens.

Instead of Europe, my parents had immigrated to Persia (Iran) where my father had business connections and where I was born. My father died of malaria when I was but five years old and I have little memory of him. It was after much thought and careful consideration on my mother’s part that she made the decision that it would benefit me more, as I grew into a young man, if I joined my uncle and aunt in France rather than to grow to manhood in Iran.

Being childless, my uncle and aunt readily adopted me as their son. As I grew up with them in France, French became the dominant language of our daily lives. Rather than addressing them in Russian, I repeatedly called them Tante Anna and Oncle Misha in French, and so, gentle reader, this is how you will meet and get to know them throughout the course of my narrative.

My memoir covers Tante Anna’s and Oncle Misha’s lives as refugees in France, how they adapted themselves to French culture and mentality, which was much more difficult for my die-hard, Russian-at-heart Oncle Misha than my cosmopolitan Tante Anna. Her spoken French was fluent, since this was the official language of the tsarist court of St. Petersburg and the diplomatic circles with which she and her family were closely connected.

Nevertheless, to visit a country as an affluent tourist, which Tante Anna did on many occasions before the revolution, and later to confront the chores of daily life there as an émigré with limited financial resources, were two quite different conditions. As for Oncle Misha, he initially had a hard time adapting to the French lifestyle and European mentality. To begin with, his spoken French was rather poor and with a heavy Russian accent. This was a handicap for him in the rather low-level job he managed to obtain at a bank. However, he gradually improved his relationships with his co-workers and, more importantly, with clients. In time he was comfortable enough to banter in French and show his droll sense of humor and sardonic wit.

Above all, I owe to Oncle Misha my having become closely acquainted with my Russian ancestry and culture and for cultivating in me a deep sense of pride in my heritage. Almost every night after supper he read aloud excerpts from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky—and his favorite author—Turgenev, which often brought tears to his eyes. At first I was bored with these reading sessions. But, in my mid-teens I showed more interest and today, after many years, I am so grateful to my dear Oncle Misha for his insistence that I should come to appreciate my splendid and proud ancestry.

When I reached my very early twenties my life changed drastically. Oncle Misha died; World War II began, and other important events occurred as you shall read in later chapters. I was able to go to the United States to attend college, where I met my cherished American-born wife, Rhoda. Our life together for 60 years is described later in this memoir.

Again, thanks to Oncle Misha I am full of remembrances and nostalgia of the glorious tsarist era that the Bolsheviks and Stalinists tried, for over seventy years, to obliterate entirely from the face of the earth. In the end this was pure vanity; since today’s Russian government has acknowledged the tsarist part of the Russian nation’s proud history prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Russian history most certainly did not begin in the year 1917, but well over a thousand years before. We are truly an ancient people.

According to John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov, authors of the book The Flight of the Romanovs, more than a million people escaped from Russia between 1918 and 1924, over loosely guarded borders, to settle all over the world, but mostly in Western Europe, 400,000 in France alone. Wherever one finds Russians, be they descendants of tsarist refugees or citizens of the past Soviet regime and the present-day Russian Federation, they all consider themselves—including me, a proud U.S. citizen—to still be in our hearts Forever Russian.

CHAPTER 1

The 1917 Soviet Revolution

And Its Disastrous Consequence

O n the morning of October 25, 1917 my Oncle Misha Obolensky stepped out onto the balcony of his palace in the Russian Imperial Capital of St. Petersburg for a quick after-breakfast cigarette. This was an enjoyable daily routine. The air was crisp and cool after two days of steady snow. The already partially frozen Neva River flowed placidly on its journey to the Gulf of Finland. From his balcony Oncle Misha’s eyes traveled across the river to rest upon the beautiful historic Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, where the remains of past tsarist emperors and a few grand dukes were buried. The charming view brought a serene and nostalgic feeling to his heart.

His reverie was suddenly shattered, however, by the approaching sound of a male chorus singing the Marseillaise. This rebellious French tune always startled and unnerved Oncle Misha, filling him with dread ever since Russian terrorist groups had adopted it as their rousing battle cry. The singing grew louder as the mob emerged from around the corner and marched in front of the palace. As they passed, a couple of shots rang out and bullets whizzed past his head. Oncle Misha jumped quickly back into his dining room.

Fortunately the bullets missed and did no damage to the last palace. The palace of Prince Abamelek-Lazarev was finished just as World War I erupted, thus it was nick-named the last palace. Prince Abamelek-Lazarev was Oncle Misha’s wife’s—Tante Anna’s—grandfather. Originally of Armenian-Russian descent, the Lazarev (Lazarian) clan was a crucial player in the incorporation of Eastern Armenia into the Russian Empire in the mid-18th century. In the late middle 19th century, Ivan Davidovich Lazarev, a general in the Imperial Russian Army, was instrumental in subduing the rebellious tribes of the northern Caucasus and obtaining a peace treaty with the Shamils and that tribe’s ultimate surrender to the authority of Imperial Russia. For his service to the Russian Empire, Ivan Davidovich Lazarev was granted nobility by Tsar Alexander II. In 1871 the last male heir of the Lazarev line Kristofor Ekimovich, died. By a special ukase issued by Tsar Alexander III, in 1873, the Lazarev name was transferred to the husband of Kristofor Ekimovich’s daughter, Prince Semen Davydovich Abamelek, thus creating him Prince Semen Davydovich Abamelek-Lazarev, Tante Anna’s grandfather. He was a very wealthy industrialist and mine owner, having inherited the Lazarevs’ mining possessions in Perm. He also held a vast estate in Podolskaya Province, inherited from his father, and the Delyanova Estate, which he inherited from his aunt. As a university-trained archeologist, Prince Abamelek-Lazarev also took part in archaeological excavations in Syria and published two books on the subject.

Since the fall of the Communists the last palace has been restored and is used as a convention center; it has been completely renovated with many of the original furnishings and some paintings and statues. One can rent it for weddings and special ceremonies, and it contains a well-known restaurant favored by tourists. Her mother, who had inherited it from her father, gave the palace to Tante Anna on the day of her wedding to Oncle Misha. The dowager princess preferred to live on her vast estate in the country near the city of Tula, rather than in St. Petersburg.

This is it, Misha yelled to his wife, slamming the door to the balcony behind him, the second Bolshevik riot since last February! Those gangsters have already forced our beloved tsar to abdicate. What more do they want? I tell you, it’s the beginning of our end!

And indeed—as history soon would play itself out—the leading gangsters, namely Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov and others of their cohort (Stalin was still lurking in the shadows) did want a good deal more, and would get it. Eventually this second revolution sealed the fate of the tsarist regime; Nicholas II and his immediate family were brutally murdered. Lenin, as head of the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party, reigned supreme amidst repeated pogroms, starvation and disease. Was that the end of the imperial dynasty as Oncle Misha imagined that fateful day from his balcony perch? Not quite yet.

To loyal army generals it was unthinkable that such a revolution would mark the end of the imperial order. They consulted each other and decided to attack St. Petersburg, as well as Moscow and other provincial capitals. They were heading loyal, dedicated army units composed mostly of Cossacks. Thus a civil war ensued with this loyalist White Army taking a stand against the brutish Bolshevik Red Army. The invading Reds represented a humiliating presence, to say the least, in Tsarist Russia. The White Army’s military objective was to converge from the vast Russian territories in the north and south and surprise and thus defeat the Reds around St. Petersburg, Moscow and other provincial capitals. This military strategy might have been successful were it not for the presence of the German army occupying large swaths of the western Russian Empire, which had been ceded to the Germans when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with them on March 3rd, 1918, thus virtually ending Russian participation in World War I. The subsequent German occupation, especially at its beginning, represented a significant impediment to the progression of the Russian Civil War between the armies of the Whites and the Reds. Nonetheless this internal struggle wore on for almost five bloody years before finally dragging to its dismal conclusion in 1923.

Among the leading White Army generals was Anton Denikin, who was stationed in the Imperial Province of Ukraine after the German withdrawal following the cancellation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on November 13th, 1918. My father, as a volunteer, was attached to the general’s staff. In between skirmishes Denikin approached my father and entrusted him with the following mission:

Yuri Leonidovich, General Denikin told him. Since you have been to Persia on business trips in the past and know prominent people in Teheran, I am sending you there again. You are to contact the management of the Anglo-Russian bank in Teheran and negotiate the release of Russian funds on deposit there. You are then to use that money to purchase armaments for us. Here is a list of the most badly needed weapons in order to continue our fight. Good luck to you, my friend, and keep me informed of your progress.

The following morning my father left Denikin’s headquarters in Kiev with a contingent of British trucks heading for Teheran. What an onerous task this is going to be, he thought bitterly to himself. And so it was. Leaving Kiev, the convoy made its way south, through the Caucasus, into Georgia, Azerbaijan and eventually to Teheran. At that time the British were occupying Persia because they were afraid the Germans would try to cross it on their way to invade India, which was then an important colony of Great Britain.

After almost six weeks of a risky and perilous journey because of armed marauding thieves against whom the British troops had to fight, my father finally reached Teheran. He contacted the manager of the bank and presented him with all his documentation proving the White Russian Army’s right to the funds. It took him over six months of arduous negotiations, primarily because the manager had to be constantly communicating with the bank’s headquarters in London. My father anxiously waited for the final approval. It never came. According to Oncle Misha this is the main reason that, for many years, the White Russians (especially the nobility) hated the British. They never forgave them for misappropriating this Russian money. History might have turned out very differently if the Russians had been able to obtain the money, which was rightfully theirs, in order to buy arms.

In the meantime, starting in early 1919, the whole White Russian army gradually began to collapse, and General Denikin himself literally disappeared. No one knew what happened to him or where he had gone. My father immediately cabled my mother, who was living in the unoccupied city of Kiev at the time, and urged her to join him as soon as possible. She finally managed to arrive in Teheran in February 1920. This is how I came to be born in Persia on December 31, of that same year.

To begin with, as jobless émigrés, life in Persia was not easy for my parents. But my father had a university degree in civil engineering, and with the help of local British acquaintances and Russian and Persian friends, he eventually obtained a position in the newly formed Persian government as director of road and highway construction throughout the country. He was very successful in his new job, creating or designing the basic highway system in Persia that exists in modern Iran to this day. Unfortunately, on one of his trips to the city of Isfahan, my father contracted malaria. He struggled with all his strength against this devastating