Postmen's Princess

Ian Elliot
March 23, 2007

Sofka Dolgorouky, born in 1907 to a life in the glittering palaces of St Petersburg, in old age fondly recalled playing with the heir to the throne in the final years of the Russian Empire. Yet even the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks (which included the murder of the Tsar and his family) did not dissuade her from joining the Communist Party.

Inspired by the gift of her grandmother's Russian diary - and her scandalous reputation -Sofka Zinovieff decided to trace her own roots. But the author's great-uncle Kyril Zinovieff, a distinguished writer on St Petersburg and one of very few who remembers pre-Revolutionary life in Russia ("from Rasputin to Putin!"), strongly discouraged her from her project. Her grandmother had made his brother Leo very unhappy by marrying him; she had failed to look after their children and was very promiscuous - and "I mean the sleeping-with-the-window-cleaner-and-postman-sort-of-promiscuous". When the subject of her Communist leanings came up, his Russian friends had called her "filth" for failing to realize that Stalinism was little better than Nazism. Sofka Zinovieff herself had doubts. She was not a professional historian, had only a "frail grip on Russian", and was aware that both her grandmother and her great-grandmother had themselves written memoirs of their life and times. Yet she naturally wished to know more about her extraordinary family, and now not only the facts of her grandmother's life had to be established, but also her motives. The result-ing book, Red Princess, delights on several levels: as a detective story, biography, family saga, with glimpses of high society in Russia and Britain, and vivid descriptions of the individual tragedies and desperate struggles for survival of those swept up in the storms of twentieth-century history. The photographs, too, are splendid. With admirable determination, Zinovieff pursued her grandmother's trail in Russia, the Crimea, Paris and London, tracking down the houses in which she lived and the people with some direct knowledge, allowing a more accurate portrait to emerge. The accusation of promiscuity, however, is certainly upheld. The Red Princess herself admitted to more than a hundred lovers, but she set her own standards: "It doesn't matter how many lovers you have .... Just don't have more than one at the same time". In trying to maintain these standards, however, she seems on occasion to have forgotten about her husbands. The shocking neglect of her children is also confirmed. They seemed to have found her fun when she was around, but that was not very often. And she was indeed a member of the Communist Party, albeit the Chelsea branch.

Zinovieff finds some explanation for this unusual behaviour in her grandmother's own family history. Her mother, Sophy Bobrinsky, was a direct descendant of Catherine the Great's illegitimate son by her lover Gregory Orlov; the baby was smuggled from the palace wrapped in a beaver fur (bobr) and later launched into society as Count Bobrinsky. At eighteen, she married Prince Peter Dolgorouky in the most brilliant wedding of the 1907 season, held in the Winter Palace and attended by the Romanovs.

His present to her was a fine car; she had already learned in secret to drive. She gave birth to Sofka just nine months after their Monte Carlo honeymoon. Prince Peter was content with life as an officer in the Horse Guards, enlivened by frequent visits to the gypsies, but Sophy wanted more from life than society normally allowed ladies of her rank. She published satirical verse in a fashionable journal, and discussed literature with her friend Anna Akhmatova, whose superb poetry was to record the coming tragedy more truly than most histories. She smoked opium with Prince Felix Yusupov, who in 1916 killed the hated Rasputin. She studied medicine and qualified as a surgeon, and in 1912 was the only woman to drive in the motor rally from St Petersburg to Kiev. Not surprisingly, Sophy grew apart from Peter, who fell in love with Anna Michaelovna, a beautiful gypsy singer, and moved out of the marital apartment. Despite his family's disapproval, he married Anna, giving her some security when his regiment was suffering huge losses in the First World War, and had six children with her. Meanwhile, Sophy served with distinction in first-aid posts on the Polish and Turkish fronts, winning two St George Crosses, the highest award for valour. Having learned to fly before the war, she then qualified as a bomber pilot. Little Sofka enjoyed her brave parents' occasional visits, but was brought up by her paternal grandmother, Olga. When (he Russian Revolution made Petrograd too dangerous, Olga reserved eight compartments on a train to Simferopol, and taking Sofka, followed her friend the Dowager Empress Marie (sister to Britain's Queen Alexandra) south to the Crimea.

This is one of the points where the author returns to the detective story, introducing an enjoyable account of her own visit to the Crimea, now part of independent Ukraine, She successfully traces the family house in Miskhor where Olga and little Sofka spent two years while civil war raged in the Russian Empire. There is little attempt to place the family saga in its wider historical setting; for a description of General WrangePs final defence of the Crimea against the Red Army, readers should consult other sources {The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, by William Henry Chamberlin, first published in 1935 is still among the best). But we do learn that Wrangel's children lived nearby, and that Sofka played with them. And her father, Prince Peter, makes another dramatic appearance, fleeing the Reds after participating in the defence of Yalta. He hides with them before escaping to Sebastopol and into emigration with other survivors of the White Army.

No doubt her parents* attitude influenced Sofka in her neglect of her own children. The seeds of her Communist views were also already planted. The footman Simyon told her secretly of his miserable, poverty-stricken childhood, and of his hopes that the Revolution would bring greater justice and equality. She ran wild with the lodgekeeper's grandsons Vanya and Shura, whose father joined the village soviet; they too contributed to her Bolshevik education. Yet recent Russian histories record that some 50,000 of those left behind when tbe Crimea was evacuated were shot by (he Reds as counter-revolutionaries. The bitterness of Russian e'migres at Sofka's Communist views is understandable. Sofka and her grandmother joined the party of the Dowager Empress on HMS Marlborough, after some delay in Constantinople and Malta they arrived in Portsmouth and were welcomed at Victoria station by King George V and Queen Mary.Sophy turns up again in London to see her daughter after two years absence, and arranges a "good school" for her. Then, brave as ever, smuggles herself back into Bolshevik Russia to rescue her second husband, Pierre Volkonsky, from prison. Amazingly, she succeeds, and together with Pierre and her awful mother-in-law, eventually escapes back to the West - as described in her own memoirs, The Way of Bitterness (published in 1931>. After living in poverty, driving a taxi in Paris and addicted to laudanum, Sophy finally opted for suicide. Sofka had found her father more fun, when Peter occasionally popped up to take her to the cinema or casino. But he died after an operation in 1925

Sofka enjoyed life in British high society. She was close friends with the seven Douglas-Hamilton children, and was even employed as secretary by the eccentric Duchess of Hamilton. She later worked for Laurence Olivier, and always enjoyed literary and theatrical connections. She maintained her links with the aristocratic Russian emigration and, despite family misgivings, married Leo Zinovieff. There were two sons, including Peter, the author's father, but loose living on a low income ended that marriage. Her second husband, Grey Skipwith, appears to have been the love of her life. Their son Patrick was to inherit the Skipwith baronetcy, but her three boys seem to have endured a miserable childhood with little parental care. Grey joined the RAF as a gunner and was killed in a bomber raid. Sofka herself was trapped in Paris by the German Occupation. Although interned, she had links with the Resistance, supplying information on the tragic fate of Jewish prisoners, and actually helping to save some of them. As one of the "righteous", she was awarded a medal by the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Institute.

Back to the detective story: her biographer granddaughter discovered that, unknown to her family, Sofka had lived for three years after the war with David Rocheman, who was sixteen years younger than her. He wanted to marry her, but she told him "not to be silly". Then the author impressively persuaded MI5 to produce Sofka's Cold War file - phone taps, photographs, intercepted letters, but no really damaging conclusions. After the war, Sofka worked for Progressive Tours, taking trade unionists on propaganda trips to the Communist countries. Most idealistic Communists left the Party after Khrushchev's secret speech and the suppression of the Hungarian Rising in 1956, but Sofka stuck with it. In 1957 she was the first Western travel agent to enter Albania.

She retired in 1962 to a run-down cottage in Cornwall, where she lived contentedly with Jack King, a Communist trade unionist from one of her Progressive Tours. Among their many visitors was the young Sofka Zinovieff, who, inspired by her grandmother's extraordinary personality, decided to elicit the truth behind the scandals and the myths. Her extensive investigations and thorough weighing of the evidence have produced a convincing portrait. In the quiet, happier years before her death in 1994, aged eighty-six, Sofka wrote her memoirs and a successful Russian cookbook, but it is likely that she will best be remembered through her granddaughter's fascinating account in Red Princess.

At the court of the fantasy princess

Almost 90 years after the Bolsheviks shot and killed Tsar Nicholas II but the world's fascination with the Romanov dynasty's grisly end shows no sign of abating

Michael Binyon
March 24, 2007

IT IS ALMOST 90 YEARS since the Bolshevik shots that killed Tsar Nicholas II and all his family in a Siberian cellar. Yet the world’s fascination with the Romanov dynasty’s grisly end shows no sign of abating.

This is partly because of the melodrama of the event. It is partly because communist shame veiled the events in a secrecy and political taboo that quickly gave rise to myth. And it is partly because of the long campaign by a notorious fraudster, a Polish peasant named Fransiszka Schanzkowska, to prove that she was Anastasia, the Tsar’s youngest daughter, who had somehow miraculously escaped the slaughter.

Almost from the moment that she was pulled out of a Berlin canal in 1920 until her death in a Virginia hospital in 1984, Anna Anderson, as she was later known, stuck to the story that she was Anastasia, probably planted in her mind by a visitor to the hospital where she was taken. The mystery is why anyone believed her — she bore little resemblance to the murdered 17-year-old and was five years older, she seemed unable to remember details of life at court (although she was adept at picking up stories from others), and neither spoke nor understood Russian. But the word spread among gullible Russian exiles, and many were fooled.

Anderson made a fine living from their credulity, staying in their castles, spending their money and repaying their hospitality with a hauteur, capriciousness, paranoia and vindictive selfishness that seemed only to strengthen their absurd belief that this was royal behaviour.

A few, such as the son of the Tsar’s personal doctor, were good people who believed in and helped her at huge personal cost. None of the surviving immediate royal family, including the exiled dowager empresses and the Tsar’s sister, took her seriously. Dozens swayed one way, then the other, including the batty American millionaire Jack Manahan, who finally married her.

Frances Welch tells the story of the deranged and despicable Anna and her eccentric hangers-on at a rollicking pace and with dry wit: the endless lawsuits, the scenes, the Nazis, the press, the squalor, the publicity that fuelled Anna’s hypochondria, her eccentricity and her canny instinct for survival. In the end she probably believed her own myth. Only years after her death did a simple DNA test prove that she was a fraud.

Princess Sofka Dolgorouky was far from a fraud, although she was almost as eccentric. Her life, wonderfully researched and movingly retold by her granddaughter, mirrors the horrors and convulsions of the past century.

Born into an aristocratic St Petersburg family, she fled to the Crimea as a girl and, with her unstable mother, escaped the Revolution aboard the warship that George V sent to rescue the Tsar’s mother.

Parked with her impoverished refugee grandmother and a grumpy governess while her mother smuggled herself back into Russia to rescue her second husband from prison, Sofka was befriended by the insouciant family of the Duke of Hamilton, and was whisked off to Rome and Nice. She took a job in London as Laurence Olivier’s secretary, hung out with Bohemian Russians, drank, flirted and had affairs, making an improbable marriage to a Russian exile and falling for a dashing younger Englishman, before ending up in France as the Second World War began.

Interned in Vittel with the ennui of prim British women for company, she was devastated by the death of her lover who was in the RAF, witnessed the transit of Poles from the Warsaw ghetto to France and back to Auschwitz.

She survived on Shakespeare, Russian poetry and lesbian friendships. Liberated, she returned to drab postwar London, and briefly became a hedonistic socialite before embracing communism and atheism as the “Red Princess”. She took a thankless job guiding British Communists round Eastern Europe while MI5 compiled crass reports on her. She finally met a dour, younger British Communist and, after a life of flight, bedsits and affairs, settled with him in Cornwall to grow old in dishevelled defiance.

She bore three sons but preferred books and was a terrible mother. She was clever, cultured, hedonistic and brave. She moved between worlds and moved all those she met. Her granddaughter’s account is funny, honest, searing and tragic — a fascinating insight into a world where fate, war and human cruelty changed lives with a sudden, reckless indifference that seems centuries ago.

The still fresh reek of Russia

Sara Wheeler enjoys Sofka Zinovieff's memorial to the courage, cruelty and exotic life of an aristocrat in exile, Red Princess

Michael Binyon
February 17, 2007

Sofka Zinovieff's grandmother was a White Russian aristocrat in flight from the political upheavals of the 20th century. Like many exiles for whom tomorrow is a hostile land, the eponymous Red Princess - also known as Sofka - lived life with the gusto of the desperado. Her biography, as a result, is a union of comedy and tragedy infused with the heady romance of a vanished Russia.

Sofka was born Princess Sophy Dolgorouky in 1907. Hers was one of the great old Russian families, and her parents' wedding was among the most brilliant of the season - long, slim engines crunching up to the Winter Palace with bat-wing canopies sheltering bejewelled beauties swaddled in furs. But the couple divorced when Sofka's father ran off with a famous Gypsy singer, whom he subsequently married. Come the revolution, little Sofka was bundled down to the Crimea with her grandmother and her grandmother's friend, the dowager empress. They were close to Yalta when the events of Ekaterinburg unfolded; Dr Botkin, shot with the tsar and his family, had been the Dolgoroukys' doctor in St Petersburg. Exile was inevitable. Sofka sailed from Yalta in 1919, arriving in London aged 11. Granny sold her pearls, and Sofka was installed at Queen's College in Harley Street, suffering what Nabokov called the "animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia".

Sofka's mother, Sophy, had remarried a homosexual prince, and when he was imprisoned in Russia, Sophy sneaked back to the motherland with a small bag containing a torch, a lethal dose of morphine and a bottle of Guerlain scent. Her husband got out, and in 1921 the couple fled to Estonia. Who can blame them? Akhmatova did. "I am not with those who abandoned their land / To the lacerations of the enemy," she wrote in a bitter poem. Well, what would you have done?

Zinovieff - named Sofka after her grandmother - paints a vivid portrait of the peripatetic years that followed, as the fragmented family criss-crossed Europe along with so many émigrés. In 1931, Sofka married Leo Zinovieff in London. The Depression politicised her, and, to the keen horror of her in-laws (who didn't like her anyway), she became a communist. The Zinovieffs had two sons, the second of uncertain male parentage; Sofka's subsequent marriage produced a third son. She was a terrible mother. During the second world war she went to Nazi-occupied Paris to visit her own mother, who had settled there. It was a city in which Russian counts waited at table and surgeons drove taxis. "You see that poodle sitting by the door?", one man asked another in a Left Bank restaurant. "In Russia he used to be a Great Dane." But of course, it wasn't funny.

The author draws on a rich source of primary material, from grandmother's moss-green velvet diary to her autobiography, published in 1968, and she quotes judiciously. Herself Orthodox, but non-Russian-speaking, Zinovieff pursues the trail from St Petersburg to the Crimea, where she tracks down the Dolgorouky estate at Miskhor.

For better or worse, she tells the story in the first person. It is notoriously difficult to breathe life into the rickety and overworked search-for-roots format; on the whole Zinovieff does a good job, and it's a marvellous story. One wishes perhaps that beards were not inevitably "Tolstoyan"; and statements such as "It is still a romantic place" (of St Petersburg, no less) might have worked better if cast as suggestive description.

Sofka's ravenous promiscuity helps to maintain the book's narrative drive (at least one of her affairs was with a woman). "It doesn't matter how many lovers you have," she advised the young author. "Just don't have more than one at the same time." If all else failed, she drank. When a daughter-in-law complained of a poor sex life, Sofka recommended half a bottle of vodka before the event, a remedy presumably based on the premise that however bad coitus proved to be, one wouldn't remember it. After many adventures - Sofka worked as a tour guide to eastern Europe for most of the 1950s, and was involved with the British security services - she spent the last three decades of her life gardening around a stone cottage on Bodmin Moor with three whippets and a short trade-unionist tool-maker she called her "devoted prole". She died in 1994, aged 86.

Zinovieff identifies with her subject. "All four generations, from Sofka's parents onwards," she writes, "lacked a conventional family environment, and in its way, it provided us all with a salutary training." She loyally gives grandmamma the benefit of the doubt. "Few mothers would have gone abroad at this stage in the war," she writes when Sofka abandons her children yet again, "but, given her mood and her character, the prospect of full-time rural motherhood with three young children, rationing and tense, sleepless nights would scarcely have appealed." Whether it appealed or not is hardly the point. But Sofka had great strengths. Late in the second world war she was interned in Besançon and then Vittel, and learned what it was like to be a PoW. Decades afterwards, Yad Vashem honoured her posthumously for risking her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.

In short, a life of eccentricity and excess; of loss and exile; of courage, and of cruelty that reverberated down the generations. Red Princess is a small memorial to all the lives dislodged by the shifting sands of modern history.

MARXIST, ROYALIST OR PLAIN HEDONIST?

Victor Sebestyen
23 February 2007

PRINCESS Sofka Dolgorouky was born into a life of luxury and privilege in Imperial St Petersburg before World War I. As a child she was a playmate of the last Tsarevich, who with the rest of his family was murdered at Ekaterinburg in 1918.

After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia she found refuge in Britain, married a fellow émigré from the Tsarist aristocracy, and had three children who she abandoned.

During the second world war she was interned by the Nazis, worked for the French Resistance, risked her life to save Jews from the death camps and later returned to Britain. Despite her background as a White Russian she became a lifelong Communist.

She ended her days in a humble cottage on Bodmin Moor, living a quiet life with a trades union activist. In between, she ran a literary salon; enjoyed -- by her own rough estimate -- at least a hundred lovers in a dozen European countries; and was spied on for decades by MI5.

The word bohemian might have been invented to describe her not so much unconventional as anti- conventional life and manner.

This beautifully written, fastpaced book by her granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, is part biography of an extraordinary woman, part loving memoir of a relative.

years before her death in 1994 aged 86, the older woman gave Zinovieff a heavy, velvet-bound volume containing the diaries she had kept since 1940 while a prisoner of the Germans in France.

Zinovieff did not look at them for a long while, but then realised she had been handed a wonderful story on a plate. She races through Dolgorouky's early years of ease in St Petersburg, her escape through the Crimea and her vagabond education in Britain, Paris and the South of France.

In addition to the pain of exile, Sofka was also abandoned by her mother -- a trait among the women of her family. She was brought up by a stern grandmother whose views would have been out of date even in the late Tsar's court.

Dolgorouky settled in London, married a White Russian in a ceremony covered by the Fleet Street gossip columnists, and landed a glamorous job as secretary to Laurence Olivier. She left her husband when her third child was a few months old for the baronet's son 'Grey' Skipwith. Her children were farmed out to family friends.

When France fell, Dolgorouky was on a visit to Paris to see her mother. As a British subject she was interned in Vittel, North-Eastern France, where she heard that Skipwith, a fighter pilot, had been killed in action.

Trapped as a prisoner with groups of Jews who were in transit to the concentration camps, Dolgorouky was an agent for the Resistance until she was sent back to Britain in 1944. Her efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust earned her a place at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

The war radicalised her. She joined the Communist Party, becoming one of its most prized assets. The 'Red Princess' tag was a powerful propaganda weapon for the party in the years after the war. A passionate rather than beautiful woman, Dolgorouky embarked on a series of casual affairs, seeing her children occasionally during their summer holidays. She tried to make amends by building new relationships with her grandchildren, including Sofka Zinovieff.

She worked for years as a guide for Progressive Tours, a CP offshoot that took Leftist groups on guided holidays to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

She was praised on visits to the Soviet Union, where she took great pleasure in showing tourists the palaces once owned by her ancestors. Zinovieff went to St Petersburg, the Crimea, a French internment camp, the MI5 archive, and across Europe in search of her grandmother. The result is a wonderfully dramatic account of a fascinating, if monstrously selfish woman.

Zinovieff tries perhaps a little too hard to clear her grandmother's name of charges that she was a hard-hearted nymphomaniac and a lousy mother.

One feels Dolgorouky herself, in the grand aristocratic manner, would not have cared what people said. Nevertheless, this is a hugely enjoyable read.

What did you do in the war, Granny?

Sofka Zinovieff's biography of her grandmother, Red Princess, tells a remarkable story

Shiona Tregaskis
February 25, 2007

She was born into White Russian aristocracy and died a Red on Bodmin Moor. According to her biographer granddaughter, Princess Sofka Dolgorouky's life was 'a dash across the 20th century ... a seismograph of its great events and political movements'. This is a personal and emotional biography that explores the waves of impact that the Russian Revolution and both world wars had on Sofka and those around her.

After escaping Russia as a child, Sofka embarked on a 'mad scramble' across the Crimea, England and France. Her granddaughter fills in the gaps in her diary by collecting stories from family, friends and lovers. Through MI5's extensive files on Sofka, Zinovieff is also provided with another perspective on her grandmother's postwar activities.

Though she came to be defined by struggle and personal desolation, this book is not a depressing read. Zinovieff writes vibrantly about this hard-drinking, promiscuous, beautiful and scandalous bohemian. But the stories she hears are not always flattering. Sofka's maverick spirit is seen, by her family, as 'wickedness', manifested in her politics, her adultery, her neglectful mothering. Throughout Red Princess Zinovieff maintains that Sofka was 'complex and flawed ... but fascinating and lovable'.

She was certainly complex. For all her nomadic habits and pagan wildness, she yearned for roots and security. However, she found family life challenging and perhaps only communism offered her the comfort of belonging, until she finally settled down. It is true that the lack of interest she showed her three sons as children cast a shadow on her socialist principles. But her efforts were significant. During her Nazi internment, she was instrumental in saving more than 50 Jewish lives.

One of Sofka's favourite sayings was: 'If you have enough money for two loaves, buy one and some flowers.' Zinovieff has inherited her grandmother's romantic outlook; there seems to be something poignant - and very often funny - on every other page of the book. It is moving to see that in the process of writing this book, Zinovieff not only gets to know her grandmother, but also finds that she better understands her parents and upbringing.

She had a soul as open as a shirt

Ruth Scurr
February 02, 2007

I began Sofka Zinovieff's Red Princess sceptically. There is a genre of writing about Russia's vanished past – "books with regretful titles such as Lost Splendour, Once a Grand Duke, or A Russian Princess Remembers", as Zinovieff characterises it. There is also a well-worn route in ancestor tourism for aspiring authors in search of a subject. At first, Red Princess seems a hybrid of these two tired publishing ideas.

On her 16th birthday, Zinovieff's grandmother and namesake gave her an old diary. She put it in a drawer and read it properly only a decade after her grandmother's death in 1994. Born in 1907, Princess Sophy (Sofka) Dolgorouky inherited the grand gold-edged notebook from her own great-great grandmother, took it into exile in Europe, and finally wrote in it in 1940, during the occupation of Paris.

The diary kept the past alive in scenes that echo Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. During the frantic evacuation of Paris, Zinovieff’s grandmother recorded: "People fainting, people ill, children screaming, women sobbing, girls giggling, others reading, sleeping, eating, just staring. People, people, people… the stench defies description."

Unlike Némirovsky, Zinovieff's grandmother was not Jewish, survived the war, joined the Communist Party in London, and published an autobiography in 1968 called Sofka: the Autobiography of a Princess. But after reading the diary, Zinovieff decided there were still many unanswered questions. Red Princess attempts to answer them.

Zinovieff sets off in search of her grandmother's birthplace in St Petersburg. No sooner has she arrived in her rented room on Bolshaya Morskaya (Greater Maritime Street) than an old man "with a long Tolstoyan beard looked down at me, framed by the window like a 19th-century portrait".

Ten pages later, she rings the bell at number 70, the English Embankment, where her grandmother's parents lived, and "a polite man with a Trotsky beard" appears. Stopping to explain that one of her Dolgorouky ancestors founded Moscow in 1154, Zinovieff records her conversation with the polite man, calling him simply Trotsky: " 'Russians, Russians…' Trotsky laughed bitterly." At this I nearly gave up.

I cannot pinpoint the precise page on which the transformation occurs. But like an out-of-focus image, hazy and irritating before it becomes piercingly sharp, this book improves dramatically. It evolves into a story of feminine inheritance. Zinovieff's grandmother's own mother turns out to have been an extraordinary woman: one of the first women to learn to fly at Chartres in 1913 and a practising surgeon who kept a human skeleton in her drawing room. Never destined for conventional family life, she divorced her first husband and married a second because he was the only man she had met more intelligent than herself.

After the revolution in 1917, the family left Russia on HMS Marlborough with the murdered Tsar's mother, Empress Marie. In London, young Princess Sofka did her best to fit in at school, but was most comfortable running wild with her friend Margaret Douglas-Hamilton on the family's country estate. By contrast, she dreaded visits to elderly Russians in exile who "shed salty tears into their weak, lemony tea".

Sofka's education was hopelessly disrupted as she followed her disparate family round Europe. High-spirited and unashamedly promiscuous, she had had three sons and two husbands by the beginning of the Second World War. Risking a visit to her mother in Paris, Sofka got trapped on the wrong side of the Channel from her children, and was interned at Vittel. Here she witnessed the harrowing persecution of Jewish prisoners and did her best to use her social connections to inform the outside world of what was really happening in occupied France.

After the war, Sofka became a Communist, to the great disgust of other Russian émigrés. MI5 reports from the 1950s describe her as "a fanatical Communist, but intelligent and charming". Earthy, practical, hopeless at housework, Sofka estimated the number of her lovers in triple figures: "My contention is that [as one gets older] it is more important to have someone to help with the laundry than someone writing sonnets to your eyebrows."

Zinovieff approaches her subject intimately. Sometimes she hazards opinions and guesses when there is no evidence as to what her grandmother thought or felt. But she does so deliberately and with the overall intention of rescuing Sofka's life from the blanket disapproval of contemporaries such as Uncle Kyril, who branded her a nymphomaniac with no sense of morals: "Just the kind of person who joins the Communist Party."

A more sympathetic Russian friend remembered: "Sofka had a 'soul as open as a shirt' – dusha na raspashku… And she was great fun." Zinovieff's book vindicates this judgment. It also highlights Sofka's more serious side in helping to save more than 50 Vittel deportees from Nazi concentration camps. "One owes it to them never to let oneself forget," she insisted for the rest of her life.

A genius for living

Charlotte Hobson
17 February 2007

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the first world war; her father occasioned less surprise but no less scandal by marrying his gypsy mistress. Yet with hindsight Sofka’s extraordinary childhood seemed peaceful, even rather dull, cut short as it was by the Revolution. Zinovieff aptly quotes the Chinese curse, ‘May you be born in interesting times.’

In 1919, aged 11, Sofka and her grandmother boarded a British destroyer in Yalta and, in the company of the dowager empress, sailed out of Russia. They had sat out the worst of the Revolution in Yalta, but still faced the long grief of exile, what Nabokov called ‘the animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia’. Sofka’s brilliant, fearless mother was destroyed by the experience. Unable to practise medicine because neither the French nor the English would recognise her Russian qualifications, she worked as a taxi-driver and a secretary, became addicted to opium and committed suicide aged 57.

Sofka could not have responded more differently; no doubt part of her rebellious joie de vivre was in reaction to her elders’’ misery. She was convinced of one thing at least – that life’s pleasures must be grasped wholeheartedly. She was beautiful and vivacious; she took lovers, enjoyed herself, married and left and married again. A typical episode occurred only a few days after the birth of her third child when a jolly visit by a troupe of Cossack riders ended with Sofka and her husband, Grey, taking to the road with the Cossacks while the new baby was left with the monthly nurse. Zinovieff depicts her as a mercurial, life-enhancing character, with a wonderful disregard for material things. Even after a lifetime of vicissitudes, while working as a tour guide in Eastern Europe – surely one of the most uncomfortable jobs ever – she says cheerfully, ‘Travelling is always fun.’ She had spirit.

Of course there were those, particularly her first husband’s family, who thought her simply promiscuous, selfish and manipulative, not to mention a hopeless mother to her three sons. According to the eldest, ‘Mother would send postcards saying “Do write!” but with no address.’ She was absent for most of their childhood, sweeping in now and again to take them for a picnic. Of course she was only recreating her own motherless childhood and adolescence. But her boys seem to have had a lonely time of it, as Zinovieff comments: ‘Patrick’s memories sound almost like those of an orphan: wandering the streets, playing in the rubble of Chelsea’s blitzed ruins… and being beaten with a broomstick, like the rest of her offspring.’

The seal on her social pariahdom – in Russian émigré circles at least – was the fact that she joined the Communist party. ‘Comrade Sofka – our Communist princess!’ as the Party leadership boasted. Her detractors took it as further proof of her amorality, muttering, ‘Just the sort of person who would be one.’ It’s true that Sofka loved to shock, and she had a romantic cast of mind that allowed her to believe in the ideal of Communism without being too disturbed by the realities of the Soviet Union. The most important factor in her conversion, however, must have been her wartime experience in the French internment camp at Vittel. There she met several hundred traumatised Polish Jews, the last remnants of the Warsaw ghetto, and made brave and ingenious efforts to save them from Auschwitz. Their final departure in a train with boarded windows did much to present Communism, the deadly enemy of the Nazis, as the only possibility for justice. It also provided the widowed Sofka with a cause and a community: ‘Belonging brought such an exciting, heady feeling of oneness… You were on the side of the angels, without believing in angels,’ as another Party member from the late Forties put it.

After the war, the Israeli government honoured Sofka with a medal for her actions at Vittel. Despite her many shortcomings, it seems to me that she deserves another for her services in the cause of the gaiety of nations. Parties and friends, conversation and sex and soup and favourite books – she was generous with all of these. In this insanely cautious age, this era of po-faced monogamy and You and Yours on Radio 4, we need to be reminded of people like Sofka Dolgorouky.

A fine turncoat

Feb 1st 2007

LIKE a Jew becoming a Nazi, was how her relatives saw it. How could a brainy, sensitive woman, exiled from her homeland by a monstrous totalitarian regime that hounded her class and murdered her friends and relatives, become an unflinching supporter of its creed?

That is the puzzling life of the beautiful Sofka Dolgorouky. Born into one of tsarist Russia's grandest families, she escaped from Soviet clutches only to spend the second world war in a Nazi internment camp. Sexually insatiable, she had two husbands and countless lovers, and neglected her children abominably. After all that, she ended up happily but squalidly in a cottage in a remote corner of rural England, defiantly communist to the last.

The story is told by her granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, who maintains an appropriate tone of slightly bemused sympathy with her captivating but repellent subject. She retraces her grandmother's footsteps, in Russia, France and Britain, presenting an evocative mix of past and present, partly with her own acute descriptions, and partly from her documentary sources. These include the copious diaries and notes of Mrs Skipwith (née Princess Dolgorouky), the recollections (mostly caustic) from the rest of the family and some revealing files from the British security service, who tracked their exotic Russian target (“outstandingly intelligent, courageous and active”) through the shabby grey world of post-war London.

Like the men in raincoats, Ms Zinovieff fails in the probably impossible task of explaining how someone who had suffered so much from totalitarianism could embrace an ideology that upheld it. The horrors of Soviet policy at home and abroad, exposed time after time from 1917 onwards, gradually destroyed the hopes and convictions of sympathisers with the Bolsheviks' experiment, even in the British Communist Party. But it left her grandmother's faith intact. You couldn't blame Christianity for Torquemada, and you shouldn't blame socialism for Stalin, was her usual answer.

The easy explanation is that her judgment was scarred by the poverty she witnessed in the 1930s, and by living on the fringes of the Holocaust—the Jews in her internment camp perished in Auschwitz. But others who experienced the same horrors became ardent democrats; the princess after the war became an enthusiastic tour-guide to the countries of the communist bloc, even editing a magazine that glorified the Stalinist outpost of Albania.

A second puzzle is that someone so good at making friends was so careless with her relatives. Ms Zinovieff reluctantly concedes that her grandmother was not just chronically unfaithful but wildly promiscuous (“bedding” was her own word for casual sex); worse, her hapless children were left in strange hands for long periods, and then moved with a cruel abruptness that even the kindest biographer can hardly excuse. Her self-absorbed carelessness in that, and towards money, hygiene and much more besides, make it easy to see why her Russian in-laws loathed the turncoat princess. Yet anyone reading about her sizzling charm, guts and literary gifts can't help thinking it would have been fun to know her.

Sofka's choice

Lesley McDowell
February 10 2007

IT WOULD BE HARD TO IMAGINE A more publicly dramatic, never mind revolutionary, life than that of Sofka Dolgorouky's. From playing with the children of the last Russian tsar (and her dread of the little haemophiliac prince Alexei falling over and hurting himself) as a little girl, to being honoured shortly after her death by Israel's principal Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, for her help saving 50 Jews during the Second World War, she was not only touched by the great and terrible events of the 20th century; she was a significant actor in them.

But the motivation for her grand-daughter, also Sofka, to embark on an account of this life is personal. It was, she says, after reading her grandmother's diary - written when she went to Paris to help her mother and stepfather at the onset of the Second World War - that she decided to right a few wrongs. For the diary reveals a personal aspect to an "official" tale Sofka Zinovieff had always been told about her grandmother - that she was a wild woman whose second husband, Grey Skipwith, had volunteered for the air force during the war just to get away from her.

It's a motive most of us can sympathise with - gossipy relatives badmouthing one member of the family until the "truth" is finally revealed. Here, Sofka learns that her grandmother and Skipwith were, far from wanting to get away from each other, actually still deeply in love. It is against this perhaps mundane private detail that the public story of a remarkable life is set.

And what a story it is. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky was born to Sophy Bobrinsky and Prince Petya Dolgorouky in 1907. It was not a happy marriage - Bobrinsky was extraordinary for her time, training as a surgeon, becoming the only woman driver in a motor rally in 1912, contributing to subversive journals and even meeting Rasputin. When the First World War began she was allowed to fly bomber planes (she learned to fly in France in 1913) and was soon off attending to injured soldiers, earning two St George crosses in the process.

The tiny Sofka was sent to stay with her grandmother, Princess Olga, in the Crimea, at a large country house called Miskhor.

In spite of the war and the revolution, the young Sofka's childhood seems to have been pretty idyllic until 1919, when she left with her grandmother and English governess, Miss King, for England to escape the Bolsheviks (she was greeted by King George V and Queen Mary on their arrival at Victoria station). Sofka's mother would eventually rescue her own second husband, Pierre, from Russia in an extraordinarily dangerous trip and they would flee to Paris; as an adolescent, Sofka would thus alternate between her grandmother's various homes in Nice, Paris and England, and her mother's tiny flat in Paris.

Sophy Bobrinsky's life was never the same again - she succumbed to drug abuse and died in her early fifties. Sofka, however, flirted with her Scottish friends, the Douglas-Hamiltons, before settling on another exiled Russian like herself, Leo Zinovieff, with whom she fell in love, married and had a child. The marriage was disastrous. Much to her husband's horror, by this time Sofka was committed to the Labour Party, for whom she would canvass regularly, after witnessing terrible poverty in Glasgow (ironically she saw all this on the campaign trail for her friend, the eldest Douglas-Hamilton, Douglas, who was standing for Parliament as a Tory). Soon she was having affairs with other men.

It was at this time to that she began working for Laurence Olivier and his then wife Jill Esmond as a secretary to earn extra money, and was introduced to the theatrical circuit - parties with Noel Coward and Edith Evans in attendance were commonplace, which returned her to the glamorous lifestyle she had enjoyed as a child. But she was still working, and it was through her job as a private tutor that she met the man who would be her second husband - and possibly the father of her second child - middle-class Englishman Grey Skipwith.

Sofka left her husband and moved in with Grey, whom she married as soon as her divorce from Leo came through, although her children stayed with their father. With the onset of the Second World War, Grey volunteered for the RAF and Sofka headed for Paris, ostensibly to help her mother, but, her grand-daughter writes: "My suspicion is that her mother was an excuse; Paris provided an escape. With her bevy of Russian friends and admirers, Sofka was distracted from the gnawing anxiety about Grey and the bleak loneliness of long evenings in the London bedsit."

But Paris was dangerous and Sofka got caught - as an enemy alien, she was interned first in the grim barracks at Besançon, then at the more comfortable converted spa at Vittel. It was there that she seems to have had a dalliance with another woman, and also heard that Grey had been shot down and killed. It would appear that only the support of the other woman got her through this period and it was at Vittel that she helped Polish Jews get false passports through her contacts in the Resistance.

After the war, Sofka returned to England and joined the Communist Party - her granddaughter describes the strangeness of reading MI5's files on her grandmother; the agency would trail her every movement (most of which were fairly routine, innocuous trips to the local shops), as she attended Communist rallies and helped sell copies of the Daily Worker. Many of her exiled Russian friends refused to have anything more to do with her. Her granddaughter's explanation for her allegiance to the Communist Party is simply that it stood for her, at that time, as the principal opposer of fascism.

It was through the Party that Sofka met her final "life" partner, Jack King, a bachelor and shop steward. She lived with Jack until the end of her life, in the relative peace and quiet of the English countryside. Sofka was a woman who went entirely her own way in life, who faced her century's worst atrocities (she visited Belsen shortly after its liberation) and survived. Her story is a remarkable, and almost unbelievable one. Told by a sympathetic granddaughter, it becomes an intimate one, too.

THE PRINCESS WHO FOUGHT FOR COMMUNISM

Frances Welch
March 11 2007

Stories of princesses becoming paupers after pampered childhoods at the pre-Revolutionary Russian Court are always popular, and Red Princess has all the vital ingredients. Born into the Russian nobility, this little girl had nursery companions that ranged from child-sized talking dolls to the young Tsarevich. Her old age was spent tending five dogs in a small cottage on the Cornish moors.

But the life of Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, 1907-1994, here told by her granddaughter, does not follow the conventional format. Through the Twenties and Thirties, the newly impoverished Princess Sofka became increasingly unsympathetic to the plight of her fellow aristocrats.

Far from condemning the Communists, she sympathised with their ideals. 'Stalin's evildoing cannot be said to detract from the basic idea of socialism,' she proclaimed. In the Forties she joined the Communist Party; her horrified White Russian friends turned on her, calling her 'filth'.

With feeling and wit, Zinovieff records the experiences that shaped her grandmother's beliefs. There have been many rosy depictions of the pre-Revolutionary Russian peasant, happy and devoted to his landlord.

But Princess Sofka used to tell a different story. Her governess warned her dust would be thrown at her while visiting the family's dacha. A forthright footman, Simyon, explained: 'Wouldn't I hate those who made me work and didn't pay me enough?' When Simyon told the princess that people were starving, she, passed on her share of biscuits.

Before she fled from the Crimea in 1919, aged 12, Sofka befriended a lodge-keeper's grandson; his reasoning seemed to clinch it for her. He was, he explained, more intelligent than her, yet he was barefoot and uneducated. 'Why should the Ivanovs have cakes when others had no bread?'

Sofka spent her subsequent years, mostly in England, flouting convention. Her sexual mores gave rise to comment; after proclaiming herself a Communist she was watched closely by MI5 and labelled 'over-sexed'. But perhaps most controversial was her disregard for the norms of motherhood.

She left her first husband to run off with another man just weeks after the birth of her second son. Shortly after the birth of her third son, she and her second husband ran off to join a Cossack circus.

She found herself in an internment camp in France during the Second World War but turned down the chance to return to her sons in England. She took the Communist Party's view that she was of more use in the internment camp. There is no doubt her three sons suffered as a consequence, but it turned out that the Party was right. Sofka is now recognised as having saved the lives of at least 50 Jews.

Red Princess presents a beguiling mixture of biography and travelogue, as the author revisits the scenes of her grandmother's life. In Russia, she comes across people who are nostalgic both for the Tsarist and the Soviet eras. They have managed to convince themselves that their 'little father' Tsar was replaced by another caring overlord.

These complexities and contradictions reach a sort of apogee in Sofka's time in the Crimea, where the surviving Romanovs fled after the Revolution. While Lenin was launching his Red Terror, tennis and tea parties carried on regardless.

The Bolsheviks eventually forced Sofka and her grandmother to dig up vegetables, but months later the Bolsheviks themselves were ousted by the Germans and the tennis and the tea parties resumed.

Pluck, pride and privilege

John McBratney
3 March 2007

The author is the granddaughter of the so-called "Red Princess" of the title, Sofka Dolgorouky. The catalyst for the book was a diary which the grandmother gave to the author when she was a teenager, a metal-framed book with cherub-faced clasp and watered silk endpapers made in Russia 150 years earlier and designed for "the feminine musings of a privileged St Petersburg lady".

That was the life the grandmother had been born into in 1907 as Princess Sofka Dolgorouky - a daughter of the St Petersburg nobility - and an only child. But history intervened and her life took a very different trajectory. She lived the last 30 years of her life on Bodmin Moor in England with her partner, Jack King, who had been born, raised and lived all his life in Shepherd's Bush. Both were long-standing members of the Communist Party. The book is about what happened in the intervening period and the author's efforts to track the tale.

Both Sofka's parents were of courtier families, steeped in the trappings and importance of the Tsarist Court. However such advantages did not prevent her parents' marriage having but a brief existence. Her uncourtier-like mother qualified as a doctor, worked at the front during the First World War and was a pilot. She palmed Sofka off with the imperious paternal grandmother with whom Sofka fled to the Crimea in 1917 after the Revolution and then in 1921, to England on the same British naval ship that rescued the old tsarist queen mother - the sister of Queen Alexandra.

Sofka appeared to settle well into English life, pursuing seriously her school studies, when she was plucked by the grandmother to live in Rome, then Nice and Paris. At all times her mother is a distant figure (with her effete, well-mannered second husband). In 1931, Sofka was back in London and married a Russian of similar noble birth to her own who is the grandfather of the author. This once-wealthy collection of grand personages were all then pulling the devil by the tail and keeping up appearances as best they could.

The author seeks to discover what drove her grandmother, who believed that life was to be lived and that the maxim applied equally to women as to men. She was well read, with a fascination for Shakespeare which was intensified by her working for Laurence Olivier and his first wife. Monogamy was of little relevance to her but it appears that she had two relationships which were of primary importance, namely that with her second husband, Gray Skipwith, who was killed in action in 1941, and then finally with Jack King. In the cataclysmic wars, revolutions and social upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, Sofka was but a small bobbing cork but she managed to steer a course of her own. Caught while in Nazi-occupied Paris and detained with a group of British passport holders, she was interned in Vittel, where she helped many Jewish prisoners. She wrote: "We failed either to suffer or to prevent the suffering" but "one owes it to them never to let oneself forget". After her death in 1994, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance institute, recognised her work. Ensnared by an inheritance of immense privilege and all sorts of attendant restrictions, the fates gave Sofka an opportunity to create a life of her own. She embraced vigorously the opportunity and her granddaughter, with a critical pride, tells the story well.

The princess and the CCCP

Sofka Zinovieff has reason to be enthralled by her family's tale, finds Louisa Waugh

17th February 2007

When the Soviet Union began to crumble in the late 1980s, droves of Russians sped their way west, Britain was a popular choice for exile because it was already home to longstanding communities of political refugees. Over these last two decades the flow has continued as Russian dissidents, despots and the criminally decadent have emigrated here in their tens of thousands. The majority have settled in Londongrad, as they affectionately refer to their adopted capital city. Amid the high-profile minority of super-rich ex-Soviets are the remnants of older communities who survived the hell of Soviet revolution and European wars.

Princess Sofka Dolgorouky was one of these refugees. Born in Tsarist St Petersburg in 1907, she lived a rich, scandalous life. Her privileged childhood, complete with personal servants and sunken marble baths, was curtailed when she was evacuated to the Crimea during the 1917 revolution. Young Sofka was placed in the care of her draconian grandmother, Olga. After two austere years in Crimea. Sofka and Olga joined a shipload of Russian royalty, including the mother of the murdered Tsar, and sailed to exile in England. Sofka described this voyage as "the end of my childhood". She was eleven. Princess Sofka's granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, has spent years tracing the personal and political history of this wayward princess and her immediate family The princess's own mother, Sophy, was a talented surgeon who railed against convention. Sophy divorced her first husband, bought her own aircraft, volunteered as a fighter bomber during the First World War and was awarded the George Cross. She also worked as a surgeon in the carnage-strewn frontline trenches and was almost suicidally courageous. But she completely neglected her own daughter: as a child Sofka rarely saw her mother and grew up independent of parental affection. It was a pattern of neglect she in turn inflicted on her own sons.

Zinovieff weaves the stories of Sophy and Sofka together during the first part of this book. Both women were extraordinary, but Sophy the more so: she rescued her second husband, who was gay, from prison in Moscow, then smuggled him to Paris, where she became a chronic opium addict. I couldn't quite understand why Sofka was the focus of this biography as opposed to her insatiable mother.

In England, young Sofka was educated at Queen's College, London, where she livened up the school magazine by describing Bolsheviks torturing while Russians ("in Odessa they slowly put the prisoners into boiling oil, drove splinters under their nails or tied a number together and threw them in the sea"). But her grandmother couldn't settle and they continued travelling. After living in Italy and France. Sofka returned to England, She married, left her husband for another man. bore three sons, then returned to France alone, where she became trapped in Nazi-occupied Paris. She spent the next four years interned in Vittel camp. The author is obviously enthralled by both her grandmother and this turbulent era of history. It's impossible not to like Red Princess because Zinovieff writes with so much passion, especially in the second half of the book. But she litters her narrative with mundane details (shoes, bathing habits and household minutiae) that clog up this already complex story. She doesn't relax into her full literary stride until around page 150, which is a real shame because from then on she's a wonderfully evocative writer. Her descriptions of Vittel internment camp in particular are raw and heartbreaking. Sofka also carne into her own in Vittel: she worked for the French Resistance, risked her life to save a group of Polish Jews and made a lifelong political commitment to communism.

After internment. Sofka returned to England, but still wasn't ready to settle down. She became a prominent member of the British Communist Party, and spent years working as a tour guide for its affiliated travel company Progressive Tours. She believed Soviet oppression came not from the communist regime itself, but from "the historical paranoid fear of dissent that has dogged Russian rulers through the centuries." Sofka debated, drank and loved in excess. She proudly told her final partner, an Englishman called Jack, that she had enjoyed more than a hundred lovers throughout her life.

COMRADE SOFKA

RED PRINCESS: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE
JOHN JOLLIFFE, March 2007

SOFKA DOLGOROUKY'S LIFE was polarised between two uniquely distant extremes. Her father's family were the epitome of St Petersburg's court grandees, though he himself was a charming playboy who dabbled in the theatre and was eventually remarried to a gypsy singer before dying at the age of forty-two. Her mother's family, the Bobrinskis, were equally exalted, being descended from one of Catherine the Great's many lovers, but her Bobrinski grandfather was an exceptionally cultivated archaeologist and collector, with a talent for versifying and for Edward Lear-like drawings. Her mother was determined to break away from a suffocating court life. She studied medicine and, having also learnt to fly at the Ecole Militaire d'Aviation at Chartres in 1913, acquired her own aeroplane. When war came, she was twice decorated as a nurse.

Sofka was an only child, and her incompatible parents separated after only five years of marriage. Her mother's mother was a close friend of the Tsar's mother, and little Sofka was given piggy-backs by the Tsar himself, and played many games of halma with the Tsarevich, who was too vulnerable, from haemophilia, to play any game in which he might be hurt.

Sofka ended her working life as a convinced communist, acting as a general manager to a Red travel company specialising in budget tours of great discomfort behind the Iron Curtain, before retiring to her first real home of her own, a small cottage on Bodmin Moor, accompanied by a retired athlete and trainer called Jack King ('my devoted prole'). But a lot had happened in between. In 1917 she was one of a large party which fled from the Crimea with the Dowager Empress, who was a sister of Queen Alexandra, on board HMS Marlborough, and on reaching England Sofka was much befriended by the eccentric animal-loving Duchess of Hamilton, and spent many holidays with the family, leading a chaotic teenage life between Scotland, Wiltshire and Rome, where her grandmother had temporarily settled. But in 1931 she married Leo Zinovieff, from another ci-devant grand family, who were appalled by what at first was her very reasonable flirtation with socialist ideas. Later, as her brother-in-law commented, 'Becoming a communist when you are a refugee is like a Jew from Germany becoming a Nazi. There is no difference.'

The couple had two sons, and it is hard to say whether Sofka was a worse wife or mother. Incurably promiscuous, she worked during the war with the Old Vic company (where she became for a time Laurence Olivier's secretary, and remained a friend of his first wife), and admitted that 'one was apt to find oneself in many beds with unexpected companions'. Her callous treatment of her eldest son undoubtedly had an unsteadying effect, though her second son Ian in due course became a bank manager with a successful marriage. Having remarried and produced a third son, she bundled him off at the age of nine weeks to be cared for by her milkman's mother-in-law, before eventually sending him to Harrow, where he was miserable. Meanwhile she and her second husband, discovering that the lease of their cottage was up, moved off with a troupe of Cossack riders and 'managed' their appearances and stabling, from Maidenhead to Caithness.

On the other hand, in 1940 she slipped over to France to take funds to her destitute and far from grateful mother, and when the Germans arrived she was interned as a British subject first in a camp at Besanfon, then in a grimmer one at Vittel, where the conditions were appalling, and where quarrels and deceit alternated with camaraderie and humour. Through her friends in the British Foreign Office she was able to help a number of Polish Jews to be released, though this only became known many years later. This episode shows that she was capable of enormous courage and determination, though these qualities were more usually put to use for totally selfish and wildly misjudged purposes.

Then came a squalid postwar life in London, when she actually joined the Communist Party and was . proudly displayed as 'Comrade Sofka, the People's Princess'. She somehow believed she was 'on the side of the angels, though without believing in angels', and her travel company was infiltrated by (mostly futile) Soviet intelligence. Naturally, she combined this with persistent neglect of her children as they grew older, her second husband having been killed in the RAF, and her first in an accident in 1948.

The author is the daughter of Sofka's eldest son, and in spite of this hazardous background she has made a successful career. Her well-written book is partly biography, partly family background, and partly a spirited travelogue in search of those who had known or known of her grandmother, and of the various places where the family had lived. It is written with a definite affection for her subject, who, in small doses, was obviously capable of enormous charm, before indifference and abandonment followed, usually rather quickly, often to be followed in turn by a new infatuation. There are many unattractive episodes in her book, bu't also a few to respect and even admire, and certainly never a dull page.

From being a princess in St Petersburg on first name terms with the Romanovs, to ending her days a committed Communist in a damp cottage in the West Country, Sofka Dolgorouky lived quite some life.  Inheriting her diaries, Sofka Zinovieff at first had no idea that she would eventually feel compelled to travel to Russia and France to research and write the story of her fabled, yet highly controversial, grandmother's life. It is a story that will have you reeling from the excesses of pre-revolutionary Russia via a stint in the French Resistance to the era of 'free love' bohemian London, with encounters with countless princes and duchesses in between. Fascinating though the details of the furs, palaces and pearls are, what is truly engrossing here is the resilience and sense of self of this of dispossessed and wilful princess who thought nothing of upsetting what she perceived to be the 'Establishment' until her dying day. This is very much a labour of love, but one that will have you gripped as if in the pages of a novel.

Family passions

William Charlton

17th February 2007 

Few twentieth-century women can have had more interesting lives than the Communist Princess Sofka Dolgorouky. As a child in St Petersburg she was thought a suitable playmate for the Czarevitch, and when the Russian Revolution overtook her in the Crimea she was carried off by the British Navy with the Empress Dowager. After that she was always more or less penniless, but in the 1930s she was employed as a secretary by Laurence Olivier, and enjoyed the life of the theatre. Her first marriage with an equally destitute emigre, Leo Zinovieff, ended after five years, and she then married an Englishman of no less ancient lineage but more progressive politics, Grey Skipwith. who was killed in action in 1942. By these husbands she had three sons. In 1940 she went to Paris where her mother was drug-addicted and desperately poor. She was promptly interned for three years. sometimes under extremely harsh conditions, and later with Jews awaiting deportation, some 50 of whom she helped to save. She had already lost any lingering beliefs in Christianity, and became a Communist and a passionate champion of Jews. Back in England she became a Communist Party member and had a Jewish lover. She later joined a Communist travel agency, conducting tours around Eastern Europe. On one of these trips she met atoolmaker 1O years her junior, who became her partner for the rest of her life. She retired with him to a remote cottage and supplemented their meagre incomes by writing an autobiography, Sofka, and Eat Russian, a cookbook.

Her personality was a mixture of fortitude, idealism and irresponsibility. Its contradictions can be traced to her parentage. Both her parents belonged to the highest rank of Russian nobility, but the Dolgorouky's were old-style aristocrats, pleasure-loving and deeply conservative, whereas her mothers family, the Bobrinsky's, were liberal and intellectual: in English terms, it was an alliance of High Tory and Whig. By 1,913 her mother had studied medicine and learnt to fly. Serving as an army doctor in the first years of the First World War she won the highest decorations for courage, and then passed through the army flying school with her own aircraft in 1916'. But she achieved these feats with the help of opium and many lovers, and was a cold, neglectful mother. Sofkas father was more affectionate but left to marry a gypsy singer. It is not surprising that, with these models, she abandoned her own children and claimed more than 100 lovers.

Sofka's life has found a perfect chronicler. Her granddaughter Sofka Zinovieff has had access to her memories as well as all her papers. She draws freely on Sofka for her grandmother's early life: but having obtained from Cambridge a First and then a doctorate in anthropology, she is a critical reader. She searched out people with recollections of Sofkas life in St Petersburg, the Crimea and France, and even used some ancestral charm to unlock the files of MI5.

As a result she not only fills in gaps in Sofka, but sometimes alters the picture it gives of the author. It passes over her appalling shortcomings as a mother. Zinovieff" shows sympathy for her grandmother but not blind partiality; she speaks perhaps as a Bobrinsky when she says that "interesting work, political commitment and sexual excitement" seem to add up to "marvellous times'", but she also quotes the severe judgements of the Zinovieff family. She presents her material with such smooth skill that this intelligent book is a very easy read.

La principessa rossa

Paolo Valentino

18th March 2007 

PROTAGONISTI La biografia di Sofka Dolgorouki raccontata dalla nipote: passioni politiche e avventure amorose
L' amica degli zar che scelse la rivoluzione Dall' esilio al Lager e alla causa comunista Era nata nobile e ricchissima. Morì comunista e quasi povera. Entrò nel secolo breve, come si entra in un uragano. La forza devastante del Novecento le si rovesciò addosso a ondate successive: la rivoluzione russa e due guerre mondiali, l' esilio, il lager nazista, la militanza scrupolosamente spiata dai servizi segreti britannici. Lei sopravvisse a tutto, divorando il suo tempo, mescolando tragedia e commedia, imponendo senza proclami la modernità ante litteram di una donna ribelle, indipendente e libera. La principessa Sofka Dolgorouki ebbe tre grandi passioni nella sua vita: la letteratura, il comunismo e il sesso. E non necessariamente in quest' ordine di priorità. Ma queste furono il sale di una vicenda personale, coraggiosa e controversa. Dove lo scandalo degli «oltre cento amanti» che si vantava di aver avuto, il rifiuto di farsi inchiodare da vincoli e responsabilità familiari o il rischio mortale affrontato per salvare la vita a un gruppo di ebrei durante l' Olocausto, sono solo alcune delle tessere di un mosaico mai banale. Quando venne al mondo, nel 1907 a San Pietroburgo, l' aristocrazia imperiale celebrò in lei la più giovane discendente del principe Yuri Dolgorouki, il fondatore di Mosca e, per il ramo materno, di Caterina la Grande. La corte di Nicola II, già minata dalla sinistra influenza di Rasputin, viveva ignara gli ultimi sfarzi prima della rovina. La piccola Sofka fu compagna di giochi dello Zarevich. Sua nonna paterna, la contessa Olga Shuvaloff, era infatti dame d' honneur di Marie, mamma dello Zar Nicola e quindi «Imperatrice madre di tutte le Russie». Fu con Olga e Marie, mentre lo zarevich seguiva il tragico destino della famiglia nella casa Epatev, che nell' aprile 1919 la piccola Sofka si imbarcò a Yalta su un incrociatore della marina britannica, cominciando la lunga diaspora dell' esilio. Quando si spense, nel 1994, in un modesto cottage di campagna sulla costa della Cornovaglia, Sofka, ora vedova Skipwith dal nome del suo secondo marito, era una signora di 86 anni, provata e senza agi economici, ma sempre piena di classe e charme. Ancora aggrappata al mito redentore del socialismo sovietico e per questo cordialmente odiata dagli ex parenti e dall' emigrazione aristocratica russa, che mai le perdonarono né il suo tradimento, né la sua promiscuità. È grazie a sua nipote, anche lei Sofka, Sofka Zinovieff, se questa straordinaria biografia del Novecento viene ora raccontata in un bel libro, appena uscito in Inghilterra per Granta. In Red Princess: a revolutionary life, l' autrice ripercorre l' intero cammino della nonna, dalla Neva alla Manica, passando per la Crimea, l' Inghilterra, la Francia, tornando poi sui suoi passi per seguire tutte le «brusche svolte» che ne segnarono la vita. Per scriverlo, è andata a parlare con tutti i sopravvissuti: i suoi Zinovieff, famiglia del primo marito di Sofka, gli ex amanti, la compagna ed eterna amica del campo di concentramento, qualche sua coetanea delle famiglie al servizio dei Dolgorouki. Ha avuto accesso ai file del MI5, l' intelligence di Sua Maestà, che a Sofka dedicò un fitto dossier: «Donna intelligente, coraggiosa e vivace, inestimabile acquisto per il Partito comunista: da controllare». E ancora: «Poco affidabile, il suo grande appetito sessuale l' ha portava ad avere molte relazioni». Ma, soprattutto, ha finalmente aperto e letto dopo molto tempo il volume rilegato in pelle, che la nonna le aveva dato quando aveva 16 anni e che lei aveva riposto in un cassetto. «Era il suo diario del campo di concentramento di Vittel, dove fu internata dai nazisti nel 1940 - spiega Zinovieff -, per me fu una rivelazione: l' avevo conosciuta solo come una vecchia signora, ero la sua nipote preferita, mi inondava sempre di libri, specie libri sull' Olocausto. Ma è stato elettrizzante conoscerla da giovane, trasgressiva e insofferente: ha sempre vissuto come sentiva e non come voleva il codice dell' epoca». I geni della trasgressione, d' altronde, Sofka li aveva ereditati dai genitori. Dalla madre, la contessa Sophy Bobrinsky, un' altra donna ribelle che mai si occupò della figlia, rifiutò l' etichetta di corte, divenne un celebre medico, ottenne il brevetto di pilota da combattimento nell' aviazione zarista, sposò in seconde nozze un principe omosessuale, che dall' esilio londinese andò personalmente a riprendersi, rischiando la vita, nella prigione bolscevica di Mosca dov' era stato rinchiuso, lavorò come tassista e segretaria a Parigi, diventò schiava di oppio e morfina, per suicidarsi a 57 anni. O dal padre, il principe Petya Dolgorouki, che quando Sofka aveva 5 anni abbandonò moglie e figlia per scappare con Anna Michaelovna, una cantante gitana. Difficile voltare le spalle a un DNA del genere. Anche Sofka, donna di grande bellezza, si sposò due volte, con Leo Zinovieff e poi con Grey Skipwith. Ebbe tre figli, due dal primo, uno dal secondo, dei quali non volle e non ebbe mai il tempo di curarsi. Un esempio per tutti, nell' estate del 1939, pochi giorni dopo la nascita di Patrick, il suo terzo, Sofka partì per tre mesi al seguito di una compagnia di cosacchi, in tournée in Gran Bretagna, per i quali lavorava da interprete. Il bambino fu dato alle cure della moglie del lattaio di Dean Cottage, il villaggio alla periferia di Londra dove viveva. Consumava amanti senza sosta, distinzione di classe e ceto: l' aristocratico e il postino, l' attore e l' idraulico, il cosacco del circo e lo scrittore famoso. Con qualche concessione bisessuale, nella lunga lista dei suoi «one night stand» c' è con certezza almeno una donna. «Puoi avere tutti gli amanti che vuoi, ma mai più di uno alla volta», avrebbe consigliato alla nipote. «In fondo - dice ironica quest' ultima - Sofka stava solo seguendo il suo scandaloso destino genealogico». A Londra fu assistente personale di Lawrence Olivier all' Old Vic, diventandone collaboratrice indispensabile e grande amica. Nel suo minuscolo appartamento, dove centinaia di libri giacevano dappertutto, organizzava saloni letterari nei quali anche Peggy Ashcroft e John Gielgud erano di casa. Feste a base di vodka (portata dagli altri) e borsch (cucinato da lei) con tanti amici, dotte conversazioni, sesso, letture infinite, questo era il mondo londinese di Sofka negli anni Trenta. La svolta della sua vita, quella che le avrebbe tagliato i ponti col suo vecchio mondo, fu l' incontro col comunismo. Una conversione, dove l' esperienza del lager ebbe un ruolo decisivo. Si era trasferita a Parigi con Grey, nel settembre 1939. Fu lì che la guerra la colse. Gli occupanti nazisti la deportarono a Vittel, dove conobbe un gruppo di ebrei polacchi, ultimi superstiti del ghetto di Varsavia e ascoltò i loro racconti d' orrore. Riuscì a salvarne alcuni. Ma quando vide tutti gli altri salire sul treno per Auschwitz, raccontò, il comunismo le apparve come l' unica possibilità di giustizia. Così, tornata dopo la guerra in Inghilterra, si iscrisse al partito. «Compagna Sofka, la nostra principessa comunista», la presentavano alle riunioni. Negli Anni Cinquanta fece la guida turistica per Progressive Tours, un' agenzia di viaggi comunista low cost per i lavoratori. Destinazioni preferite, l' Est europeo e soprattutto la Russia. Tornò infinite volte nella sua città natale, nel frattempo diventata Leningrado, 62 ore di viaggio in treno da Londra. Il punto culminante del tour era quando, visitando con l' Intourist l' ex Palazzo Bobrinsky, ora sede del Dipartimento di geografia dell' Università, Sofka diceva ai suoi compagni di viaggio: «Questa era la casa dei miei nonni, dove ho giocato da bambina. Ma è stato giusto che sia stata tolta alla mia famiglia ed è molto meglio che appartenga alla nazione, per essere usata nell' educazione dei giovani». Sarebbe venuto anche il tempo della disillusione e dello scetticismo, l' insostenibile scoperta dei crimini di Stalin nel 1956, la progressiva convinzione che «con le bugie, non si difende l' Urss». Anche se rinnovò la tessera fino alla fine. Qualche anno dopo la sua morte, lo Yad Vaschem, il memoriale dell' Olocausto di Gerusalemme, scrisse il suo nome nella lista dei giusti, per quello che aveva fatto a Vittel in favore degli ebrei. La medaglia d' oro, chiusa in un cofanetto di legno d' ulivo, venne consegnata proprio a Sofka Zinovieff, la nipote biografa.

"L' autrice Una storia appresa in famiglia Sofka Zinovieff, autrice di «Red Princess - A revolutionary life» (Granta, pp. 346, £ 16.99), dedicato alla vita della nonna, è nata in Inghilterra in una famiglia di origine russa. Ora vive in Grecia"