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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
