Revolutionary Days: Recollections of Romanoffs and Bolsheviki
By , COUNTESS SPERANSKY,née GRANT. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1919. Crown 8vo, xii + 411 pp. Illustrated by photographs. $2.00.
THIS is a lively and decidedly readable book. It is not a history, and makes no pretense of being one; nor is it a chronicle of personal melodrama depending for its interest on desperadoes and desperate deeds; the book is, in essence, a picture, and a valuable picture, of the fall and disintegration of a great nation as these events were seen by one of privileged rank. Indeed, this book’s weakness in history (Princess Cantacuzène troubles herself little with dates and deals with great events in a paragraph) is, paradoxically, its strength. For instance, the dates of the ministry of the much-berated Stünner mean little to us, while the fact that Stünner, far from being the sinister plotter the world imagines, revealed himself to the Petrograd world as a vain, garrulous, and useless old man, in a word, the straw at which the drowning Empire was invited to clutch, means everything. This record of gossip, hearsay, tea-table chatter, and personal observation is exactly the medium necessary for the summoning up of that extraordinary atmosphere of corruption and Byzantine intrigue which haunted Russia.
There are some unforgettable pictures, and the anecdotal material has been wisely edited and chosen. It will be long before a reader can dismiss from his mind the memory of that old Russian Princess who, living deserted and forgotten in her huge palace, dressed herself daily in her best black silk dress and lace cap, and waited calmly, with true Slavic fatalism, for death and destruction; and the account of how the Bolsheviki, during the Kerensky régime, turned Kcésehinskaia, prima ballerina of the Petrograd Opera, and late mistress of an imperial somebody or other, out of her splendid palace, and calmly set to work brewing their social poisons in the boudoir of the dispossessed and angry sylph, is an unequaled commentary on the times. The Bolsheviki, by the way, appear to have treated Princess Cantacuzéne with courtesy and respect on all occasions.
On finishing this book, the reader finds himself with two distinct impressions: first, that the overthrow of the old Russian régime, no matter by whose hands or at what cost, was a necessity to the advance of European civilization; second, that the chaos in Russia is not so black as it has been painted, and that no one, not even delegates to the late Peace Conference, need despair.
H. B. B.