One Man In His Time: The Memoirs Of Serge Obolensky

Prince Serge Oblensky

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786256539
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Personal account of a young Russian nobleman and his life through the Russian Revolution, leaving Russia, and serving in two World Wars, including the U.S. Army (OSS) during WWII.
Obolensky was a Russian prince who became a publicist and international socialite. Scion of a wealthy White Russian family and husband of Czar Alexander II's daughter, the Oxford-educated Obolensky fled his native country after battling Bolsheviks as a guerrilla fighter. The tall, mustachioed aristocrat subsequently divorced Princess Catherine, married the daughter of American Financier John Jacob Astor, settled in the U.S. and worked with his brother-in-law, the real estate entrepreneur Vincent Astor. During World War II, Obolensky at 53 became the U.S. Army's oldest paratrooper and earned the rank of colonel. He started his own public relations firm in New York in 1949, handling accounts like Piper-Heidsieck champagne. "Serge, " a friend once remarked, "could be successful selling umbrellas in the middle of the Sahara." A legend in the hotel business, Colonel Obolensky became a Director of Zeckendorf Hotels, then Vice Chaiman of Hilton Hotels.

PART ONE—HORSE BLANKET

1

A WIDE BOULEVARD, with four rows of shade trees on both sides of it, ran from the railroad station at Czarskoe Selo to the park around the Summer Palace of the Emperor of Russia, and the houses of the nobility stood in their own grounds on both sides of the boulevard. My father’s house in Czarskoe Selo was the first in the row after leaving the station, and there I was born on October 3, 1890. I was my father’s first child; we were in the direct male line of the Obolensky family.

Each summer the Emperor and the Empress left the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, twenty miles away, for Czarskoe Selo; and the villas filled up with people whose position in Russian life was about like our own. By that I mean they belonged to one of the two hundred princely families of Russia, their wealth was generally in landed estates, their social life revolved around court functions, and their sons went into the army.

Under ordinary circumstances I might have been expected to do the same. My father was Colonel Platon Obolensky, then forty years old, a heavy-set, kindly man who had a military record of considerable distinction and was aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Vladimir. You see, in Russia in those days a boy with a background like mine would almost automatically be trained to become an officer, and if his father was aide-de-camp to a Grand Duke, it meant that he would probably be brought up close to court circles. But I was too young to have had a real life in the Russian court before the war and the Revolution came. Curiously enough, I had no military training whatever until 1914, when I entered the Russian cavalry as a private and was trained in actual combat.

Up to the time I was five or six years old, my mother had complete charge of me and brought me up the way she thought I should be brought up, regardless of tradition or anything else. She was strong-willed, and she had her own ideas.

Mother was born Marie Narishkin. She was a slight, rather frail-looking woman, with thin features and dark hair, much younger than my father. She loved horses, raised thoroughbred trotters on her estate in the district of Tambov and raced them. The Narishkins were a family of courtiers. They had been in evidence at the Russian court from the time of Peter the Great, whose mother was a Narishkin. But the Narishkins never accepted a title. They considered it beneath them. They were brilliant, gay, reckless, good-looking people, art collectors, patrons of artists, gamblers, and they lived abroad much of the time.

Pushkin’s famous gambling story, The Queen of Spades, was inspired by the life of my great-great-great-grandmother Anna Narishkin. It is a sinister tale about a great lady who never loses when playing cards and who is murdered by an impecunious young officer for her secret. And about the time I was born, Tschaikovsky based one of his last operas, Pique Dame, on the same Narishkin family legend.

Mother’s father, my grandfather Narishkin, was typical of the family. He lived a very gay life, spending most of his time in Paris, was mixed up with a lot of women, and ran through a couple of fortunes. But he was exceedingly lucky—or maybe he gauged things right, for he came into a new inheritance every time his money ran out. When he died, at a considerable age, he was once again possessed of tremendous wealth. His wife, my grandmother Narishkin, was a tall, imperious woman and one of the most famous beauties of her time.

Mother was not very strong, and I eventually learned that she had lost a child shortly before I was conceived. She had been disappointed by so many miscarriages that when I appeared I was babied, petted, worried about, and spoilt. The worst thing, though, was that Mother had wanted a daughter. She had no intention of changing her feelings just because I turned out to be a son. For the first five years of my life my hair was kept long, and I was dressed in skirts. This was humiliating to me. I even had curls, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. My male cousins pulled my hair and made my life miserable, whilst my girl cousins liked to curl my ringlets, which was just as bad.

But I had a guardian angel in the person of my nurse, Miss Lizzie Arthur, a stout little Scottish woman born in Glasgow. She came to us because her aunt, Mimi Brown, had been the nurse of the Narishkin family, my mother’s own nurse. Miss Lizzie lavished her kindness on us all her life, for she remained with us as housekeeper when we no longer needed a nurse. Firm, independent, just, and loving, she saved our young souls from cynicism after our mother left. I barely managed to get her out of Russia at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Miss Lizzie was extremely outspoken, but she pronounced Russian words with a rolling Scottish burr, so it was almost impossible to understand her. She spoke English also with an accent that could hardly have been surpassed by Robert Bums himself. The result was that I learned to speak English like some Russian branch of a Highland clan, which highly amused my English friends later on at Oxford.

I had an old donkey, an animal so portly that his neck had a roll of fat on it. His tummy bulged so much that I actually fancied him to be a python who had swallowed something in two parts. They used to place a basket saddle on his back and strap me into the basket; then we waddled through the lanes in the park. Czarskoe Selo was surrounded by a dense belt of fir trees. Inside this perimeter the park was magnificently landscaped. It was heavily wooded in places, and successive empresses had planted shrubs that by my day had turned into small forests of lilac. It was in one of these that the old donkey took it into his head to run away with me.

Miss Lizzie rushed home and alerted the police. The servants were called out to search the woods, and I understand that a whole cortege streamed from the house in their varied costumes and went plunging through the lilac bushes. They found me in a gentle little glade, fast asleep in the basket saddle, while the donkey contentedly nibbled the lilacs.

During the winter we lived in our house on the Mohovaya in St. Petersburg. We occupied the top two floors. The nursery was the next room but one from the end of the long corridor, with Father’s dressing room on one side. Opposite this was a big bathroom with two bathtubs in it and two small wood-burning stoves—chip heaters. Beyond Father’s dressing room, the corridor led to the Green Room, a big sitting room which opened onto our landing—Miss Lizzie’s and mine. Across the landing was the Red Room, another big sitting room. Beyond the Red Room was Mother’s bedroom. It was an enormous room, and she always kept it dark and shadowy. It was also the haunt of her poodle, Turk, who always growled at me and bullied my poodle, Filka. Turk didn’t bite, but Filka and I never liked that side of the house. Mother’s dark room was a creepy place.

From the landing a wide stairway covered with a cerise rug swept down to the first floor. Another aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Vladimir, Prince Chahovskoy, lived there with his two children, who were about my age. On the first landing, there stood an enormous stuffed bear that my father had killed. In his paws the bear held a silver tray on which callers deposited their cards. Beside him stood an old-fashioned Victorian chair with a canopy over it. Down another few steps was the entrance. Our doorman was an enormous man with a very long black beard. His uniform was blue, and he wore a kind of bandoleer, blue, with red and gold ornaments on it. On great occasions he substituted a large red bandoleer for his everyday blue one. I could never find out what it was for. Father was of the opinion that in earlier days it was a sort of scabbard and that it had probably been much smaller then. As he said, there was always meaning to such things. In any event, all the doormen of the big houses wore them, and all had great beards and smart blue uniforms.

At intervals a significant pair of gray trotters and a sleigh appeared before our door. You could tell those were fast horses just by looking at them. The coachman looked enormous in his padded livery. A coachman like that was what I wanted to be. And in the back of the sleigh, on a carpeted platform, stood a footman wearing a long coat with an immense fur collar. Whenever that sleigh appeared, my curls were put in order, a fur coat was pulled over my skirted clothes, and Miss Lizzie hustled me off to visit my Grandmother Obolensky. Those were her fast trotters, and when they arrived at our doorstep it generally meant that she wanted to see me.

Nothing ever delighted me more. Grandmother’s sleigh was very grand, and Father always had slow horses, so those gray trotters with the blue net over them, the fat coachman, the motionless footman and the two-horse sleigh gave me a thrill every time I saw them. I really loved horses, good ones. We sailed out over the snow. The Mohovaya ran perpendicular to the Neva River, which was only a few blocks from our house, and opened into the Sergievskaya, the street on which my grandmother lived. The Sergievskaya ran parallel to the Neva. So it wasn’t a very long journey to my grandmother’s, really just around the corner. But thanks to Grandmother, who I think had heard how much I enjoyed these rides, we took longer than necessary. Then we turned and approached her house with considerable ceremony. Across the frozen Neva was the outer ring of Peter and Paul Fortress. A short distance upstream, on our side of the river, stood the Winter Palace.

The sleigh stopped before the house. Grandmother had an apartment. We got out and went upstairs. As soon as I came in, some elderly ladies gave me candy and all sorts of things, and they fussed and clucked over me. They were callers—aunts and great-aunts of the family, which was large. I suppose they had heard I was coming. To elderly ladies of Russia, children were always an occasion.

Grandmother herself lived alone except for a lady companion. She was very old, and she was an invalid. A hint of peppermint always pervaded her dim bedroom. There were a great many icons over in one corner, and before them a vigil light that was always burning gave a fading reddish luster to the heavy furniture and the drawn curtains.

I suppose the lack of other Obolensky grandchildren gave me a special importance in Grandmother’s eyes. At each visit, her features glowing, she handed me a little present. I’m afraid I was always disappointed. What I really wanted was those trotters. But I adored her, and I think the feeling was mutual.

I know now that I grew up in a world where the relics of different social periods were all around me. Grandmother represented something fundamentally Russian, timeless and changeless, that underlay them all. She was a survivor of a bygone era even then. Her native Russian quality was neither tempestuous nor emotional, which is what Europeans have erroneously come to think of as the Russian temperament—the extreme, in other words. On the contrary, Russia’s strength of that epoch, Grandmother’s strength, was abiding simplicity, a radiant hospitality, an almost frugal way of life that linked the richest people to the general norm of Russian existence. Wealth was not at all a matter for display. It was used to maintain the outward forms of responsibility and position, the way my grandmother kept those wonderful horses that she never used. Or maybe she kept them up for me.

In Russia you were called by your first name and your father’s name. In some circles it was actually a social error to forget the patronym. So I was Serge Platonovitch—Serge for my own name, and Platonovitch meaning “son of Platon.” However, I couldn’t pronounce Platonovitch. I said “Paponch,” so they called me Paponch or Paponka, the diminutive. Paponka means “horse blanket.” Once when a party was setting out from the house at Czarskoe a general whose name I can’t remember, but who was commander of the Emperor’s Cossack bodyguard, said to Mother, “I’m going to teach Paponka something.” He got a tea tray and said “Horse Blanket, you come along with me.” He took me up the front stairs, put me on the tray, and let me loose. I came swinging down the stairs, around the curve, with a terrific clatter, to the absolute horror of poor Mother. From then on I found tea-traying down the stairs a superlative pastime. It may have been good training for tobogganing at St. Moritz later on.

Horses made up the abiding interest of my childhood. Father drove what were called English harness horses. And when I say drove, I mean that he drove himself. As an old cavalryman he often dispensed with the services of the coachman and handled his own team. I often think his coaching knowledge may have served him in good stead—nobody knew where he went. But, as I said, he had slower, heavier horses than my grandmother.

Mother, like Grandmother, preferred fast horses. She had a pair of blacks, Atlasnie and Skvoretz—Satin and Blackbird. Satin was a cross between an Arab and a race horse. Mother also had a pair of bays, but she preferred the blacks. They were usually driven as a team, but sometimes singly. Sometimes Satin was placed in the shafts and Blackbird was harnessed as a wheel horse or trace horse, a pristiashka, harnessed outside the shafts and guided by an outside rein. Blackbird galloped while Satin trotted, and the art of the coachman was to keep the two gaits equal but dissimilar. Blackbird looked as if he were just running alongside to keep Satin company.

I liked to dress up as a coachman, so Mother had a blue coachman’s coat made for me. What with my hair and skirts, she really went to an enormous amount of trouble. The coat was lined with white rabbit fur. I wore it practically all the time. As a result, the fur molted and soon my clothing was covered with rabbit hairs. Then Mother gave me a little red two-wheeled governess cart for Czarskoe, and the aged donkey, more obedient than before, pulled it around. Our house at Czarskoe Selo was well heated, and we were able to stay there in the autumn until after the snow fell. Mother also gave me a little Finnish sleigh, called a veica sleigh, lighter than the Russian sleighs. The donkey was harnessed to it and I drove around the grounds in my molting coachman’s coat.

Besides living in St. Petersburg in the winter and at Czarskoe in the summer, we sometimes visited Mother’s estate, called Ira, in the district of Tambov, about three hundred miles southwest of Moscow. These trips awed me. The train that carried us south lived in my memory. The engine was supposedly dangerous, and at stations we all stood well back for fear it might explode. Inside the carriage, though, we seemed to be speeding like the wind. I retained an image of the little city of Tambov as colorful and glamorous, and of the trip overland to Ira, a long way to the east, as a prolonged adventure.

Most of the land was flat, with hilly country around the Vorona River, near which the estate lay. Mother had shee...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• GENEALOGY OF DIRECT MALE DESCENT OF THE PRINCES OBOLENSKY
• PART ONE-HORSE BLANKET
• PART TWO-LAND HUNGER
• PART THREE-A RUSSIAN IN ENGLAND
• PART FOUR-HORSES IN WAR
• PART FIVE-THE REIGN OF TERROR
• PART SIX-EXILES
• PART SEVEN-NEW WORLD