1925: What Was a Day Like for a Russian Noblewoman in Exile in Paris

In 1925, a woman who once owned hundreds of silk dresses woke up in a one-room apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Her bed was a narrow cot pushed against a wall with peeling wallpaper. The icon of Saint Nicholas that she had carried out of Russia sat on the windowsill, propped between a chipped teacup and a tin of tea. She had 45 minutes before she needed to be at the embroidery workshop on the other side of the city. And the woman threading needles beside her that morning would be a grand duchess. This was not unusual in 1920s Paris. It was ordinary, because by the middle of the decade, roughly 43,000 Russian refugees had settled in the city, with almost 10,000 more scattered across the suburbs. Former countesses sewed buttons in garment factories. Retired generals opened car doors for American tourists. A prince who once commanded an estate larger than some European countries now spent 12 hours a day behind the wheel of a taxi on the boulevard Saint-Germain. And their wives, the women who had grown up in palaces along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, who had worn gowns ordered from Worth and Poiret and attended balls at the Winter Palace, were bent over sewing machines in rooms that smelled of damp wool and machine oil. The saying that captured their situation was blunt. The men drive taxis, and the women sew for a living. That was the entire economy of the Russian exile, reduced to a single sentence. But behind that sentence were thousands of individual mornings, each one beginning with the same quiet ritual of getting dressed in a cold apartment, pinning up hair that was no longer styled by a lady's maid, and walking to a job that would have been unthinkable just eight years earlier. To understand how a woman born into the highest ranks of the Russian aristocracy Ended up threading needles for Coco Chanel, you have to go back to 1917. The February Revolution toppled the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty in a matter of days. The October Revolution that followed brought the Bolsheviks to power. And then came the Civil War, and with it, the real terror. Estates were seized, bank accounts were frozen overnight. Families who had owned land for generations watched their homes burned or converted into Soviet offices, and the people who lived in them had a choice. Stay and face arrest, imprisonment, or execution. Or run. Most of the aristocracy ran. They fled south toward Crimea, east toward Manchuria, west toward the Baltic. They crowded onto ships at Odessa and Sevastopol. Sometimes hundreds of families crammed onto vessels designed for a fraction of that number. They left with whatever they could carry. A few managed to smuggle out jewelry sewn into the linings of coats. Others brought nothing except the clothes on their backs and a handful of photographs. One former princess later said it simply. For you see, I had always had everything. She had never carried cash. She had never written a check. Her servants had handled all of that. And now she was standing on a dock in Constantinople, with no money, no documents, and no idea what came next. Constantinople was the first stop for most of them, and it was brutal, Thousands of Russian refugees packed into the city in 1920 and 1921, sleeping in warehouses and abandoned barracks on the outskirts. Women who had attended the opera at the Mariinsky Theatre were selling homemade pierogi on the streets of Galata. Officers who had commanded regiments were hauling crates on the docks for a few coins a day. The city was overwhelmed. The Allied occupation authorities treated them as a problem to be managed, Not a population to be sheltered. And so the ones who could scrape together enough money for a third-class ticket, or who had a distant relative somewhere in Western Europe, kept moving west. What came next, for tens of thousands of them, was Paris. The city had been a playground for the Russian aristocracy for decades. They had vacationed there, gambled there, spent fortunes in the boutiques along the Rue de la Paix. They knew the restaurants, they knew the hotels, and when they needed somewhere to flee, Paris was the place that felt closest to home. But the Paris they returned to was nothing like the Paris they remembered. Before the revolution, Russian aristocrats visiting the capital had spent so lavishly that it was said the ladies of Paris cost Russia at least a battleship a year. Now those same families arrived with their remaining jewelry as their only source of income, selling off pearls and gold ornaments and family heirlooms one piece at a time. Ernest Hemingway, Living in Paris as a young journalist in 1922, wrote about them for the Toronto Star. Paris is full of Russians, he reported. He described them drifting through the city in what he called a childish sort of hopefulness, that things would somehow be all right. He noted that no one knew how they survived, except by selling off the jewels they had carried out of Russia. According to jewel dealers on the Rue de la Paix, the price of pearls actually dropped across Paris because so many Russian refugees were flooding the market with beautiful stones. In 1921, the Soviet government did something that turned a temporary crisis into a permanent one. They stripped every Russian emigre of their citizenship. Hundreds of thousands of people, scattered across Europe and beyond, woke up one morning to discover they were no longer citizens of any country. They were stateless. They could not apply for work permits in the usual way. They could not travel legally. They existed in a kind of legal nowhere, living in France but belonging to no nation on earth. The solution came from a Norwegian polar explorer turned diplomat named Fridtjof Nansen. Appointed by the League of Nations as High Commissioner for Refugees, he created what became known as the Nansen Passport in 1922. It was a simple identity document, a flimsy piece of paper with a sickly green cover, as the writer Vladimir Nabokov later described it, but it gave its holder the legal right to exist, to cross borders, to prove that they were a real person in the eyes of international law. The novelist Nabokov, himself a Russian exile, Kept one of those passports and called it inferior. But inferior or not, it was the only thing standing between a former Russian countess and total invisibility. The passport had to be renewed every year. And each renewal meant another trip to a government office. Another hour standing in a line with other stateless people. Another few francs paid for a stamp on a piece of paper that no other nation was required to honour. Some countries accepted it. Others did not. A woman who wanted to visit a relative in London or Berlin, had to plan weeks ahead, apply for visas, and hope that the consular officer on duty that morning decided her documents were in order. For a woman who had once traveled across Europe in a private railway car, carrying nothing but a calling card, the bureaucracy of statelessness was its own form of daily humiliation. So now it is a cold morning in 1925, and our noblewoman is awake. Her apartment is in one of the cheaper arrondissements the kind of neighborhood where the buildings sag inward and the stairwells smell of boiled cabbage she has a single gas ring for cooking she makes tea in a small samovar that she brought out of Russia one of the few possessions she managed to keep the tea is weak because she stretches the leaves across multiple days breakfast if there is any is a piece of bread with a scraping of butter she dresses carefully this part matters Even in exile, even in poverty, the Russian women maintained their appearance with a discipline that startled their French neighbors. Their clothes might be old, but they were always pressed. Their shoes might be worn through at the soles, but they were always polished. Appearance was the last boundary between who they had been and who they were becoming, and they defended it fiercely. By 7.30, she is out the door and walking toward the metro. The streets of her neighborhood are already busy with working people, shopkeepers rolling up their shutters, delivery men unloading bread and milk from horse-drawn carts. She passes a concierge sweeping the steps of a building, and the woman watches her go, because the French neighbors had noticed the Russian women early on. Their bearing gave them away. Even a woman carrying a paper bag of fabric scraps to a sewing job walked as though she were crossing a marble floor. On the train, She might see other Russian women heading to their own shifts at the garment workshops and fashion houses scattered across the city. They recognized each other without speaking, The posture, the way they held themselves on crowded trains, the particular way a woman stands when she was raised to occupy a ballroom rather than a factory floor. Her destination that morning was one of the embroidery workshops that had become a lifeline for Russian women in Paris. The most famous of these was called Kitmir and its story was remarkable even by the standards of the émigré community. Kitmir was founded in 1922 By Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, a woman who was a cousin, niece and granddaughter of the last three Russian Tsars. She had been raised in the opulence of the Romanov court in St. Petersburg, born in 1890 into a world of gold, leaf and ermine. She fled Russia after the revolution and arrived in Paris in 1921 with her brother, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. Maria Pavlovna had no money, but she had something else. She knew how to embroider. Russian noblewomen had been trained in delicate needlework since childhood and Maria turned that aristocratic accomplishment into a business. She bought a sewing machine and taught herself how to do traditional Russian embroidery on it. And through her brother, who was romantically involved with Coco Chanel at the time, she got an introduction to the most powerful woman in Paris fashion. In the autumn of 1921, Maria Pavlovna met Chanel. In her memoir, published a decade later under the title A Princess in Exile, Maria described how the collaboration began. Less than three months after their first meeting, she brought Chanel a blouse embroidered on a machine. Chanel was impressed. An exclusive contract followed. Maria founded the Kitmir workshop, named after a legendary dog in Persian mythology. And, at its peak, the workshop employed up to 50 young Russian exile women. These were women who had been trained in embroidery as part of their aristocratic education. Women who now sat at machines producing the intricate chain stitch patterns that would appear on Chanel's runway collections. Chanel herself liked to boast that she employed real Russian princesses. The irony was brutal and specific. A magazine called Illustrated Russia wrote about the situation at the time. A Russian émigré lady has shyly entered this city, they observed. There was a time when her mother and grandmother ordered their dresses from Worth and Poiret. But this young Russian woman has just escaped from the hell of the revolution and civil war and she has arrived in the capital of female elegance and knocked on the doors of a luxury fashion house. And the doors opened. Kitmir was not the only Russian fashion venture in Paris. In 1924, Prince Felix Yusupov and his wife, Princess Irina, founded a fashion house called IRF, built from the first two letters of each of their first names. Yusupov was already infamous across Europe. He was the man who had taken part in the assassination of Rasputin in 1916. He had married Princess Irina, a niece of Tsar Nicholas II, who was considered one of the most beautiful women of her generation. The couple fled Russia in 1919 and eventually settled in Paris. Their fashion house occupied the ground floor of a building at 10 rue du Fort near the heart of the Paris fashion district. Almost the entire staff consisted of friends of the Yusupovs and other Russian immigrants. The models were not hired professionals. They were Irina herself and her aristocratic friends, women who had once worn couture and now displayed it for paying customers. The first collection was presented at the Hotel Ritz on Place Vendôme and created a sensation, but the excitement had as much to do with gossip as with fashion. Clients came out of curiosity, Yusupov later wrote in his memoirs. One American woman reportedly asked to see the prince with the phosphorescent eyes, as though he were a zoo exhibit rather than a business owner. But back to the daily reality. Our noblewoman's workday at the embroidery workshop lasted 10 or 11 hours. The room was long and narrow, lit by windows on one side and bare electric bulbs on the other. The women sat in rows at wooden tables, each with her own set of needles, spools and fabric frames. The work was detailed and physically demanding, hours of close stitching that left their fingers cramped and their eyes strained by late afternoon. the pay was modest. Some women earned a pittance doing piecework at home, taking fabric and thread back to their apartments and sewing late into the night by lamplight. Others worked in the fashion houses of Lanvin, Lanvin or Poiret, where their skills in needlework and their natural understanding of luxury fashion made them valuable employees. Some of the younger women, particularly those with the tall, slim builds fashionable in the 1920s, Found work as models. Princess Eristova was invited to work for Chanel in 1925. She was petite and dark-haired, the kind of beauty that suited Chanel's aesthetic perfectly. The midday break, if it came at all, was spent at one of the small Russian restaurants or tea rooms that had sprung up across the city. These were gathering places as much as eating places. The food was cheap and familiar. Borscht, black bread, weak tea served from a samovar. The conversations drifted between practical matters, who was hiring, which pawn shop offered the best price for a brooch, and the topic that consumed every exile gathering. When would they go home? Would the Soviet regime collapse? Would there be a restoration? The émigrés described themselves as sitting on their suitcases. Ready to return to Russia at any moment. Most of them assumed the Bolshevik government would last a few years at most. That some kind of restoration or change would open the way home. Because of this belief, very few of them worried about integrating into French society. They continued to speak Russian at home. They enrolled their children in Russian schools. They read Russian language newspapers. The most prominent being Posledny Novosti, the latest news. Which became the daily record of the exile community. The children were growing up between two worlds. At school, they studied Russian grammar, Russian history, Russian literature, all taught by former professors who had once held chairs at universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But on the street, they spoke French with the neighborhood children, picked up slang their parents did not understand, and began to think of Paris not as a temporary stop, but as the only home they had ever really known. This was a source of quiet anguish for their mothers. A child who preferred croissants to black bread, who could not recite Pushkin, who shrugged at the mention of the Neva River, was a child being lost to France. And for a woman whose entire identity was built on being Russian, watching that identity fade in her own children was a grief that had no remedy. On Sundays, and on any day that allowed a free hour, The emotional center of the Russian community was the Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky on Rue de Roux in the 8th arrondissement. The church had been built in 1861 for the small Russian community, then living in Paris, funded partly by a donation from Tsar Alexander II. Its five golden domes rose above the rooftops of a neighborhood that became known as Little Russia. After the revolution, the émigré population around the church exploded. It became a cathedral in 1922 under Archbishop Eulogius and it served as far more than a house of worship. It was a meeting ground where the old Russia was preserved through liturgy, through choir music, through the careful maintenance of a social hierarchy that no longer existed anywhere except inside those walls. Weddings happened there, funerals happened there, Baptisms and memorial services and quiet prayers spoken in Church Slavonic by women who could not say those words anywhere else without drawing stares. The church on Rue de Roux was the one place in Paris where a former countess could stand next to a former servant. And both of them could feel, for an hour, that the world they had lost was still real. After the workday ended, our noblewoman walked home through the Paris streets. If it was still light, she might stop at a market stall to buy vegetables for supper, counting out centimes from a small purse she kept in the pocket of her coat. Every purchase was a calculation. Meat was expensive. Cheese was expensive. Bread was the one thing that was cheap enough to eat every day. And even that had to last. She knew the prices of everything now. Down to the centime. A kind of knowledge she had never imagined needing. The city around her was deep in the decade the French called the Annie's Falls. The crazy years. Jazz poured out of nightclubs on the left bank. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were holding court in the cafes of Montparnasse. The city was alive with artistic energy and post-war celebration, and the Russian exiles moved through it like ghosts from another century, their world running on a parallel track that rarely intersected with the glittering expatriate scene that history remembers best. Some émigrés did cross over, the composer Igor Stravinsky, the painter Marc Chagall. The impresario Sergei Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes had already conquered Paris before the war. The writer Ivan Bunin, who would become the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But for every Bunin, there were thousands of anonymous women sewing beadwork onto silk in windowless workshops, and thousands of anonymous men steering taxis through streets they once visited in private carriages. The evenings were the hardest. In small apartments across the city, Russian families gathered around tables set with whatever food they could afford. The conversations turned, as they always did, to the past. What the estate had looked like in summer, what the servants had prepared for Easter dinner, what the children had worn to their first ball, these were not conversations about nostalgia in the gentle sense. They were conversations held by people who were mourning a country that still existed on every map But was now sealed behind a border they could not cross. Life in these homes was often psychologically exhausting. The past was vivid and beautiful, and it was gone, and it was never coming back. And the tea was weak, and the bread was day old. And tomorrow meant another ten hours at the sewing machine. Not everyone survived the pressure. Some émigrés fell into drinking. Some fell into depression, so severe they could not work. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva settled in Paris in 1925 and found it nearly impossible to survive financially. She lived in cramped apartments, feuded with other émigré writers, and struggled to get her work published in the small Russian language journals that circulated through the community. Her isolation deepened year by year, a few driven by despair or by the manipulation of Soviet agents who circulated through the émigré community The agents were always there, at the edges of the community, promising that things had changed, that the motherland would welcome them back. Most of those who went back met terrible ends. But there is another side to the story, and it matters. Because the Russian women of Paris did not only endure, they created. The embroidery that Maria Pavlovna's workshop produced for Chanel was not mere piecework, it was art. The patterns drew on centuries of Russian folk tradition, reimagined through the visual language of 1920s Paris. Slavic motifs met Persian and Chinese influences in designs that appeared on some of the most celebrated garments of the decade. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London still holds a Chanel evening dress from 1923, embroidered by the Kitmir Workshop, its surface covered in intricate chain-stitch work produced by the hands of women who had once lived in palaces. The IRFE Fashion House, for all its gossip-fuelled origins, Produced collections that genuinely impressed the Paris fashion world. A review in the French edition of Vogue praised one collection by saying it did not contain a single model that did not work. IRFE opened branches in Le Touquet, in London and in Berlin before the 1929 crash wiped out its wealthiest clients and forced Yusupov to close the business. And beyond fashion, the Russian women built institutions. They organized charities. Ran nurseries for the children of working mothers and staffed the clinics that served refugees who could not afford French doctors. Mother Maria Skobtsova, a poet who had survived the revolution, established a food kitchen and refuge for Russian émigrés in Paris. She rented a house on the Rue de Lormel and turned it into a shelter where anyone could eat, sleep and pray. She would later be arrested during World War II for sheltering Jewish refugees and died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp just days before it was liberated by advancing Russian troops. The Orthodox Church canonized her as a saint decades later. By the end of a day in 1925, our noblewoman would have returned to her small apartment. She would have set the samovar on the gas ring for her evening tea. She might have written a letter to a cousin who had ended up in Berlin, or in Constantinople, or in Shanghai. The Russian diaspora stretched across the globe, and letters were the thin threads that held it together. She might have mended a hem on her own dress. the same hands that spent the day embroidering silk for Chanel now repairing a cotton sleeve for the third time and before she slept she might have stood for a moment before the icon of Saint Nicholas on the windowsill and crossed herself in the orthodox manner right to left The way her mother had taught her in a nursery overlooking the Neva River, in a house that no longer belonged to anyone she knew. She did not know, standing there, that the Soviet regime would not fall in five years, or ten, or twenty. She did not know that her exile was permanent. She did not know that the church on Rue Daru would become a cathedral visited by tourists who came to photograph the golden domes Without knowing anything about the women who had prayed there with their eyes closed, silently naming the streets of a city they would never walk again, what she knew was this. Tomorrow, she would wake early. She would make tea. She would dress carefully. She would walk to the metro and ride it across Paris to a workshop where she would sit beside other women who had once owned estates and ballrooms and libraries full of books in three languages. She would thread a needle and she would sew. That was a day in the life of a Russian noblewoman in exile. Not a single dramatic event, but a quiet act of survival, repeated every morning for years in a city that was busy being the centre of the modern world while thousands of women from another century moved through it, invisible and enduring. If this story stayed with you, consider subscribing and leaving a like so more people can find it. And drop a comment telling us which part of the Russian exile experience you find most fascinating.