A Blue Blood Recalls Caprices of a Red Century

As she stepped up to the banquet table beside the thrush-breasted Prince Miloslavsky, the Princess Trubetskaya looked smaller than usual.


Her suit was cheap blue acrylic, and her arm -- as she raised it in a toast to Tsar Alexander III -- was thin as a rail. But the All-Russian Monarchist Center's Council of Nobles went dead quiet when she lifted her glass to past dynasties. "Our white galleon is still sailing forward," she said, grandly, in a voice colored by age and papirosi cigarettes. "Let them know that we still live, that we still have champagne, that we even have caviar."


Forty latter-day courtiers looked up at her from behind the table, and one whispered word could be heard in the room: Trubetskaya.


The princess circuit is a weekly affair for Irina Trubetskaya Sherbakovskaya Bayer, a former factory technician with -- she will tell you repeatedly, as though it explains everything -- a seventh-grade education. Otherwise, she keeps herself busy in a manner typical for a widowed pensioner. At 72, Bayer goes to church, negotiates lifestyle issues with her 25-year-old granddaughter and regards the nouveau royal gatherings with studied detachment.


"There is this circle that advertises me a little," she says, days later, over beet salad and chocolates in her north Moscow apartment.


"You understand why they respect me. It seems that I am one of the last pure, full-blooded, unadulterated princesses," she adds, with a certain gusto. "They tell me I have the bluest, bluest blood among them."


The daughter of Prince Vladimir Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, Irina Bayer represents a noble line that has stocked Russia with philosophers, academics and artists for generations. Her grandfather, Prince Sergei Nikolayevich, was a celebrated philosopher and rector of the Moscow Institute, whose support for the constitutional monarchy enraged Lenin but entranced the thousands of citizens who surged through St. Petersburg at his 1905 funeral. Her father, Vladimir, was a virtuoso musician and writer of the "I-will-eat-black-bread-but-I-will-stay-in-Russia" school, whose decision to remain in his homeland would shape his children's lives, one after the other.


Each of Vladimir's six brothers and sisters fled the country in the '30s, but Vladimir spirited his family off to Andizhan, Uzbekistan, where he thought the family could live in peace. That would not turn out to be true; one sister died in a camp, another died shortly after her release, one brother was killed in the war. At 15, Irina escaped the camps, since she was too young to have a passport.


Virtually every member of her extended family emigrated in the '30s, and a family register includes snapshots of suburban families in Paris, and London, and Milan, and upstate New York -- but not in Moscow. So, of the Trubetskoy diaspora, Irina Vladimirovna and her brothers are the last who have not left.


Bayer was a late arrival to the business of lineage -- a subject, she recalls, that her family had always been "afraid to speak of." Up to a certain point in her life, too, it didn't seem relevant. Then, on Dec. 16, 1991, her second husband died. On the 17th, she attended her first monarchist assembly, and was drawn in by the cause and by the circle. "It set me alight," she recalls. "For the longest time such meetings were impossible."


Bayer protests ceaselessly that titles carry little weight -- "I am an uneducated person, I am not an educated person, none of this means anything to me" -- but she manages a delicate disdain on matters of rank. She describes the 20-something courtiers who hail her at banquets as "about half legitimate, with some young men who are pure nobility, and the kind of young women who want to socialize with nobility." This offhand interest in prestige throws her own position into high relief. For her -- as for many of the older generation at the council -- her family name has meant more loss than anything else.


"What unites us, as much as anything, is what we have suffered," said Zurab Chavchavadze, whose royal Georgian bloodlines also allow him to attend the council. The council requires genealogical documentation -- but only for two generations, he adds. "Anything further back than that is usually lost."


Holding up a picture of her father, who was shot in a Siberian detention camp in 1937, Bayer tries to explain what the House of Trubetskaya has done for her. Before he died, when the family had fled to a small town in Uzbekistan, her father played cello in a restaurant to support the children. The restaurant, she recalls, advertised him on a placard, in bright letters: "Prince Trubetskoy on Cello!" Since then, titles have held a degree of ambiguity.


"Of course I am glad to have these relatives," she says. "But how proud can I be? They were all shot," she adds. "All this means very little to me. Only that we suffered so much."


The name and the trials seemed inextricably linked in 1985, when Bayer first stepped into the public eye as a representative of her family. That was the year that Gorbachev handed over the death certificates of her father and her sister Varvara, who had both been shot at concentration camps in 1937. Along with the slips of paper -- which fill in the "cause of death" space with the penciled word "shot" -- state archives gave her photographs taken immediately before the executions, and the handful of books and documents that her father left behind.


Among them were manuscripts for her father's book of stories, which he composed in a detention camp. Her younger brother smuggled the pages of longhand past prison guards in the waistband of his pants, she says. She keeps the thin, paperback volume in a drawer beside her bed, next to the family registers and a silver funeral plaque given her by a church. Reading it still moves her. "You read it in one breath," she says. "I could not tear myself away."