Russian Nobles of the World, Unite!

A golden nutcracker, three icons and a photograph showing her grandmother with the Tsarina are all that is left of Yevgenia Nikolayeva's noble past. The costumes, which could have led to the family's identification as part of the old nobility, were burned years ago. The jewelry was flushed down the toilet after a midnight knock at the door was feared to be the secret police.


But Yevgenia, who sits with the poise of royalty in a Moscow apartment stuffed with pre-revolutionary furniture, says she is lucky to be alive.


"Many noble families with easily traceable names left the country, and those who didn't were exterminated", she said. Because Yevgenia's grandmother had been an aide to the Tsarina, the family was a prime target for Stalin's labor camps.


On Wednesday nights, Yevgenia, 65, joins other descendants of the old landowners of Russia in an unused church on a back street near the Kremlin. They have formed the nobility club, or dvoranskoye sobraniye, for the reassertion of the nobility in Russia. The organization has been running since August 1990 and aims to rejuvenate the cultural life associated with the aristocracy. Some of the more extreme members, led by their chairman Vladimir Lupandin, want involvement in politics and the immediate return of land confiscated in 1917 by the Bolsheviks.


"I'm not a member of the nobility club just in order to get land or money", says Yevgenia. "I want to relive our traditions and promote humanitarian behavior. All cultural life was killed in the revolution".


Mikhail Khrushchev, a retired geologist, is another of the club's 70 members. His grandfather, a member of the Russian Duma, owned land in Voronezh.


"I'm a member of the nobility club because I saw how my parents lived", he says. "I want to reinstate some of those values in Russian society. I want to try and give my children something of spiritual value".


Before the revolution the average noble family in Moscow or St. Petersburg owned two houses and land. Most had servants, and some, French and English governesses. After 1917, their property was confiscated and many of them were forced to emigrate, terrified they would be killed. Today European descendants are returning to Russia to see the land of their parents.


To join the nobility club, proof of the father's line has to be approved. Birth certificates, family trees and photographs are all useful pieces of evidence, although many families destroyed these. Much of the meetings are spent discussing such matters.


But for Marina, who claims to be related to Peter the Great and declined to give her last, name today's nobles are "children playing games". Her mother, born in 1915, fled Russia in 1922 on the last boat for Turkey and ended up in Bulgaria, where Marina was born. Life has been made difficult for Marina because of her noble blood. After graduating university, she spent three years looking for a job. Employers always found her "unsuitable" because they could guess from her birth place, Bulgaria, that she was not a proletariat.


"I was very upset at the time", she says. "It seemed so unfair. I know three foreign languages but couldn't get a job".


She does not see any point in glorifying a past that cannot be recreated.


"The problem with the nobility club is that they are saying who is noble and who is not", she says. "They don't have the right to do this. Catherine the Great gave nobility titles to the people, so why do today's so-called nobles think they have also the power to give out titles? "


Marina says she will bring up her children in a traditional noble atmosphere. "I want them to know two foreign languages and music, but I don't need a club to help me do this".