Princesses Behaving Badly (19 page)

Sofka’s story is related in a fascinating biography, written by her granddaughter and namesake, as well as in her own 1968 autobiography. First, her princess pedigree is off the charts (although a bit illegitimate in parts); she was descended from the great royal houses of Russia, including that of Catherine the Great, and Kievan Rus, the proto-Russian state. Sofka grew up in St. Petersburg as many other noble children did then, with a grim British governess, tons of toys, playdates with the hemophiliac tsarevich, and no contact with common children. But her mother, Countess Sophy Bobrinsky, was different from other aristocratic wives. Though cold and inaccessible to her only child, Sophy was forceful and intense in ways that few other women of her day could be. She was an exceptional surgeon, one of the first female pilots in Russia, the only woman to drive in a 1912 motor car rally, and a writer of satirical poetry that was published under a pseudonym. And perhaps most shocking of all: she divorced Sofka’s father, the charming if reprobate Prince Peter Dolgorouky, after only five years of unsatisfactory and unfaithful marriage.

Other events soon conspired to ensure that Sofka’s youth was nothing like her parents’. The old regime, and Sofka’s family along with it, was about to go barreling into revolution. World War I took her parents to the front lines—Sofka’s father with the Horse Guards, and her mother as a surgeon with the Red Cross. The deprivations and deaths of Russian soldiers caused by World War I fueled revolutionary passions among the populace. As the conflict ground to its inexorable conclusion, Russia had another war to deal with, a civil one. Disturbed by the red Bolshevik banners blossoming in the marketplaces and shootings in the streets, Sofka’s grandmother took the little princess to the Crimea, on the Black Sea. And that is where they were when the Bolsheviks executed the imperial family and when Sofka’s father was declared an enemy of the people with a price on his head.

Life for Sofka continued precariously. She received a secret education in the revolutionary cause from the family groom, a Bolshevik of sorts, who explained to her the basic injustice of the aristocratic system. In April 1919, with danger increasing for the nobility, a nearly 12-year-old Sofka and her grandmother left Russia on a refugee ship bound for the British Isles. Once in England, Sofka’s experience was similar to that of many White Russian émigrés, displaced nobility who—for the time being, at least—were considered romantic and pitiable. She was even featured in a magazine called
Eve
, posing with her dog; the article played up the glamour of her title and the Russian Revolution. Her teen years were spent bouncing between family in Hungary, Italy, and Paris. She was young, impetuous; she read Russian poetry and wandered the streets with her boyfriends. After failing her school exams, she found odd jobs until a Scottish duchess, a longtime family friend, hired her as a personal secretary.

But the seeds of revolution had been sown in Sofka’s psyche back in Russia. And amid the wealth and privilege in which she lived, witness to the frivolous lives of people blind to the suffering and poverty of their own countrymen, those seeds would begin to germinate.

The innocence with which a teenage Sofka had pursued boys became something much less chaste by her twenties. Not to put too fine a point on it, she slept around. “When I say promiscuous, I mean the sleeping with the window-cleaner and postman sort of promiscuous,” was how an ex-brother-in-law would describe her a decade after her death. Sofka herself boasted of having more than 100 liaisons in her lifetime. As she told her granddaughter, “It doesn’t matter how many lovers you have, just don’t have more than one at the same time.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t take her own advice. In 1931, Sofka married Leo Zinovieff, a fellow exiled aristocrat and an architect; the two were very different but seemed to be genuinely in love, at least for a while. Soon the cracks were starting to show: she’d had a brief affair that she described in her autobiography as one of the “worst things” she’d done. Leo didn’t really like his wife’s left-leaning friends and, as she discovered, had
indulged in an affair of his own. Thus the scene was set when, in late 1934, Sofka met Grey Skipwith, the man she’d consider the love of her life. She was 27, and teaching him Russian; he was 23, the wealthy-ish son of a baronet. Within six months, their flirtation turned to real passion. Even though Sofka was pregnant with her second child (Leo’s, in fact), she resolved to leave her husband. The couple separated in 1936 and divorced the next year. Two days after the divorce was finalized, Sofka became Mrs. Skipwith in a quickie ceremony at the Chelsea Registrar’s Office; the couple spent a short honeymoon in Nice and then settled into a rural idyll in Maidenhead. Within six months, she was pregnant again.

Throughout her personal upheaval during these years, Sofka’s political leanings matured into something that her aristocratic relatives would hate. She had known privilege as well as poverty (at one point Leo had lost his job, leaving the couple destitute), and she couldn’t understand the gulf between the two. “Once one has experienced this,” Sofka wrote, “one can never regard life in the same way as before.” By the time she found regular work again (as a secretary to the actor Laurence Olivier), she was on her way to becoming a Communist, subsisting on a diet of Karl Marx, leftist ideology, and Soviet propaganda. She’d read the Communist Manifesto and “could see nothing to disagree with.” But she still had doubts, later writing, “Our idea of Communism was that it was a world-wide conspiratorial organization to overthrow authority. Once you joined it, it ruled your life. Like the Mafia, there was no escape.”

After war was declared in September 1939, Grey volunteered for the Royal Air Force; Sofka became so depressed, she started drinking wine in the mornings. She later claimed that her flight to France was at the request of her mother, who was running out of money (perhaps due to a morphine addiction). But the truth is that Sofka probably wanted a distraction from her life—she never was the type to wipe noses and change diapers anyway—and going to France as the Nazis beat down the door was as good as any. She arrived in Paris just in time for Germany to invade and France to surrender. The princess was trapped in a city on fire, amid
millions of panicked people. Even worse, as a British citizen, she was an enemy in the eyes of the Germans. Her diary, which is written to Grey, records on December 5 that a fellow Russian hatched a plan for her to escape to an unoccupied country. Three days later, she wrote, “Darling. I do love you. It’s agony cold today—a black frost. Bloody. G’night, beloved—please do not forget me.” The diary ends there—the next day, she was arrested. She had just enough time to grab a fur coat, a copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
, and a loaf of bread from a bakery before she was taken to police lock-up and, from there, to the train station.

Sofka arrived at Besançon, in eastern France, after three days of traveling locked in a third-class train car with dozens of other women, all holders of British passports. The women were deposited in a drafty barracks turned makeshift prison camp. Despite the appalling conditions, Sofka adapted. She managed to advocate on behalf of the inmates to earn them hot showers and organized their daily rota; she was named her dormitory’s
chef de chambre
, in charge of rations and fuel. Six months later, the women were moved to the Grand Hotel in Vittel, a popular spa resort requisitioned by the Nazis and turned into a model camp—a handy, picturesque refutation of the reports of horrifying conditions in the concentration camps.

At Vittel, survival was no longer as difficult. Sofka gave lectures in Russian poetry, started a dramatic society that performed Shakespearean plays, and taught Russian and English. She was effervescently active, engaging in at least one lesbian fling, staying up late playing cards, and, according to a good friend she made there, never allowing herself to mope. It was here that Sofka met real Communists, party members from way back, who convinced her that perhaps Communism wasn’t quite the mafia she thought it was. “I felt that here was an ideology that could provide an equitable existence for humanity,” she later wrote. Soon she became part of the Communist spy network, passing on information and helping other inmates escape.

In June 1942, Sofka’s internment “idyll” came crashing down when she learned that her husband was missing in action; his death was confirmed that September. She refused to leave her bed or eat and was admitted to the camp’s hospital. Grey’s death shook Sofka to her core, but
she found some comfort in the arms of a Jewish prisoner named Izio, who arrived at the camp in 1943 with his 4-year-old daughter and mother (his wife had been murdered by the Nazis). When the day came that the Nazis took the Jewish prisoners to the concentration camps, Izio could have escaped, but alone. Instead, he, too, went to his death. Sofka’s grief turned to rage. She’d passed on information to the Resistance about the conditions the Jews were facing, about how 16 of them tried to commit suicide rather than leave Vittel, how she smuggled out a newborn baby, sedated with pills from the camp hospital and swaddled in a blanket in a Red Cross box, after his mother was sent to her death. But it seemed like the Allies did nothing. Sofka continued to do what she could. In 1944, when she and some of her friends were allowed to leave Vittel, they carried the names of Polish inmates on pieces of paper sewn into the linings of their coats. After her death, Sofka’s efforts on behalf of the Jews at Vittel were recognized by the Holocaust Remembrance Institute in Israel.

As a war widow with children in Britain, Sofka was offered release by the Germans in 1943. She decided to stay at Vittel, saying later that the Communist Party thought she would be more helpful there. As the war neared its end, Sofka was invited by the German government to give propaganda broadcasts for Radio Berlin; she agreed, intending to escape German custody in Lisbon. That plan worked: Sofka and a fellow Vittel inmate were picked up by tipped-off officials from the British Embassy. By summer 1944 she was back in England, where she found a job through her old boss, Olivier. She drank heavily and had sex often and with many different men (“anyone who seemed pleasant and entertaining,” she wrote), trying to fill the hole in her soul.

Sofka also threw herself into Communism. She joined the Communist Party, sold the
Daily Worker
on street corners, and visited the Soviet Embassy to watch Russian films on Sunday mornings. She was a true believer—party officials would show her off as “Comrade Sofka, our Communist Princess!” On Saturdays, she’d host “Sofka’s Saturday Soups,” inviting party members, journalists, writers, artists, and bohemians for potluck at her
house. In 1946, she left her job to work as the secretary of the British Soviet Friendship Society, translating Russian propaganda.

Sofka’s political views were extremely unpopular, especially with her fellow exiled nobles; she was not welcome at her former in-laws’ home, where her two older sons were living. Given that the Bolsheviks destroyed Sofka’s family’s way of life, murdered their friends and relatives, and scattered the Russian nobility across Europe and beyond, their reaction is not surprising. As her former brother-in-law declared, “Becoming a Communist when you are a Russian refugee is like a Jew from Germany becoming a Nazi. There’s no difference.” Sofka’s Communist activities also brought her under surveillance of the British secret service. According to files unearthed by her granddaughter, British intelligence at first thought Sofka “an invaluable recruit” for the Communist Party, furnished with contacts in many spheres. Later, they declared her “unreliable,” adding that “she is oversexed and this has led to her having many affairs.”

In 1949, Sofka finally found her calling: she started working with a Communist travel agency called Progressive Tours. Under the motto “Travel, Friendship, Peace,” the company took people on tours of the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries. As tour leader, she excelled at bullying hotel managers into lowering prices, steamrolling bureaucrats, and shepherding her charges around monuments and apartment blocks of the Soviet Brutalist school of architecture. And she was being watched the whole time—MI5 had its own agent working for the company.

Sofka would remain a loyal party member and tour operator through the 1950s. Although she suffered doubts and a “lack of conviction,” even revelations about the atrocities under Stalin couldn’t shake her fundamental belief that Communism offered the only plausible way to an equitable society. She felt it was the duty of any party member to defend the Soviet Union, despite evidence that this particular experiment wasn’t working out. And when she ushered tours through the palace that had once belonged to her grandparents and was now the University of Leningrad’s geology department, she stressed that she quite agreed it all should have been taken for the good of the people.

Sofka wrote in her 1968 autobiography, “The world into which I was born in 1907 seems as unimaginable today, sixty years later, as the way of life on some distant planet. In fact, it is far easier to envisage tourist traffic to outer space than a return to the conventions and prejudices, the strict rules of etiquette, the luxury and the misery, the culture and the ignorance of that age.” That world was irrevocably destroyed by the time she was 12 years old. The world she knew as a young woman was itself swept away by war and class upheaval. And before her death in 1994, the Soviet Union—the world that this exiled Russian princess had grown to love—would fall, too.

In 1962, Sofka moved to Bodmin Moor with her last lover, Jack, whom she’d met on a Russian tour, and finally settled down. She became an eccentric, living in a filthy house (she was too busy thinking and reading to clean) and spending her days watching tennis on the television and mothering a pack of whippets. She penned a Russian cookbook in the 1970s, and although her relationship with her children had always been a complicated one, she found herself enjoying being a particularly nontraditional grandmother.