Abstract
Reviewed by: Peter Waldron, University of East Anglia, UK
Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna was one of the nineteenth century’s aristocratic women who succeeded in playing a substantive role in politics, despite the exclusion of women everywhere in Europe from formal political life. Her St Petersburg salons of the 1840s and 1850s brought together men in the Russian political elite: ministers and senior civil servants mixed together at the Mikhahilovsky Palace, exchanging views that would form the bedrock for the reforms of Alexander II. The Grand Duchess, however, was not simply a passive observer of the political scene, for she played a central part in formulating ideas and in the political manoeuvring over the practical implementation of reform after the death of Nicholas I in 1855. Elena Pavlovna was not Russian by birth. She had been born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg in 1807 and was one of the many German royal women who married into the Romanov family. At the age of 16 she moved to Russia to marry Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, the youngest son of Paul I and, as was the custom, took a Russian name and converted to the Orthodox faith.
Elena Pavlovna spent the rest of her life close to the heart of the Russian ruling dynasty, and Soroka and Ruud’s book is the first biography of the Grand Duchess in any language. The book gives a detailed account of Elena Pavlovna’s life, tracing the awkward relationship she had with her husband and the difficulties she faced in adjusting to life in St Petersburg. The Grand Duchess’s salons began in the 1830s as musical evenings, and Soroka and Ruud suggest that they were initially a means by which Elena Pavlovna could make friends and engage with society. The constricting atmosphere of Nicholas I’s reign made open discussion of political and social issues very difficult, but the patronage of a member of the Romanov family provided a secure environment in which select members of the Russian elite could debate issues and form alliances to promote change. Elena Pavlovna’s circle included men who would be at the heart of the reformist movement during Alexander II’s reign, such as the Miliutin brothers, but it also included people with more conservative views, such as Yuri Samarin and Konstantin Kavelin. She herself did not just facilitate political debate, but also engaged directly with significant social issues, planning the emancipation of serfs on her own estate at Karlovka. Soroka and Ruud demonstrate the breadth of Elena Pavlovna’s activities: during the Crimean War she established the Holy Cross community of nurses who played a significant part in caring for the Russian wounded during the war. By the mid-1860s, reform was losing its place on the Russian political agenda and Elena Pavlovna’s salons came to an end. She retreated from society and died in 1873.
The book provides a good account of Elena Pavlovna’s life, but it would benefit from a better discussion of the broader issues raised by the Grand Duchess’s activities. The way in which Elena Pavlovna engaged both with St Petersburg politics and with practical relief work in Crimea should be placed in the wider context of women’s political and social activity during the nineteenth century. Aristocratic women elsewhere in Europe, such as the redoubtable Lady Mary Derby in Britain, played significant roles in the informal networks of politics and were treated by their contemporaries as serious political figures. Elena Pavlovna’s activities need to be seen as part of more general moves towards direct and open female engagement in political and social debate. Soroka and Ruud’s book is based on a useful range of primary materials, although most of Elena Pavlovna’s own diaries and correspondence has been destroyed. The book is significantly less sure in its use of secondary materials, and would benefit from a much closer engagement with the scholarship dealing with the reform movement in Russia in the 1850s and 1860s. The book’s discussion of the process of emancipating Russia’s serfs, for example, is weakened by the lack of reference to most of the major work on this topic in both Russian and English. The picture that Soroka and Ruud provide of the Grand Duchess is of a person who found herself isolated in the unfamiliar environment of St Petersburg, but who was able to build a network of like-minded people and who used her position as part of the imperial family to advance the cause of modernization. This is a useful contribution to the literature on mid-nineteenth century Russia, but the book’s rather limited focus restricts its overall value.