Wanting to tell the story of aristocratic women’s considerable influence on Russian society, a Western professor emeritus and PhD alumna found their ideal subject in a well-known, yet barely understood, Grand Duchess.
“It’s a little different subject in Russian history – emphasizing the role of a woman. They are hard to find. But we found one in the case of Elena Pavlovna,” said Charles A. Ruud, Western History professor emeritus.
Ruud and Marina E. Soroka, who earned a PhD in History from Western, recently published Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and Her World (1807-1973). Released by Ashgate Publishing in the United Kingdom, the book takes a fresh look at the Romanov Dynasty and the degree to which “high-born women” in Russia gained ground in the 19th-century empire.
“Elena Pavlovna is well-known and commonly mentioned in Russian history – but only in a superficial way,” Ruud continued. “She believed in the emancipation of the serfs. But her story often ended there. We started thinking, ‘What was her actual role in the emancipation? Did she have any particular influence? Why was she interested in it?’”
The Russian Great Reforms of the 1860s were the last major modernizing effort by the Romanovs. From 1855-61, Pavlovna – born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg to Grand Duke, later Tsar Paul I of Russia, on Christmas Eve 1784 – acted as the spokeswoman for the reform-minded circles of Russian society. She served as a bridge between Emperor Alexander II, her nephew, and those individuals who formed the core of the committee that prepared the most complex series of the reforms in Russian history – the abolition of serfdom.
Soroka stressed the Grand Duchess’s involvement in these events highlights the considerable influence aristocratic women had in Russian society – quite unlike women of the same class and status in Western Europe.
Becoming a Romanov is the first book about Elena Pavlovna’s life.
“Can you really understand a person historically by finding out what kind of person they truly were, sort of get inside them?” Ruud said. “That’s the way we approached our last subject. We sort of approached her a similar way. What is her motivation? What does she think about?”
In 2012, Ruud and Soroka translated, edited and re-introduced My Life for the Book: The Memoirs of a Russian Publisher, a long-forgotten autobiography highlighting the career of Ivan Sytin, one of his nation’s most successful publishers prior to the Revolution of 1917. The book had never seen the light of day as a complete edition until then.
Unlike that work, there was very little foundation laid for Pavlovna. Perhaps it was the enormity of the task, in combination with the far-flung nature of the source materials, that has scared away would-be biographers for years, Ruud and Soroka laughed.
For Becoming a Romanov, Soroka unearthed a tremendous amount of largely unused archival sources – published correspondence, memoirs and mentions in the literature of others in French, Russian, German, Italian and English. However, the most valuable material was lost to the world long ago.
“Most of her diaries and correspondence were destroyed. She did not want anyone to have those,” Soroka said. “The ones we mention are not her main correspondence. Those are gone. In many letters, she would say, ‘Please destroy this letter.’ What little we had, however, was telling.”
Ruud concluded, “The key to the whole thing is doing research in areas neglected previously up to this point. Researchers have been mesmerized by the scandal of the Romanovs. Well, they aren’t so Romanovs once you start to look at them with all the documents in front of you. At least some of them are not.”