An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(38)
A reporter from the New York Times who, later that month, managed to penetrate the palace almost completely cut off from the outside world, noticed how respectfully the head jailer behaved toward his prisoners. While other guards made a sport of speaking as scornfully to the fallen monarch as possible—calling him “Citizen Nikolai Romanov” or “Little Nikolai”—Paul addressed him as “Former Emperor” and spoke with evident fondness of him and his family.
The former emperor was in good health and relatively good spirits, despite occasional fits of crying, Paul told the reporter. He took daily walks in the garden with his wife’s ladies-in-waiting and made himself useful clearing snow, “which he enjoys greatly.” He also showed a boyish interest in everything written about him, in particular in the foreign press. Young Prince Alexei was in reasonable health but cried terribly when he heard his father had given up the throne. And the czarina was ill, although according to her empathetic guard it was mainly because her heart had been broken: “Her real malady is from the heart.”
The American reporter was clearly impressed by the handsome Russian and described Paul as the height of civility and courtly manners: “Youthful and urbane, an officer of the guard type, speaking perfect French and English.” They got along so well together that they visited the improvised grave of Rasputin—“the unintending parent of the revolution,” in the journalist’s words—together. They found the chapel sullied and soiled, the rock face next to it covered in insulting inscriptions such as “Here lies Rasputin, foulest of men, the shame of the Romanov dynasty.”
According to a family chronicle about the Kotzebues that was published later, this wasn’t in fact Paul’s first visit to the monk’s final resting place. An eyewitness would say that the revolutionary government had given him the rather unsavory task, earlier that month, of visiting the tomb with a yardstick to check whether the rumor about the legendary size of Rasputin’s member was true:
Although the body had been embalmed, the stench was so strong that Count Kotzebue, an elegant officer (he later became count), who had been given this horrible task, told me he thought he would pass out.
The interview with Paul that Allene may have read was published in the New York Times on March 27, 1917, under the headline “Ex-Czar, Guarded, Has Fits of Crying.” The article ended with the statement that security at the palace had been stepped up in connection with rumors about potential escape attempts by the czar. Indeed, members of the Kotzebue family later recounted that Paul had tried to bring Nicholas II, disguised as a palace guard, to safety.
At the last minute—the boat that would have taken him to a steamship in the Gulf of Finland was ready and waiting on the Neva River—the former czar, who may have been a poor ruler but was a solid family man, decided that he couldn’t leave without his family. It was a decision that would cost him his life. The revolutionary government no longer trusted Paul and relieved him of his role at the end of March. In August 1917, the Romanovs were transported to Siberia. A little less than a year later, they were moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were executed in July 1918.
At the time the czar’s family was being slaughtered, Russia was in the grips of a civil war that the Red Army would win in 1920, led by Communist Vladimir Lenin. Paul; his mother; his older sister, Marie; his older brother, Alexander; and Alexander’s wife (born Countess Tolstoy) were among the hundreds of thousands of czarists who fled their motherland.
Like most exiles, the Kotzebues first settled in Berlin with the firm conviction that the international community would never tolerate the establishment of a socialist state and that they’d be able to return to their homeland at any moment. That hope evaporated in 1922, when the communist Soviet Union was founded and then recognized by one nation after the next. Paul and his sister—their mother had died in the meantime—left with the great stream of refugees for France, which had traditionally counted as a second homeland for Russian artists and aristocrats. Their brother ended up in Switzerland, where he was able to set up a banking company with what was left of the family fortune.
During the 1920s and the first part of the ’30s, Paul and his sister seem to have led unremarkable lives in a modest apartment on the Avenue du Président-Wilson in Paris. Neither of them married, and neither of them played much of a role in the Russian exile community. As far as can be ascertained, Paul was in contact only with his former fellow students from the Page Corps. When the brother and sister went to New York in November 1934, they told the immigration service they were fifty and fifty-two years old, respectively, and without profession or nationality.
What Paul did have, though, was an aristocratic title: in 1933, a cousin of his father’s, Count Dimitri Kotzebue-Pilar von Pilchau, had transferred his title to Paul with permission of the imperial family in exile. Shortly thereafter he met the American princess whose fairy-tale marriage to German Prince Henry Reuss had ended in such public disappointment. She was clearly in need of a new life partner; he, in turn, could use a wife who would give him new status and would return to the Kotzebue family the respect they had once enjoyed in Russia.
On October 31, 1935, Allene was granted her second “Paris divorce.” Less than half a year later, on March 4, 1936, she married Paul Kotzebue in a closed ceremony in the Russian church in Geneva, in the presence of Paul’s brother, Alexander, and his sons, among others. News of Allene’s fifth wedding was met with unsurprising mockery in both the American and the international press. “There is something of a perennial Cinderella about the Countess Kotzebue,” wrote Maury Paul, rather gently by his standards—but he had a soft spot for his enterprising compatriot.