Restitution for Russian Nobles?

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Obolenskaya admits the chances for restitution are slim. But what riles the aristocrat most is that the former owners are not even invited to weigh in on the fate of their mansions.

"The new Russian state shows no more respect for a human being than the Soviets did," she said.

THE ROAD HOME

Obolenskaya's grandparents escaped Russia shortly after the revolution.

"My grandparents were rescued by their own peasants, who warned them about the Bolsheviks' raid on their estate," she said. "Dressed in peasant clothes, my family members ran away and subsequently fled the country."

The family was not able to move their riches to France when they fled, and Obolenskaya's father earned a living by editing an émigré newspaper in Paris. She still wears antique pearl jewelry inherited from her grandmother.

Obolenskaya, 57, first came to the Soviet Union at age 26 on a business trip.

"Everything was gloomy and gray — buildings, shops, clothes, people's faces — apart from blood-red posters advertising the questionable benefits of the Soviet way of life," she said.

"When I think back, what comes to mind are horrendous hotels and scandalized tourists. … I didn't really enjoy those trips because they were too supervised; I had very little liberty in choosing where to go and what to see. A few times, secretly, I was able to escape, call my friends from a street telephone booth — never from a hotel! — and go see them."

It was on one of Obolenskaya's visits to Russia that she met her husband, St. Petersburg violinist and artist Valentin Afanasyev, who is also of noble origin. They first saw each other at the first session of the Russian Nobles Assembly in Moscow in 1992.

One year later, they married in Preobrazhensky Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Theirs was the first official wedding between members of the nobility in the city since the Bolshevik Revolution.

"Even if there were such weddings in the Soviet years, it was done in secret as people were forced to hide their identity," Obolenskaya said.

In 1997, Obolenskaya and Afanasyev moved to St. Petersburg when she accepted an offer to run the local office of French travel agency CGTT Voyages. There were many reasons to come: Afanasyev, a native of the city, is more comfortable here; her ancestors are from here; and Obolenskaya welcomed the challenge of running a business in Russia during the transitional period.

CODE OF NOBILITY

Obolenskaya's fluent Russia is delivered with a slight French accent. She speaks deliberately, avoiding slang. She is passionate about fine living and fine arts but gives little of herself away in conversation.

Obolenskaya never raises her voice, preferring instead to calmly offer suggestions rather than straightforward arguments, and always addresses people by their names. When she speaks at roundtables or in television discussions, she avoids confrontation — even when she is ridiculed by her opponents as a throwback — and resorts to subtle irony.

"It is encouraging to see a Communist politician regretting the loss of historical mansions and opposing rampant construction in the heart of the city...especially if you remember how many of such buildings had been demolished by the Bolsheviks," she said during a live talk show on St. Petersburg's 100TV in June.

"Vera is hugely charming, and she's always surrounded by the most interesting people," Irina Arsentieva, a manager with Obolenskaya's agency, said. "Her environment both at work and at home is carefully, almost artfully, arranged."

The French influence, with its emphasis on food and elegance, is unmistakable in Obolenskaya's and Afanasyev's somewhat bohemian flat, which overlooks a quiet street in central St. Petersburg. Although not luxurious, it has carved wooden furniture, a table set with fine silver and porcelain, an old piano, his abstract paintings, and numerous photographs of ancestors on the walls.

"She never really emphasizes her title, and I've never seen her telling anyone," said Arsentieva, who has known her boss for nine years. "But everyone in the office has gotten to know about it eventually. When we ask her about her family or life in Paris, Vera's very keen to talk."

"I never hide my origin because it is an integral part of my identity," Obolenskaya said.

Obolenskaya and Afanasyev, who teaches at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory, spend much of their spare time strolling the streets of the historical center and frequenting St. Petersburg's classical halls. Their favorite is the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which occupies the former headquarters of the Russian Noble Assembly.

Although she describes the reforms in the country as random and uncoordinated, Obolenskaya sees many positive changes and is optimistic about the future.

"It is most encouraging to see that many Russian people are still strong, intelligent, and good-hearted despite all the turbulence the country has been through," she says. "But of course, all that boorishness and selfishness, which I believe is the legacy of 80 years of communism, is still there. The drivers easily run over people, the nouveaux riches behave as if their money gives them license to act as they please."

She misses French courtesy: on the banks of the Neva River, neighbors rarely greet each other, passing by with indifferent faces, something she says would be unthinkable in France.

"Of course, you can't compare French and Russian societies, simply because civil society in Russia hasn't yet been formed," she continued. "But what can you expect after 80 years of the continual destruction of democratic values?"

It was reform that Russia needed at the beginning of the 20th century, not revolution, Obolenskaya said. "Monarchy had outlived itself, and a competent liberal reform would have helped Russia to embrace democratic values and institutions, like a strong and independent parliament, for example," she said. "Instead, the country was forced into a bloodbath. There are better ways to achieve social equality than a massacre that takes millions of lives."

After she moved to Russia, Obolenskaya was sad to see that along with the nobility, the concept of noblesse oblige had disappeared.

"The revolution broke the tradition of a particular family upbringing: self-respect, independent thinking, a benevolent heart, the qualities essential for a politician, for example," she explained. "Some aristocrats who stayed in the country were frightened by repressions and encourage their children to forget all about their background for their own safety. As a result, this culture vanished, evaporated. Most regrettably, the very same qualities are missing in the new political elite that rules Russia now. Greed and an insatiable appetite for personal gain dominate politics."

Coming back has meant facing the lingering Soviet-era attitudes of the Russian people toward the nobility.

"What really frustrates me is the manner in which some people — and unfortunately it happens very often — ask me when they hear my last name, 'Oh, are you from those, errh, what are they called, the aristos?' "

Obolenskaya and her husband find themselves struggling to explain what they describe as "the mass cowardice of the people."

"Among themselves, many people speak very critically about the authorities but would never take action, like a street protest, a strike, or any other form of resistance. It shows that after decades, cowardice has seeped into the people's genes," Afanasyev said, sitting in the couple's flat. "Several generations have to pass until the fear starts to evaporate."

And people must better understand their own country's history, he suggested.

Obolenskaya said, "When I talk to the people I see that they know nothing [about Bolshevik brutality]," she said. "They look at me in disbelief and horror when I tell them that in the tsarist times, members of families' of rebels did not suffer from persecution but the Bolsheviks killed even distant relatives of the nobles."

Under the Bolsheviks, being related to a non-proletarian was considered a crime, according to Irina Flige of the historical branch of Memorial, a St. Petersburg human rights group. But the families of dissidents were not treated unfairly under tsarist rule, she noted.

"After 1825 when a group of officers from noble families staged an uprising seeking to end the tsarist rule and kill all members of the Romanov family, the five leaders were executed, and a group of others sent to exile; but not a single member of the rebels' families was persecuted," she said.

Lenin's brother, Dmitry Ulyanov, was executed for plotting an assassination of Tsar Alexander III but no members of the family were punished.

Obolenskaya believes that restitution and an apology for the Bolshevik crimes are necessary for the future stability of Russia. She is convinced people need to support it, if only for the safety of themselves and their children. Otherwise, there is always a risk that a new president or a new Duma will launch a new, irreversible expropriation campaign," she said.

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