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Michael Hughes, Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and her World (1871–1873), by Marina Soroka and Charles A. Ruud, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 559, December 2017, Pages 1628–1629, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex331
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Every student of nineteenth-century Russia is familiar with the name of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Not only was she the aunt by marriage of Tsar Alexander II (and, indeed, the sister-in-law of Tsar Alexander I and Tsar Nicholas I), she was also a central figure in the complex series of political and bureaucratic manœuvres that led up to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Elena Pavlovna appears in every serious account of Russia’s Great Reforms, yet her name is much better known than her life. Marina Soroka and Charles Ruud have attempted to resolve this conundrum in their new book.
Soroka and Ruud only address the question of the Great Reforms in the final chapters of their book. Instead, they use a wealth of archival material to build up a picture of the woman who was born Frederica Charlotte Marie in 1807, daughter of Prince Paul of Württemberg, before being married in 1824 to the younger brother of Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Her marriage to the Grand Duke Mikhail was seldom happy, although the two seem to have arrived at a modus vivendi, based on long periods of separation and a shared commitment to promoting the welfare of the Romanov dynasty. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (as she became, following her conversion to Orthodoxy) was, from a young age, interested in both culture and politics. Her salon at the Mikhailovskii Palace became, during the 1830s, an important meeting-place for writers and musicians, as well as those who believed that the government of Tsar Nicholas I would at some point need to contemplate the kind of social and economic reforms required to bolster Russian power and allow it to compete with the other Great Powers. Soroka and Ruud’s chapter on the ‘Red Cabinet’ is of particular value in showing the deep historical roots of the reformist coalition that eventually prevailed in ending serfdom in Russia.
