The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1928.

Hokitika Guardian, 22 February 1928, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1928.

AX OCTCAST ARISTOCRACY. The plight of the Russian aristocracy, driven from their homeland. might surely lie regarded as one of the saddest pages in all history. Despite massacres of a ] wholesale character there are still successors to the Czars. Three weeks ago, remarks a contemporary, there was horn in London a hov who may some day lay claim to the Russian throne. His father is the Grand Duke Dmitri, who is the son of the Grand Duke Paul, and therefore cousin of the late Czar Nicholas 11. His mother, by the way, is daughter of John Emery, who made millions by' selling leather during the war; but that is not to the point. The young Grand Duke Dmitri has had an adventurous career. He was virtually exiled from Russia in 1916 for shielding the murderers of Rasputin. ,the brutal charlatan who then dominated the Czar and the Russian Court. After the revolution of 1917 Dmitri fled westward, eventually arriving in Paris “with less than a hundred francs in his packet and only ortc extra shirt,”

In 1923, when Mr F. Collins wrote his ‘‘intimate accounts ol royalty ’ under the characteristic title “This King Business,” Dmitri was struggling along in Paris with his fellow exiles, doing odd jobs and endeavouring to Hoat an art depot and embroidery factory, being assisted in hi.s enterprise by the Grand Duchess Marie, another of the Czar’s first cousins, and her numerous exiled relatives. Happily lor Dmitri lie married Miss Emery in 1920 ii ml lias found a use for some of the American leather merchant’s millions. But, like all his family, lie believes in the monarchy still, and clings devoutly' to the hope of its restoration. 'I here is one side of the transformation or downfall of Russia that has attracted far too little attention, and that is. the fate of the Russian “intellectuals,” the aristocracy, and the nobility. Very I or people seem to have any idea ol the magnitude of this great catastrophe. “There is nothing like it in all history,” the Grand Duchess Marie lias said, and certainly she lias not exaggerated. A short time ago, at the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet official newspapers published details of the massacres of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, showing that up to 1921. 1,706.000 had been executed, including 7000 teachers, 9000 doctors and 3-50,000 members of the socalled “intolligenzia.” But qnito apart from the awful slaughter we have to take into account the wholesale expulsion of t aristocracy. '1 hero is nothing, says the American. E. Collins, in the book from which onotations are made, comparable to this Russian exodus and its consequences. It is as if the President of the United States, the governors of all the States, most of the doctors and teachers and judges and preachers and bankers and manufacturers, and most of the big men of the cities, great and small, were to lie “suddenly expunged from our American life and dumped without warning or resources into foreign conditions.” In Paris and many other Western cities they have crowded together for the past ton years, struggling for work, enslaved to sordid and menial duties for which they are totally untitled, living on the burlier line of starvation many of them once the splendid adornments of Russian Court life, the typical representatives of tin' most opulent and extravagant and gorgeous aristocracies of modern limes. Any historian who want* an illustration of the irony of Fate need not go lieyoiid the ruin ol Iho Russian nobility.