Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents plotted espionage and assassination from both sides. Some, like Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers struggled in exile, eking out a living at menial jobs.

Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers such as Coco Chanel. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Epoque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution - never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. From the New York Timesbestselling author of The Romanov Sisterscomes the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light. Full of colorful anecdotes and sharp character sketches, this breezy account of life in exile entertains. (“The couture houses loved the willowy, fine-boned Russian women,” Rappaport notes.) Meanwhile, Russian men found jobs as taxi drivers or factory workers and crowded Paris’s Russian cabarets at night. After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Russian noblewomen found work as designers, seamstresses, and models in the fashion industry. She also describes how Russian performers, composers, and artists shocked and “entranced” Parisian audiences with their avant-garde ballets, and how Russian writers and poets overwhelmed the cafes of Montparnasse, causing local police to worry that revolution might spread to France. Drawing on French tabloids and countesses’ diaries, Rappaport details scandalous affairs, sumptuous parties, extravagant shopping trips, and “rollicking night out” at Maxim’s restaurant, where a Russian grand duke once presented his mistress, a high-class prostitute, with a pearl necklace worth 20 million francs served on a plate of oysters. Historian Rappaport ( The Race to Save the Romanovs) delivers a glossy portrait of Russian artists and nobles who flocked to Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the romanovs book