Comrade Princess - Memoirs of an Aristocrat in Modern Russia

London: Doubleday, 1990. A near Fine unmarked copy apart from a neat inscription and date to front endpaper with a VG+ price clipped dustjacket. 228 pages. 18 illustrations. Princess Ekaterina Meshcherskaya was born in 1904, and lived the latter part of her life in Moscow in a tiny caretaker's apartment surrounded by relics and souvenirs of her family's past, the last of the Russian princesses living in Russia. Glasnost has enabled this remarkable woman to publish her story for the first time. She was only 13 years old when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and unlike the vast majority of aristocrats who fled the country after the Revolution, she and her mother forged new lives in a society now resentful and hostile towards the privileged classes. Their world of servants, pedigree dogs, a Greek tutor, French and German governesses, vast estates, was lost at a stroke, leaving them alone and penniless. Yet Ekaterina and her mother, a musically talented and iron willed young woman, overcame the challenges, denounced and arrested constantly, and Ekaterina worked in countless jobs as seamstress, dancer, singing teacher, even wartime ditch digger, in order to survive. L. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.