In Bread of Exile, Byzantine scholar Dimitri Obolensky opens the book on his family's royal Russian past. Sir Dimitri Obolensky was born Prince Dmitriy Dmitrievich Obolensky in 1918. His passing in 2002 was mourned by professionals and friends alike.
Obolensky spent a period of his young life on the French coast in Nice. He reminisces about the details, but also paints a broader historical picture of the Russian exile community on the Mediterranean coast. Describing the Dowager Empress Alexandra's two visits to Nice during the winters of the 1850's, Obolensky offers valuable historic insight on the Russian royalty's "strategic" connections to Nice before meandering back to recent history:
Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1856) led to the country being forbidden to maintain naval forces in the Black Sea. In an effort to counteract this vexatious clause, the Russian government sought to establish a naval presence in the Mediterranean.
Its choice of a station fell on the deep-sea port of Villefranche-sur-Mer, a mile or so east of Nice. It was in this bay that the Empress arrived in October 1856 on board a Sardinian frigate. By 1858 the Russians were openly using its naval facilities. When in 1860 Nice and Villefranche became French, the government of Napoleon III raised no objections. No so the British, whose press, echoing Palmerston's indignation, voiced the strongest suspicions of these manifest attempts by Russia to evade its contractual obligations by using the Bay of Villefranche.
This attempt by the Russians to find a naval point d'appui in the central Mediterranean was short-lived. By 1870, Russia had freed itself from the restraints on her movements in the Black Sea imposed by the Treaty of Paris, so her naval strategy no longer required a Mediterranean base.
In the nineteenth century, Nice played another role in European history, by providing a refuge for political exiles. The most distinguished was Alexander Herzen, often called the father of Russian radicalism. His fervent admirer, Isaiah Berlin, has applauded his view "that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of delusion which leads to the destruction of all that alone is valuable in men and societies, to the gratuitous sacrifice.... of live human beings upon the altar of idealized abstractions." Herzen's presence in Nice is recorded several times between 1847 and 1867. When in England, he founded the earliest Russian free press abroad. He died in Paris and was buried in Nice, next to his wife.
Obolensky, Dimitri. Bread of Exile: A Russian Family. London: Harvill Press, 1999. pp. 199-200.
