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| Illustration from a New York Times story about Princess Zizianoff, April 1921 |
Once there
was a Russian princess who wanted to live in America.
It was after
the Great War, after the Bolshevik Revolution.
She visited New York City during the early 1920s on a six-month visa
and found it to her liking. Since then the
Immigration Act of 1924 had slammed the door shut, even on royal aspirants from
Western Europe. But the French quota had
yet to be filled.
Nina Zizianoff had been born in Chambery in 1878, so it made sense for her to go to Paris to ask the
American consul, a diplomat named Donald Fairchild Bigelow, to grant her a permanent
visa. To Nina's great surprise, on Christmas
Eve of 1925 he turned her down.
In an interview
with American newspaper reporters, he accused the princess of having been an
international spy for the Central Powers during the war. She was deported to Siberia after being
caught, he said, and now worked as an agent of the Soviet government while masquerading
as an anti-Bolshevik.
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| Princess Zizianoff, newspaper illustration, 1921 |
No way would
he grant a visa to Nina. And yes, Secretary
of State Frank Billings Kellogg backed Bigelow one hundred percent.
“References
to political activities which make me undesirable in America are extremely
amusing and of an astonishing ingenuity,” the princess told the New York
Times. “On the contrary, I am a
lover of American things and am eager to become one of you myself.”
The widow of
a prince who had been close to the Czar and his family, Nina Zizianoff had begun
selling herself to the American public in 1921, introducing herself as a
“princess who became a peddler,” having defied deprivation and death before
escaping from Russia to Vienna. There
she penned a long autobiographical article that was picked up widely by U. S.
newspapers.
The
headlines proclaimed:
She Lived Among Killers, Grafters and Children
Trained to Brigandage
Princess Nina Zizianoff’s Thrilling Escape from
the Bullets of the Russian Firing Squad Only Doomed Her to Years of Starvation
Her own
story and her portrayal of Russia under the Bolsheviks may have been part of a
grand scheme, but readers found it riveting.
The proletariat,
promised land, liberty and ownership, instead is now a silent horde controlled
by terror and hunger,
she wrote. The Russians are
children. They believe and want
everything. They will endure everything
and are overjoyed by trifles.
Imprisoned in
Siberia – because she had worked without a permit in an open-air market in
Petrograd, she claimed – Nina saw prisoners chained together hand to foot, just
like Russia dragging its chain, hoping for death.
Children
over the age of six were taken from their parents and placed in boarding
schools, where they occupied barracks, starving and dressed in rags but
singing: “Long live our red
liberty! The Soviet is our family!”
The
bourgeoisie have become agents provocateurs, she wrote. People disappear, arrested for all kinds of
reasons. At night the Communists shoot
the traitors. At dawn they load the frozen corpses onto trucks.
While Nina
may have won the hearts of Americans, the article evidently planted seeds of
doubt at the State Department. Princess
Nina did not give up easily, however. After
Bigelow turned her down, she filed a lawsuit against a young woman named Irene
Kaline, the daughter of a wealthy tailor alleged to have had an affair with
Nina after his wife and family fled to safety during the Revolution.
As
retribution Irene had accused Nina of being a spy, said the princess. A long, complicated tale emerged involving a
family servant, stolen heirlooms, libelous postcards, and exonerating documents
that might be stashed in a house in Prague.
The lawsuit
fell apart but in 1927 Nina filed another one – this against Donald Bigelow, who
had since moved on to an appointment in Tangier. She charged defamation and libel and asked
for 500,000 francs in damages. The suit
became a very big deal as it moved through the French courts.
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| Donald F. Bigelow appears in the third row, far right; American Foreign Service Journal, 1936 |
At issue was
Bigelow’s diplomatic immunity. His
lawyers admitted that Bigelow should not have publicly referred to Nina as a
Bolshevik. In fact, he should not have discussed
the case with reporters. However, since
he had merely expressed the position of the State Department, how could he be personally
liable?
Invoking an
1876 consular treaty, Bigelow’s lawyers further argued that American consuls
could not be tried in France except for the commission of a crime. But the Tribunal of the Correctional Court of
Paris was not buying. In January 1928 it
ruled against Bigelow, stating that the consul’s remarks about the princess did
not constitute part of an “official act” and ordering him to pay the cost of
the appeal.
While the
decision was important enough to be debated in the American Journal of
International Law, there is no evidence that Bigelow paid anything to the
court or to Nina Zizianoff.
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| The princess designed her own trademark, which she planned to use on branded products when she finally became a U.S. citizen. |
The princess
filed one more lawsuit in December 1929, going after the newspaper that first
reported Bigelow’s accusations. A French
court fined Richard Grozier, editor of The Boston Post, 20,000 francs
and condemned him to two months in prison.
But unless Grozier were to set foot in France, the judgment could not be
enforced.
It seems
unlikely that Nina Zizianoff would have returned to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. She probably spent the rest of her life in
France, and her name never appeared in an American newspaper again.
