Behind the Veil at the Russian Court

Princess Catherine Radziwill’s first-person account of life in Imperialist Russia provides a fascinating insight into the country at a historic time, as it teetered on the precipice of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. This historic memoir offers a uniquely personal account of the final years of the fated Russian aristocracy, and is all the more thrilling because it was penned from the perspective of an aristocrat herself. 

As a prominent member of both German and Russian high society — and one no stranger to scandal herself — Princess Catherine Radziwill had intimate knowledge of the Imperial courts of both countries. In Behind the Veil at the Russian Court, the Polish-Russian princess paints a vivid picture of a bygone world and the rulers, gossip, culture, intrigue, and politics of Russia in the years between 1855 and 1913, before the entire social order of the country was overthrown. With astonishing detail, she recounts what we now know to be the crumbling of the Romanov dynasty under its last three tsars — Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Nicholas II. 

Peppered with insider tidbits — whispered “from behind the veil” — this contemporaneous account of the last years of Tsarist Russia was first published in 1913, and is all the more compelling with the benefit of hindsight.