The White Russians of Shanghai
Merchant Ivory’s latest film White Countess tells the story of a high-born Russian woman reduced to poverty and prostitution to support her family – refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution – in a Shanghai slum. Fraser Newham investigates the experience of the real White Russians of Shanghai and discovers this scenario to be close to the truth for many exiled Russian women.
In 1937 the honorary Mexican consul in Shanghai, Mauricio Fresco, wrote a sensationalist expose of the city’s dark underbelly – an undertaking which, despite attempts to hide behind a pseudonym, would ultimately cost him his job. In its opening chapter, the author describes a visit to the Renaissance, one of Shanghai’s many Russian restaurants and the favourite meeting place of ‘all so-called Grandees who claim to have baked in the now-set sun of the Tsar’s good graces’. No Soviet citizen would ever dare enter a White stronghold like the Renaissance, he tells us; and if a new face is seen, it is because a Russian girl wants to flaunt her latest western beau. ‘I shall manage to pay this month’s rent, yet,’ Fresco has one such girl jauntily proclaim.
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