The Czarists of New Hampshire

World War One shattered the old political order, its traditional monarchies and aristocracies, and the historical boundaries of nations. The explosion also ejected the population of European nations across the world in a flood of refugees, both the high born and the low. Hundreds of thousands fled before invading armies in Belgium, Russia, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere. The 1917 Russian Revolution also cast a wave of refugees upon land and sea, including many members of the White Army fighting the Bolshevik government. Those in flight settled everywhere. In 1930, walking up a lonely rural New Hampshire Road near Mt. Monadnock, you could spy a poultry farm teeming with turkeys and ducks, owned by a man who looked every inch an old Yankee descended from a Bradford or Mather. Instead, he was Prince Irakly Toumanoff, former colonel in the late Czar Nicholas II’s Imperial Family Guard Regiment. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was known locally as “the Prince” and he and his wife Sophia became prominent New England anti-communists.

The Toumanoffs’ story well illustrates what the Great War wrought and its peculiar consequences, even on so unlikely a place as rural New England. The Prince was the youngest of four boys born to a noble Georgian-Armenian family in 1891. All four served in the Russian military: Leo as a Major-General in the Army, Jason and Vladimir as naval officers, and Irakly in the Imperial Guard. Irakly was a fine marksman just out of the academy and the Czar presented him with a rifle as reward for a second-place finish in a shooting contest. “I was 21 years old when I joined one of the most brilliant Guard regiments as an officer,” he later remembered. “With all the ardor of my impassioned heart I was filled with adoration of my emperor. His appearance, especially the eyes – affectionate, burning into the most concealed and hidden corners of the soul – never will be forgotten by anyone who ever saw them.” His proximity to the Russian royal family also brought him into contact with Czarina Alexandra. His regiment heard constant nasty rumors of Grigori Rasputin’s hold over her and conspired to assassinate him. Toumanoff recalled meeting the mystic at the Petrograd railway station in 1915-16:

I was accompanying a very beautiful young lady. Rasputin was walking ahead of us. At the turn of the stairs, he looked up and stared at the lady I was with. I thought this was a good opportunity to kill him. Our winter uniform coat was of a cape effect with an inside pocket where I carried my revolver. My hands were inside, and I could move them without being seen. I had only time to grasp my revolver when Rasputin turned his eyes on me and I felt that my hand was paralyzed. I was unable not only to pull out my hand, but for some time I could not even open my fingers. Only after he was out of sight did I recover my senses. I think as long as I live, I shall remember his piercing, steel-like eyes.

While the Prince missed his chance, others did not. Rasputin was eventually murdered in December 1916.[1]

When war came, Toumanoff went to the front, fought in Galicia and in the 1916 Brusilov Offensive, and was thrice wounded. On one of his returns to the battlefield, he met a young Red Cross nurse named Sophia Sergeyevna. The two fell in love and married in 1918. The daughter of a railroad director, Sophia was born in Moscow in 1892 and enjoyed the fruits of her wealthy background, especially education, both formally in school and informally from the governesses who raised her. She spoke four languages, read widely in classic European literature, and was trained in music. While fellow students reveled in rising Russian socialism and the potential of overthrowing the Czarist regime, she would have none of it. Prewar Russia was an idyllic age for Sergeyevna:

These years of 1905-1914 were the richest and most fruitful, most creative years for Russia. Never had my country developed so rapidly, progressed so magnificently normally in all branches of national life. We owe it to a concurrence of leaders among the first place must be reserved to our late Czar, Nicholas II. It was he, the retiring, modest, almost humble man that was the initiator and the spirit behind the great reforms that took place during his reign. Too refined, too noble to rule a mob he perished under the onslaught of gossip and slander and with his martyr death proved once more and forever that he had been the most loyal, the most devoted son of his country. His glory is yet to come.

She graduated from Moscow University’s law school – one of the earliest women graduates – but was unable to use her training. When the war began in late July 1914, she and her aunt were marooned while vacationing in Italy. Austria-Hungary and Russia declared war against one another, so instead of a return via Vienna they traveled home via Constantinople.[2]

As the Revolution commenced in 1917, both Irakly and Sophia noted the changes in Russia. Nobility and honor gave way to selfishness. In the trenches, the Prince’s soldiers conspired to kill him and he fled when alerted by one of them: “He was, I am afraid, the only communist that I had to deal with who remained honest and decent.” He eventually found a horse on which to escape:

I expected that [the stables] would be unguarded, because one of the first achievements of the revolution was the abolition of all responsibilities. They still existed on paper, but as all discipline had been done away with nobody would serve just out of conscience but preferred to sleep soundly in the warm hut better than keep watch in the cold stable. Thus was freedom perceived – all rights and no responsibilities.

Sophia made similar observations back in Moscow on leave. The new regime bore no resemblance to the old:

The favorite pastime of the men now became meetings. As this was a new toy they enjoyed it to satiation for 24 to 48 hours without interval. Life became one huge meeting, or rather, a series of meetings. What did they discuss? Everything and nothing from the ration of sugar per man or hay per horse (these were the most useful discussions provided the decision was made in less than a week), to international situations, military tactics, government, etc. … What is freedom if not the ability of the individual to take responsibility without outer pressure? Alas, our rank-and-file men interpreted it as: I can do as I please, whatever I please and when I please – degradation was the result.

After escape, Irakly served as an officer in the White Army during the Russian Civil War, but when that cause failed, he and Sophia escaped to Turkey. Turkish communists wanted him deported back to Russia but he twice evaded that certain death sentence after a wealthy American lawyer heard of his plight and paid for the Toumanoffs’ travel to the United States.[3]

The Toumanoffs landed in New York City in September 1923 and later moved to Boston. In less than a decade, they moved from prominent Russians in the Czar’s circle to refugees in America. He made money playing violin in restaurants and working at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, while she served as a social worker and later taught French at Beaver Country Day School in Massachusetts. War injuries, however, imperiled the Prince’s health and when doctors advised the rigorous outdoor life, he purchased a fifty acre farm in Hancock, New Hampshire, a small New England village of only 560 people. Here, he began a new life as poultry farmer raising turkeys, pheasants, and ducks for sale, with particular attention to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Toumanoff named the farm “Hootor,” Russian for “one man farm,” and quickly became a local celebrity. The Peterborough Transcript dubbed him “the turkey king of southern New Hampshire” and “the largest pheasant raiser in the state,” and tourists visited the farm to observe a real Russian prince. He appeared to them a real-life Dr. Doolittle. Ducklings followed him around the property, and he nursed sick ones inside his shirt. If a turkey or duck broke a leg, he fashioned tiny leg splints to help heal them. His baby pheasants were sometimes hatched by volunteer mallard ducks and a tame Blue Heron made yearly visits to the farm. Guarding them all was the Prince’s loyal Airedale. “His place will be a very interesting place to visit after the chicks hatch,” a local agricultural writer related in May 1932. “But take a tip from me, go in the daytime. He has a dog over there that’s a – . Well, take my advice and go in daylight.” The Prince also offered violin and balalaika concerts, tutored local music students, and played at weddings across southern New Hampshire. Russian songs were introduced to New England audiences, often accompanied by Russian garb and dancing.[4]

Princess Sophia exceeded her husband in activity. She performed at his concerts with “a cultured soprano voice of great power and beauty,” singing in Italian, German, and Russian for New Hampshire audiences. Both she and her husband lectured on the Russian Revolution, and US Communist Party members sometimes interrupted their talks. Their son Vladimir later reported they were under observation: “I assume Soviet intelligence tracked my parents in the United States through 1933.” These public presentations also brought them into the company of prominent American diplomats like Joseph Grew, the US Ambassador to Japan who lived in Hancock, and Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who married Grew’s daughter and served as US ambassador to Canada in World War Two. By the 1930s, the Toumanoffs had become prominent commentators on Russian communism.[5]

In March 1933, the infant Roosevelt Administration began steps toward diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, reversing American policy since 1917 followed by Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Sophia Toumanoff took to Boston radio to attack the policy change and those misinformed Americans who supported the Soviet communist “experiment.” “It really calls for an unusual imagination to fully appreciate the fact that the aim of the Bolshevik government is not the well-being of Russia, that national feeling is forbidden, that Russia’s huge population is being sacrificed for this experiment,” she told listeners. Those Americans who sympathized with communism were journalists, professors, and intellectuals smitten with idealistic theory rather than acknowledging the brutality of communist ideology: “They are mostly people of theory and not of practical life. They criticize the existing order in a destructive way; to replace it they offer all sorts of beautifully conceived ideas.”[6]

The Princess cautioned that this was how the Russian Revolution and all revolutions began, with intellectuals peddling political radicalism. Yet they realized their errors too late, for when the Revolution began those same intellectuals and “parlor Bolsheviky parasites” were the first to be rounded up and executed. She rattled off statistics of how many professors, physicians, government bureaucrats, and other professionals were killed in the early years of the new Russian regime, “making a total of 382,000 people executed only belonging to the intellegenzia [sic].” Those numbers decreased because there was no one left to execute: “everybody is completely subjugated.” Russian communism was not an “interesting experiment … I know that a constant stream of blood is paying for this experiment.” The Princess’s knowledge came from her personal experience. Two of her brothers and her sister-in-law died in the Revolution.[7]

She then blasted the naïve sympathy of American clergymen for communism. “Some go so far as to say that the fundamental ideas of Christianity and Communism are identical. But isn’t the basic idea of Christianity love in all the greatest and beauty of its meaning, with all the creative impulse that it holds?” the Princess asked. “And isn’t Communism based on class hatred, individual envy, and suspicion, all destructive elements?” Anti-Christian propaganda posters littered the Soviet Union, one showing Jesus giving wine to drunkards, with the text “the very first and wickedest moonshiner was Jesus Christ.” This reflected communist hatred for Christianity, not grounds for cooperation. The Soviets murdered Russian priests with the same zeal as they liquidated the professors. “No compromise is possible for Christianity and Communism,” she warned. “You have to accept it all as it is, or else oppose it.”[8]

The Soviet state was “the worst kind of a dictatorship mankind ever knew,” she informed listeners. Government censored and limited publications. Private property was eliminated, and citizens made entirely dependent on the government: “The government is the sole and only holder of all necessities of life, it is also the only employer, it owns its citizens body and soul.” The Communists maintained power only through violence, not consent or any legitimate claim to authority. The regime terrorized its people within and looked to expand the revolution abroad, and she pointed to a 1928 Pravda article with the haunting line, “The worldwide nature of our program is not mere talk, but an all-embracing and blood-soaked reality. It cannot be otherwise.” Through all the horror, the Soviet regime was also broke and willingly let foreigners purchase the freedom of friends and relatives to attract western money. “In what, I question, does this differ from the slave trade or wholesale kidnapping?” she asked.[9]

Princess Toumanoff insisted that diplomatic recognition would not help the Soviet people, only its murderous rulers. She told radio listeners, “I do not see how you, a freedom-loving nation, believing in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people can lower your standard by recognizing the Soviet government which is nothing but a group of international revolutionaries.” What happened when other nations recognized the USSR? Just look at what happened in England, where the Soviets encouraged and organized labor unrest, and infiltrated the British armed forces. The same was already occurring in the United States, even without recognition. The Russian government’s trade organization in New York City imported 1500 workers and used “a code for its communications with Moscow, which the best experts have not succeeded in deciphering.” The Princess was remarkably prescient in this warning. Almost immediately upon American recognition in December 1933, Soviet spies began a comprehensive effort to infiltrate American government and industry, much of it reported back to Moscow in code via Western Union. The code remained unbroken until sloppy practices allowed US codebreakers to crack into the telegrams and uncover Soviet agents operating in every government branch, from the White House to Congress to every federal department and the atomic bomb facility in New Mexico. A Russian czarist princess living in New Hampshire sounded the alarm in 1933.[10]

The Prince and Princess Toumanoff continued to lecture on Soviet communism into the 1940s, still criticizing Stalin even during the war. Their public condemnations endangered their lives and their son later reported that the Soviets “put a very large price on [my father’s] head and on the heads of the entire family.” Failing health forced the Prince to cease farming in 1945 and while they both continued to visit Hancock, it was now only as summer cottagers. He died in February 1947 and was interred in the cemetery behind the Hancock Congregational Church. Sophia continued to work in the new Cold War environment, teaching Russian and directing language education at the School for Advanced International Studies. She died in 1950 and was buried alongside her husband. Sophia and Irakly’s two sons became leading figures in American business and government, George Toumanoff as an aviation executive and Vladimir Toumanoff as a foreign service officer in DC and Moscow.[11]

British Foreign Secretary Edward Gray famously remarked at the beginning of World War One that “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” The darkness of mass death and disorder fell over the continent for five years. Yet in the years after war’s end, flickers of light reappeared in the strangest of places. In Hancock, New Hampshire a refugee family of Czarists worked to rebuild their lives, defend the virtues of the old order, and condemn the murderous ideology that replaced it. Yet their new life in New England was a good one. When asked how a Czarist army officer could become an American poultry farmer, Prince Irakly Toumanoff replied, “If somebody were to offer me what I once had, I think I would refuse.”[12]

This essay was first published here in August 2021.

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Notes:

[1] Peter Toumanoff, “Early August 1914,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923 (blog), September 23, 2014, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/early-august-1914; Peter Toumanoff, “Wartime,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923, August 12, 2015, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/wartime-2/

[2] Peter Toumanoff, “Sophia’s Childhood,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923 (blog), December 3, 2014, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/sophias-chidhood/; Peter Toumanoff, “Outbreak of World War I,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923 (blog), October 6, 2014, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/outbreak-of-world-war-i-4/

[3] Peter Toumanoff, “Bolshevik Revolution,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923 (blog), August 27, 2019, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/bolshevik-revolution/; Peter Toumanoff, “February Revolution,” A Russian Family History – 1914-1923, August 20, 2019, accessed July 14, 2021, http://www.history.toumanoff.com/february-revolution/; J. L. Dery, “Exiled Prince of Persia, Long in Flight from Soviets, Finds Haven on Turkey Farm,” Mercury (Pottstown, PA), January 4, 1934.

[4] Peterborough Transcript, September 21, 1950; Peterborough Transcript, April 14, 1932; Peterborough Transcript, July 9, 1936; Peterborough Transcript, May 26, 1932.

[5] Peterborough Transcript, November 6, 1930; https://adst.org/oral-history/fascinating-figures/a-russo-american-diplomat-back-in-the-ussr/

[6] Peterborough Transcript, April 14, 1933.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Peterborough Transcript, April 14, 1933; for more information on Soviet espionage and US codebreaking, see Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era (New York, 1999), Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Washington, DC, 2000), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (San Francisco, 2003).

[11] Vladimir Toumanoff’s life and career is fascinating in its own right, including run-ins with Joseph McCarthy and Nikita Khrushchev. See https://adst.org/oral-history/fascinating-figures/a-russo-american-diplomat-back-in-the-ussr/; New York Times, February 4, 1947; Peterborough Transcript, September 21, 1950.

[12] New York Times, February 4, 1947.

The featured image is a photograph of Kingsbury Farm in Keene, New Hampshire, and has no known copyright restrictions, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.