A few weeks ago, I hosted a Russian Ball in Washington, DC. The occasion was the 53rd annual Russian New Years’ Ball, a storied tradition of the U.S. capital dating back to 1971 and one of the oldest Russian-themed social parties held anywhere in the world, including Russia. I have been its chairman for ten years. The ball’s origins are as peculiar as the city in which it is held. Like Washington itself, the ball is fundamentally a European innovation imposed on an American landscape—in this case a social, rather than geographic, landscape. It is a dinner dance enduring in a city that has made pompous self-regard into an art form and become infamous for offering parties at which no one dares dance for fear of being thought insufficiently serious.
The ball was started by a Washington society lady called Maria Fisher, who fancied giving what would today be called ‘heritage’ parties but were then commonly, and without offense, called ‘ethnic’ parties. Every year, Mrs. Fisher busied herself in the then-robust capital social season celebrating Mexico, Austria, or Italy. At a Viennese-themed party she gave in 1970, an urbane White Russian émigré, Prince Alexis Obolensky, suggested that she throw a Russian party the following season. With that, Washington’s Russian Ball was born.
Mrs. Fisher held only one Russian Ball, but the event gathered a spirited community and has endured ever since. At first it was held at what is now the Capital Hilton hotel (then the Capital Statler), on 16th Street, close to the White House. Later it moved to the statelier Mayflower Hotel, where it remained until 2014—my first year as chairman—when we relocated it to a private club to which I belong but will not identify out of respect for its long-standing privacy policies.
When the ball was founded in the dark days of the Cold War, many of the Russians who lived in Washington came from the so-called first wave of émigrés, who fled the chaos of revolutionary Russia after 1917 to build new lives abroad. Some who made that journey as young people were still alive in the 1970s, but by that time most of the community were their children or grandchildren. Having fled or been born outside of the Soviet Union, they congregated in the U.S. capital as patriotic American citizens to fight against the communist terror that had seized their country and inflicted indescribable horrors on their families. It should go without saying that those horrors were inflicted by the Soviet secret police apparatus, which eventually produced Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who is said to this day to gather with old comrades to celebrate the anniversary of its founding.
Most of the original Washington-based Russian émigrés served in some capacity in U.S. military, security agencies, diplomatic organizations, and public-information spheres, while others worked to preserve religious, cultural, and charitable traditions. Prince Obolensky, who suggested the Ball to Mrs. Fisher and then chaired it with his Alabama-born wife Selene from 1972 until shortly before his death in 2006, served for nearly 25 years as the head of the U.S. State Department’s Russian translation section. Count Tolstoy, a relative of the famous writer, worked as a high-level interpreter and taught Russian language at the U.S. Naval Academy. Prince Chavchavadze, the scion of a great Georgian noble house whose mother was a Romanov dynastic princess, was an undercover field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He titled his entertaining memoirs Crowns and Trenchcoats: A Russian Prince in the CIA. Prince Volkonsky, the son of Tsar Nicholas II’s last Imperial Chamberlain, served in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and had a long career in U.S. Army counterintelligence and in the Special Forces. The ball’s patroness is Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, the most commonly recognized claimant to the Romanov throne, who resides in Spain.
Naturally, the ball had no relationship with the Soviet embassy, which lurked within walking distance of the annual event. Some in the Russian-American community had fleeting contact with their counterparts on the ‘other side,’ especially during World War II, when the USA and the USSR were allies. Prince Chavchavadze, then a young American officer, recalled the astonishment of Soviet officers who addressed him as “Comrade Prince” when they encountered him in a remote liaison posting in Alaska. As the Revolution of 1917 receded in memory, even Soviet officials whose forerunners would have gladly sent the émigrés to the gulag or worse at least affected courtesy toward them as fellows of a shared history. As Prince Obolensky once remarked, they “have without exception even at the worst times of the Cold War always treated me with a certain respect and a certain deference not due to my person but due to the family’s standing … If you want a flippant answer, I think that’s the way it ought to be.”
For the most part, these encounters were curiosities, ripples in a ruptured timeline that had left Soviet Russia under the communists and a far-flung ‘Russia Abroad’ that grew and became more diverse as successive waves of emigrants left the country. Millions more Russians fled or found themselves outside Russia during World War II and had no desire to return. Political dissidents found ways to defect; later the regime found it expedient to expel them. Beginning in the 1970s, Soviet Jews facing discrimination at home were able to leave in large numbers. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the borders to unlimited legal emigration, of which millions more availed themselves. Vladimir Putin’s political crackdown in 2012 produced another wave of emigration, as has the recent war in Ukraine among political dissidents, men of military age who face the draft, and ordinary citizens dissatisfied with life under Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime. In the finest of American traditions, all of these new arrivals have enriched our ball.
I am not Russian myself, though I long studied and taught about Russia and its history, with concentrations on its imperial era, diplomacy, and lively performing arts culture. While studying in Washington, I became very friendly with the White Russian community—so friendly, in fact, that I married one of them, a factor that played no small role in the request that I, by then a committee member, assume the chairmanship when Prince Obolensky’s widow became terminally ill and no other candidates were willing to take over. I believed then that declining, and thereby allowing the ball to disappear, would do a great disservice to a fine tradition—a proud Russian-American one created by a unique community that contributed heavily to the defeat of communism in the cause of liberty. I continue to feel that way now, regardless of what Putin’s bombs and rockets do, or, more accurately, what they fail to do.
Our decision to continue the ball despite the war has faced some criticism, even though both the ball itself and our patroness have vociferously denounced the war in Ukraine and called for an end to its bloodshed. Unfortunately, for the ignorant and the sensationalist anything Russian has become taboo. We have seen Russian vodka dumped out in the streets of Washington, Russian artists removed from performance, Russian culture disparaged and subject to any number of ‘cancellations’—all for the actions of a dictator who never would have existed without the evil Soviet empire we all fought determinedly against and the globalists who tried and catastrophically failed to impose neoliberal norms and values on a post-Soviet Russia they barely understood.
To such critics, I would say the ball was conceived at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was actively supporting our opponents in Vietnam and a range of other countries, aiming nuclear missiles at our cities, and still oppressing what remained of the pre-revolutionary elite families at home. The Ball was held after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It was held through the years during Russia’s brutal wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s. It was held after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea and supported Donbas separatism in Ukraine in 2014, and began military operations in Syria in 2015. All of these events were terrible and mightily contributed to Russia’s ostracism by the international community. But they were correctly understood to be the actions of a repugnant communist or thinly veiled ex-communist government whose evil works our community opposed and continues to oppose, not those of noble refugees who devoted their lives to fighting hard against the Soviet government and the heinous ideology that it propped up in power and sought to impose on the entire world. No sensible person should have any other view of our Russian ball today.
Many of the Washington Russian émigrés took American wives, and the ball’s guest list has become increasingly less Russian as it has drawn large numbers of the original community’s American friends, who understand its realities and appreciate its evolving legacy. Today it is probably 80-90% non-Russian. But the spirit of memory and good will remains the ball’s guiding principle. In the words of my predecessor the late Princess Obolensky, “Southern hospitality is the same as Russian hospitality. The emphasis is on community … ’Course they drink vodka here.” And so we shall, for many years to come.
Why I Hosted a Russian Ball in Wartime
A few weeks ago, I hosted a Russian Ball in Washington, DC. The occasion was the 53rd annual Russian New Years’ Ball, a storied tradition of the U.S. capital dating back to 1971 and one of the oldest Russian-themed social parties held anywhere in the world, including Russia. I have been its chairman for ten years. The ball’s origins are as peculiar as the city in which it is held. Like Washington itself, the ball is fundamentally a European innovation imposed on an American landscape—in this case a social, rather than geographic, landscape. It is a dinner dance enduring in a city that has made pompous self-regard into an art form and become infamous for offering parties at which no one dares dance for fear of being thought insufficiently serious.
The ball was started by a Washington society lady called Maria Fisher, who fancied giving what would today be called ‘heritage’ parties but were then commonly, and without offense, called ‘ethnic’ parties. Every year, Mrs. Fisher busied herself in the then-robust capital social season celebrating Mexico, Austria, or Italy. At a Viennese-themed party she gave in 1970, an urbane White Russian émigré, Prince Alexis Obolensky, suggested that she throw a Russian party the following season. With that, Washington’s Russian Ball was born.
Mrs. Fisher held only one Russian Ball, but the event gathered a spirited community and has endured ever since. At first it was held at what is now the Capital Hilton hotel (then the Capital Statler), on 16th Street, close to the White House. Later it moved to the statelier Mayflower Hotel, where it remained until 2014—my first year as chairman—when we relocated it to a private club to which I belong but will not identify out of respect for its long-standing privacy policies.
When the ball was founded in the dark days of the Cold War, many of the Russians who lived in Washington came from the so-called first wave of émigrés, who fled the chaos of revolutionary Russia after 1917 to build new lives abroad. Some who made that journey as young people were still alive in the 1970s, but by that time most of the community were their children or grandchildren. Having fled or been born outside of the Soviet Union, they congregated in the U.S. capital as patriotic American citizens to fight against the communist terror that had seized their country and inflicted indescribable horrors on their families. It should go without saying that those horrors were inflicted by the Soviet secret police apparatus, which eventually produced Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who is said to this day to gather with old comrades to celebrate the anniversary of its founding.
Most of the original Washington-based Russian émigrés served in some capacity in U.S. military, security agencies, diplomatic organizations, and public-information spheres, while others worked to preserve religious, cultural, and charitable traditions. Prince Obolensky, who suggested the Ball to Mrs. Fisher and then chaired it with his Alabama-born wife Selene from 1972 until shortly before his death in 2006, served for nearly 25 years as the head of the U.S. State Department’s Russian translation section. Count Tolstoy, a relative of the famous writer, worked as a high-level interpreter and taught Russian language at the U.S. Naval Academy. Prince Chavchavadze, the scion of a great Georgian noble house whose mother was a Romanov dynastic princess, was an undercover field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He titled his entertaining memoirs Crowns and Trenchcoats: A Russian Prince in the CIA. Prince Volkonsky, the son of Tsar Nicholas II’s last Imperial Chamberlain, served in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and had a long career in U.S. Army counterintelligence and in the Special Forces. The ball’s patroness is Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, the most commonly recognized claimant to the Romanov throne, who resides in Spain.
Naturally, the ball had no relationship with the Soviet embassy, which lurked within walking distance of the annual event. Some in the Russian-American community had fleeting contact with their counterparts on the ‘other side,’ especially during World War II, when the USA and the USSR were allies. Prince Chavchavadze, then a young American officer, recalled the astonishment of Soviet officers who addressed him as “Comrade Prince” when they encountered him in a remote liaison posting in Alaska. As the Revolution of 1917 receded in memory, even Soviet officials whose forerunners would have gladly sent the émigrés to the gulag or worse at least affected courtesy toward them as fellows of a shared history. As Prince Obolensky once remarked, they “have without exception even at the worst times of the Cold War always treated me with a certain respect and a certain deference not due to my person but due to the family’s standing … If you want a flippant answer, I think that’s the way it ought to be.”
For the most part, these encounters were curiosities, ripples in a ruptured timeline that had left Soviet Russia under the communists and a far-flung ‘Russia Abroad’ that grew and became more diverse as successive waves of emigrants left the country. Millions more Russians fled or found themselves outside Russia during World War II and had no desire to return. Political dissidents found ways to defect; later the regime found it expedient to expel them. Beginning in the 1970s, Soviet Jews facing discrimination at home were able to leave in large numbers. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the borders to unlimited legal emigration, of which millions more availed themselves. Vladimir Putin’s political crackdown in 2012 produced another wave of emigration, as has the recent war in Ukraine among political dissidents, men of military age who face the draft, and ordinary citizens dissatisfied with life under Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime. In the finest of American traditions, all of these new arrivals have enriched our ball.
I am not Russian myself, though I long studied and taught about Russia and its history, with concentrations on its imperial era, diplomacy, and lively performing arts culture. While studying in Washington, I became very friendly with the White Russian community—so friendly, in fact, that I married one of them, a factor that played no small role in the request that I, by then a committee member, assume the chairmanship when Prince Obolensky’s widow became terminally ill and no other candidates were willing to take over. I believed then that declining, and thereby allowing the ball to disappear, would do a great disservice to a fine tradition—a proud Russian-American one created by a unique community that contributed heavily to the defeat of communism in the cause of liberty. I continue to feel that way now, regardless of what Putin’s bombs and rockets do, or, more accurately, what they fail to do.
Our decision to continue the ball despite the war has faced some criticism, even though both the ball itself and our patroness have vociferously denounced the war in Ukraine and called for an end to its bloodshed. Unfortunately, for the ignorant and the sensationalist anything Russian has become taboo. We have seen Russian vodka dumped out in the streets of Washington, Russian artists removed from performance, Russian culture disparaged and subject to any number of ‘cancellations’—all for the actions of a dictator who never would have existed without the evil Soviet empire we all fought determinedly against and the globalists who tried and catastrophically failed to impose neoliberal norms and values on a post-Soviet Russia they barely understood.
To such critics, I would say the ball was conceived at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was actively supporting our opponents in Vietnam and a range of other countries, aiming nuclear missiles at our cities, and still oppressing what remained of the pre-revolutionary elite families at home. The Ball was held after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It was held through the years during Russia’s brutal wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s. It was held after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea and supported Donbas separatism in Ukraine in 2014, and began military operations in Syria in 2015. All of these events were terrible and mightily contributed to Russia’s ostracism by the international community. But they were correctly understood to be the actions of a repugnant communist or thinly veiled ex-communist government whose evil works our community opposed and continues to oppose, not those of noble refugees who devoted their lives to fighting hard against the Soviet government and the heinous ideology that it propped up in power and sought to impose on the entire world. No sensible person should have any other view of our Russian ball today.
Many of the Washington Russian émigrés took American wives, and the ball’s guest list has become increasingly less Russian as it has drawn large numbers of the original community’s American friends, who understand its realities and appreciate its evolving legacy. Today it is probably 80-90% non-Russian. But the spirit of memory and good will remains the ball’s guiding principle. In the words of my predecessor the late Princess Obolensky, “Southern hospitality is the same as Russian hospitality. The emphasis is on community … ’Course they drink vodka here.” And so we shall, for many years to come.
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