Kyril Zinovieff’s death at the age of 104 would certainly have surprised the doctor who examined him when he arrived in Britain. He and his siblings — refugees from the Russian revolution — had had little to eat for weeks as they fled Bolshevik terror.
However, Zinovieff defied the odds to live a very full life. He was, as one of his friends put it, “an amazing figure — Russian, aristocrat, refugee, pauper and Englishman”. And he was one of the last surviving witnesses to the dramatic final moments and key figures of the tsarist regime.
Zinovieff could remember seeing a carriage in his home city of St Petersburg containing two laughing men with “rather big beards and very white flashing teeth”. One of them was Rasputin — the mystic who was murdered in 1916, allegedly by those resenting his influence over the tsar’s family.
Then from his nursery window in 1917 he witnessed random violence as the revolutionaries seized control.
“Our friends were being killed,” he recalled later. “Somebody would enter your house and then would murder — murder! — everybody. ‘You are not fit to live — you certainly are not!’ Bang, bang, bang, and they were killed.”
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Having escaped the Bolsheviks, Zinovieff was to have one more dramatic brush with the perils of 20th-century European history. Working in Prague in 1939 for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he saw Hitler arrive triumphantly as the Nazis invaded. When war broke out between Britain and Germany he received a pre-arranged telephone signal warning him to leave immediately, and abandoned a dinner party in his flat by the back door as German soldiers arrived at the front.
The stability of a long life in Britain was a welcome haven from such dramas. Yet he was always drawn back to engage with the Russian culture into which he had been born.
“You can look at Russia when you look at me,” he once commented. “I’ll remember it to my dying day. I am Russia. For ever.”
— The Times