Foreshadowing all the horrors of the October Revolution for tsarist Russians, as Helen Rappaport shows in this absorbing and poignantly topical account of life in exile, was the ‘dress rehearsal’ (Lenin’s description) of 1905, when the first uprising against the brutally oppressive Romanov regime was crushed in St Petersburg. The tsar retained his power, but the most prescient of the Romanovs knew that their days of splendour were numbered.

The events of 1905 loom behind the lively opening chapters of Rappaport’s admirably researched history of dispossessed White Russians – not just the surviving Romanovs – in Paris. ‘Alps crossed – Paris taken,’ the great Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin crowed to a friend in 1908 from a Paris which had shown itself more than ready to embrace Russian culture after watching Diaghilev’s artfully selected scenes from Boris Godunov. This was a buoyant prewar Paris in which visiting Russian princes showered appreciative dancers with orchids and diamonds, while their quietly apprehensive parents still presided over Proustian drawing rooms in palaces overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. Craftily – she’s a fine storyteller – Rappaport also introduces into the mix figures like Anna Akhmatova (enjoying a rapturous early love affair with Modigliani), Chagall, eager to meet Diaghilev’s great designer Léon Bakst, destitute Chaïm Soutine, painting carcases and living on scraps, and Paris-hating Lenin himself, seen through the eyes of an admiring young poet, Ilya Ehrenburg, newly arrived from Lithuania.

And then came 1917. ‘I shall forever go on looking, seeing my own land slip softly, slowly away from me,’ the popular Russian author known as Teffi wrote. Rappaport tracks the terrible exodus from Odessa to Constantinople, the city reached in 1920 by a ‘veritable armada’ of boats