The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva could not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity.
Three million Russians fled their native land between 1917 and 1929. They made up a shadow nation stretching from Manchuria to California, with major centres of Russian cultural life in Berlin, Paris and New York. Here were the remnants of a vanished world: former advisers to the Tsar and government officials lived from the sale of their last jewels; ex-landowners worked as waiters; ruined businessmen as factory hands; officers of the defeated White armies worked by night as taxi drivers and by day composed their memoirs about the
mistakes of the White Army leader, General Denikin. Large families, like the Sheremetevs, were fragmented as their members fled in all directions. The main branch of the Sheremetevs left in 1918 with Count Sergei, travelling to Paris and then to New York. But others fled to South America, Belgium, Greece and Morocco.
Berlin was the first major centre of the emigration. It was a natural crossroads between Russia and Europe. The post-First World War economic crisis and the collapse of the mark made the city relatively inexpensive for those Russians who arrived with jewels or Western currency, and in the suburbs of the ruined middle classes a large but cheap apartment could be easily obtained. In 1921 the Soviet government lifted its controls on exit visas as part of its New Economic Policy. At that time Germany was the only major European country to have diplomatic and commercial relations with Soviet Russia. Still paying for the war through reparations and trade embargoes imposed by the victorious Western governments, it looked to Soviet Russia as a trading partner and a diplomatic friend. Half a million Russians crowded into Charlottenburg and the other south-western suburbs of the German capital in the early 1920s. Berliners dubbed the city's major shopping street, the Kurfurstendamm, the 'Nepskii Prospekt'. Berlin had its own Russian cafes, its own Russian theatres and bookshops, its own Russian cabaret. In the suburbs there were Russian everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian pawn shops and Russian antique stores. There was even a Russian orchestra. And a Russian football team (with a young Vladimir Nabokov playing in goal).7
Berlin was the undisputed cultural capital of the Russian emigre community. Its musical talent was extraordinary: Stravinsky, Rach-maninov, Heifetz, Horowitz and Nathan Milstein could have shared the stage in any concert there. By the time Tsvetaeva arrived, in 1922, Berlin had become the adopted home of some of the most brilliant literary talents of the Russian avant-garde (Khodasevich, Nabokov, Berberova, Remizov). The city had an astounding eighty-six Russian-language publishers - comfortably outnumbering the German ones -while its Russian newspapers were sold throughout the world.8
Berlin was also a halfway house between Soviet Russia and the West for writers such as Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya
Ehrenburg, who were yet to make up their minds where they wanted to be based. It became a meeting place for writers from the Soviet Union, their literary confreres from the West, and the already-established Russian emigre community. Publishing costs in Berlin were extremely low - so low that several Soviet publishers and periodicals set up offices in the German capital. In the Russian Berlin of the early 1920s there was still no clear divide between Soviet and emigre culture. The city was the centre of the left-wing avant-garde, among whom the idea of a common Russian culture uniting Soviet Russia with the emigration remained strongest after 1917. Such ideas were generally rejected in the other major centres of the emigration. But Berlin was different - and for a brief period it was possible for writers to move freely between Moscow and Berlin. The climate changed in the middle of the decade when a group of emigres known as
