SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7
the Renault factory at Quai du Point-du-Jour
at day’s end “by the fact he was generally
cleaner and better dressed and even wore a
tie,” she writes.
The wives and sisters of these men were
lucky to have needle skills — embroidery,
knitting and tatting being favorite feminine
pastimes in the rich old days. Several thou-
sand Russian woman were eventually em-
ployed by the Parisian garment trade, and by
1935, Russian emigres had founded 27 new
French fashion houses.
Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna — whose
father, Grand Duke Paul, son of Czar Alexan-
der II, was shot by the Bolsheviks at the St.
Peter and St. Paul Fortress in 1919 — bought a
Singer sewing machine on credit and even-
tually started Maison Kitmir, named for a
legendary dog in Persian mythology that
Russians considered lucky. Her business
flourished until the rage for Slavic-styleslums of Constantinople. The lucky ones who
had the means to travel on to France generally
arrived with their funds exhausted.
Coco Chanel, who enjoyed a love affair with
handsome Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich,once
the fourth-richest man in Russia, described
him and his friends as “almost emasculated by
their poverty.” A few of the better-educated
exiles wrangled positions as bookkeepers or
bank clerks. But mostly these former princes,
army officers and high government officials
found themselves working as taxi drivers,
waiters or on factory assembly lines.
Rappaport is a mistress of the telling detail.
Chanel, she reports, took pity on Count Sergei
Kutuzov, former governor of Crimea, by mak-
ing him head receptionist at h er atelier on Rue
Cambon. An entire company of ex-Cossacks
staffed the Gare de l’Eastern time as porters
and freight handlers. A Russian could be
spotted among the workers who poured out ofBook World100%
DEMOCRACY
The Case for
Universal
Voting
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
and Miles
Rapoport
T he New Press.
186 pp. $24.99AFTER THE
ROMANOVS
Russian Exiles in
Paris from the
Belle Époque
Through
Revolution and
War
By Helen
Rappaport
S t. Martin’s Press.
336 pp. $29.99clothes cooled in 1928. She then moved to New
York, was hired as a style adviser by Bergdorf
Goodman, and wrote her dramatic memoirs.
When in 1941 the United States joined the
Soviet Union in the war against Germany, the
Grand Duchess sailed to Argentina in disgust.
As Rappaport skillfully recounts, staunch
monarchists among the exiles took time out
from worrying about their finances to argue
over plans for an eventual restoration. After
an absurd three-sided battle of pretenders,
Grand Duke Vladimir’s eldest son declared
himself the Emperor Kirill of All the Russias
in 1927. He kept office hours every weekday
from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in his house in the Breton
fishing village of Saint-Briac, issuing procla-
mations and various directives. “It isn’t even
theater,” s niffed one unimpressed fellow exile,
“It’s a puppet show.”
The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, even-
tually infiltrated the emigre community and
in 1937 kidnapped Gen. Yevgeny Miller, a
former leader of the White Army, smuggled
him from Paris to Moscow, where he was
tortured and then shot. Subtler tactics were
used to lure back various homesick emigre
artists and writers. Sergey Efron, husband of
Marina Ts vetaeva, today considered among
Russia’s greatest poets, was secretly enlisted
by the NKVD, and both he and the couple’s
daughter went home. Ts vetaeva only reluc-
tantly followed. In Stalin’s Great Terror, Efron
was shot and their daughter arrested and
tortured. Tsvetaeva herself was never accept-
ed by the Soviet literary establishment and
died by suicide in 1941.
For the emigres in Paris, hopefulness and
nostalgia eventually turned into something
far more painful, as they were forced to
witness from afar the evil that consumed their
beloved homeland.W
hen Ernest Hemingway arrived in
Paris, he found a city crowded with
Russian emigres who had fled the
Bolshevik Revolution more than four years
earlier. In February 1922, he observed: “They
are drifting along ... in a childish sort of
hopefulness that things will somehow be all
right, which is quite charming when you first
encounter it and rather maddening after a few
months.”
By then, the writing was already on the wall
for those Russian exiles who chose to read it.
Despite their hopes, dreams and expectations
of returning home, the new “blood-red” re-
gime, as they dubbed it, showed no sign of
imminent collapse. Of the 50,000 displaced
Russians who eventually settled in the French
capital, only a handful would ever see their
native land again. And as they lingered in the
cafes on the Boulevard du Montparnasse,
longing for a lost world of luxury and ease,
their real task was to scratch out a living in
this pinched and hostile new one.
British historian Helen Rappaport — au-
thor most recently of “The Race to Save the
Romanovs” in 2018 — has produced an
engaging group biography of this melancholy
crowd: “After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles
in Paris from the Belle Époque Through
Revolution and War.” She begins in the last
years of the 19 th century, when the czarist
nobility treated the French capital as their Las
Vegas — a place to spend lavishly and live
indulgently. The last czar’s uncles, Grand
Duke Vladimir and Grand Duke Alexis, were
carousers-in-chief, regularly descending on
the city in pursuit of food, wine and women.
After the overthrow of the Romanov dynas-
ty in 1917, plenty of those who had formerly
traveled to Paris on luxury train cars em-
barked on a desperate and hazardous flight
from the Red Army. S outh to Crimea and then
across the Black Sea in rickety and overcrowd-
ed boats, Russian refugees soon filled the fetid
How Russian emigres scratched out a living once they lost their world of riches
HISTORY REVIEW BY CLARE MCHUGH
OLGA MALTSEVA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
A woman visits, a
permanent
exhibition in 2017
that highlights
clothes dating from
the 18th century,
most of which
belonged to the
Romanov dynasty,
in Saint Petersburg.Clare McHugh is the author of the novel “A Most
English Princess.”penditures, additional volunteer poll workers
and help from private donors and founda-
tions. Dionne and Rapoport hope that univer-
sal civic duty voting would create the impetus
for local, state and federal governments to
shore up election infrastructure. They would
need to keep voter rolls up to date and make
voting widely accessible. However, it seems
just as likely that the rollout of universal
voting would be marred by delays and biases
in enforcement. The authors are not unaware
of these risks and presume that gateway
reforms (such as all-mail voting and same-day
registration) would need to accompany uni-
versal voting.
It is also unclear how universal civic duty
voting might affect other (problematic) as-
pects of our politics: gerrymandering, malap-
portionment, campaign finance. There are
alternative institutional and regulatory ar-
rangements that create better democratic
outcomes outside the United States. Universal
voting would help increase turnout, but it
would be unlikely to curb the influence of
well-heeled donors or rectify the counter-ma-
joritarian features of our national institu-
tions.
Ultimately, “100% Democracy” is more
manifesto than playbook. Dionne and Rapo-
port want us to think big, to envision a world
where voting is easy and routine. They imag-
ine a future built on civic participation and
pride, rather than one built on democratic
subversion. Theirs is a compelling case for a
radical idea, one that might even have deep
skeptics shrugging and asking, why not?ing and detailing the constitutional protec-
tions on various forms of speech, Dionne and
Rapoport suggest that universal voting in the
United States could work much as it does in
Australia. Citizens would all be expected to
check in at a polling station on Election Day
but would not be forced to cast a ballot; they
could also mail in blank ballots. They would
face a small fine (or, in the early rollout phase,
a warning) for not voting. The government
would need to make registration and voting
easier across the board. The book’s appendix
includes a universal civic duty voting bill that
was introduced in the Connecticut legislature
in 2021; universal voting would probably start
with localities and states.
Dionne and Rapoport also respond to
criticisms of universal voting, using survey
data to show that most Americans think of
voting as both a right and a duty — and
pointing out that Americans accept jury duty
and the Selective Service as obligations. Fur-
ther, the authors argue that although it may be
democratic to protect the right not t o vote, it is
just as democratic to believe in full participa-
tion. After all, the government makes deci-
sions that affect all people; why should the
government be selected by only part of the
citizenry? Dionne and Rapoport dismiss the
cringeworthy arguments that voters are too
ignorant to participate or that voting
shouldn’t be as easy as “ordering Chinese
takeout.” They point to the nation’s brutal
history of voter suppression and Jim Crow,
and the myriad ways anti-democratic politi-
cians have sought to limit the franchise
through history.
And they are realistic about the difficulty of
implementing universal voting. The 2020
election required significant government ex-and no-excuse absentee voting, expanding the
window to vote, and setting up ballot drop-
boxes. Election administrators, Congress, cor-
porations, activists and the media came to-
gether to encourage safe voting amid a global
pandemic. This, the authors argue, should be
the norm in our elections.
The main problem that universal civic duty
voting solves is the problem of low turnout.
Dionne and Rapoport note that people who
vote are Whiter, older and more educated than
the overall population. When voting is more
accessible, the electorate becomes more repre-
sentative. Further, universal voting would not
clearly benefit one party over the other.
Instead, it would increase the overall competi-
tiveness of elections. Virginia, for example,
expanded voting access after 20 18, and Re-
publican Glenn Youngkin defeated the former
Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, in- Republican candidates in down-ballot
races also did well in 2020, when voting access
expanded during the pandemic.
How would universal civic duty voting work
in practice? The authors devote a great deal of
attention to Australia, which implemented
mandatory voting in 192 4. All citizens older
than 18 must register to vote in Australia,
which they can do online or at the post office.
Elections are held every three years, on
Saturdays. Australians must present them-
selves at the polls or face a fine (about $14),
although they can also provide “valid and
sufficient” reasons for not voting that include
travel, illness and religious objection. Turnout
rates are higher than 90 percent, and Austra-
lians take pride in voting — they even have
barbecues on election day.
After reviewing the two dozen or so other
countries with some form of mandatory vot-
W
hile commemorating the 50 th anni-
versary of the Bloody Sunday voting
rights march in Selma, Ala., President
Obama contrasted the historic achievement of
the civil rights movement with the low turn-
out rates characteristic of American elections.
“What’s our excuse today for not voting?” he
asked. That same year, he floated a solution:
mandatory universal voting. If all Americans
were asked to show up to the polls on Election
Day, the effects on representation and civic
culture could be “transformative.” Unsurpris-
ingly, the proposal went nowhere — compul-
sory voting is, and has long been, unpalatable
to Americans. Criticism, particularly from the
right, was swift and vehement.
But in the seven years since Obama asked
how Americans so “casually discard the right
for which so many fought,” the world has
changed. Republicans and Democrats at the
state level are reworking voting rules and
procedures. Since 2020, 19 states have passed
laws making it harder to vote, largely in
response to the Big Lie that the 2020 election
was stolen. Twenty-five other states have
passed laws expanding voting access, largely
in response to heroic efforts to carry out an
election under conditions of a global pandem-
ic. Underlying these differing trajectories are
fundamental disagreements about what de-
mocracy means and how we, as citizens, value
participation.
Democracy requires free and fair elections,
which are now under threat after the disputed
election of 2020. In their new book, E.J.
Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport offer a solution
that has the potential to achieve, as the title
suggests, “100% Democracy.” That solution is
universal civic duty voting: a formalization of
the moral duty to participate in elections.
Unlike many other political changes that have
been advocated, such as those in President
Biden’s failed Freedom to Vote Act, Dionne
and Rapoport’s solution does not rely on
institutional or technical fixes. Theirs is a
wholesale rethinking of the American elector-
ate’s relationship to elections.
The authors envision a democracy that is
more representative and less cynical; univer-
sal voting, they argue, would obviate the cycle
of voting rights expansion-retrenchment to
which Americans have (unfortunately) be-
come so accustomed. The U. S. Constitution
does not protect the right to vote. Instead, it
protects citizens from infringement of the
right to vote. The distinction may sound
trivial, but in many other countries, the state
must proactively make it easy for citizens to
vote. In the United States, on the other hand,
citizens take on much of the responsibility of
voting and cannot easily seek redress from the
state when new burdens are enacted.
Taking the step of creating an obligation to
vote could “vindicate the liberating purposes
of the 1965 [voting rights] law and the rights
guaranteed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendment of the Constitution.” Efforts to
suppress or subvert votes would largely be
rendered irrelevant. Nonvoters, who tend to
be more cynical about politics, would become
more invested in democracy. Candidates and
media consultants would need to make broad-
er appeals in their campaigns.
Dionne and Rapoport’s call for universal
voting is undergirded by optimism, urgency
and a bit of naivete — the sort welcome in a
genre that is otherwise bleak. “100% Democ-
racy” argues that we are in a time of democrat-
ic renewal, based on the surge in voting in
- American turnout rates are usually low:
Since the 1960 s, they’ve hovered at about 50
percent of the voting-eligible population. The
turnout of 2020 was 67 percent, the highest in
120 years. States made it easier for voters to
cast ballots by allowing online registration
The case for mandatory universal voting in America
VOTING RIGHTS REVIEW BY DIDI KUO
PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Voters cast ballots
on electronic Voting
Solutions for All
People (VSAP)
ballot marking
machines at an
early voting polling
location i n Los
Angeles on Oct. 29,
2020.Didi Kuo is a senior research scholar and associate
director at the Center on Democracy, Development
and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.