A Gentleman in Moscow

Directed by Sam Miller and Sarah O’Gorman ◆ Written and Produced by Ben Vanstone ◆ Distributed by Paramount+

“I am an old mummy,” declared the 85-year-old Prince Alexis N. Obolensky in a self-deprecating 2005 speech at Washington, D.C.’s annual Russian Ball, a White Russian affair he chaired for decades before I took over. A resplendent scion of Russia’s medieval rulers, Alyusha, as I knew him, presided over Russian translation at the State Department for some 25 years. In any setting, he left the impression of a figure out of time, and in many ways, he was. He was born in Germany in 1919 to émigré parents who fled the Russian Revolution in 1917. Aristocrats for centuries, they were reduced to living in exile “as poor as church mice,” as he described his upbringing.

Nevertheless, Alyusha maintained affectations of the noble world that revolution had long since rent asunder. Always impeccably dressed, he frequently appealed to tradition to solve problems and, on one memorable occasion, flew into a fit of pique when somebody’s Georgetown dinner guest had the effrontery to bring his cocktail glass to the dining table. Well into the current millennium, he hosted the Ball in the uniform of Ivan the Terrible’s falconer, a Muscovite court office an ancestor held in the 16th century. He unapologetically smoked from an ivory cigarette holder in a city where most people disapprove of ivory, cigarettes, and—unless they accept their party invitations—princes.

Whenever Alyusha met Soviet officials in his professional capacity, they recognized his quality. “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,” he recalled. “If you want a flippant answer, I think that’s the way it ought to be.”

Just over a year after his funerary speech, Alyusha died on what had been his family’s estate in the Russian region of Kaluga, where he did much charitable work after the fall of communism. That he ended life there is his most poignant commonality with his fictional peer, Count Alexander Rostov, the protagonist of Amor Towles’s 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow, which Paramount+/Showtime recently adapted and released as an eight-part limited streaming series. In the end, Rostov also finds final peace on his ancestral lands, deep in the heart of an otherwise unforgiving Soviet Union.

The story does not begin so peacefully for Rostov, whose life follows a peculiar path after he chooses to return to Soviet Russia from abroad. As a “former person,” to use a uniquely Soviet term applied to those dispossessed by the revolution, Rostov is initially marked for death by the Communists. He is witty, charming, and elegant, but these qualities only make him suspect since the new ideology “scientifically” holds that he will act in his supposed socioeconomic interests, which can only be hostile to egalitarianism and progress. The forces of Marxist-Leninism thus reduce him to a crude stereotype—an “enemy of the people” who must be eliminated for the public good. 

Rostov wins a reprieve, however, when the revolutionary tribunal learns that he authored an ideologically sympathetic poem in his youth. That is enough to spare his life, but his sentence is commuted to permanent house arrest at Moscow’s fashionable Metropol Hotel—in the upper-floor servants’ quarters rather than his usual suite. Surrounded by luxury but not truly living in it, he will be shot if he ever sets foot outside the hotel.

The conceit is fanciful. The Metropol is a real hotel, an old-world oasis designed in the style moderne that then graced many northern European cities and was eagerly imported to prerevolutionary Moscow and St. Petersburg. Brutal Soviet social policies, however, did not extend to using it as a gilded cage for suspect members of Russia’s superannuated nobility, no matter how sympathetic their youthful verse. Those who stayed behind and survived typically eked out existences in the professions, trying with varying degrees of success to be useful enough to leave their ancestry discounted or unnoticed.

Initially, the incipient Soviet regime converted the Metropol to housing and office space for its sprawling new bureaucracy, a necessity after 1918, when Moscow once again became Russia’s capital. In the 1930s, the hotel, then in a very rundown state, reopened to accommodate foreigners for the purpose of monitoring them and preventing them from interacting with ordinary Soviet citizens. During World War II, it housed Western journalists reporting on the Eastern Front. Only in the late 1980s, as communism waned, did restoration work begin to revive its prerevolutionary elegance.

Towles was inspired by episodes of his investment banking career when he stayed in historic European hotels and was fascinated to learn that people permanently resided in them, a practice that has since diminished. Fictionalizing the Metropol as a place that never lost that elegance allows Rostov to maintain his identity and a semblance of his values while reflecting with acute concentration on the true meaning of life. He learns his best lessons from an eccentric cast of characters who present moral dilemmas that allow him to mature from a dissolute dilettante to a middle-aged man of character. 

Played with exceptional insight by Ewan McGregor, in perhaps his best role, Rostov grows close to the hotel staff and eventually joins them as a waiter. Along the way, he fosters an orphaned girl who grows up to embrace the hateful ideology that imprisons him, falls in love with an actress despite her vulgar opportunism, develops a respectful rapport with his secret police tormentor, and reconciles himself to the loss of friends whose consciences are twisted by events beyond anyone’s control. These relationships culminate in his taking the ultimate risk by aiding his talented ward in her attempt to defect to the West. Initially flippant and self-indulgent, Rostov becomes stoic and self-sacrificing, willing to do what is morally right to defend what he loves most.

The romantic fantasy behind A Gentleman in Moscow fits with the wider trend of nostalgia for elegant lost worlds. Directors Sam Miller and Sarah O’Gorman play that up to the hilt, even if they had to use British rather than Russian settings due to the war in Ukraine. The series is a fine Russian-themed answer to Brideshead Revisited, The Remains of the Day, Downton Abbey, and more recent made-for-television phenomena such as The Gilded Age, Palm Royale, and (if one must) Bridgerton. 

“It is not the business of a gentleman to have occupations,” Rostov archly says early on, in a tone matching the Dowager Countess of Grantham’s dismissive “What is a week-end?” when encountering a man who unfamiliarly works for a living. The dystopian element of the series follows such landmark epics as Gone With The Wind and Doctor Zhivago, as well as more recent retrospectives, including the jarring German serial Line of Separation and Wes Anderson’s characteristically twee but appositely situated The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Some critics have questioned A Gentleman in Moscow on politically correct grounds, wondering whether it is right to depict an aristocrat who expresses no regret over the source of his family’s vast expropriated wealth. This deflating critique is as great a bore as those advanced against Gone With The Wind for its supposed romanticization of the antebellum South, but it does raise an important point. Despite the severity of Rostov’s lengthy predicament, until the end he never seems to think much about politics or what it has done to his country and its people. Instead, he exists in a world of forces and personalities that he scarcely seems to understand above a child’s level.

The series exaggerates this in several ways. Rostov’s youthful ward, for example, gets a bigger role than she does in the book because the production team wanted the character to have more “agency.” Yet she grows up to become an ideologue who unquestioningly enforces merciless Soviet directives to starve peasants during collectivization, remains loyal to the system when her (unseen) husband is arrested and sent to the gulag, and later dies young in a thoroughly misguided attempt to share his internal exile. Clearly, she has little “agency,” and one might wonder—as Rostov never seems to do—whether she ever was free.

In a similar boondoggle, the production team confusingly cast a black actor—the overzealous Fehinti Balogun—in the role of Rostov’s childhood friend and classmate Mishka, who becomes a revolutionary but is ultimately disenchanted with the Soviet system. Without reading Towles’s novel, it is never clear whether Balogun was hired to play a black man who happened to live in revolutionary Russia or a white character without accounting for color. If the former is true, the absence of any comment on race in what remained a profoundly racist society seems ingenuous. If the latter is true, the producers might know that claiming “not to see color” is considered a racist “microaggression.”

Despite these foibles, fans of the novel and the moral dilemmas therein will enjoy the series and, one hopes, reach the correct conclusions about Marxism as it resurges in our social and cultural life.