This dissertation is a biography of a house, utilizing a particular building as a prism through which to see Russian modernity. The Kshesinskaia mansion, a founding work of the Art Nouveau in Russia, was originally a St. Petersburg socialite's salon. Through 1917, it became the center of one of the most famous lawsuits in the country and the headquarters of the Bolsheviks as well. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the house was dedicated to a number of social service causes and as of the 1930s became what it is today, a museum dedicated to the revolutionary past. This saga of this building, with its extraordinary links to the central players of the Russian Revolution, thus allows us a rare stage on which to see the revolutionary era unfold.
This dissertation therefore speaks to the Russian Revolution and in particular, Russia's experience with modernity. While historians have tended to trace Russia;s steps to 1917 through the eyes of particular groups, in this work, I show that "modern society" was a vision multiple groups embraced, although they understood that term differently. Through the figures of this dissertation (aristocrats, architects, writers, lawyers, and revolutionaries alike), we see that a number of visions existed of what "modern society" should be. In my work, I bring all of these visions together to suggest that all of them played a role in bringing about the Russian Revolution as it developed. I show how these small stories, played out on the stage of the Kshesinskaia mansion, reflected the fall of one culture and the rise of another, premised entirely on the idea of service to the people. The Petersburg nobles, although united by the idea of service, believed too much in ritual and expectation to allow them to spontaneously change, en masse, to befit the expedience of a new industrial order. The artists and intelligentsia (represented here by the architects) sought to keep one foot in the patronage system of the imperial world and another in the new, international, professional vision of their field; because they were insistent on their role as servants to the people, they were not necessarily against the rise of a "People's Government." By looking at the courts of 1917, I demonstrate that the Provisional Government was inept and at points hypocritical in its application of the law, and ultimately undermined its own role as the guardian of civil rights. Meanwhile, just as the Provisional Government was contradicting its own values, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, created a truly accessible organization that offered the Russian people a solid vision of an organization, and later government, that desired to serve the people. Of all of these visions of modern society, it would be the Bolsheviks that would triumph, partly because they were able to create a credible argument, through their use of the spaces of the Kshesinskaia mansion, that they were indeed servants of the people.