Zenaïde Romanoff was born in Moscow. The youngest of four children, she was raised by her parents, the Pertzoffs, whose father was an engineer, entrepreneur and railway designer. After private studies, she was a home school teacher in Moscow and married the imperial prosecutor Savoysky at the age of 17 in 1915.
In 1917, like many others, she had to flee the revolution and its executions. Her parents' home was seized and occupied by Trotsky.
After many adventures, including two arrests with executions as a consequence (the first time she was saved by a former servant who became a Bolshevik cadre and let her escape in memory of the good relations with the family, and the second time thanks to the capture of the place of arrest by troops of the White Army), she was able to cross the Black Sea and set foot in Constantinople (Istanbul). After a divorce and a remarriage to Baron de Ligny Tandefelt, she stayed in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, where her son Steve (Mstislav) was born, before arriving in Paris and then in Nice, where she lived until 1931.
Afterwards, she divorced again and left for the Ivory Coast with her new husband Karpoff, an architect with the AOF railways, and lived in Abidjan, then in Saint-Louis du Sénégal. After the death of her husband in 1939, she settled in Dakar where she was secretary to Théodore Monod at the Institut d'Afrique and secretary to the director general of the BNCIA.
Zénaide then remarried Romanoff, a public works engineer, and left Dakar for Morocco in 1945. In 1952, following her husband, she left for Algeria, where she set up a topographic survey company.
Two events will mark this period of her life. Firstly, the death of her husband. Secondly, the crisis in Algeria forced her to leave Algiers in a hurry and to reside in Cherbourg, where she had found a post as secretary-translator in an organisation whose aim was to help persecuted Christians in the USSR by sending parcels, books and religious literature. This organisation was headed by Father Marie, from the Trappe de Brickebeque, former chaplain of the Free French Forces in England. In 1946, her son, who had moved to Martinique, offered her a studio in his villa. Since then, she has lived in Martinique and, as long as her health has allowed it, she has frequently travelled to France, the United States and Canada to see relatives and friends. She wrote a fascinating and quite extraordinary memoir covering the whole of her life, but for which there has been no publishing opportunity. At 100 years of age, Zenaïde Romanoff still lives in Fort-de-France with her family, in good health thanks to doctors, nurses and carers, and in good spirits thanks to family and friends.
