playing and the delusion that someday his late father's fortune would be returned to him. Lenin's New Economic Policy (1921–1928) provided for limited capitalism to help finance his new regime exhausted and debilitated by three years of civil war. Karinska opened a Tea Salon that became the meeting place of Moscow artists, intellectuals and government officials every afternoon at five o’clock. In the same complex she founded an haute-couture and a millinery atelier to dress the wives of the Soviet elite. She opened an antique store and an embroidery school where she taught the needle arts to the proletariat. Karinska's reasons for leaving Russia are multiple: (1) the death of Lenin in 1924 and the uncertainty of what was to come; (2) within weeks after Lenin's death the new regime nationalized her embroidery school and turned it into a factory to manufacture Soviet flags (in exchange, she was awarded the title of “Inspector of Fine Arts”); (3), importantly Mamontov, a chronic alcoholic was incapable of performing any kind of work and thus seen as symbol of bourgeois decadence; his arrest was imminent. Karinska devised a plan to save Mamontov. Supported by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister of Education and long time friend of her father, she proposed to take a large number of embroideries made by her students to exhibit in Western European cities as a “good will” gesture to demonstrate the great cultural advances that the young Soviet regime was making. The proposition was enthusiastically accepted across the high ranks, although Lunacharsky and others knew quite well what she was up to. With corruption widely practiced throughout the Soviet government, an exit visa was obtained for Mamontov who left immediately for Germany where he had cousins in exile. A few weeks later Karinska, Irina and Vladimir left together from Moscow station on a Berlin-bound train. Irina boarded the train whimpering under the weight of a huge chapeau. “Stop whining!” her mother would scold. Later the girl of 14 learned that the hat was filled with diamonds. Vladimir boarded the train with a suitcase filled with his Soviet school books, American hundred dollar bills, bought on the black market, hidden between the pages. Karinska boarded the train waving and blowing kisses to the crowd that came to bid her bon voyage. But the crates with her student's embroideries framed under glass had, hidden underneath each, antique embroideries sewn by the ladies-in-waiting to