The Black Russian (17 page)

Nightlife in Moscow went on, although nothing about it could remain quite the same against the background of the Great War, which kept unfolding with grim relentlessness. On the Russian front, the fighting took on a character very different from how it was being conducted in the West. After an initial, rapid, wheeling advance through Belgium into France in August and early September of 1914, the Germans were stopped just thirty-five miles outside Paris. It was the fatal Russian incursion into East Prussia, ending in the Battle of Tannenberg, that had helped save the French capital. Thereafter, for much of the rest of the war, the western front congealed into
brutal trench warfare with relatively little movement but hecatombs of deaths along a curved line that ran from the English Channel to Switzerland. In the east, the war was more wide-ranging and
mobile
, and even more bloody. After Tannenberg, in early September 1914, Russian armies four hundred miles to the south attacked the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, seized an important fortress, laid siege to another, and captured over a hundred thousand
prisoners
. For much of the war, this province would be the site of massive retreats and advances by both sides, with horrific losses every time the scythe of war changed the direction of its swing.

However, not all evidence of the war’s carnage came from
dispatches
about events hundreds of miles away. As the mobilization of Russia’s enormous army grew—it would eventually reach 15
million
men—actors and other theater workers in Aquarium, Maxim, and other venues began to be called up. Men in military uniforms appeared everywhere in Moscow—on the streets, in theaters, and on streetcars. Refugees escaping the battles on the empire’s
western
frontier started to arrive as well; masses of the wounded filled hospitals and clinics; trainloads of Austrian prisoners of war passed through to points farther east.

But the biggest change for those in businesses like Frederick’s was prohibition. Although never announced as the official law of the land, as it was in the United States in 1920, Russia’s “dry law” began as a series of restrictions on sales of alcoholic beverages during
mobilization
leading up to the war and ended with the tsar’s “wish” that the sale of alcoholic beverages be stopped throughout the empire for the war’s duration. The actual regulation of sales was left to the discretion of local governments, although all of them rapidly signed on. Moscow was the first to restrict sales by restaurants in accordance with their classification; then came Petrograd, and finally the rest of the country.

At first, the effects appeared to be dramatic. Some Russian and foreign observers concluded that the country’s population had
genuinely embraced sobriety. The army’s mobilization seemed to take half the expected time because the recruits were not drunk when they showed up, as they had been during the war with Japan. “Drunkenness vanished in Russia,” proclaimed the
New York Tribune
; “there never has been anything like it in the history of the world,” reported an excited Englishman living in Moscow; “one of the greatest reforms in the history of the world,” exclaimed another. The Russian Duma, or parliament, received an official request from the United States Senate for information about the practice of prohibition, and an American delegation traveled all the way to the provincial city of Samara to investigate matters there.

But—as Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev is reported to have
proclaimed
as far back as the tenth century—“Russia’s joy is to drink,” and the old habits quickly reasserted themselves. The highly unpopular ban quickly dissolved in an ocean of evasion, corruption, and
bootlegging
, just as it would in the United States a few years later. With his decade and a half of experience in Moscow’s restaurants, cafés, and bars, Frederick would not have been surprised.

Russians began to take steps to avoid the restrictions even
before
they were fully in place. In mid-November 1914, for example, an American in Petrograd saw thousands of men, women, and even children lining up outside liquor shops as early as 4 a.m. during a driving snowstorm because that was the last day when they could buy wine and beer before prohibition took effect. In Moscow after prohibition, residents had only one legal method of obtaining any alcoholic beverage, whether it was vodka or wine—with a doctor’s prescription, in a limited amount, and one time only. However, what was supposed to be a controlled trickle soon became a flood as the “medicinal” spigot was wrenched open by bribes; illegal stills and moonshine production began to proliferate as well.

If you had money and knew where to go in Moscow, you could buy anything. Frederick’s well-heeled clients expected nothing but the best, and it was his ability to satisfy them during prohibition that
made him a millionaire several times over in the short span of three years. In upscale places like Aquarium and Maxim, the owner’s normal practice was to pay off the police officials in charge of enforcing the ban on liquor sales. Such bribes could be substantial. For example, a certain Richard Fomich Zhichkovsky, the police superintendent in the district where Aquarium was located, and whose palm Frederick doubtless greased, accumulated enough money to be able to buy an automobile for the two mistresses he had, as well as a pair of horses and a two-seater motorcycle.

Some eating and drinking establishments in Moscow took the trouble to maintain outward appearances by serving alcoholic
beverages
in pitchers or in bottles that had originally held fruit drinks and mineral water. Waiters also brought vodka to the table in teapots, and clients drank it out of porcelain cups. But other restaurants flouted the law and sold everything openly. Because of shortages, prices
skyrocketed
and bootlegging became highly profitable. In 1915, a bottle of French champagne in a fancy café chantant could cost as much as $1,000 in today’s money. The sale of vodka had been a Russian government monopoly prior to prohibition, earning the imperial treasury enormous sums. Part of these huge profits also started to pour into private hands as distillers now sold their bootleg vodka at several thousand percent over the cost of the raw ingredients, and with no government middleman. Even Nicholas II was reputed to have ignored the prohibition he initiated and continued to enjoy his cognac with lemon, although, in a concession to the times, when he and members of his retinue visited the front, they eschewed crystal glasses for silver cups.

The result of this freewheeling atmosphere was that a year after the war began, word spread in Moscow that Frederick was enjoying an “unheard of success” in Aquarium and “harvesting laurels and silver rubles” in “colossal” amounts. What made this possible, in spite of the soaring prices of drink, was the new money that appeared in Russia because of the war and the new, frenzied atmosphere of Moscow’s
nightlife. As soon as mobilization began, well-soaked send-offs for officers became obligatory in the better restaurants. Such occasions, with bravura regimental marches booming from the orchestras, were clearly not the time to skimp on toasts to the victory of Russian arms over the “hordes of Teutonic barbarians.” Later, as reports of
appalling
losses began to accumulate, a nervous and febrile note crept into such celebrations, but they also became more urgent.

As the war ground on, new sorts of moneyed clients started to appear in the fashionable and expensive establishments as well. Some were in the military, although they were “heroes” of the home front rather than of the front lines—quartermasters who had
successfully
skimmed tidy sums from the torrents of supplies that passed through their hands; military doctors who sold exemptions from the draft to the sons of rich families. And then, as in all wars, there were swarms of businessmen making money hand over fist from contracts to supply the army with everything from boots and canned meat to high explosives. Maxim especially reconfirmed its status during these years as “The Favorite Place of Muscovites,” a slogan that Frederick adopted in his numerous advertisements.

In January 1915, in the dead of a bitterly cold winter, Muscovites’
attention
became riveted on another massive swing of the scythe of war in Galicia. The Austro-Hungarian armies launched a counteroffensive in the Carpathian Mountains against Russian forces. However, the attack failed miserably and by March the advancing Russians had captured the enormous fortress Przemyśl, thus potentially aligning their armies for a march through the mountain passes toward
Budapest
and Vienna, the twin capitals of the Hapsburg Empire.

There were also dramatic events to the south that Muscovites followed with a mix of anxiety and excitement. A second front had opened for Russia at this time, in the Caucasus Mountains and on the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire was an old enemy that had
recently allied itself with the Central Powers. Two months after the war began, Turkish warships shelled cities on the south coast of
Russia
, including Odessa. The great prize that beckoned in this part of the world was Constantinople. If Russia could take this ancient city, to whose Byzantine Christian past the Russians felt a visceral tie, it would have free passage from the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean, and from there to all the oceans of the world. (In fact, in a secret treaty planning the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the war, France and Great Britain formally promised Constantinople and the Straits to Russia.)

Muscovites responded to the news from both fronts with an outpouring of patriotic generosity. In early February, leaders of the city’s theaters organized a campaign they called “For the Russian Army, from the Artists of Moscow.” Frederick played a visible role in the weeklong series of benefit concerts and performances to
collect
gifts for the troops, and Maxim was mentioned prominently in the press. The campaign began with a solemn prayer service in the enormous, white marble Christ the Savior Cathedral south of the Kremlin. (Stalin dynamited it in 1931, using much of its decorative stone to line the walls of Moscow’s new subway stations; it was not rebuilt until 2000.) The week ended with a gala show in the Great Hall of Moscow’s Nobility Club, located on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street near the Bolshoy Theater, during which performers from all of Moscow’s theaters and circuses appeared onstage. The campaign was a resounding success and won the actors and the theaters that sponsored them a great deal of public appreciation.

Frederick would need this and any other goodwill he
accumulated
when two months later he got into trouble with the city
authorities
. In April 1915 Maxim was shut down, ostensibly for letting in Moscow high school students and law students from Petrograd. As in the case of selling alcoholic beverages despite prohibition, there was too much profit to be made to take age and other legal
restrictions
overly seriously: fines and closures were often just the cost of
doing business. Frederick certainly did not break stride because of the temporary problems with Maxim, whose winter season was coming to an end anyway. Rather, as a journalist reported, he continued to “prepare energetically” for Aquarium’s summer season, which was only a few weeks away. The coming spring was also heralded by a joyous event in his personal life—the birth on April 25 of his and Elvira’s second son, whom they gave his father’s middle name, Bruce.

However, other threats loomed. Frederick’s prominence and success attracted not only greedy officials looking to wet their beaks but also envious competitors who wanted to humble and hurt him. That same April Frederick came under attack from Andrey Z.
Serpoletti
(whose real surname was Fronshteyn). He was the pugnacious editor of a Moscow theatrical journal, also a variety stage satirist, and was always looking out for the interests of his fellow performers—as well as for opportunities to settle scores with old enemies. He complained that directors of variety theaters were adding to their soaring profits from illegal liquor sales by cutting the salaries of the actors they hired and targeted Frederick specifically, making fun of his broken Russian.

If this initial attack of Serpoletti’s was relatively mild, the one he initiated a year later was dangerous, especially in the intensely xenophobic atmosphere that had developed in Moscow by that time. What Serpoletti wrote in the guise of a malevolent short story is also the only unequivocal attack that Frederick was subjected to
as
a black man in Russia. However, it is noteworthy that even in this case he was not attacked primarily
for
being black.

Trying to be witty, Serpoletti first throws some silly camouflage over Frederick’s name and business, and then provides an encoded summary of Frederick’s biography, which he obviously knows well. This “citizen,” as Serpoletti pointedly calls him, who was “despised” in his native “Egyptian Colonies” (these are allusions to Frederick’s application, his African blood, the status of blacks in the United States, and the nation’s origin as English colonies), came to Russia
from Paris as a lackey; “got fat” on Russian bread; benefited from Russians’ good nature; made a lot of money; and became a captain in a restaurant, a maître d’hôtel, and finally the owner of an entertainment garden. Serpoletti’s main point is that despite such humble origins and “undeserved” success—which Serpoletti bitterly envied—Frederick “puts on airs because of his position” and assumes a “negro-
dully-arrogant
” (“negrityanski-tuponadmenno”) attitude toward Russian artists, whom, moreover, he calls “pigs.” Then comes Serpoletti’s final, vicious thrust—an accusation that was as dangerous to make in Russia during World War I as was calling someone a “communist” in the United States in the 1950s: Frederick is “great pals with foreigners in general and with Germans in particular.” Despite all this
scaffolding
, the reason for Serpoletti’s animus is clear: Frederick supposedly preferred to hire foreign performers for Aquarium and Maxim rather than native Russians (including Serpoletti and his protégés).