The Black Russian (19 page)

The emotional abandon that Russians sought from the tango during the war, and the elation that they got from vodka and wine, found a new blood relative in drugs, especially cocaine. In certain urban circles cocaine became the path of choice to euphoric oblivion in the face of the hopeless problems swirling all around. And it quickly emerged as an emblem of decadence, of failing national spiritual health: the tides of battle on the fronts ebbed and flowed; ministers and courtiers intrigued; profiteers schemed. For many, daily life was becoming more difficult, and for others it seemed pointless.

“Cocainomaniacs,” as the addicts came to be called, were a common sight in Moscow’s theatrical world, and Frederick grew to know one of the most famous very well. Aleksandr Vertinsky, who performed in Maxim and would work for Frederick in
Constantinople
as well, became wildly popular at the end of 1915 for his songs of resignation in the face of life’s sadness and pain, as well as for their complement—escapist longing for exotic locales. A
well-known
example of his repertoire is “Kokainetka,” or “Little Cocaine Girl,” which dates from 1916 and laments “a lonely and poor young woman/Crucified on Moscow’s wet boulevards by cocaine.” (Later he would stage a dance on a related theme—the “Hashish Tango.”) On
stage Vertinsky dressed as Pierrot, the sad, naive clown of the Italian commedia dell’arte, whose heart is always broken by Columbine. His face powdered a deathly white, his eyes and eyebrows exaggeratedly made up with tragic black, and wearing crimson lipstick, he looked like a haunted character from another world.

By 1916, Frederick’s and Russia’s fates had diverged dramatically. Aquarium and Maxim were still thriving and money was pouring in. But his new homeland was succumbing to myriad diseases that were eating away its insides and that no one knew how to slow, much less cure. The country was bleeding men. Popular support for the disastrous war had plummeted and revolutionary agitation against the imperial regime was growing. Shortages of fuel and foodstuffs worsened. Workers struck against the high cost of living; strikes
included
those in such critical industries as the giant Putilov munitions factory in Petrograd, which was the largest in Europe and employed 30,000 men, the Nikolaev naval shipyards on the Black Sea, and the Donbas region in the Ukraine, with 50,000 coal miners. The
authorities
responded brutally by drafting the physically able and arresting and prosecuting the rest. When labor shortages led the government to conscript several hundred thousand Muslims in Turkestan and Central Asia to work in military factories near the front, a rebellion broke out and troops had to be dispatched to put it down by force, resulting in thousands of deaths.

But the most grotesque sign of the empire’s sickness was
Rasputin
, the self-styled “holy man” who, for nearly a decade, had had a cancerous grip on Tsaritsa Alexandra and, through her, on Nicholas II and the rest of the government. A semiliterate, cunning, and
libidinous
peasant, he combined greed with primitive mysticism and a beguiling manner that attracted sycophants and hypnotized the gullible. The empress was a painfully shy and haughty woman whose life was dominated by piety, spite, and frantic worry about the health
of her only son, Tsarevich Alexis, the heir to the throne and the most famous hemophiliac in history. As witnesses attest, it was Rasputin’s uncanny ability to calm the boy during episodes of life-threatening bleeding that made his mother believe in the “holy man’s” healing powers, and to follow his advice on everything else as well.

Rasputin’s notoriety in Russia and around the world inspired some contemporaries to invent meetings with him in order to spice up their own life stories. Jack Johnson succumbed to this temptation, according to a memoirist who also went on to claim that Frederick introduced Johnson to Rasputin—and at a court ball in Petrograd, no less. This could never have happened, as documentary evidence proves. But Frederick did know well several people who had to deal with Rasputin’s scandalous behavior in Moscow, when he came from Petrograd to close a tawdry business deal. On the night of March 26, 1915, Rasputin and his entourage went to Yar, which was still owned by Frederick’s old boss and mentor Aleksey Sudakov. The “holy man’s” escapades were legion, but on this occasion he managed to outdo himself. He was already drunk when his group occupied a private room. They ordered dinner, more drink, summoned a choir, and launched into a noisy revel. As always, Rasputin was the center of attention: he ordered the choir to sing his favorite songs; made the chorus girls do “cynical dances,” as the police report subsequently put it; performed Russian folk dances himself; and dragged some of the women onto his lap. Not forgetting his role as a “holy man,” he also scribbled notes urging them to “love disinterestedly” (meaning that they should yield to him because their love would be
sanctified
). When Sudakov heard what was going on he fell into a panic and tried to persuade other patrons that it was not actually Rasputin carousing upstairs but an imposter passing himself off as the
notorious
“friend” of the imperial family. Rasputin got wind of this and was so incensed that he started to prove his identity in the most unbridled ways possible—hinting obscenely about his relations with the empress, bragging that she had personally sewn the caftan he was
wearing, and, finally, dropping his trousers and exposing himself to the young women.

Outrage at Rasputin’s behavior and supposed influence played into the hands of his many enemies, and early in 1916 three
prominent
men, including the tsar’s first cousin, murdered him in Petrograd. In their own blundering and bloody way, the three had tried to save their country from one of the malignancies at its heart, although they had misconceived the scope and nature of the task. Corruption had already spread too deeply to be excised by the killing of any single man. But in contrast to the country’s ruling circles, the three had at least looked inward, which was the right direction.

During the last months of its life, the Russian Empire was being threatened from two directions simultaneously. The tsar, his
ministers
, and his top military commanders focused almost entirely on the external danger posed by the Central Powers and were
committed
above all else to a “victorious conclusion” of the war. As a result, they largely neglected the grave internal threat to the empire’s entire social and political order—the disaffection of large swaths of the population, including many troops at the front, the workers, and the peasants. The conditions were ripe for revolutionary groups to exploit the situation and to foment open rebellion.

In the end, the imperial regime’s blind pursuit of victory proved suicidal. Six months before the empire collapsed, the Russian army managed to gather itself up for an immense new effort and won its greatest victory of the war against Austria-Hungary, known as the “Brusilov Offensive.” In fact, some historians have characterized this as the single greatest military triumph of the Entente against the Central Powers and one of the deadliest battles in world history. But it was a classic Pyrrhic victory. The Russian army suffered such
staggering
casualties and desertions that it began to disintegrate. More than anything else, General Brusilov’s great success underscored the waste of men, wealth, and vast national potential that was Russia’s tragic fate during the Great War.

Back in Moscow, Frederick did not see the coming cataclysm. Even though every month it became more difficult to carry on as before because of shortages of food items, alcohol, electricity, fuel, and people, the variety theaters and restaurants were packed and profits kept pouring in. The only adjustments that Frederick made during these troubled times were driven, ironically, by his personal success. To free himself from the daily chore of attending to his properties, he transformed most of his active business interests into passive
investments
by leasing his theaters to other entrepreneurs. Concurrently, in a move without precedent in Moscow’s theater world, he generously rewarded some of his senior employees—the stage manager, the
accountant
, the head chef, and several maîtres d’hôtel—by transferring day-to-day control of the Aquarium garden’s multifaceted operation to them. However, he remained so optimistic about the future that all the leases he signed were for several years and the rents he demanded and received were high.

In fact, Frederick made his biggest investment in Moscow—and thus tied his fate to Russia’s more strongly than ever—in the last days of the Russian Empire. He had been scouting properties in Moscow for some time before he finally found one that suited him in terms of location, quality, size, and income. On February 16, 1917, he signed documents that made him the owner of a block of six adjoining buildings, with thirty-eight rental units of varying sizes, on one of the main spokes of the Moscow street wheel, at 2 Karetny Ryad Street. This location is less than a mile from the Kremlin, and, in an ironic twist, was (and still is) across the street from the Hermitage Garden, Aquarium’s only rival. He had paid 425,000 rubles, which would be about $7 million today.

In making the purchase, Frederick must have been amused by the unlikely coincidence that one of the former owners—a man
with two resonant titles: Prince Mikhail Mikhaylovich Cantacuzene, Count Speransky—had a prominent American connection. In 1899, he had married Julia Dent Grant, the granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union armies during the Civil War and eighteenth president of the United States. Julia had in fact been born in the White House during her grandfather’s presidency, and after her marriage she lived in Russia with her husband, who was a close aide to the tsar and eventually rose to the rank of general during the war. Who in Hopson Bayou could ever have imagined that a black native son would be involved in a property transaction in Moscow with a family like this?

With this purchase, Frederick completed the process of
investing
the money that he had made during the war. His focus on real estate reflected not only his desire to put roots even more deeply into his adopted country. His purchase at this moment in Russian history also shows a character trait that he shared with his parents: a conviction that he could prevail.

Frederick could scarcely have chosen a worse time to make his
biggest
investment in Moscow; exactly one week after he bought the apartment buildings from the Cantacuzene-Speranskys the first Revolution of 1917 broke out in Petrograd. On February 23 O.S. (March 8 in the West), hundreds of thousands of striking workers, who had been protesting shortages of bread and fuel for months in the outlying factory districts, started to pour into the city center to demonstrate their anger directly to the authorities. The tsar, who was still at the front, ordered the commander of the capital’s garrison to disperse the demonstrators, but the troops were so disaffected that they refused to fire on the crowds. Soon, soldiers and even some
officers
started to fraternize with the demonstrators and to join them; sailors of the Baltic fleet also mutinied. The insurgents began seizing control of sections of the city and attacking government buildings. On March 11, as the rebellion spread to Moscow and other cities, Nicholas ordered the Duma, which had been pressing him for change, to dissolve. Most members refused, and on the following day they announced the creation of a Provisional Government that consisted largely of liberal and progressive members; more radical elements
formed a second center of power—the Petrograd Soviet of
Workers
’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The tsar made a halfhearted attempt to return to Petrograd, but after learning that both of the empire’s capitals were in the hands of rebels and that he had no support from his generals, on March 2/15 he abdicated for himself and his son, Alexis, in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The next day, the latter abdicated in favor of the Provisional Government. As the historian Riasanovsky put it, the three-hundred-year-old Russian Empire died “with hardly a whimper.”

Throughout the country, news of the monarchy’s collapse was greeted with elation. Sculptures and images of the two-headed eagle—symbol of the monarchy—were torn down everywhere. In Moscow, after some initially tense confrontations between troops and the rebellious crowds in front of the City Duma building near Red Square, the soldiers joined the insurgents and tied red ribbons to their bayonets. Masses of people poured into the streets and squares in the city center carrying red banners in support of the revolution in Petrograd and singing the “Marseillaise.” On Sunday, March 25, a giant “Liberty Parade” consisting of several hundred thousand people wound through the heart of Moscow. An American who saw it was much impressed by the orderliness of the procession, the good cheer of the crowds that gathered to watch, the absence of police, and the easy mixing of the social classes. In a sign of the transitional nature of the time, the procession blended the new with the old—banners with revolutionary slogans such as “Land and the Will of the People” combined with prayer at the Chapel of the Iberian Mother of God at the entrance to Red Square. Part of the procession had a carnival atmosphere and the crowds especially enjoyed a circus troupe with a camel and elephant covered with revolutionary placards. Behind them came a wagon holding a black coffin labeled “The Old Order,” on top of which sat a grimacing dwarf wearing a sign that read “
Protopopov
”—the name of the reviled last imperial minister of the interior, who had been placed under arrest by the new regime.

But not all that happened in the spring of 1917 was festive or peaceful, and men of property like Frederick soon realized that the revolution endangered their well-being and livelihood. In Moscow, the police force had been disarmed and disbanded by the insurgents even before Nicholas abdicated. When, as one of its first acts, the
Provisional
Government announced broad civil liberties, it also granted an amnesty to all political prisoners, including terrorists; in Moscow, some two thousand thieves and murderers were released from prisons as well. A crime wave began in the city, with robberies in the streets and attacks on homes and businesses. The new city militia, composed primarily of student volunteers, proved ineffective, and householders were forced to organize their own associations for mutual protection. This was but an early harbinger of the greater anarchy to come.

Another early decree with fateful consequences for the entire country was “Order Number One,” issued by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the second center of power in the capital. This soviet (“council”) proclaimed that it had the right to countermand any of the Provisional Government’s orders regarding military matters, and that every unit down to the size of a company should elect soldiers’ committees to decide how it would act in any given situation. This “democratic” order abolished the imperial army’s hierarchical command structure, as was intended. But it also sounded the death knell for the army, which, although greatly weakened by early 1917, was still the only organization left in Russia that might have been able to resist the destructive social forces that were now beginning to gather hurricane strength.

By this time, the patriotic upsurge of the war’s early phase had been long forgotten. Soldiers wanted peace, and large-scale
desertions
increased. Some units mutinied against their officers and beat or even shot them. Others began to fraternize with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians across the front lines. However, the Provisional Government remained blind to the reality at the front, and believing it had a debt of loyalty to the Entente persisted in trying to whip up
enthusiasm for yet another offensive, with the stated goal of nothing less than “decisive victory.” This fatal gap between the ineffectual government and the masses of soldiers, who were largely drawn from the peasantry and the lower classes, was reproduced throughout the country. The peasants had no interest in the war and wanted land reform. Workers wanted better wages, shorter hours, and control over their factories. City dwellers wanted an end to the shortages of food, fuel, and consumer goods. In a hopeful gesture of support for the Russian war effort, first the United States and then the other members of the Entente recognized the Provisional Government within a few days after it was formed. But the new regime failed to win the support of its own people, and that failure would be its doom.

Theatrical life in Moscow started to adapt to the country’s new
political
reality very quickly, but many of the earliest changes were
superficial
and most activities went on as before, with profits continuing to roll in. The city’s new “commissar,” who replaced the
governor-general
, renamed the former “imperial” theaters “Moscow State Theaters.” Mikhail Glinka’s superpatriotic nineteenth-century opera
A Life for the Tsar
was dropped from the repertory of the Bolshoy Theater. By contrast, with the elimination of the imperial censorship and a marked decrease in the influence of the Orthodox Church on public life, lewd and irreverent plays began to be staged widely. An especially popular genre ridiculed Rasputin and his relations with the imperial family, and included such titles as
Rasputin’s Happy Days, Grishka’s Harem
, and
The Crash of the Firm “Romanov and Co.”

Despite such iconoclasm and the incendiary revolutionary
rhetoric
resounding everywhere, many venerable tsarist-era institutions continued to function by inertia during 1917, and it is striking that Frederick chose this time to join one of the most archaic. On June 10/23, 1917, he officially became a Moscow “Merchant of the First Guild” and his name was duly entered in the register for “Gostinnaya
Sloboda” (the “Merchant Quarter”), a Moscow place-name dating to medieval times that now referred simply to a specific merchants’ association. He had included Olga, his oldest child, who had recently turned fifteen, in his application as well.

The designation that Frederick received had been established in the early eighteenth century and had originally entitled the bearer to some important privileges, such as freedom from military service, from corporal punishment, and from the head tax. The designation was also an honorific and gave its bearers an elevated social status. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the designation was little more than an anachronism, although its benefits were not without charm: merchants of the first guild were in principle entitled to attend the tsar’s court and wear an official uniform, including a sword. (By the time of Frederick’s enrollment this privilege had become academic, of course; Nicholas had been placed under house arrest in one of his former palaces.) Nonetheless, for Frederick this was a sign that he had risen to the top of his profession and that his Russian peers recognized his position. Olga’s inclusion demonstrates that he expected her, and probably his other children when they were older, to participate in running the businesses that he had established.

Once again, however, Frederick’s timing could scarcely have been worse. By becoming a merchant of the first guild, he was, in
effect
, proudly confirming that he was a prosperous bourgeois capitalist. Although this class had been an honorable one in old Russia, it would soon become anathema in the growing revolutionary storm. Frederick was on the verge of discovering that he was no longer merely caught in the flow of history; its forces were beginning to turn against him.

Calamitous historical events accumulated rapidly in the second half of 1917. A few weeks after the collapse of the tsarist regime, the Germans decided to aggravate the revolutionary fever that had gripped Russia by shipping Vladimir Lenin, the willful and unscrupulous leader of the
radical Bolshevik Communist Party, to Petrograd from Switzerland, where he had been in exile. In the ensuing months, Lenin and his followers did all they could to undermine the weak and increasingly unpopular Provisional Government. They called for Russia’s
immediate
withdrawal from the war, the control of factories by workers, the expropriation of large estates, and the distribution of land to the
peasants
. All these goals increasingly appealed to the Russian masses, but the Provisional Government could not or would not support them. In July, an attempt by the minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, to launch a new offensive against Germany in Galicia led to an insurrection and the collapse of what was left of the Russian army. At the end of August, there was an attack on the discredited Provisional
Government
from the right by the army’s commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov, who became involved in a coup conspiracy. The specter of a counterrevolution now rallied the radical parties and the city’s
workers
in support of the Provisional Government, with the result that the attempted coup dissipated. However, the only group that gained from the episode was the Bolsheviks, and by the end of September 1917, they had become the strongest military faction in the capital.

In the summer of 1917 Frederick decided that he would have to come out of his self-imposed role as a passive investor. The political climate was drifting increasingly to the left and he would have to find a way to adapt. His solution was to strike a deal with the Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies, which was the local version of the Petrograd Soviet that had vied for authority with the Provisional Government ever since the February Revolution. The plan was to establish a new “soldiers’ theater” at Aquarium and to stage performances of a kind that had never appeared there before. Rather than light
entertainment
, the focus would be on famous serious dramatic works,
classical
music, and operas. The aim of the plan was in keeping with the noblest ideals of the revolution: to democratize access to high culture
by educating soldiers, who, as the argument went, had been kept in a state of ignorance by the dark forces of the old regime. Now, they would be exposed to the best, “strictly democratic” works that had been created in Russia and abroad, including plays by Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, Schiller, Ibsen, and Shakespeare; operas by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky; and concerts of symphonic and chamber music. An initiative like this was not going to bring in as much money as a French or Viennese bedroom farce, but it was clearly better than leaving the theater empty. Frederick appears to have been the first prominent entrepreneur in the city to align himself with the new order by leasing his theater to an overtly populist, revolutionary group. His reason was surely hard-nosed pragmatism rather than politics. Maxim remained leased to another entrepreneur during the fall of 1917, but without any major changes in its traditional repertory.