The Black Russian (20 page)

On October 25/November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd struck. Wearing a disguise, Lenin had slipped into the capital from his temporary refuge in Finland two days earlier and managed to convince his followers that the time had come to seize power. Red troops coordinated by Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s ablest assistant, occupied a number of strategic locations in the city. That night, Bolshevik-led soldiers, sailors, and factory workers attacked the Winter Palace, the former imperial residence where the Provisional Government was meeting. The small defense force in the palace, which consisted of several hundred military cadets and elements of a women’s battalion, was overcome after a few hours of resistance. The Bolsheviks
arrested
members of the government; Kerensky, who had become prime minister, had managed to escape earlier in a car borrowed from the United States embassy. The Bolshevik coup against the Provisional
Government succeeded with fewer people killed in Petrograd than after the tsar’s abdication in February.

In Moscow, by contrast, there was more serious resistance. On the morning after the Provisional Government fell, Bolshevik troops surrounded the Kremlin and were confronted by cadets from the city’s military academies and some Cossacks. Each side accused the other of illegitimacy and refused to back down. The Bolsheviks opened fire first. In the next several days, pitched battles raged across the city between Red units and those few that were still loyal to the
Provisional
Government. The situation quickly became so chaotic that the city appeared to descend into schizophrenia: people stood in lines to get their bread rations on one side of a square while cadets and Red troops were exchanging fire on the other. An Englishman recalled that railways, post offices, and other public institutions continued to function at the same time that heavy fighting was breaking out all across the city. Despite the danger, he risked venturing out one night and went to see Chekhov’s famous play
The Cherry Orchard
at the Moscow Art Theater, which was a few blocks from Maxim, but on the way home he had to duck for cover from machine-gun fire.

Frederick would have had good reason to worry about both of his families’ well-being and about his properties. By November 10, streetcars had stopped running and telephones were not working. Banks and businesses closed. Out of fear of being hit by bullets or shrapnel, people avoided leaving their homes except for necessities. Patrols of bellicose Bolshevik soldiers and rough-looking factory workers with rifles slung on pieces of rope began to appear on the city’s streets. In apartment buildings, members of residents’
committees
collected whatever handguns they could find and took turns guarding the entrances against marauding bands of armed men whose allegiance was uncertain; other residents slept fully clothed to be ready in case anyone tried to break in.

By the end of the week, scores of buildings in central Moscow had been badly damaged by rifle, machine-gun, and artillery fire,
including some of the most revered cathedrals in the Kremlin itself. As a horrified city dweller characterized it, the damage to Russia’s symbolic heart during this fratricidal fighting exceeded what
Napoleon’s
foreign invaders had caused in 1812. An American described what he saw outside his residence in the city center.

Between five thousand and seven thousand people had been killed. But on November 20, Moscow’s Military-Revolutionary
Committee
announced that it had won and that all the cadets and its other opponents had either surrendered or been killed.

The first weeks after the fighting stopped were an anxious time in Moscow. No one knew exactly what to expect from the Bolsheviks, but the fact that they had seized power in Petrograd by force and had used it indiscriminately throughout the city was an ominous sign. Nevertheless, people in Frederick’s world had little choice but to try to live as before, despite the widespread destruction, dislocations, soaring prices, and scanty food and fuel supplies. Maxim had escaped damage in the fighting, and the theater director who had leased it tried to
continue
with his old repertory—a hodgepodge of melodramas, comedies, lighthearted French song and dance numbers, and, in a gesture to the times, an occasional, ponderously serious play (this unappetizing mix would not survive for very long). Similarly, during the last months of 1917, Aquarium continued serving up its mostly high-minded fare as the official theater of the Moscow garrison. Since both places were still functioning and making money, so was Frederick.

However, as an especially harsh winter descended on Russia, the new regime began to reveal its fundamentally belligerent face, and the danger to Frederick and his ilk became apparent. The Bolsheviks’ most urgent task was to secure their grip on power by eliminating all external and internal threats to it. They would eliminate the external threat by getting Russia out of the Great War, and the internal threat by unleashing a new kind of war against entire classes of people they considered their enemies.

In the Bolsheviks’ Marxist worldview, the war that had engulfed Europe was being waged by “bourgeois capitalist” powers with selfish economic and geopolitical interests that had nothing to do with, and in fact were opposed to, the genuine needs of the workers and
peasants
. Thus, immediately after seizing control, the Bolshevik regime offered a cease-fire to the Germans, and on March 3, 1918, the two sides signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks agreed to give up one-quarter of what had been the Russian Empire’s
territory
, population, and arable land; three-quarters of its iron industry and coal production; and much else besides. The terms were brutal, but the Bolsheviks were now free to turn their attention to their enemies within.

Their identification of who these were might have struck
Frederick
as grotesquely familiar. Just as a black person could not escape racist categories in the United States, everyone in the new Soviet state was now defined by socioeconomic class; and despite the seeming differences, the Marxist and communist concept of “class” functioned, perversely, as a quasi-racial label. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, you were indelibly marked by what you did or had done for a living, and people with money, people who owned property or businesses, as well as the nobility, the clergy, the police, the judiciary, educators, army officers, and government bureaucrats—in short, all those
implicated
in maintaining or serving the old imperial regime—were on the wrong side of history. An American visitor to Russia at the time described the extreme forms that this attitude took.

Frederick’s origin as a black American would have done nothing to mitigate his class “sins.” The Bolsheviks hated the Americans, the French, and the British, believing that the Entente was trying to keep Russia in the war (which was true). And Frederick’s past oppression as a black man in the United States was trumped by his having become a rich man in Russia. In the end, he could no more escape how the new regime saw him than he could change the color of his skin.

The October Revolution also changed Frederick’s strained relations with Valli, and what had been a stable if awkward arrangement was transformed into a toxic mixture of the personal and the political. In the crazy inversion of Russian norms that the revolution caused, it was as if Valli were a white American woman who suddenly decided that her estranged husband was a “Negro.”

Frederick had known for over a year that she had taken a lover. This was a complication because Irma, Mikhail, and Olga
continued
to live with Valli in the big apartment at 32 Malaya Bronnaya Street; but considering how he had treated Valli himself, Frederick could not have cared all that much. Neither the lover’s name nor his occupation before the October Revolution is known, although he must have been an ardent supporter, because he emerged from it as a “Bolshevik Commissar,” in Frederick’s later characterization. As such, he had become a person of importance in Moscow’s new regime, and his involvement with Valli became dangerous. He could back up the animosity she felt for her husband with his political power.

It would not take long for Frederick to be confronted by Valli’s wrath. In addition to casting about for ways to accommodate himself to the new regime, he also began to search for a place where his
family
could escape the threats, restrictions, and shortages in Moscow. Everything suddenly changed when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In February, the Germans started their occupation of the Ukraine, and by mid-March they were in Odessa. What had been a disastrous loss of territory for the new Soviet regime proved a godsend for Russians with money and others who wanted to escape the Bolsheviks. Despite the fact that until recently the Germans had been a vilified enemy, many Russians now began to see them as the lesser evil. At a minimum, they could be relied upon to restore, in the occupied territory, a more familiar social order than what the Bolsheviks were imposing on the rest of Russia. Frederick could now get Elvira and his children out of harm’s way by sending them to the villa he owned in Odessa. Moreover, Elvira was German and had relatives in Berlin, and this would surely be to her advantage with the region’s military government.

But finding a place to go was just the beginning of the difficulties that Frederick and his family now had to overcome. The Bolsheviks did not want people to escape their rule, and anyone seeking to leave Moscow had to obtain a special permit. Frederick’s own application was peremptorily denied, and that did not bode well for his future. However, he managed to get permission for Elvira and the children by exploiting a loophole that applied to actors and other performers. He claimed that she was still active onstage and had to travel to cities in the south to practice her profession.

Additional obstacles still lay ahead. During the past year, train travel had deteriorated very badly throughout the country: schedules became irregular, tickets were scarce, the rolling stock was ramshackle, and delays because of engine breakdowns were frequent. Getting on a train in Moscow was also no guarantee that you would actually reach your destination. At every station, so many people would try
to climb on board that passengers had to fight to keep their places. However, Frederick persevered once again and was able to secure passage for all six. This left only the chore of gathering up the entire group from the two separate households.

On the eve of Elvira’s departure, Frederick went to his
apartment
on Malaya Bronnaya to fetch Mikhail and Irma. Valli was not expecting him. When he walked into the bedroom he was surprised to see that her lover was there with her. The scene left nothing to the imagination: “I ketched her upstairs of my eight-room flat, in baid wid one o’ dem commissars,” was how Frederick described it to an acquaintance later.

Valli was infuriated by Frederick’s sudden appearance as well as by his reason for coming to the apartment. Turning toward her lover, she began to goad him to avenge the humiliations that she had suffered at Frederick’s hands for years. This was not an idle threat: commissars at this time carried guns. Moreover, Frederick was not only an adulterous husband but also a class enemy. A hysterical scene followed, as he later described it in a letter: “the Woman forced her Bolshevik Lover to attempt to kill me and only my little Girl and my Son, who was a Child then too … saved me from beeing thus killed, because they screamed aloud and the Bolshevik let me go.”

During the ensuing confusion and in his haste to escape,
Frederick
managed to take only Mikhail with him. Irma remained in the apartment, and Frederick would never see her again. Whether she stayed with Valli willingly or was kept by her, and whether Valli kept Irma out of love or calculation, the little girl was the victim of the adults’ emotional battle. She would remain a pawn between the two for years after they parted.

Following the grotesque encounter with the commissar,
Frederick
realized that he had to put as much distance between himself and Valli as possible. This is when the radical revision of family laws, which the new regime introduced only two months after the revolution, played into his hands. In a coordinated series of steps, he
divorced Valli, married Elvira, and legalized the status of Fedya and Bruce; thereafter, Elvira always used “Thomas” as her surname. She and the four children then set out on their long, arduous journey to Odessa.

Frederick could now concentrate on trying to figure out what to do with his businesses. All of his actions in the early months of 1918 show that he did not expect the Bolsheviks and their policies to survive the year, even after they had dispersed the Constituent
Assembly
, a democratically elected body that was supposed to create a new representative government. In January 1918, an armed
rebellion
of “White” forces against the Bolsheviks had begun to brew in the Don Cossack lands in the southeast. In Moscow that spring, the Bolsheviks had to use artillery, armored cars, and heavy machine-gun fire to dislodge anarchist groups from the city center. There were even Russians who hoped that the Germans would ignore the
Brest-Litovsk
Treaty and occupy the rest of the country.