The Black Russian (21 page)

Frederick began a series of determined efforts to adapt to the new trends as much as he could and to save what he had created. His lessee had by now abandoned Maxim and Frederick tried to revive its old style and programs. He signed a new lease to rent its theater for a highly optimistic term of five years and an impressive seasonal fee of 105,000 rubles. Despite the fact that Aquarium’s winter
theater
had been taken over by the Moscow garrison, in January 1918 Frederick signed a new deal with the entrepreneur Boris Evelinov to stage operettas and farces in both of Aquarium’s theaters during the coming summer. Evelinov paid Thomas a very substantial advance of 175,000 rubles—roughly $3 million in today’s currency—a hefty wager that they would be making even more money in the future.

Within weeks, however, virtually all of Frederick’s hopes would prove to be chimeras. By March, the Bolshevik regime’s wave of
theater
takeovers reached Frederick and he was forced to abandon his
properties. Maxim’s main theater was nationalized and given over to a succession of theatrical companies with higher artistic aims than the kind of entertainment in which Frederick had specialized. All that he could recoup for himself was one of the smaller spaces in the building, where he was allowed to open a simple dining room that would provide cheap meals, at three rubles apiece, to theatrical workers and actors who were members of professional unions. This was a precipitous drop for someone who had presided for years over some of the city’s most renowned restaurants. The final ignominy came when Frederick was hired as the director of what had been his own theater.

The situation with Aquarium was initially more complicated and confusing, but it ended the same way. After some vacillation on the part of the new regime, Frederick and Boris Evelinov’s plans came to naught. The Bolshevik regime, which managed to combine bloodlust with prudery, decided against allowing Frederick and
Evelinov
to stage their “bourgeois” risqué farces and frivolous operettas.

After this failure, they made one final attempt to find a niche for themselves in the only world they knew and came up with the idea of a summer season of classical ballet at Aquarium. This was in keeping with the “cultural and enlightening” function that
revolutionary
theater was now supposed to have for the benefit of soldiers and their ilk. It was here that Frederick’s well-honed sense of theatricality emerged again, although for the very last time in Moscow. He knew which ballets were popular because short performances by famous ballerinas were staples of the variety stage. Frederick suggested that
Giselle
, a well-known nineteenth-century French romantic ballet, would be a certain success. He was right, and this production of
Giselle
remained on the Aquarium stage for several years after he had fled from Moscow.

The nationalization of Maxim and Aquarium was just the beginning of the changes sweeping through Moscow. Frederick had now
gotten
caught in an historical rip current that was threatening to pull him under. The country was moving in directions that no one could have imagined. In keeping with Marx’s proclamation that a
communist
revolution signaled the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of private property, the Bolsheviks systematically dismantled all the social and economic foundations of the Russian Empire. They eliminated former ranks and titles; they gave control of businesses and factories to committees of workers; they decreed that peasants should break up landowners’ estates. Foreign trade was made into a national monopoly; banks and church property were nationalized; the old judicial system was replaced by revolutionary tribunals and “people’s courts”; education and entertainment were placed under strict ideological controls. Shortly after their coup, the Bolsheviks had established the “Extraordinary Commission to Combat
Counterrevolution
, Sabotage, and Speculation”—the notorious political police that became known by its Russian abbreviation, Cheka, and that initiated a reign of state terror lasting the entire Soviet period of Russian history. After the Constituent Assembly was disbanded in January, all political parties were declared counterrevolutionary, including those that had originally allied themselves with the
Bolsheviks
. On January 31, 1918, the government marked a new era by adopting the New Style (N.S.) calendar.

This revolutionary transformation of the country was not meant to be impersonal or peaceful: in Lenin’s words, the newly empowered proletariat’s mandate was to “rob the robbers.” The peasants and workers took this literally and in cities as well as the countryside began a campaign of confiscating and pillaging wealthy homes and estates, businesses, and churches. The boundary between state-sponsored expropriation and armed robbery had disappeared.

Many Muscovites suffered confiscations, thefts, and extortions at the hands of Red troops and the Cheka. Residential properties throughout the city were seized as the new regime saw fit, with
owners
and tenants often thrown out onto the street and members of the
new order moving into their houses and apartments. This was very likely the fate of Frederick’s upscale apartment buildings on Karetny Ryad Street, but Valli’s commissar could have shielded her in the big apartment on Malaya Bronnaya.

Like all other members of his class, Frederick was at risk of being physically attacked anywhere. Bolshevik soldiers in gray overcoats and shaggy fur hats skulking in dead-end streets and alleyways would target likely apartments and suddenly burst in, ostensibly to search for army officers on the run or for concealed foodstuffs, but often just to rob the inhabitants. Venturing out at night for any reason became especially dangerous. In mid-March on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, just down the street from Maxim, a popular actress was robbed of two expensive fur coats in which she was going to perform that evening. The same month, six armed men walked into the popular restaurant Martyanych and robbed all the patrons of several hundred thousand rubles’ worth of money and jewelry. No one even attempted to
protest
because there was no recourse; if victims tried calling the local police station, they were likely to be told: “They acted on the basis of the law. If you resist—we’ll arrest you!”

One of Frederick’s business acquaintances, the theatrical
entrepreneur
Sukhodolsky, was a prominent victim. In early March, a group of fifteen men pulled up outside his home in a well-to-do neighborhood, blocked all the entrances so that no one could escape, drew weapons, and forced their way into his apartment. After
ransacking
it, they beat up Sukhodolsky and his wife and left with 24,000 rubles and other valuables. The couple were lucky to have survived.

The regime’s efforts to redistribute wealth were not restricted to sending out marauding bands to attack individuals in their homes. When the first wave of bank seizures by the Bolsheviks failed to
generate
the money they wanted ($100 billion to $150 billion in today’s currency) to consolidate their power internally and to start projecting it abroad, where they hoped to ignite a worldwide revolution, they turned to the contents of private bank safe-deposit boxes. In Moscow
alone by the summer of 1918 they confiscated the contents of 35,493 safes, which yielded half a ton of gold, silver, and platinum bullion; some 700,000 rubles in gold, silver, and platinum coin; 65 million tsarist rubles; 600 million rubles in public and private bonds; and large sums in foreign currencies. This was only a fraction of the total number of safes in the city; the others were cracked later.

By the summer of 1918, Frederick was determined to escape from Moscow. Many people he knew well were leaving for the south,
including
his former business partner Tsarev, who had rented, for the winter, a theater in Kiev, which was under German occupation. In early June, the Moscow government announced a ban on middlemen in the city’s theaters, which deprived Frederick of his job as
director
of a nationalized Maxim. Cholera and typhus began to spread in the city as health and sanitary conditions deteriorated. In July, fighting broke out when the Socialist Revolutionaries assassinated the German ambassador in an attempt to scuttle the peace treaty with the Germans, and then tried to start an uprising by seizing key positions throughout the city. The Bolsheviks brought in troops and quickly crushed the rebels, but they also exploited the occasion to consolidate their power further. Later the same month, news reached Moscow that Nicholas II and his wife, son, and four daughters had been executed by a local soviet in Yekaterinburg in the distant Ural Mountains.

The only livelihood Frederick had left was the cheap restaurant that he had been allowed to open in part of the Maxim building. Running a restaurant of any kind at this time in Moscow required connections or ingenuity because normal wholesale distribution was in complete disarray. The city was near famine, with rationing of basic foodstuffs and soaring prices on the black market. This is when small-scale entrepreneurs who came to be known as “sackers” (“meshochniki”) emerged to partially fill the gap. Crowds of peasants
started coming into the city from outlying villages with sacks of
locally
produced food—flour, baked bread, butter, cereals, eggs—which they bartered for manufactured goods that could still be found in the city’s black market, such as head scarves, calico, thread, sugar, soap, and matches. Hungry city dwellers made the same trip in reverse. Bolshevik guards saw the trade as a form of illicit speculation and tried to stop it, but the need in the city was great and the price
discrepancies
between the city and the countryside were large, making the risks both necessary and profitable. Inevitably, train stations in Moscow became one of the main meeting places for buyers and sellers. This is where Frederick was able to get the provisions he needed for his restaurant and how he was also able to plot his escape from the city.

Frederick fled from Moscow in August 1918, when he learned that he was slated for arrest by the Cheka and that his life was in danger. Some years later, he told the story to a tourist from Texas, who was so impressed that he wrote it up for a newspaper after he got home. He summarized how Frederick’s work at his restaurant

Thomas’s trip would have been more dangerous than Elvira’s because he was traveling illegally. He could be arrested on the spot by any Bolshevik soldier, official, or member of the Cheka who might want to check his papers, although even without official permission to leave, Frederick could buy any document he needed if he had the cash; in 1918, the going rate for a passport from a police station in Moscow was around 1,200 rubles. After one got onto a train, it was a matter of luck what sort of trip it would be. Frederick was taken in by a friend who may have had his own compartment; this
implies that the friend had influence or connections—travelers with neither had to manage as best they could. What happened during the journey south also depended on one’s luck. Some trains made it from Moscow to the border of German-occupied Ukraine in only a couple of days, even though there were long stops at intermediate stations. However, other trains heading south were blocked at remote road crossings by bands of armed men who were either Bolsheviks or criminal gangs—it was frequently hard to tell which—and who would open fire on the cars to chase everyone out; they would then loot the passengers’ belongings before letting them back on.
Conditions
on the trains themselves were miserable: they were not only overcrowded but dilapidated and unsanitary; windows were broken; theft was rampant; food and water were hard to get; and stops at stations, which were usually pillaged, failed to provide relief. Young women traveling alone were especially at risk.

Passengers who reached the frontier of German-occupied Ukraine typically felt a mixture of elation and resentment. On the one hand, they were escaping the Bolsheviks. But on the other, the Germans acted like arrogant conquerors and herded disembarking passengers across the border with little wooden switches, as if they were farm animals. Officers checked the passengers’ papers at
tedious
length. In an attempt to stop the spread of typhus, influenza, smallpox, and other diseases, the travelers were sent off for days of quarantine in hideous and filthy temporary barracks before being allowed to continue on their way.

Although the act of crossing the border into German territory
immediately
removed the class stigma and the threats that had dogged Frederick on the Bolshevik side, new difficulties would have appeared at every step, beginning with his having to insist that he was Russian
and not American (he would soon find it necessary to claim the
opposite
). The United States had been at war with the Central Powers since April 1917 and an American entering their territory would have to register as an enemy alien and would be their nominal prisoner. Frederick’s appearance and the way he spoke English would give him away to any German who had ever met other American blacks.

Odessa was also a dangerous place for anyone who was rich or looked rich. When the Germans and Austrians occupied southern Russia, they set up a puppet state in the Ukraine, including Odessa, which they garrisoned with thirty thousand troops. Their presence put an end to the reign of terror against the “bourgeoisie” that the Bolsheviks had unleashed in the city after their October takeover. But not all the Bolsheviks had fled: some went underground instead, plotting how to expel the occupiers and their local allies, and waging a persistent, low-grade guerrilla war that marked daily life in Odessa.

As in Moscow, the Bolsheviks had thrown open all the prisons in Odessa, and several thousand thieves and murderers had spilled out onto the streets. Thus reinforced, the city’s notorious criminal gangs—which in their larger-than-life brazenness were comparable to the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s—instituted their own reign of terror against the city’s inhabitants, whom they burglarized, robbed, and murdered on the streets, in their homes, and at their businesses.

Odessa was especially dangerous at night. A prominent lawyer who risked walking to the well-known London Hotel late one night counted 122 gunshots from various directions during the twelve minutes that he was outside. Such firing lasted all night long and it was hard to tell who was shooting at whom—Bolsheviks at soldiers or criminals at barricaded home owners.

Expensive villas like Frederick’s were typically in outlying, sparsely populated areas and would have been easy prey for thieves. Frederick was also sufficiently well known to have been mentioned in local newspapers when he arrived, together with other notable entrepreneurs and entertainers from Moscow and Petrograd, and
this publicity increased his chance of becoming a target. Between Bolsheviks on the one hand, who were still eager to finish settling accounts with the “bourgeoisie,” and traditional thieves on the other, he would have found it prudent to move himself and his family to the city center, where there was at least some military protection and safety in numbers.

But even with the threats swarming around them, Odessites were still free in ways that had become impossible in the Bolshevik north. The Germans and Austrians had no interest in establishing a radically different social and economic order and thus largely left the local population to its own initiatives. As a result, the city’s residents could pursue all their favorite pastimes and forms of dissipation, which they did with a feverish zeal that contemporaries likened to a feast in time of plague.

During the day, the handsome streets overflowed with polyglot southern crowds. Well-dressed people filled the stores, restaurants, and popular cafés like Robinat and Fanconi, which also doubled as exchanges for crowds of speculators trading currencies, cargoes from abroad, abandoned estates in Bolshevik territory—anything of value. At night, people flocked to theaters, restaurants, cafés chantants, and gambling dens, as well as to dives specializing in sex or drugs. They threw money around as if it had lost all value, trying to grab as much pleasure as they could and to forget the horrors of recent years as well as those still lurking outside. As the champagne corks popped and singers warbled indoors, businesses and home owners alike bolted their iron shutters and locked their entrance doors. The city center took on an eerily empty appearance late at night, as if the entire population had died out. The sudden noise of a crowd leaving a theater or cinema and scattering rapidly broke a silence that was otherwise punctuated only by sporadic gunshots. Cabs were hard to find and drivers demanded enormous fares to venture out, forcing people to take special
precautions
in case they had to walk any distance. One naval officer recalled being instructed about how to behave: if you saw someone on the
street, and especially two or three people together, cross over to the other side immediately and take the safety off your revolver; if anyone follows you, open fire without warning.

This is the world in which Frederick lived for nine months, until April 1919. What did he do in Odessa at this time? Among the refugees were many entrepreneurs and performers from Moscow’s theater world whom he knew, including the singers Isa Kremer and Alexander Vertinsky, as well as Vera Kholodnaya—Russia’s first star of the silent screen. He also had numerous contacts among Odessa’s entrepreneurs and theater owners, with whom he had done business since 1916. It would have been natural and easy for him to get
involved
in running a café chantant, theater, or restaurant, especially because he had always worked with partners in Moscow, and new establishments were being opened everywhere. It is likely that in addition to his villa Frederick had some money and other assets in Odessa that had escaped expropriation in Moscow. Despite the regime changes in the city during the past year, a number of private banks had managed to stay in operation through the Bolshevik period and would continue to function as late as April 1919. What is certain is that like most other refugees in Odessa he was still “sitting on his suitcases,” in the phrase of the time, and waiting for the Bolsheviks to fall or be pushed out so that he could return to Moscow and reclaim what was his.

Everything suddenly changed after November 11, 1918. On that day, at eleven in the morning in a forest near Paris, Germany surrendered to the Allies and the Great War finally ended. Shortly thereafter, as the armistice agreement stipulated, the Germans started to evacuate the territories they had occupied, including Odessa.

Then came news that filled the refugees from the north of Russia with joy. An Allied naval squadron had arrived in Constantinople and was heading for Odessa; the French were going to land an army in
the city; White army forces would gather in the resulting enclave to start a crusade against the Bolsheviks, whom the French saw as the Germans’ stepchildren and as traitors to the Allied cause. Excited crowds began to gather daily on the boulevards above Odessa’s harbor to search the horizon for the ships of their saviors. For Frederick and the other refugees, returning home now seemed just a matter of time.

On December 17, the Allied warships finally reached Odessa. After a local White unit expelled some Ukrainian troops that had briefly moved into the city, an advance guard of 1,800 Allied troops came ashore the same day. On December 18, the first waves of what would be a 70,000-man army, magnificently equipped with all the hardware of modern war—tanks, artillery, trucks, armored cars, and even airplanes—began to disembark from the transports. The
enormous
quantities of matériel seemed to confirm that the French and other Allies were in Odessa to stay.

People rushed out onto the streets leading to the harbor to cheer the arriving troops as saviors and liberators. After months of anxiety, the joyful unreality of the scene was magnified by the exotic
appearance
of the soldiers, few of whom, it turned out, actually came from mainland France. Most were from French colonies in North Africa, including black Muslims from Morocco and 30,000 Zouaves from Algeria, whose uniforms included fezzes and picturesque, baggy red pants. There was also a large contingent of tough-looking Greeks in khaki kilts and caps with long tassels.

As the Allied troops continued to pour in, they spread out from Odessa in a semicircle twenty miles long, with the Black Sea at their backs. This was the solid barrier that the French commander in chief, General Franchet d’Espèrey, who was based in Constantinople, promised would allow a White Russian army to grow.

At first, the French occupation invigorated civilian life in Odessa. More people crowded into the restaurants and theaters, there was less shooting in the center, and the speculators were busier than ever. But as the spring of 1919 approached, the situation began to
deteriorate very rapidly in every conceivable way. The Bolsheviks defeated Allied forces in two major towns some seventy miles to the east, and then started to move toward Odessa itself. The Whites were unable to coordinate their recruitment efforts effectively either among themselves or with the French. By March, the food situation in Odessa had become dire, the city’s infrastructure was collapsing, and an epidemic of typhus had broken out. The high commands in Paris and Constantinople concluded that the entire Odessa adventure had been a strategic error and that they had to evacuate the city. On April 6, 1919, Frederick had to escape the Bolsheviks once again.