The Black Russian

FEBRUARY 1917

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.

OCTOBER 1917

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.

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.

ODESSA

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.