The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  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

  permitted him to go to the station daily as a porter. This he did regularly for about six months and thus disarmed suspicion until, by the aid of a friend traveling under a permit, he was able to conceal himself in a train compartment and escape to one of his villas, outside of the reach of the new Government.

  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.