Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  None of the great powers had recognized the new Bolshevik regime, and most were worried that the disease of socialism would spread from Russia to their own class-bound societies. Revolutionaries had already tried to topple governments in Germany and Hungary, and Poland was now on the frontline, coordinating the backlash against the idea of world revolution. In Istanbul, the Poles led the intelligence-gathering effort against the Bolsheviks. They continually fed to the Allied authorities whatever bits of news they could glean from White refugees. They also found plenty of eager fighting men with very personal reasons for hating the Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1922, Shalikashvili left with his brother, David, who had only recently arrived in Istanbul after being released from Bolshevik internment in Georgia. They sailed for the Romanian port at Constana. A train took the two brothers on to Poland. Their mother and sister were still in the Caucasus, and neither brother ever saw them—or Georgia, or Istanbul—again.

  Desperation and resourcefulness were the two defining qualities of the White Russians in Istanbul. Secondhand shops in Pera were filled with the detritus of past lives being sold on consignment: silver, china, and linen; random family pictures taken in studios in St. Petersburg and Moscow; snuff boxes bearing the Romanov crest; porcelain Easter eggs; military decorations on silk ribbons; Cossack knives and filigreed necklaces; icons in silver covers; embroidery cut from antique gowns; books and parchment manuscripts on all topics; miniature portraits of the favorite courtiers of Catherine the Great.

  Like a great migration of souls from one world to the next, talents from former lives were resurrected in new ways. A twelve-piece balalaika band performed on the quarterdeck of a British warship in exchange for dinner in the officers’ wardroom. A professor of mathematics might make an ideal restaurant cashier. A voluble society matron might become a gossipy nightclub hostess. Pretty ingénues, who in earlier social seasons would have debuted at balls in St. Petersburg, could end up in a floor show with blonde bobs and bare midriffs. From Graveyard Street across the Galata Bridge and into the warren of alleys around the Grand Bazaar, Russian artists turned entire neighborhoods into open-air galleries, displaying their landscapes and portraits to passersby. Other people relied on more basic skills: washing bodies at the city morgue, selling peppermint-flavored toothpicks, making rag dolls painted with the face of Sultan Mehmed VI, even chasing down dockyard rats and selling the skins to furriers.

  Window shopping: A woman walking along the Grande Rue, with both an automobile and a traditional porter, or hamal, in the background.

  The Muslim memoirist Ziya Bey recalled being approached at his export business by a Russian woman who introduced herself as a princess. He was incredulous, especially once she started naming a string of business propositions in which she hoped to interest him. Her family had once controlled a tremendous estate in Crimea, she told him, along with the rights to several oil wells in the Caucasus. She would gladly sell those rights for a nominal fee. Ziya Bey explained to her that the offer was worthless. The Bolshevik government had nationalized all the industrial firms and recognized no previous owners or any foreign employers. She tried again: perhaps he would be interested in purchasing some of the jewels that she had hidden away before her quick departure from Crimea? That, too, would be useless, Ziya replied, since it was doubtful they could ever be found; the region had been crisscrossed by armies for years. Even if they could be located, getting them out of the country would be impossible because of Bolshevik restrictions on the export of valuable property. The woman finally settled on one of the few things still in her power to control. Would Ziya know someone interested in French lessons? That, he said, might work, and he put the Russian woman in contact with his American wife, who signed up for occasional conversation practice.

  “Constantinople was a completely Russian city,” recalled Georgy Fyodorov, a soldier in Wrangel’s forces. He remembered the streets of Pera full of people flogging goods and calling out in Russian:

  “Fresh full-flavored donuts!”

  “Nuts from Lebanon!”

  “Wouldn’t you like some artificial flowers?”

  “The Evening Press—latest news in Russian!—get it here!”

  “Selling a cheap shirt, completely new! Worn only twice!”

  “I’m buying currency—Denikin banknotes, tsarist ones, too!”

  Another old soldier remembered an open-air market near the Galata Tower that offered refugees a chance to trade the many different banknotes that had been printed by the White forces. Buyers and sellers, standing with wads of paper in their hands, would call out names of the various types of Russian money, which circulated as informal currencies among the refugees.

  “I’m buying and selling. Tsarist notes! Romanov ones! Kerenskys! Dumas! Arkhangelskes! Astrakhans! Tashkents! Kolchaks! And others!”

  “I’m selling only Nikolayevs!”

  “I’m buying Wrangel and Don notes! I’m paying top price!”

  At the Grand Cercle Moscovite, one of the most illustrious restaurants in the city opened by Russian immigrants, an evening of dinner and dancing brought a visitor into contact with a cavalcade of diminished lives. The doorman was a former Cossack of the storied Atamansky Regiment once commanded by the tsar’s mother. The manager was a former factory owner from Kiev. The kitchen was run by the former chef at the tsar’s Livadia Palace in Crimea. The sous-chef had cooked for the Russian governor-general of the Caucasus. The maître d’ had worked at Yar, the most famous restaurant in Moscow. His assistant had been an officer in the light infantry of the Imperial Guards. All the waiters, serving dishes ranging from borscht to côtelettes à l’Impératrice Catherine IIème, had been officers in the tsar’s forces or the Volunteer Army. The orchestra played Glinka, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky; struck up foxtrots, one-steps, tangoes, and waltzes; or ceded the stage to guitarist Sasha Makarov, eager for work after the closing of Koki and Niko’s. When you left, the man retrieving your coat or cape was the former bodyguard of Tsar Nicholas II. “It is the best food I have ever eaten,” said Billy Fox-Pitt, the Welsh Guardsman, in a letter to his mother, “but it wouldn’t do to make a habit of it, as one would be very ill as well as broke!!”

  No one understood this world better than an American then living at the Pera Palace. The French doors in his room opened onto a view of the Golden Horn, but he had little time to appreciate it. Loose papers lay in stacks on a small table. Boxes and valises were piled against a wall or peeked out from under the bed. A typewriter rested on the dresser. He was so busy that he sometimes appeared at meetings with mismatched socks. By midmorning, a long line of Russians snaked up from the Orient Bar to his room on the fourth floor.

  Born in 1871 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Thomas Whittemore was named for his grandfather, a prominent Universalist minister and New England publisher. The pastor’s theology stressed not only the idea that salvation was a gift eventually available to all people—a basic doctrine of all Universalists—but also the more radical view that the entire idea of hell was incompatible with an all-loving God. A belief in the universal connectedness of humanity was also dear to his namesake. During the First World War, the younger Whittemore had traveled through Bulgaria and the Russian Empire—working for the Red Cross, running supply boats to Crimea, and bringing coats and other clothing to refugee families escaping the Bolsheviks. When the Russian crisis hit Istanbul, he found himself at the center of the relief effort. Next to the Allied administration authorities, he was probably the best-known foreigner in town, at least to the city’s neediest. Friends called him “The Flying Mystery.” “Whittemore is never in a place,” wrote one of his closest confidants, the curator and art historian Matthew Prichard, “he was, he will be; he comes from and is going to; but is never ‘here.’”

  Whittemore was director of the Committee for the Education of Russian Youth in Exile, which he had founded in 1914 to deal with the brewing problem of refugees displaced by war. The committee had no offices, no personnel except for Whittemore an
d those he could charm or cajole into helping, and no headquarters other than whichever hotel room he happened to be occupying. Whittemore’s experience in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution had given him a broad familiarity with the range of social organizations that already existed throughout the empire. Many had quickly reproduced themselves in exile, and Whittemore knew that they would be essential to integrating the refugees into new societies. But he also knew one thing that the Russians themselves had not yet come to understand: They were in all likelihood never going back.

  On most days, the lobby of the Pera Palace was filled with people waiting to see Whittemore, from artists bringing new paintings for him to consider for purchase to counts and barons hoping to enlist his aid for their own charitable organizations. Like the hierarchical country they had fled, the exiles held fast to the gradations of rank, privilege, and profession that had framed their lives before the revolution. The hotel’s lounge was a miniature map of old Russian society, with its many bits and pieces clustered together in conversation around small tables and armchairs. Cavalrymen from the Imperial Guards; officers of the Horse Artillery and the Imperial Navy; veterans of the Russo-Japanese War; recipients of the Order of St. George; bureaucrats from the ministries of justice, interior, and foreign affairs; old parliamentarians; engineers, doctors, lawyers, novelists, and sculptors; Russian Orthodox bishops; Cossacks from the Kuban, Don, Terek, and Astrakhan regions; Caucasus mountaineers; Muslims from the Black Sea coast; Buddhists from Siberia; and councilmen from local administrative bodies, or zemstvos—all had regrouped in the months following Wrangel’s retreat and were now competing for the limited resources supplied by the Allies and other donors.

  Left to their own devices, the leaders of each of these communities would spend much of their time quarreling with one another, much as they had done during the civil war. Part of Whittemore’s task was to stitch together the competing factions, especially by mobilizing the energetic countesses who daily streamed into the Pera Palace looking for things to do. Only a few weeks after Wrangel’s exodus from Crimea, a registration bureau had been set up to record the names of the refugees, list their particular skills, and reconnect families. Ladies were assigned to go from camp to camp collecting names and filing the information on cheap cards in old cigar boxes.

  Training was the key to starting new lives, and Whittemore set about creating a purpose-built education system. Not far from the center of Pera, he located a small plot of land on which several large tents could be erected. Young Russian men were given bunks in the tents, where they could sleep after coming home from their day jobs as hamals (porters), salesmen, or deliverymen. Toward evening, the hamals would arrive with their special backpacks on which they carried heavy loads. Street hawkers would return carting unsold chocolates and paper flowers. Newsboys came in with papers that they would sell the next day for half price. Water vendors brought in clean Standard Oil cans that could be used in their trade, while fishermen mended nets and street sweepers repaired their brooms.

  But then the real work began. Whittemore had organized the tent encampment not just as a refugee home but also as a placement center. Through countless letters to foreign universities, he managed to secure hundreds of places for Russian students who were sufficiently talented to pass the basic entrance examinations. Each night, after a supper of soup and bread, the tents became study halls, with Russian professors providing tutoring in mathematics, engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry. Students who had already had some university coursework assisted those with only secondary education or military training.

  In time, an attestation commission was organized among former members of the prestigious Russian Imperial Academy, which certified that the students had reached a level of expertise qualifying them for admission to universities in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. After weeks of waiting to hear about the universities’ final decisions, the tents would fall silent when a letter for a student arrived from Paris or Prague. At an annual awards ceremony held in a former Ottoman army barracks, each student would don a makeshift version of Russian national costume—a pair of white pajamas supplied by the Red Cross, cinched at the waist with a belt—and cross the stage to receive a diploma from a professor in a threadbare suit. They were now graduates of an informal finishing school with its administrative offices in the Pera Palace, and their diplomas entitled them to enroll in prestigious institutions ranging from Charles University to the Sorbonne. By the autumn of 1921, hundreds of students had made their way to Europe, some traveling in boxcars, to start new lives. Many more would follow. Whittemore’s records, diligently kept by archivists in New York down to the present day, contain more than a thousand individual student files with names that read like the guest list from a Russian imperial ball—Volkonskys, Ostrogorskys, Kuznetsovs, Tolstoys, Ignatievs—the paper trail of an entire world in the process of picking itself up and moving somewhere else.

  “[H]aving acquired useful learning while in exile, the young folk, upon their return to Russia, will form the nucleus of educated workers, destined to labour in the task of rebuilding our country,” Wrangel wrote to Whittemore, expressing his profound gratitude for the committee’s work. Even then, however, in the mid-1920s, this was optimistic boosterism. Shortly before he gave the order to evacuate Crimea, Wrangel had reassured his officers that the retreat would be only a period of rest and re-equipping, to be followed by an “attempt to wrest victory from the hands of the enemy.” A little belt-tightening now, and they would be home as soon as the Bolsheviks had exhausted themselves—by the autumn of 1921 at the latest, Dmitri Shalikashvili predicted. But soon the White Russians began to cross the mental borderland between flight and exile. The extraordinary circumstances of losing a war were now giving way to the heartbreaking reality that the loss would be permanent.

  Whittemore’s students were the last generation of the empire, and it was gradually dawning on them that they might well be the first generation of something else. They had become modern versions of les ci-devants, as French revolutionaries had called the washed-up nobility in 1789. The Bolsheviks had a similar name for them: byvshie, or “former people.” Countess Vera Tolstoy, a cousin of Leo Tolstoy and one of Whittemore’s supporters, summarized the situation in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly. “If the . . . martyrs of the French Revolution showed their butchers how nobles die,” she wrote from her small house on the outskirts of Istanbul, “we, the victims of Bolshevist crime, who have yet escaped with our lives, shall show them how to live.”

  KONSTANTINOUPOLIS

  A man running to catch an electrified Istanbul trolley car.

  AFTER THE END OF the Russian civil war, there were perhaps around 860,000 former Russian subjects living abroad as refugees from war and revolution, ethnic Russians as well as representatives of just about every cultural group of the old empire. Many of them were concentrated in Istanbul. The city had shrunk from nearly a million people before the First World War to perhaps seven hundred thousand after the 1918 armistice. Fears of a wartime invasion by Greece, followed by the prospect of Turkish nationalists’ exacting revenge in the occupied city, on the model of their reconquest of Smyrna, had pushed civilians—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—to flee. As a result, the Russian invasion represented a staggering increase in the city’s overall population. A refugee crisis had become a demographic revolution.

  Émigrés is the name societies give to immigrants they happen to like, and it was the smallest of victories that White Russians managed to acquire that label in Paris, New York, and just about everywhere else they landed. In Istanbul, though, Turkish slang referred to them as the “Goodies,” the haraolar, from the Russian term for “good” or “fine.” The Russian word is a commonplace of everyday speech, but the Turkish variant was a cruel joke. Russians were not doing fine at all. Throughout much of the 1920s, if you encountered a beggar on the street in certain quarters of Istanbul, it was almost certain that he o
r she would speak Russian.

  Letters about individual cases flowed into relief organizations in the city and to charitable groups as far afield as New York and Washington, DC. Aleksei Sterladkin, a blind man who had made his living by playing the harmonium on the Grande Rue, appealed for assistance when the police accused him of illegal begging. A Mr. Tcherniavsky, formerly a singer with the Russian imperial opera, requested that relief workers pass along information about his upcoming concert in Istanbul. Father Michel Vassilieff asked for a small contribution toward organizing an Easter meal for destitute Russian-speaking Christians. A Princess Shakhovskaya wrote to request a visa for getting herself and her husband, a musician with the Tokatlian Hotel orchestra, to the United States.

  The problem for the refugees was not simply Istanbul’s sluggish postwar economy, which affected Turks and Russians alike, but rather the peculiar way in which their prospects intersected with international politics. On July 24, 1923, Allied and Turkish negotiators finally signed a peace treaty ending the state of hostilities that had existed since 1914. Brokered by the League of Nations, the Treaty of Lausanne allowed the Allies to untangle themselves from the occupation, preserve some degree of dignity in the exit, and legitimize Mustafa Kemal’s government as the successor to the deposed sultan. Years had passed since the 1918 armistice, and during that time the political and military situation in Turkey had changed profoundly. The country was no longer ruled by a faltering emperor. It was now headed by an elected parliament and a confident commander in chief who had pushed out foreign invaders and encircled the former capital with loyal troops. Unlike the treaties with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria, Lausanne was the only peace accord negotiated with, rather than simply imposed on, a belligerent power that the Allies had earlier defeated on the battlefield.