The Black Russian

by Alexandrov, Vladimir

  Some eating and drinking establishments in Moscow took the trouble to maintain outward appearances by serving alcoholic beverages in pitchers or in bottles that had originally held fruit drinks and mineral water. Waiters also brought vodka to the table in teapots, and clients drank it out of porcelain cups. But other restaurants flouted the law and sold everything openly. Because of shortages, prices skyrocketed and bootlegging became highly profitable. In 1915, a bottle of French champagne in a fancy café chantant could cost as much as $1,000 in today’s money. The sale of vodka had been a Russian government monopoly prior to prohibition, earning the imperial treasury enormous sums. Part of these huge profits also started to pour into private hands as distillers now sold their bootleg vodka at several thousand percent over the cost of the raw ingredients, and with no government middleman. Even Nicholas II was reputed to have ignored the prohibition he initiated and continued to enjoy his cognac with lemon, although, in a concession to the times, when he and members of his retinue visited the front, they eschewed crystal glasses for silver cups.

  The result of this freewheeling atmosphere was that a year after the war began, word spread in Moscow that Frederick was enjoying an “unheard of success” in Aquarium and “harvesting laurels and silver rubles” in “colossal” amounts. What made this possible, in spite of the soaring prices of drink, was the new money that appeared in Russia because of the war and the new, frenzied atmosphere of Moscow’s nightlife. As soon as mobilization began, well-soaked send-offs for officers became obligatory in the better restaurants. Such occasions, with bravura regimental marches booming from the orchestras, were clearly not the time to skimp on toasts to the victory of Russian arms over the “hordes of Teutonic barbarians.” Later, as reports of appalling losses began to accumulate, a nervous and febrile note crept into such celebrations, but they also became more urgent.

  As the war ground on, new sorts of moneyed clients started to appear in the fashionable and expensive establishments as well. Some were in the military, although they were “heroes” of the home front rather than of the front lines—quartermasters who had successfully skimmed tidy sums from the torrents of supplies that passed through their hands; military doctors who sold exemptions from the draft to the sons of rich families. And then, as in all wars, there were swarms of businessmen making money hand over fist from contracts to supply the army with everything from boots and canned meat to high explosives. Maxim especially reconfirmed its status during these years as “The Favorite Place of Muscovites,” a slogan that Frederick adopted in his numerous advertisements.

  In January 1915, in the dead of a bitterly cold winter, Muscovites’ attention became riveted on another massive swing of the scythe of war in Galicia. The Austro-Hungarian armies launched a counteroffensive in the Carpathian Mountains against Russian forces. However, the attack failed miserably and by March the advancing Russians had captured the enormous fortress Przemyśl, thus potentially aligning their armies for a march through the mountain passes toward Budapest and Vienna, the twin capitals of the Hapsburg Empire.

  There were also dramatic events to the south that Muscovites followed with a mix of anxiety and excitement. A second front had opened for Russia at this time, in the Caucasus Mountains and on the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire was an old enemy that had recently allied itself with the Central Powers. Two months after the war began, Turkish warships shelled cities on the south coast of Russia, including Odessa. The great prize that beckoned in this part of the world was Constantinople. If Russia could take this ancient city, to whose Byzantine Christian past the Russians felt a visceral tie, it would have free passage from the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean, and from there to all the oceans of the world. (In fact, in a secret treaty planning the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the war, France and Great Britain formally promised Constantinople and the Straits to Russia.)

  Muscovites responded to the news from both fronts with an outpouring of patriotic generosity. In early February, leaders of the city’s theaters organized a campaign they called “For the Russian Army, from the Artists of Moscow.” Frederick played a visible role in the weeklong series of benefit concerts and performances to collect gifts for the troops, and Maxim was mentioned prominently in the press. The campaign began with a solemn prayer service in the enormous, white marble Christ the Savior Cathedral south of the Kremlin. (Stalin dynamited it in 1931, using much of its decorative stone to line the walls of Moscow’s new subway stations; it was not rebuilt until 2000.) The week ended with a gala show in the Great Hall of Moscow’s Nobility Club, located on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street near the Bolshoy Theater, during which performers from all of Moscow’s theaters and circuses appeared onstage. The campaign was a resounding success and won the actors and the theaters that sponsored them a great deal of public appreciation.

  Frederick would need this and any other goodwill he accumulated when two months later he got into trouble with the city authorities. In April 1915 Maxim was shut down, ostensibly for letting in Moscow high school students and law students from Petrograd. As in the case of selling alcoholic beverages despite prohibition, there was too much profit to be made to take age and other legal restrictions overly seriously: fines and closures were often just the cost of doing business. Frederick certainly did not break stride because of the temporary problems with Maxim, whose winter season was coming to an end anyway. Rather, as a journalist reported, he continued to “prepare energetically” for Aquarium’s summer season, which was only a few weeks away. The coming spring was also heralded by a joyous event in his personal life—the birth on April 25 of his and Elvira’s second son, whom they gave his father’s middle name, Bruce.

  However, other threats loomed. Frederick’s prominence and success attracted not only greedy officials looking to wet their beaks but also envious competitors who wanted to humble and hurt him. That same April Frederick came under attack from Andrey Z. Serpoletti (whose real surname was Fronshteyn). He was the pugnacious editor of a Moscow theatrical journal, also a variety stage satirist, and was always looking out for the interests of his fellow performers—as well as for opportunities to settle scores with old enemies. He complained that directors of variety theaters were adding to their soaring profits from illegal liquor sales by cutting the salaries of the actors they hired and targeted Frederick specifically, making fun of his broken Russian.

  If this initial attack of Serpoletti’s was relatively mild, the one he initiated a year later was dangerous, especially in the intensely xenophobic atmosphere that had developed in Moscow by that time. What Serpoletti wrote in the guise of a malevolent short story is also the only unequivocal attack that Frederick was subjected to as a black man in Russia. However, it is noteworthy that even in this case he was not attacked primarily for being black.

  Trying to be witty, Serpoletti first throws some silly camouflage over Frederick’s name and business, and then provides an encoded summary of Frederick’s biography, which he obviously knows well. This “citizen,” as Serpoletti pointedly calls him, who was “despised” in his native “Egyptian Colonies” (these are allusions to Frederick’s application, his African blood, the status of blacks in the United States, and the nation’s origin as English colonies), came to Russia from Paris as a lackey; “got fat” on Russian bread; benefited from Russians’ good nature; made a lot of money; and became a captain in a restaurant, a maître d’hôtel, and finally the owner of an entertainment garden. Serpoletti’s main point is that despite such humble origins and “undeserved” success—which Serpoletti bitterly envied—Frederick “puts on airs because of his position” and assumes a “negro-dully-arrogant” (“negrityanski-tuponadmenno”) attitude toward Russian artists, whom, moreover, he calls “pigs.” Then comes Serpoletti’s final, vicious thrust—an accusation that was as dangerous to make in Russia during World War I as was calling someone a “communist” in the United States in the 1950s: Frederick is “great pals with foreigners in general and with Germans i
n particular.” Despite all this scaffolding, the reason for Serpoletti’s animus is clear: Frederick supposedly preferred to hire foreign performers for Aquarium and Maxim rather than native Russians (including Serpoletti and his protégés).

  Frederick successfully countered this accusation by continuing to demonstrate his Russianness at every opportunity, to the extent of assuming a leading role in a grand patriotic demonstration that began in Moscow on May 19, 1915, just a few days after his application for citizenship had been approved. This was a momentous time in the Russian conduct of the war. A German advance in Galicia inflicted huge Russian casualties, and a retreat that had been orderly at first degenerated into a “mad bacchanalia” all along the front, with troops fleeing their positions and hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees also streaming east. The combined German and Austro-Hungarian advance lasted five months. By October 1915, the Russian armies not only had lost everything they had won but had been pushed back one hundred miles and forced out of what had been Russian Poland since the end of the eighteenth century.

  In Moscow toward the end of May, however, the full extent of the developing catastrophe was still not clear and, in an atmosphere of buoyant patriotism, the Moscow Red Cross planned a three-day event that was named “Tobacco for the Soldier.” May 19 began with several thousand actors and other performers from variety theaters across the city gathering in Aquarium’s garden, which Frederick and Tsarev had made available as a staging area. Participants formed into a long parade and left the grounds at 4 p.m., heading down Tverskaya Street toward the Kremlin. Leading the procession were actors from Aquarium riding in decorated wagons and dressed in the national costumes of the countries of the Entente. Then came numerous other groups, vehicles, and floats. Participants numbered in the thousands and attracted huge crowds.

  As the lead elements of the parade began to enter Red Square, an outdoor prayer service led by a bishop assisted by a multitude of priests began at Lobnoye Mesto—a raised, circular stone platform traditionally used for imperial proclamations. The icon of the Iberian Mother of God—long venerated by Muscovites as “wonder-working”—was brought from its nearby chapel to the platform, as were other icons and religious banners from St. Basil’s Cathedral a few dozen yards away. Wounded soldiers from Moscow’s hospitals gathered around, accompanied by their nurses. The remainder of the vast square between the soaring redbrick walls of the Kremlin and the ornate facade of the Upper Trading Arcades filled with tens of thousands of people—the men’s heads bared; women on tiptoes straining to see, some holding their children up—while the bishop, priests, and deacons intoned prayers for the army’s valiant warriors, for the emperor and his “august family,” for all faithful Russian Orthodox Christians during this time of dreadful travail. A reverent hush spread over the crowd. The gold brocade raiments of the churchmen gleamed in the afternoon sun as wisps of sweet incense wafted from their swinging censers and the hymns of the deep-voiced male choir rose, fell, and rose again. At the end of the service, the enormous crowd broke into singing “God Save the Tsar” and repeated it over and over again. The actors from Aquarium who had led the parade stayed together as a group by the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, two seventeenth-century Russian national heroes in the war to liberate Moscow from the Poles.

  After the service, the parade returned to the Aquarium garden, with the troupe of its actors again leading the way. That evening and during the next two days, special performances to benefit the soldiers took place in theaters all over the city; hundreds of volunteers also took up collections on the streets, in stores, and in restaurants. Frederick and Tsarev themselves worked the crowds in Aquarium with collection cups in hand and were singled out for special praise several times in newspaper and magazine reports.

  A native son of Russia could not have done more to demonstrate his loyalty. Frederick’s actions were seen by hundreds if not thousands of Muscovites and were known to many more, including the city’s leading citizens. He had also inscribed himself convincingly in the tradition of philanthropy for which Moscow merchants and businessmen were famous throughout Russia. Whatever vengeful designs Serpoletti might have had against the black former American could not pierce the armor of goodwill that Frederick created around himself.

  Frederick demonstrated his Russianness with uncannily accurate timing; a week later Muscovites revealed the inevitable other face of patriotic fervor—hatred of the enemy and paranoia regarding outsiders. For many, the calamitous retreat of Russian forces in Galicia seemed inexplicable without sabotage or treason on the home front. Anti-German and then broadly antiforeign riots erupted in the city in late May. Hundreds of stores were sacked and entire streets were set ablaze. One horrified Englishman recalled seeing grand pianos being pushed out of the fourth-floor windows of Zimmermann’s famous music store on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow’s toniest shopping street, and crashing to the sidewalk with a doleful ringing sound as pages of sheet music swirled in the air like flocks of white birds. Some of the mobs swarmed partway up Tverskaya Street, which led to Aquarium. The financial and social costs of the riots were huge: damage was estimated at what would be about $1 billion today. There was also a heavy political cost: the mostly lower-class rioters had gotten a taste of taking the law into their own hands and using street violence to show their frustration with the government’s conduct of the war. Few observers realized it at the time, but Moscow’s “anti-German” pogrom was a harbinger of far worse things to come.

  By the first anniversary of the war, Frederick and his adopted homeland were starting to move in different directions. Russia had lost a million men killed or wounded and another million captured; all evidence showed that the country had been woefully unprepared for a war of this length and magnitude. Blundering through historical events that he could not understand, much less control, Nicholas II in September 1915 dismissed the army’s commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, who was not only a professional soldier but his uncle. The tsar assumed command of all the Russian forces himself, even though he had no military experience. Elsewhere, the British attempt to support and resupply Russia by forcing the Turkish Straits and opening a passage to the Black Sea ended in disaster. In one of the many ironies of the time, a hero of the Turkish defense at Gallipoli was Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later to become the savior of his country and arbiter of Frederick’s fate.

  But Frederick remained unaffected by these problems and was making so much money that he began to search for new ways to invest it. His vehicle of choice was real estate. During the summer of 1915, news had begun to spread that the Ciniselli Circus in Petrograd was going to be put up for auction. This was an exciting possibility, because for all of Moscow’s economic and cultural importance, it was still the country’s second city. Ciniselli Circus was a prestigious and potentially very lucrative venue. It was the oldest permanent building of its kind in Russia as well as one of the most famous in all of Europe. It was also very popular with the cream of Petrograd society, from the imperial family on down.

  The auction was scheduled for December 7 and Frederick traveled to Petrograd to take part in it. A motley array of other major players also participated, including Fyodor Chaliapin, the famous operatic bass whom Frederick had met at Yar several years before, and who was represented by an agent. The stakes were for the highest of rollers: bidding would start at an annual rent of 60,000 rubles (approximately $2 million today) and all participants had to provide a deposit of 30,000 rubles to show they were serious.

  The minimum was quickly left behind. An entrepreneur from Petrograd bid 73,000 rubles; another one from Moscow offered 76,000; then Frederick topped him with 78,000. But someone quickly offered 80,000 and Frederick decided that he was out. It is possible that he had gotten wind of something underhanded in the entire affair. Several months later, when the old leaseholder unexpectedly emerged as the winner, rumors began to circulate that the auction had been rigged from the start.

  But Frederick still had money to invest and turned his
attention to the south and to Odessa. He went there initially to search for new acts to put on Aquarium’s and Maxim’s stages. Because the war had made it difficult to travel to and from Western Europe, the only ready source of new talent was what could be found in other Russian cities. Odessa was polyglot and cosmopolitan and had a very lively theatrical life. On the eve of the war, its population was 630,000, a third of them Jewish and thirty thousand of them foreigners, including Greeks, Armenians, Germans, Romanians, Italians, and many others. During two trips in February and July 1916 Frederick booked a variety of catchy acts—a singing duet, a female impersonator, an actress who was a local star, a ten-year-old moppet who belted out Gypsy romances—and also negotiated with entrepreneurs who wanted to lease his Aquarium theater for the following season. Frederick must have liked the city itself very much, because during his second trip he also bought a fancy villa there for 100,000 rubles, around $3 million in today’s money.

  The climate was a bit milder in Odessa than in Moscow, but the city’s chief appeal was its location on the shore of the Black Sea. With its wide, straight, tree-shaded streets and elegant stone buildings, it would not have looked out of place on the Mediterranean. In Frederick’s time Odessa was an important commercial center and despite its distance from the two capitals was neither quiet nor provincial. Fashionable hotels and restaurants, elegant shops, popular cafés, and several theaters attracted an urbane and moneyed crowd to its famous thoroughfares. Sailors from exotic ports mixed with the city’s criminals in the raucous, beer-smelling dives near the commercial harbor. On the city’s outskirts, the banks of the lagoons were dotted with villas facing the shimmering expanse of the sea. In 1916, Frederick could not have anticipated the role that Odessa would play in his life in just two years.