The Black Russian

by Alexandrov, Vladimir

  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.

  7

  Reinvention in Constantinople

  The American consulate general in Constantinople did not have the money or the inclination to provide much practical help to the refugees from Odessa after they finally disembarked on the Galata quay. Frederick initially took his family to the Pera Palace Hotel, which was one of the two best in the city. Staying there was an indulgence that he could ill afford, but it must have been an enormous relief to immerse oneself in the cleanliness and comforts of a good hotel after the filth and deprivations of Imperator Nikolay and the degrading quarantine at Kavaka.

  The Pera Palace had opened in 1895 on the heights of the city’s European district as a modern residence for the passengers of the Orient Express, the fabled train that ran from London, Paris, and Venice (in reality as well as fiction and film), across all of Europe to the Sirkeci Terminal in Stambul. Other than the sultan’s Dolmabahçe Palace, the Pera Palace was the first building in Constantinople with electricity, an electric elevator, and hot running water. In its heyday before and after the Great War its famous guests included Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary; Edward VIII of the United Kingdom; Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the founder of modern-day Turkey; Ernest Hemingway; Greta Garbo; and Agatha Christie, among many others. Lavishly decorated with stained glass, marble, and gilded plaster (recently refurbished to all its former glory), the hotel had wonderful views of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn and was the epitome of the Pera district—a cosmopolitan, Westernized island in an otherwise Turkish Muslim sea.

  The Pera Palace Hotel was then one of the main centers of social and business life in Constantinople, and a crossroads for people who had either money or ideas about how to make it. Shortly after he arrived, Frederick ran into an old Moscow acquaintance, the Romanian musician Nitza Codolban, a large-nosed man with slicked-back hair, sad eyes, and a big smile. He was a virtuoso of the cimbalom, an instrument resembling a hammered dulcimer that was very popu
lar in Gypsy music.

  Codolban recalled how struck he was by Frederick’s passion and eagerness to confront the difficulties ahead: “I’m going to try something desperate,” the black man proclaimed, “and I’ve got a few ideas.”

  Frederick went on to explain that he was going to start everything from zero. He described how he had overcome far bigger obstacles than the Black Sea to stop now. He also said that he liked this new city, which even reminded him a bit of Moscow.

  Frederick then swore to Codolban, as he said he had already sworn to his wife, that he had had enough. No matter what happened in Constantinople, he would never leave. This is where he would die, he declared, after “conquering the Bosphorus nights,” in Codolban’s florid recollection. “And so, will you join me?” he concluded with his memorable smile.

  Much impressed by Frederick’s energy, Codolban decided that he would put off leaving Constantinople and, in a reference to their shared past, agreed to work in what he assumed would be a “new Maxim,” a nightclub to be named after its famous Moscow predecessor. But Frederick was not ready to move so quickly: “Not a Maxim yet. You have to move slowly with luck,” he explained. “I’m going to start with a Stella.”

  Despite the physical and cultural distance Frederick had traveled, he discovered that Pera suited him surprisingly well. All the Western embassies were located there, as were the most important businesses, banks, fashionable restaurants, bars, and shops. Many of the buildings on the main streets were half a dozen stories high, constructed of light-colored stone, and European in style. The population was mixed; in addition to Turks there were large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and people known locally as “Levantines,” or natives of European descent. Even though spoken Turkish was unlike anything Frederick had heard before, and its written form in Arabic was unintelligible to him, the language of commerce and the second language of the city’s elites was French, which he spoke fluently. This would make life and work in Constantinople much easier.

  Frederick also soon noticed some similarities between Constantinople and Moscow because of how both straddled East and West, the old and the new. Despite its European traits and cosmopolitan character, prerevolutionary Moscow often struck visitors as having an Oriental cast due to the unfamiliar architecture of its numerous churches and the traditional garb worn by peasants, priests, and other exotic types. Similarly, in Constantinople the shop signs in French on the Grande rue de Pera, the European district’s central thoroughfare, as well as the automobiles, the streetcars, and the men in business suits, all proclaimed “the West.” But like the fez (the signature tasseled red hat of the Ottoman Empire) that many of the men wore, reminders that Constantinople was on the border between continents and cultures were never far from sight.

  Like Moscow, Constantinople had its own religious “soundscape” that showed visitors how far they had traveled. Instead of a chorus of church bells marking the daily round of services, here it was a single male voice from atop a minaret calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. The muezzin would begin with a mellifluous tenor chant—“Allahu Akbar,” “God is Great”—that would draw out into a long, oscillating slide, slowly soaring and descending, like a seagull riding a breeze over the Golden Horn. The muezzin’s final words— “La ilaha illa Allah,” “There is no god except the One God”—would then fade and dissolve in the crash of the city’s background noise: the clatter of cart wheels and hooves on cobblestones, trams banging and squealing, automobile klaxons blaring as drivers raced through narrow streets, vendors shrieking out the virtues of their wares.

  Just walking up the steep streets from Galata to Pera was like passing through an ethnic kaleidoscope. Harold Armstrong, one of the many English officers who served in the Allied military administration of the city, captured this impression (even though he viewed it with an Occidental’s superciliousness).

  There were long-bearded Armenian priests with rusty gowns and chimney-pot hats, and Greek priests in top-hats with the brims knocked off and dirty shabby boots sticking out from under dingy gowns. There were hodjas [Muslim schoolmasters] in turbans, Turks and French colonial troops in fezes. There were slit-eyed Kalmucks, great gaunt eunuchs, Turkish bloods of the Effendi and Pasha [lord and master] class, men with hats on, as in London, men with black astrakan brimless caps on, just as in Teheran or Tiflis. There were women in veils and women in hats, and street vendors and beggars with horrors of open sores and mutilated limbs asking for alms. Some loitered talking and sucking cigarettes. The rest elbowed and rushed, twisted, turned and butted me off the narrow pavements into the complicated medley of vehicles in the road. Everywhere there was confusion, noise and bustle.

  A sight that especially astounded many visitors was the city’s “hamals,” traditional porters who carried enormous loads on their backs, be it hundreds of pounds of coal, a freshly killed beef carcass, or a new bureau measuring twelve by four feet and filling the entire narrow street so that pedestrians had to squeeze into doorways to let it pass.

  The Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn that linked the European districts with Muslim Stambul on the other side showed most spectacularly the city’s mix of cultures. Visitors would go to the bridge just to observe the great parade of people wending their way across: Turks, Tatars, Kurds, Georgians, Arabs, Russians, Jews; sailors from American warships, Gypsies in tattered robes, Persians in high fur caps. On any given day, one could see a Circassian from the Caucasus in a tunic with rows of cartridge pockets and a sheathed dagger in his belt, a French Catholic Sister of Charity in her billowing black robes, or an old Turk with a bit of green on his turban to show that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The transport on the bridge was as varied as the population: modern automobiles, wagons drawn by horses and oxen, mules hauling baskets, even occasional caravans of camels.

  Once across the bridge, however, the crowds and racket melted away. In 1919, Stambul was still the home of old Muslim Turkish traditions, with narrow, quiet, shaded streets; the upper floors of the weathered two-and three-story wooden houses, shuttered and jutting out over passersby, dimmed the light even more. In Stambul life turned inward, and at night the quarter was silent and seemed deserted. But at its heart, concentrated in a space less than a mile long, are Constantinople’s grandest and most cherished monuments from the past, and what Frederick saw then, one can still see today. In the middle soars Hagia Sophia, built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century, once the patriarchal basilica of Eastern Christianity, and converted into a mosque by the Ottomans after their conquest in the fifteenth century. Facing it like an echo in stone is the vast, blue-tiled seventeenth-century Mosque of Sultan Ahmed, its rising cascade of domes guarded by six minarets. And on Seraglio Point, jutting into the Bosporus, sprawls Topkapi Palace—a maze of pavilions, galleries, and courtyards that was the residence of the sultans for four hundred years, before the Dolmabahçe Palace was built in the nineteenth century. The glories of the Ottoman past, and remnants of Byzantine architectural marvels, were everywhere in Stambul. Then as now, no visit to the quarter could end without a foray into its Grand Bazaar—a labyrinthine covered market encompassing scores of streets and thousands of shops, all piled high with a riot of goods.

  Like the European quarter where Frederick settled, Constantinople’s postwar history also seemed fashioned to fit his needs. The Allies began their occupation only days after the armistice, with the British taking control of Pera. The French got Galata, as well as Stambul. The Italians were in Scutari, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Because the Americans had not been at war with Turkey, they did not administer any territory, but their activities and interests were also concentrated in Pera; in fact, the American embassy and consulate general were only a few dozen steps from the Pera Palace Hotel, where Frederick stayed at first.

  The Allies also arrived with plans to stay. They had agreed among themselves to carve up the vast Ottoman Empire, leaving only the core of Anatolia to the Turks, and to divide its mineral-and
oil-rich territories by drawing lines across maps without regard to who lived where. The affected areas included present-day Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, and we live to this day with the consequences of those decisions. Constantinople itself would be transformed into an international city, resembling what Shanghai had been in China since the nineteenth century. To secure their position and to intimidate the defeated Turks, the Allies brought a fleet of several dozen warships to the Bosporus and anchored them off the Dolmabahçe Palace.

  Thousands of British, French, Italian, and American officers, soldiers, sailors, diplomats, and businessmen poured into the city, and the nature of commerce in Pera changed accordingly. Many of the military arrivals were single men who brought with them an appetite for wine, women, and song. Such interests were inimical to conservative Turkish Muslim culture, but the liberal, Europeanized districts were happy to satisfy them. And it is doubtful that there was anyone in Constantinople in the spring of 1919 with more or better experience in this line of work than Frederick.

  The historical and social forces swirling through the city had thus created another charmed circle, one within which Frederick could try to reproduce the world that had made him rich and famous in Moscow. He would have to deal with the American diplomats and their racism, but Jenkins’s acceptance of him in Odessa set a precedent that he could try to build on in the future.

  Frederick also had the consolation that for the Turks and other natives of Constantinople, his race was of no concern. The Ottoman Empire had stretched from North Africa to Europe to the Near East and into Asia; it was racially heterogeneous and parsed the world very differently than white America did. A Turk who met Frederick would want to know first if he was a Muslim or not and after learning that he was a Christian would not care at all that he was married to a white Christian woman. In fact, black Africans had regularly risen to high positions at the Turkish sultan’s court. The Ottoman language, which was replaced by modern Turkish only in 1928, did not even have a special word for “Negro” in the American sense; it used “Arap,” or “Arab,” for anyone who was dark-skinned. (The African-American writer James Baldwin would discover that this tradition was still alive in Istanbul as late as the 1960s.) History had uprooted Frederick from Russia very painfully, but the place of exile that it had chosen for him was unique in the world at the time. He had been given a remarkable second chance.