The Black Russian
Vladimir Alexandrov
Born the son of slaves in America’s Deep South, he escaped the stifling racism of his native land to pursue a dream of freedom, wealth and personal happiness that took him from Brussels to Monte Carlo, and from Moscow to Constantinople. Embracing triumph and tragedy and spanning continents, wars and revolution, his life story is as colourful as it is improbable. He is the ‘Black Russian’.
Frederick Bruce Thomas was born in 1872 to former slaves who had become prosperous farmers in Mississippi. When his father was brutally murdered, the teenaged Frederick fled the Deep South and headed for New York City, where he worked as a waiter and valet. Deploying charm, charisma and cunning, he emigrated to Europe, criss-crossing that continent to find employment as a multilingual waiter in locations as diverse as London and Leipzig, Venice and Vienna, before settling in Moscow in 1899. There he married twice, acquired a mistress, and became one of that city’s richest and most fêted restaurateurs and nightclub impresarios. But then came the shock of the Bolshevik Revolution. Frederick and his family were forced to flee Russia for Constantinople, where, ever resourceful, he reinvented himself afresh, opening nightclubs that introduced jazz to Turkey. However, Frederick’s luck was finally running out: the long arm of American racism and his own extravagance landed him in a debtor’s prison in 1927, after which death came swiftly.
Written with a novelist’s verve, The Black Russian is both the extraordinary story of the most engaging and unexpected of heroes, and a meticulously researched and richly characterized tour of the changing political and cultural landscape of the early twentieth century.
Vladimir Alexandrov
THE BLACK RUSSIAN
For Sybil, who heard it all first
Conventions
All dates for events in Russia prior to 1918 are given in the “Old Style” (O.S.) calendar: the Julian calendar that was in use until that year and that was thirteen days behind the Gregorian, “New Style” (N.S.) calendar used in the West during the twentieth century (during the nineteenth, it was twelve days behind). Occasionally a double date is given for clarity in connection with events that were also important in the West: e.g., August 2/15, which means August 2 according to the O.S. calendar and August 15 according to the N.S. calendar.
Russian personal names and place-names are given in their most accessible forms. For Turkish personal names, I use the spelling in my sources. For Turkish place-names, I give the forms used in Western sources during the time I describe, rather than present-day names: thus, “Constantinople” not “Istanbul”; “Pera” not “Beyoğlu”; “Galata” not “Karaköy”; “Scutari” not “Üsküdar”; “Grande rue de Pera” not “İstiklal Caddessi.”
Estimates of what different currencies and sums from the past would be worth in today’s dollars are determined by calculators at http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/.
Maps
Prologue:
Life or Death
The catastrophe should never have happened. On the morning of April 1, 1919, William Jenkins, the American consul in Odessa, a major Russian port on the Black Sea, walked from his office to the London Hotel, where the French army of occupation had set up its headquarters. He was alarmed by the previous day’s setback on the front—Red Guards had driven Greek and French troops from yet another town to the east—and by the hysterical rumors that were sweeping through the scores of thousands of refugees who had fled to Odessa from Soviet territory. He wanted to meet with the French commander himself, General Philippe d’Anselme, and to ask him point-blank what he was going to do in the face of the deteriorating situation. Shortages of food and fuel in the city had become critical. A typhus epidemic was breaking out. Radicalized workers were mutinying and stockpiling guns. And Odessa’s notorious criminal gangs vied with the Bolshevik underground in robbing homes and businesses, and murdering anyone who got in their way. Jenkins had compiled a list of twenty-nine Americans in the city, including, against all odds, a black man from Mississippi accompanied by a white wife and four mixed-race children. As consul, Jenkins was responsible for the entire group’s safety and was beginning to doubt the resolve and reliability of the French.
Although he would not know it for another thirty-six hours, Jenkins’s fears were well founded. The French high command in Paris had concluded several days earlier that their military intervention in the Russian civil war had been a mistake. However, General d’Anselme skillfully concealed this behind his blunt military manner and proceeded to lie to Jenkins’s face.
He began by pretending that he was sharing a confidence with Jenkins, who was, after all, the official representative of an important ally, and admitted that it might perhaps be necessary to evacuate some of the old men, women, and children in Odessa because of food shortages. But when Jenkins pressed the crucial point of a general evacuation of the city, d’Anselme assured him that there was absolutely “no question” of the French army abandoning Odessa.
Jenkins left French headquarters reassured. The following day, Wednesday, April 2, he received written confirmation of what d’Anselme had told him. The French commander also broadcast his message to the city at large by publishing announcements in the local newspapers to the effect that although some civilians would have to be evacuated—he used the strangely callous expression “all useless mouths”—the military situation was secure.
In truth, however, the French had already decided to withdraw all forces from Odessa. But rather than organize an orderly evacuation that might take two weeks—which would have been the only way to accommodate 70,000 troops, their equipment, and anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians—d’Anselme and his staff decided to keep their decision secret as long as possible. The city was dangerously overcrowded and they hoped to prevent panic. What they achieved instead was the exact opposite and would become known around the world as the French “debacle” in Odessa.
Wednesday passed relatively calmly. All the government offices were open and working. After the sun set, the only disturbances were the occasional, familiar crackle of gunfire and detonations of hand grenades as the city’s criminals and Bolsheviks began their nightly depredations. In the inner and outer harbors, the French and other Allied warships rested reassuringly at anchor. The bivouacs of the Greek, Senegalese, and Algerian Zouave regiments were quiet.
Then, almost by chance, Jenkins learned the incredible news. Around 10 p.m., Picton Bagge, the British commercial attaché in the city, came to him with urgent and confidential information. He had heard from the captain of HMS Skirmisher, a British torpedo boat in the harbor—the captain in turn having gotten it from a French admiral in Odessa—that the French had decided to give up the city.
Jenkins was stunned: not only had d’Anselme lied to him, but the French withdrawal meant that the Bolsheviks would be in Odessa in a matter of days. Jenkins also realized that as soon as word got out, the hordes of White Russian refugees from Moscow, Petrograd, and other places in the north would stampede out of terror that the Bolsheviks would massacre them. With escape by land cut off, the only way out was across the Black Sea, and there were not nearly enough ships for everyone. He would have to rush to get his flock aboard a ship while there was still time.
Most of the Americans trapped in Odessa were in Russia because of business and charitable ventures with which Jenkins was familiar. But the black man who had recently come to see him was unlike anyone he had ever met in Russia before. The man gave his name as Frederick Bruce Thomas and claimed he was an American citizen who owned valuable property in Moscow. He explained that his passport had been stolen from him several months earlier during his harrowing escape by train from Moscow and that he had no other documents to prove h
is identity; neither did his wife, who he said was Swedish, nor his four children. He was presenting himself at the consulate to claim the protection for himself and his family to which his American origin entitled him.
As Frederick anticipated, his black skin and southern drawl identified him as convincingly as any official piece of paper could have done. But as he also surely knew, any assistance that Jenkins would give was risky: it could be a return ticket to the world of American racism. During the past twenty years, every time Frederick had filled out an application to renew his passport in Western Europe or Russia, American consular officials had noted his skin color on it; the Europeans and Russians, by contrast, seemed never to care about such matters.
However, this time Frederick was facing an even bigger risk. He had concealed something very important about himself when he met Jenkins and could not be sure he would not be found out. Four years earlier, soon after the Great War began, in a move that may have been without precedent for a black American, Frederick became a citizen of the Russian Empire. He had thus automatically forfeited his right to American citizenship, and this meant that he no longer had any moral or legal claim on American protection. But Frederick never told the United States consulate in Moscow what he had done; and, as far as he knew, the Imperial Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, which presented his petition to Tsar Nicholas II for approval, had also not informed the United States embassy in Petrograd. As a result, neither Jenkins nor any other American official, in Russia or in Washington, was likely to have known the truth.
It was Frederick’s good fortune that Jenkins had no reason to doubt his story. During the past year, many people escaping from Bolshevik Moscow had experienced far worse than stolen documents. Trains lumbering across the lawless and war-torn expanses of Russia constantly risked attacks by armed bands, both political and criminal, who robbed and murdered civilians at will. And because black Americans were hardly known in Russia, Jenkins could never have imagined that Frederick was anything other than what he claimed to be, even if Jenkins had never heard of Frederick’s fabulous career as a rich theater owner in Moscow. The consul therefore accepted that the smooth-talking, sophisticated, middle-aged black man with the big smile was an American, although he would qualify this in his official report to the State Department by noting that “Mr. Frederick Thomas” was “colored.” Jenkins also dutifully added him, his wife, and their four children to the list of people he would try to get on board a ship.
The choice for Frederick had been stark: to lie to Jenkins and escape or to stay in Odessa and risk death. When, in the first months of 1919, it became increasingly obvious that the French were not going to succeed in nurturing a White Russian crusade against the Bolsheviks—a prospect that had originally made refugees in the city delirious with joy—the hopes of people like Frederick that they would be able to return home and reclaim their former lives and property began to sink. In a paradoxical reversal, the Russian citizenship that had provided Frederick with valuable protection in Moscow during the outburst of patriotism at the beginning of the Great War had now become a liability. The Bolshevik Revolution had destroyed the society that had embraced him and allowed him to prosper. His theaters and other property had been nationalized and his wealth stolen. In the poisonous atmosphere of class warfare that the Bolsheviks created, he risked arrest and execution simply for having been rich. By contrast, nationals of the United States and the other Allied powers who had succeeded in getting to the French-controlled enclave in Odessa could turn to their countries’ diplomatic representatives for help. And because after the war the Allies had sent a large fleet to Constantinople, the capital of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and transformed the Black Sea into their dominion, the diplomats were backed up by military strength.
The hour was late, but the news Jenkins had gotten was so shocking that he decided he could not wait until morning. He immediately began to contact all the Americans in the city, instructing them to gather their belongings as quickly as possible and get to the harbor while they could still find cabs. He also started burning all the coded telegrams in the consulate and packing the secret codebooks. By working through the night, Jenkins was able to round up the entire group. And by early in the morning on Thursday, April 3, he had gotten them onto two ships: HMS Skirmisher, which had agreed to take most of the American consular and other officials; and Imperator Nikolay, a Russian ship that the French had placed at the disposal of the consuls from several Allied countries—France, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. The American contingent on Imperator Nikolay was one of the smallest: in addition to sixteen other civilians, it included Frederick; his wife, Elvira; and his three sons, who ranged in age from four to twelve—Bruce, Frederick Jr., and Mikhail. There was supposed to be a fourth child, his seventeen-year-old daughter Olga, but she had unexpectedly disappeared at the last minute and no one knew where she was.
Olga was not staying with the rest of the family and had been put up in a hotel. Perhaps this was because of the severe overcrowding and shortage of rooms in a city filled with refugees, or perhaps her relations with Elvira, her stepmother, were strained, as they would be later for her brother Mikhail. Whatever the reason, the sudden call from Jenkins late at night had caught Frederick by surprise. As he rushed to gather his wife, sons, and what little luggage they could take with them, he turned to the British acting consul general Henry Cooke, who was working with Jenkins, for help in getting word to Olga to come to the ship without delay. Cooke agreed to send someone to Olga’s hotel. But when the messenger returned, he brought the distressing news that she had already left and that her new address was unknown. It was possible, Cooke suggested, that Olga had decided to try to get on board one of the other ships in the harbor.
There was no way to verify this during the Thomases’ flight through the sleeping city. And once he was on board, Frederick could not risk going back on shore. At any moment, word of the evacuation could leak out, and then Odessa would erupt, and the streets would become impassable. Despite the relief he felt because his wife and sons were almost out of danger, it must have been excruciating to wait within easy reach of the shore, helpless to do anything.
The hurry to get on board also cost Frederick what remained of his fortune. At its peak on the eve of the February Revolution in 1917, it had amounted to about $10 million in today’s currency. All he had left now was what he happened to have on hand—“less than $25,” as he later described the sum, which is equivalent to perhaps a few hundred now. Thursday, April 3, also proved to be the last day that any of Odessa’s banks were open and clients could make withdrawals, but Frederick had boarded Imperator Nikolay before they opened.
As the sun climbed higher over the city, the anxiety of rushing to the ship was gradually eclipsed by the tedium of waiting. Imperator Nikolay continued to sit at anchor as one delay followed another. First, there were problems with the engines, which needed twenty-four hours to get up steam in any case. Then the crew suddenly deserted in support of pro-Bolshevik workers in the city and replacements had to be found. More and more refugees kept boarding, including many Russians. The French had still not announced the evacuation officially, although rumors were spreading and agitation in the city was growing.
Finally, on the following morning, Friday, April 4, d’Anselme published in the Odessa newspapers the announcement of an immediate evacuation. A Russian naval officer, Prince Andrey Lobanov-Rostovsky, saw what happened in the London Hotel when people heard the news and when they suddenly realized that they would need exit visas from the French to get on board a ship:
In an instant bedlam reigned…. The lobby was filled with wildly gesticulating people. The elevators were jammed. Two streams of humanity, going up and down the stairs, met on the landings between floors, where free-for-all fights took place. Women caught in the crush were shrieking, and from these landings valises came tumbling down on the heads of those who were below in the lobby.
Adding to the chaos was a violent
mob that had gathered in the street and was trying to force its way into the hotel. A unit of French soldiers, rifles at the ready, took up positions in the lobby behind the bolted doors. With great difficulty, and “risking being crushed,” Lobanov-Rostovsky pushed his way to the upper floor, where he “succeeded in getting past some hundred people who were hammering at the doors of the rooms occupied by headquarters, claiming visas.” Once inside, he got a written order allowing him to board a ship leaving that morning; he then escaped by a back door and hastened to the port. The steamer on which Lobanov-Rostovsky got passage turned out to be the same one that had been designated for foreigners, Imperator Nikolay, so his memoirs provide a glimpse of the fate he shared with Frederick.
The panic was even worse in the harbor because the ships that were supposed to carry the refugees to safety were within sight and almost within reach. In Jenkins’s words, the “confusion was indescribable.” A crush of tens of thousands of panicked civilians poured down the streets from the upper city and flooded onto the docks, trying to get past armed Allied sentries, struggling with their luggage and waving their documents in the air.
Discipline among the French colonial troops and other Allied troops had been weak to begin with. The sudden evacuation eroded it further. Greek soldiers on the docks hacked at the engines of brand-new automobiles with axes, then pushed them into the water, so that the Bolsheviks would not get them. Cooke saw drunken soldiers looting supplies they were supposed to be evacuating while their officers stood by and watched. Just before setting sail, a British captain noticed several drunken French soldiers from Senegal grab two young Russian women who were on the dock and push them screaming into a shed. He intervened and was able to get the women on board his ship. As he went up the gangplank behind them, one of the soldiers ran alongside with his rifle and took a shot at him, but missed.
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