The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  During the war’s second year, its effects were becoming harder to ignore in Moscow. The city started to be overwhelmed by trainloads of wounded soldiers being evacuated from the European and southern fronts. As with most other Russian military preparations, the number of hospitals proved to be inadequate, and the authorities were forced to look for private property that could be requisitioned until dedicated new facilities could be arranged. Yar was closed to the public for nearly a year and its restaurant transformed into a hospital, with the tables replaced by neat rows of cots occupied by meek and stoically suffering, mostly peasant soldiers. Military commissions also examined Aquarium and Maxim with a view toward using the spacious theaters as clinics or storage depots for medical supplies. But Frederick was characteristically deft in the deals he made, and only part of each of his large properties was taken over for military needs in 1915 and again in 1916.

  Other wartime impositions on entrepreneurs began to accumulate as well. Starting in late 1915, fuel and electricity shortages forced the commander of the Moscow military district to announce that all theaters would have to observe shorter hours, starting at 8 p.m. and ending at midnight. New taxes to support the war effort, and coercive “donations” to the official imperial charities, known collectively as “Empress Maria’s Department of Institutions,” were also imposed on theatrical entertainments. In some cases, taxes were estimated to be as high as 30 percent of an establishment’s gross income.

  The news from Petrograd was also becoming progressively more unnerving and there was a growing sense that the empire’s center was not holding. Nicholas II was at the army’s headquarters in Mogilyov, four hundred miles south of Petrograd, and effectively removed from direct control of his government. Russia’s nascent parliament had tried to build on the genuine surge in patriotism accompanying the outbreak of the war and could have mediated between the government and an increasingly anxious public. But because Nicholas was unwilling to consider any form of cooperation with it, he left a dangerous power vacuum in the capital. It was partially filled by his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, a narrow-minded and credulous woman, who intervened in government affairs while being herself under the influence of Grigory Rasputin, imperial Russia’s extraordinary evil genius. As a result, during the year and a half following Nicholas’s departure from the capital a process that came to be labeled “ministerial leapfrog” took place: in quick succession, it gave Russia four different prime ministers, five ministers of internal affairs, three ministers of foreign affairs, three ministers of war, three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture. A few were competent; most were craven and inept.

  As the country’s mood darkened, a febrile atmosphere began to creep into the entertainments and distractions that were sought by civilians and military men. On the eve of the war, a new dance craze had emerged from Argentina, leaped to Paris, and swept around the world—the tango. Its popularity in Russia was so immediate and so great that Frederick, who was always alert to novelty, decided to capitalize on it by refurbishing large spaces in his theaters and naming them after the dance, leading a journalist to proclaim that Maxim had become Moscow’s “kingdom of the tango.” During the war, the tango’s popularity increased, with some professional dancers and singers adding macabre overtones to its elegant, stylized eroticism. One couple became famous for their “Tango of Death,” in which the man, who was otherwise impeccably dressed in evening clothes, had his face made up to look like a skull. It was a melodramatic echo of the lurid news arriving from the fronts, as were such other popular tunes as “Wilhelm’s Bloody Tango” (named after the German kaiser) and “The Last Tango,” in which a jilted lover stabs the woman to death.

  The emotional abandon that Russians sought from the tango during the war, and the elation that they got from vodka and wine, found a new blood relative in drugs, especially cocaine. In certain urban circles cocaine became the path of choice to euphoric oblivion in the face of the hopeless problems swirling all around. And it quickly emerged as an emblem of decadence, of failing national spiritual health: the tides of battle on the fronts ebbed and flowed; ministers and courtiers intrigued; profiteers schemed. For many, daily life was becoming more difficult, and for others it seemed pointless.

  “Cocainomaniacs,” as the addicts came to be called, were a common sight in Moscow’s theatrical world, and Frederick grew to know one of the most famous very well. Aleksandr Vertinsky, who performed in Maxim and would work for Frederick in Constantinople as well, became wildly popular at the end of 1915 for his songs of resignation in the face of life’s sadness and pain, as well as for their complement—escapist longing for exotic locales. A well-known example of his repertoire is “Kokainetka,” or “Little Cocaine Girl,” which dates from 1916 and laments “a lonely and poor young woman/Crucified on Moscow’s wet boulevards by cocaine.” (Later he would stage a dance on a related theme—the “Hashish Tango.”) On stage Vertinsky dressed as Pierrot, the sad, naive clown of the Italian commedia dell’arte, whose heart is always broken by Columbine. His face powdered a deathly white, his eyes and eyebrows exaggeratedly made up with tragic black, and wearing crimson lipstick, he looked like a haunted character from another world.

  By 1916, Frederick’s and Russia’s fates had diverged dramatically. Aquarium and Maxim were still thriving and money was pouring in. But his new homeland was succumbing to myriad diseases that were eating away its insides and that no one knew how to slow, much less cure. The country was bleeding men. Popular support for the disastrous war had plummeted and revolutionary agitation against the imperial regime was growing. Shortages of fuel and foodstuffs worsened. Workers struck against the high cost of living; strikes included those in such critical industries as the giant Putilov munitions factory in Petrograd, which was the largest in Europe and employed 30,000 men, the Nikolaev naval shipyards on the Black Sea, and the Donbas region in the Ukraine, with 50,000 coal miners. The authorities responded brutally by drafting the physically able and arresting and prosecuting the rest. When labor shortages led the government to conscript several hundred thousand Muslims in Turkestan and Central Asia to work in military factories near the front, a rebellion broke out and troops had to be dispatched to put it down by force, resulting in thousands of deaths.

  But the most grotesque sign of the empire’s sickness was Rasputin, the self-styled “holy man” who, for nearly a decade, had had a cancerous grip on Tsaritsa Alexandra and, through her, on Nicholas II and the rest of the government. A semiliterate, cunning, and libidinous peasant, he combined greed with primitive mysticism and a beguiling manner that attracted sycophants and hypnotized the gullible. The empress was a painfully shy and haughty woman whose life was dominated by piety, spite, and frantic worry about the health of her only son, Tsarevich Alexis, the heir to the throne and the most famous hemophiliac in history. As witnesses attest, it was Rasputin’s uncanny ability to calm the boy during episodes of life-threatening bleeding that made his mother believe in the “holy man’s” healing powers, and to follow his advice on everything else as well.

  Rasputin’s notoriety in Russia and around the world inspired some contemporaries to invent meetings with him in order to spice up their own life stories. Jack Johnson succumbed to this temptation, according to a memoirist who also went on to claim that Frederick introduced Johnson to Rasputin—and at a court ball in Petrograd, no less. This could never have happened, as documentary evidence proves. But Frederick did know well several people who had to deal with Rasputin’s scandalous behavior in Moscow, when he came from Petrograd to close a tawdry business deal. On the night of March 26, 1915, Rasputin and his entourage went to Yar, which was still owned by Frederick’s old boss and mentor Aleksey Sudakov. The “holy man’s” escapades were legion, but on this occasion he managed to outdo himself. He was already drunk when his group occupied a private room. They ordered dinner, more drink, summoned a choir, and launched into a noisy revel. As always, Rasputin was the center of attention: he ordered the choir to
sing his favorite songs; made the chorus girls do “cynical dances,” as the police report subsequently put it; performed Russian folk dances himself; and dragged some of the women onto his lap. Not forgetting his role as a “holy man,” he also scribbled notes urging them to “love disinterestedly” (meaning that they should yield to him because their love would be sanctified). When Sudakov heard what was going on he fell into a panic and tried to persuade other patrons that it was not actually Rasputin carousing upstairs but an imposter passing himself off as the notorious “friend” of the imperial family. Rasputin got wind of this and was so incensed that he started to prove his identity in the most unbridled ways possible—hinting obscenely about his relations with the empress, bragging that she had personally sewn the caftan he was wearing, and, finally, dropping his trousers and exposing himself to the young women.

  Outrage at Rasputin’s behavior and supposed influence played into the hands of his many enemies, and early in 1916 three prominent men, including the tsar’s first cousin, murdered him in Petrograd. In their own blundering and bloody way, the three had tried to save their country from one of the malignancies at its heart, although they had misconceived the scope and nature of the task. Corruption had already spread too deeply to be excised by the killing of any single man. But in contrast to the country’s ruling circles, the three had at least looked inward, which was the right direction.

  During the last months of its life, the Russian Empire was being threatened from two directions simultaneously. The tsar, his ministers, and his top military commanders focused almost entirely on the external danger posed by the Central Powers and were committed above all else to a “victorious conclusion” of the war. As a result, they largely neglected the grave internal threat to the empire’s entire social and political order—the disaffection of large swaths of the population, including many troops at the front, the workers, and the peasants. The conditions were ripe for revolutionary groups to exploit the situation and to foment open rebellion.

  In the end, the imperial regime’s blind pursuit of victory proved suicidal. Six months before the empire collapsed, the Russian army managed to gather itself up for an immense new effort and won its greatest victory of the war against Austria-Hungary, known as the “Brusilov Offensive.” In fact, some historians have characterized this as the single greatest military triumph of the Entente against the Central Powers and one of the deadliest battles in world history. But it was a classic Pyrrhic victory. The Russian army suffered such staggering casualties and desertions that it began to disintegrate. More than anything else, General Brusilov’s great success underscored the waste of men, wealth, and vast national potential that was Russia’s tragic fate during the Great War.

  Back in Moscow, Frederick did not see the coming cataclysm. Even though every month it became more difficult to carry on as before because of shortages of food items, alcohol, electricity, fuel, and people, the variety theaters and restaurants were packed and profits kept pouring in. The only adjustments that Frederick made during these troubled times were driven, ironically, by his personal success. To free himself from the daily chore of attending to his properties, he transformed most of his active business interests into passive investments by leasing his theaters to other entrepreneurs. Concurrently, in a move without precedent in Moscow’s theater world, he generously rewarded some of his senior employees—the stage manager, the accountant, the head chef, and several maîtres d’hôtel—by transferring day-to-day control of the Aquarium garden’s multifaceted operation to them. However, he remained so optimistic about the future that all the leases he signed were for several years and the rents he demanded and received were high.

  In fact, Frederick made his biggest investment in Moscow—and thus tied his fate to Russia’s more strongly than ever—in the last days of the Russian Empire. He had been scouting properties in Moscow for some time before he finally found one that suited him in terms of location, quality, size, and income. On February 16, 1917, he signed documents that made him the owner of a block of six adjoining buildings, with thirty-eight rental units of varying sizes, on one of the main spokes of the Moscow street wheel, at 2 Karetny Ryad Street. This location is less than a mile from the Kremlin, and, in an ironic twist, was (and still is) across the street from the Hermitage Garden, Aquarium’s only rival. He had paid 425,000 rubles, which would be about $7 million today.

  In making the purchase, Frederick must have been amused by the unlikely coincidence that one of the former owners—a man with two resonant titles: Prince Mikhail Mikhaylovich Cantacuzene, Count Speransky—had a prominent American connection. In 1899, he had married Julia Dent Grant, the granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union armies during the Civil War and eighteenth president of the United States. Julia had in fact been born in the White House during her grandfather’s presidency, and after her marriage she lived in Russia with her husband, who was a close aide to the tsar and eventually rose to the rank of general during the war. Who in Hopson Bayou could ever have imagined that a black native son would be involved in a property transaction in Moscow with a family like this?

  With this purchase, Frederick completed the process of investing the money that he had made during the war. His focus on real estate reflected not only his desire to put roots even more deeply into his adopted country. His purchase at this moment in Russian history also shows a character trait that he shared with his parents: a conviction that he could prevail.

  6: Loss and Escape

  FEBRUARY 1917

  Frederick could scarcely have chosen a worse time to make his biggest investment in Moscow; exactly one week after he bought the apartment buildings from the Cantacuzene-Speranskys the first Revolution of 1917 broke out in Petrograd. On February 23 O.S. (March 8 in the West), hundreds of thousands of striking workers, who had been protesting shortages of bread and fuel for months in the outlying factory districts, started to pour into the city center to demonstrate their anger directly to the authorities. The tsar, who was still at the front, ordered the commander of the capital’s garrison to disperse the demonstrators, but the troops were so disaffected that they refused to fire on the crowds. Soon, soldiers and even some officers started to fraternize with the demonstrators and to join them; sailors of the Baltic fleet also mutinied. The insurgents began seizing control of sections of the city and attacking government buildings. On March 11, as the rebellion spread to Moscow and other cities, Nicholas ordered the Duma, which had been pressing him for change, to dissolve. Most members refused, and on the following day they announced the creation of a Provisional Government that consisted largely of liberal and progressive members; more radical elements formed a second center of power—the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The tsar made a halfhearted attempt to return to Petrograd, but after learning that both of the empire’s capitals were in the hands of rebels and that he had no support from his generals, on March 2/15 he abdicated for himself and his son, Alexis, in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The next day, the latter abdicated in favor of the Provisional Government. As the historian Riasanovsky put it, the three-hundred-year-old Russian Empire died “with hardly a whimper.”

  Throughout the country, news of the monarchy’s collapse was greeted with elation. Sculptures and images of the two-headed eagle—symbol of the monarchy—were torn down everywhere. In Moscow, after some initially tense confrontations between troops and the rebellious crowds in front of the City Duma building near Red Square, the soldiers joined the insurgents and tied red ribbons to their bayonets. Masses of people poured into the streets and squares in the city center carrying red banners in support of the revolution in Petrograd and singing the “Marseillaise.” On Sunday, March 25, a giant “Liberty Parade” consisting of several hundred thousand people wound through the heart of Moscow. An American who saw it was much impressed by the orderliness of the procession, the good cheer of the crowds that gathered to watch, the absence of police, and the easy mixing of the soc
ial classes. In a sign of the transitional nature of the time, the procession blended the new with the old—banners with revolutionary slogans such as “Land and the Will of the People” combined with prayer at the Chapel of the Iberian Mother of God at the entrance to Red Square. Part of the procession had a carnival atmosphere and the crowds especially enjoyed a circus troupe with a camel and elephant covered with revolutionary placards. Behind them came a wagon holding a black coffin labeled “The Old Order,” on top of which sat a grimacing dwarf wearing a sign that read “Protopopov”—the name of the reviled last imperial minister of the interior, who had been placed under arrest by the new regime.

  But not all that happened in the spring of 1917 was festive or peaceful, and men of property like Frederick soon realized that the revolution endangered their well-being and livelihood. In Moscow, the police force had been disarmed and disbanded by the insurgents even before Nicholas abdicated. When, as one of its first acts, the Provisional Government announced broad civil liberties, it also granted an amnesty to all political prisoners, including terrorists; in Moscow, some two thousand thieves and murderers were released from prisons as well. A crime wave began in the city, with robberies in the streets and attacks on homes and businesses. The new city militia, composed primarily of student volunteers, proved ineffective, and householders were forced to organize their own associations for mutual protection. This was but an early harbinger of the greater anarchy to come.