The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  Another early decree with fateful consequences for the entire country was “Order Number One,” issued by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the second center of power in the capital. This soviet (“council”) proclaimed that it had the right to countermand any of the Provisional Government’s orders regarding military matters, and that every unit down to the size of a company should elect soldiers’ committees to decide how it would act in any given situation. This “democratic” order abolished the imperial army’s hierarchical command structure, as was intended. But it also sounded the death knell for the army, which, although greatly weakened by early 1917, was still the only organization left in Russia that might have been able to resist the destructive social forces that were now beginning to gather hurricane strength.

  By this time, the patriotic upsurge of the war’s early phase had been long forgotten. Soldiers wanted peace, and large-scale desertions increased. Some units mutinied against their officers and beat or even shot them. Others began to fraternize with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians across the front lines. However, the Provisional Government remained blind to the reality at the front, and believing it had a debt of loyalty to the Entente persisted in trying to whip up enthusiasm for yet another offensive, with the stated goal of nothing less than “decisive victory.” This fatal gap between the ineffectual government and the masses of soldiers, who were largely drawn from the peasantry and the lower classes, was reproduced throughout the country. The peasants had no interest in the war and wanted land reform. Workers wanted better wages, shorter hours, and control over their factories. City dwellers wanted an end to the shortages of food, fuel, and consumer goods. In a hopeful gesture of support for the Russian war effort, first the United States and then the other members of the Entente recognized the Provisional Government within a few days after it was formed. But the new regime failed to win the support of its own people, and that failure would be its doom.

  Theatrical life in Moscow started to adapt to the country’s new political reality very quickly, but many of the earliest changes were superficial and most activities went on as before, with profits continuing to roll in. The city’s new “commissar,” who replaced the governor-general, renamed the former “imperial” theaters “Moscow State Theaters.” Mikhail Glinka’s superpatriotic nineteenth-century opera A Life for the Tsar was dropped from the repertory of the Bolshoy Theater. By contrast, with the elimination of the imperial censorship and a marked decrease in the influence of the Orthodox Church on public life, lewd and irreverent plays began to be staged widely. An especially popular genre ridiculed Rasputin and his relations with the imperial family, and included such titles as Rasputin’s Happy Days, Grishka’s Harem, and The Crash of the Firm “Romanov and Co.”

  Despite such iconoclasm and the incendiary revolutionary rhetoric resounding everywhere, many venerable tsarist-era institutions continued to function by inertia during 1917, and it is striking that Frederick chose this time to join one of the most archaic. On June 10/23, 1917, he officially became a Moscow “Merchant of the First Guild” and his name was duly entered in the register for “Gostinnaya Sloboda” (the “Merchant Quarter”), a Moscow place-name dating to medieval times that now referred simply to a specific merchants’ association. He had included Olga, his oldest child, who had recently turned fifteen, in his application as well.

  The designation that Frederick received had been established in the early eighteenth century and had originally entitled the bearer to some important privileges, such as freedom from military service, from corporal punishment, and from the head tax. The designation was also an honorific and gave its bearers an elevated social status. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the designation was little more than an anachronism, although its benefits were not without charm: merchants of the first guild were in principle entitled to attend the tsar’s court and wear an official uniform, including a sword. (By the time of Frederick’s enrollment this privilege had become academic, of course; Nicholas had been placed under house arrest in one of his former palaces.) Nonetheless, for Frederick this was a sign that he had risen to the top of his profession and that his Russian peers recognized his position. Olga’s inclusion demonstrates that he expected her, and probably his other children when they were older, to participate in running the businesses that he had established.

  Once again, however, Frederick’s timing could scarcely have been worse. By becoming a merchant of the first guild, he was, in effect, proudly confirming that he was a prosperous bourgeois capitalist. Although this class had been an honorable one in old Russia, it would soon become anathema in the growing revolutionary storm. Frederick was on the verge of discovering that he was no longer merely caught in the flow of history; its forces were beginning to turn against him.

  Calamitous historical events accumulated rapidly in the second half of 1917. A few weeks after the collapse of the tsarist regime, the Germans decided to aggravate the revolutionary fever that had gripped Russia by shipping Vladimir Lenin, the willful and unscrupulous leader of the radical Bolshevik Communist Party, to Petrograd from Switzerland, where he had been in exile. In the ensuing months, Lenin and his followers did all they could to undermine the weak and increasingly unpopular Provisional Government. They called for Russia’s immediate withdrawal from the war, the control of factories by workers, the expropriation of large estates, and the distribution of land to the peasants. All these goals increasingly appealed to the Russian masses, but the Provisional Government could not or would not support them. In July, an attempt by the minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, to launch a new offensive against Germany in Galicia led to an insurrection and the collapse of what was left of the Russian army. At the end of August, there was an attack on the discredited Provisional Government from the right by the army’s commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov, who became involved in a coup conspiracy. The specter of a counterrevolution now rallied the radical parties and the city’s workers in support of the Provisional Government, with the result that the attempted coup dissipated. However, the only group that gained from the episode was the Bolsheviks, and by the end of September 1917, they had become the strongest military faction in the capital.

  In the summer of 1917 Frederick decided that he would have to come out of his self-imposed role as a passive investor. The political climate was drifting increasingly to the left and he would have to find a way to adapt. His solution was to strike a deal with the Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies, which was the local version of the Petrograd Soviet that had vied for authority with the Provisional Government ever since the February Revolution. The plan was to establish a new “soldiers’ theater” at Aquarium and to stage performances of a kind that had never appeared there before. Rather than light entertainment, the focus would be on famous serious dramatic works, classical music, and operas. The aim of the plan was in keeping with the noblest ideals of the revolution: to democratize access to high culture by educating soldiers, who, as the argument went, had been kept in a state of ignorance by the dark forces of the old regime. Now, they would be exposed to the best, “strictly democratic” works that had been created in Russia and abroad, including plays by Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, Schiller, Ibsen, and Shakespeare; operas by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky; and concerts of symphonic and chamber music. An initiative like this was not going to bring in as much money as a French or Viennese bedroom farce, but it was clearly better than leaving the theater empty. Frederick appears to have been the first prominent entrepreneur in the city to align himself with the new order by leasing his theater to an overtly populist, revolutionary group. His reason was surely hard-nosed pragmatism rather than politics. Maxim remained leased to another entrepreneur during the fall of 1917, but without any major changes in its traditional repertory.

  OCTOBER 1917

  On October 25/November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd struck. Wearing a disguise, Lenin had slipped into the capital from his
temporary refuge in Finland two days earlier and managed to convince his followers that the time had come to seize power. Red troops coordinated by Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s ablest assistant, occupied a number of strategic locations in the city. That night, Bolshevik-led soldiers, sailors, and factory workers attacked the Winter Palace, the former imperial residence where the Provisional Government was meeting. The small defense force in the palace, which consisted of several hundred military cadets and elements of a women’s battalion, was overcome after a few hours of resistance. The Bolsheviks arrested members of the government; Kerensky, who had become prime minister, had managed to escape earlier in a car borrowed from the United States embassy. The Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government succeeded with fewer people killed in Petrograd than after the tsar’s abdication in February.

  In Moscow, by contrast, there was more serious resistance. On the morning after the Provisional Government fell, Bolshevik troops surrounded the Kremlin and were confronted by cadets from the city’s military academies and some Cossacks. Each side accused the other of illegitimacy and refused to back down. The Bolsheviks opened fire first. In the next several days, pitched battles raged across the city between Red units and those few that were still loyal to the Provisional Government. The situation quickly became so chaotic that the city appeared to descend into schizophrenia: people stood in lines to get their bread rations on one side of a square while cadets and Red troops were exchanging fire on the other. An Englishman recalled that railways, post offices, and other public institutions continued to function at the same time that heavy fighting was breaking out all across the city. Despite the danger, he risked venturing out one night and went to see Chekhov’s famous play The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theater, which was a few blocks from Maxim, but on the way home he had to duck for cover from machine-gun fire.

  Frederick would have had good reason to worry about both of his families’ well-being and about his properties. By November 10, streetcars had stopped running and telephones were not working. Banks and businesses closed. Out of fear of being hit by bullets or shrapnel, people avoided leaving their homes except for necessities. Patrols of bellicose Bolshevik soldiers and rough-looking factory workers with rifles slung on pieces of rope began to appear on the city’s streets. In apartment buildings, members of residents’ committees collected whatever handguns they could find and took turns guarding the entrances against marauding bands of armed men whose allegiance was uncertain; other residents slept fully clothed to be ready in case anyone tried to break in.

  By the end of the week, scores of buildings in central Moscow had been badly damaged by rifle, machine-gun, and artillery fire, including some of the most revered cathedrals in the Kremlin itself. As a horrified city dweller characterized it, the damage to Russia’s symbolic heart during this fratricidal fighting exceeded what Napoleon’s foreign invaders had caused in 1812. An American described what he saw outside his residence in the city center.

  The house we are in is almost a wreck, and the boulevard in front is a most singular and distressing panorama of desolation. The roads are covered with glass and debris; trees, lampposts, telephone poles are shot off raggedly; dead horses and a few dead men lie in the parkway; the broken gas mains are still blazing; the black, austere, smoking hulks of the burning buildings stand like great barricades about the littered yards of the boulevard.

  Between five thousand and seven thousand people had been killed. But on November 20, Moscow’s Military-Revolutionary Committee announced that it had won and that all the cadets and its other opponents had either surrendered or been killed.

  The first weeks after the fighting stopped were an anxious time in Moscow. No one knew exactly what to expect from the Bolsheviks, but the fact that they had seized power in Petrograd by force and had used it indiscriminately throughout the city was an ominous sign. Nevertheless, people in Frederick’s world had little choice but to try to live as before, despite the widespread destruction, dislocations, soaring prices, and scanty food and fuel supplies. Maxim had escaped damage in the fighting, and the theater director who had leased it tried to continue with his old repertory—a hodgepodge of melodramas, comedies, lighthearted French song and dance numbers, and, in a gesture to the times, an occasional, ponderously serious play (this unappetizing mix would not survive for very long). Similarly, during the last months of 1917, Aquarium continued serving up its mostly high-minded fare as the official theater of the Moscow garrison. Since both places were still functioning and making money, so was Frederick.

  However, as an especially harsh winter descended on Russia, the new regime began to reveal its fundamentally belligerent face, and the danger to Frederick and his ilk became apparent. The Bolsheviks’ most urgent task was to secure their grip on power by eliminating all external and internal threats to it. They would eliminate the external threat by getting Russia out of the Great War, and the internal threat by unleashing a new kind of war against entire classes of people they considered their enemies.

  In the Bolsheviks’ Marxist worldview, the war that had engulfed Europe was being waged by “bourgeois capitalist” powers with selfish economic and geopolitical interests that had nothing to do with, and in fact were opposed to, the genuine needs of the workers and peasants. Thus, immediately after seizing control, the Bolshevik regime offered a cease-fire to the Germans, and on March 3, 1918, the two sides signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks agreed to give up one-quarter of what had been the Russian Empire’s territory, population, and arable land; three-quarters of its iron industry and coal production; and much else besides. The terms were brutal, but the Bolsheviks were now free to turn their attention to their enemies within.

  Their identification of who these were might have struck Frederick as grotesquely familiar. Just as a black person could not escape racist categories in the United States, everyone in the new Soviet state was now defined by socioeconomic class; and despite the seeming differences, the Marxist and communist concept of “class” functioned, perversely, as a quasi-racial label. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, you were indelibly marked by what you did or had done for a living, and people with money, people who owned property or businesses, as well as the nobility, the clergy, the police, the judiciary, educators, army officers, and government bureaucrats—in short, all those implicated in maintaining or serving the old imperial regime—were on the wrong side of history. An American visitor to Russia at the time described the extreme forms that this attitude took.

  The Bolsheviks are out to get the scalps of all “capitalists”—the “bour-jhee,” as they call them; and in the eyes of a Bolshevik, anyone belongs to the bourgeoisie who carries a handkerchief or wears a white collar! That is why some of our friends are begging old clothes from servants; rags are less liable to be shot at in the street!

  Frederick’s origin as a black American would have done nothing to mitigate his class “sins.” The Bolsheviks hated the Americans, the French, and the British, believing that the Entente was trying to keep Russia in the war (which was true). And Frederick’s past oppression as a black man in the United States was trumped by his having become a rich man in Russia. In the end, he could no more escape how the new regime saw him than he could change the color of his skin.

  The October Revolution also changed Frederick’s strained relations with Valli, and what had been a stable if awkward arrangement was transformed into a toxic mixture of the personal and the political. In the crazy inversion of Russian norms that the revolution caused, it was as if Valli were a white American woman who suddenly decided that her estranged husband was a “Negro.”

  Frederick had known for over a year that she had taken a lover. This was a complication because Irma, Mikhail, and Olga continued to live with Valli in the big apartment at 32 Malaya Bronnaya Street; but considering how he had treated Valli himself, Frederick could not have cared all that much. Neither the lover’s name nor his occupation before the October Revolution is known, although he must
have been an ardent supporter, because he emerged from it as a “Bolshevik Commissar,” in Frederick’s later characterization. As such, he had become a person of importance in Moscow’s new regime, and his involvement with Valli became dangerous. He could back up the animosity she felt for her husband with his political power.

  It would not take long for Frederick to be confronted by Valli’s wrath. In addition to casting about for ways to accommodate himself to the new regime, he also began to search for a place where his family could escape the threats, restrictions, and shortages in Moscow. Everything suddenly changed when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In February, the Germans started their occupation of the Ukraine, and by mid-March they were in Odessa. What had been a disastrous loss of territory for the new Soviet regime proved a godsend for Russians with money and others who wanted to escape the Bolsheviks. Despite the fact that until recently the Germans had been a vilified enemy, many Russians now began to see them as the lesser evil. At a minimum, they could be relied upon to restore, in the occupied territory, a more familiar social order than what the Bolsheviks were imposing on the rest of Russia. Frederick could now get Elvira and his children out of harm’s way by sending them to the villa he owned in Odessa. Moreover, Elvira was German and had relatives in Berlin, and this would surely be to her advantage with the region’s military government.