Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

Among the needy were local Christians as well as Muslims, individuals pushed out of their homes in Thrace and Anatolia and now turning to the one place that seemed relatively calm and secure amid the growing violence in the provinces. But those who occupied most of Harington’s time—and who came to define the refugee condition in Istanbul in the early 1920s—were not natives at all. Like the Turks who surrounded them, they had lost an empire, and its demise had not been of their own making. Yet it was difficult for them to imagine a new country precisely because they had not given up the idea of winning back their old one. They clung to memories of a place called the Russian Empire and a monarch called the tsar, and they were the exiles whose presence in the Ottoman capital was the most unexpected. The influx of Russians would also turn out to have a profound effect on the culture of their adopted refuge.

  Turks and Russians had both experienced revolutions of a sort, and both found ways of remembering them that treated the losers as not just morally wrong but also deeply inconsequential. The triumphalist version of Soviet history cast the Bolsheviks as predestined winners of the universal struggle between the working class and its exploiters. A popular revolt in February 1917 toppled the tsar and installed a provisional government, which in turn gave way to a workers’ revolution in October. But what began as a Bolshevik coup, a quick seizure of power intended to quash the provisional government in advance of parliamentary elections, evolved into a long and bloody civil war that raged across the entire breadth of the Russian Empire. It was all “a salad of warring communities and factions,” Tom Bridges, the British liaison officer in Istanbul, reported at the time. Homes were burned, people were put to flight, and livestock was left to wander masterless along village roads, no matter the cap badges or ideologies.

  In the autumn of 1917, the anti-Bolshevik opposition was concentrated along the Don River, where Cossack communities refused to accept the authority of the new socialist government in Petrograd. The Cossack uprising turned out to be a magnet that attracted disaffected imperial officers, old aristocrats, Russian nationalists, and adventure-seeking schoolboys committed to turning back the Reds. They formed the so-called Volunteer Army, a small force with no more than four thousand men under arms at the outset. It grew to become the largest and most powerful of several opposition groups opposing Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders. Where the Bolsheviks had unity of mission and ruthlessness of execution, however, their opponents—collectively known as the Whites—had only a vague program: restoring the old order, protecting their traditional privileges, and denying a revolution that seemed to have the wind of history at its back. By February 1920 the Whites were in full retreat, withdrawing to the shelter of the Black Sea coast. Russian subjects streamed out of ports such as Odessa and Sevastopol, which were soon overrun by Bolshevik troops. The commander of the Volunteer Army, Anton Denikin, was forced into a chaotic evacuation from his redoubt in the port of Novorossiisk.

  Charles Strafford, a British naval aviator on board the warship Pegasus, was part of the Allied contingent dispatched to cover Denikin’s retreat. The tsar’s empire had been an ally during the First World War, and British, French, and American forces made a halfhearted attempt to assist Russia’s struggling loyalists against the socialists. Strafford was appalled by the scenes of desperation and disorder. The docks were covered with Russian soldiers and their families, all wearing a mix of uniforms and civilian clothes caked with mud. The night sky glowed from fires raging through the docklands, the searchlights of British and French vessels, and the flash of naval and shore artillery. Cossack cavalry unbridled their horses and turned them into the hills. As the fleeing army steamed away on a flotilla of evacuation vessels under Allied escort, the Cossack horses reportedly galloped into the sea, swimming toward their old masters on the departing ships. From the railings, people watched the foamy wakes subside as the horses drowned in the deep water.

  As soon as the Novorossiisk refugees were safely in Crimea, an area still under White control, Denikin stepped down in disgrace. “The things in Russia are now very, very bad. Everybody who can is running away, but we stay here,” seventeen-year-old Katya Tenner, a Russian in Crimea, wrote to Strafford. Individuals were weighing up the costs and benefits of leaving. Families of means could tilt fate in their favor, but everyone faced the common problem of planning for uncertainty. Twenty-year-old Vladimir Nabokov, the future novelist, had been packed off to Crimea by his father, a prominent Petrograd lawyer and minister of justice in Denikin’s government. The family cook had prepared a knapsack of caviar sandwiches for the journey, and the family eventually settled on the grounds of the tsar’s summer home, the Livadia Palace, near Yalta. Nabokov’s father was able to secure places aboard a freighter carrying a cargo of dried fruit, calling briefly at Istanbul and then Piraeus. Next came a long journey by train and ferry to London, where the family began a new life as émigrés.

  Tens of thousands of others were less fortunate. The remnants of the Volunteer Army were wedged onto the Crimean Peninsula, hunkered down between the mountains and the coast. The army was now under the leadership of Pyotr “Piper” Wrangel. His nickname referenced his love of Piper-Heidsieck champagne, but in the field he was ramrod-straight. Tall and lithe, in his early forties, he was usually clad in an exotic Cossack uniform, with a cherkeska tunic and fuzzy astrakhan hat. He exuded the martial pedigree that extended through an ancestral line of imperial field marshals.

  On Wrangel’s estimate, his men were outnumbered more than three to one, with the Bolsheviks counting as many as 600,000 men under arms. By early November 1920, the Bolsheviks had pushed into Crimea, threatening the coastal cities where Wrangel’s civilian administration and army were concentrated. On November 11, 1920, facing a bitterly cold winter, Wrangel issued a proclamation from his headquarters in Sevastopol, the old seat of Russia’s southern naval force. The unequal contest was lost, he said, and the last remnant of Russia on which law and order still prevailed was to be evacuated as quickly as possible. For weeks, he had been collecting ships in the Crimean ports for exactly this eventuality.

  On a calm sea, Wrangel stepped aboard his flagship, the cruiser General Kornilov. It was soon joined by the French cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau, which fired a twenty-one-gun salute; the massive transport ship Don, its decks a fuzzy mass of fur hats and horseflesh; and other coastal steamers, icebreakers, cargo vessels, and warships of all tonnages—one hundred twenty-six ships in all. As seagulls wheeled overhead and a pink haze veiled the coast, Wrangel gave his last order in Russian waters: Make for Istanbul.

  Three days later, the flotilla limped into port and set anchor near Moda, on the Asian side of the city within sight of Topkapı Palace. Since Russians and Turks had been on opposite sides of four wars over the previous century, this was not exactly the way generations of tsarist strategists had dreamed of a Russian navy’s arrival in the Ottoman capital. Nor was it the way that generations of Ottomans had expected to receive them. But times had changed. The Russians were now refugees and the Turks were under foreign occupation.

  “The plight of those poor people was indescribable,” recalled General Harington. Some of the larger ships carried thousands of passengers, crammed onto decks and below, with no awnings or other covers to keep off the wind and rain—“like cattle ships,” reported Admiral Bristol, the American high commissioner. No one had adequate food or water. When a small group of caiques and patrol boats approached from shore, women threw their fur coats and pearls overboard in exchange for bread.

  Harington boarded one of the vessels and found “a starving mass of humanity.” Lice and vermin were common. Counting Wrangel’s flotilla, the largest single group of evacuees, some 185,000 people had arrived from Russia during the civil war, swelling Istanbul’s population by as much as twenty percent. The harsh winter, the paucity of resources, and the potential threat to public order posed by the influx—more than a hundred thousand of the refugees were White Army soldiers, eager to regroup and launch a new war
against Bolshevism—prompted some diplomats to suggest sending the Russians even farther southward, perhaps settling them in North Africa. But as the ships sat off Moda, it was clear that, at least for the time being, the only place the Russians were going to colonize was Istanbul.

  Representatives from the Pera Palace and other hotels were on hand when the ships arrived, hoping to snag a few well-to-do patrons. The hotel owners seemed more than willing to evict their existing guests (including entire bands of prostitutes whose business was booming with so many foreign soldiers and sailors in the city) in order to charge even higher prices to the desperate Russians. Less fortunate migrants had to rely on the makeshift canteens and bunkhouses set up by occupation authorities. Istanbul was probably outfitted with more barracks than any city in the world, noted a British diplomatic report, but there had been so many waves of arrivals that some people were forced to sleep rough on the street or curl up in disused foxholes dug during the First World War. Dead bodies sometimes went uncollected for days. There was barely time to disinfect an old barracks or tent encampment before the next group struggled off ships and onto land.

  The Russian Embassy on the Grande Rue became the center for the relief effort organized by the Russians themselves. As power shifted wildly across the old empire—from the tsar, to a provisional government, to the Bolsheviks, to the governments declared in southern Russia by Denikin and Wrangel, and then back to the Bolsheviks—the ambassador and staff had been left to fend for themselves, making up directives and determining loyalties on the fly. Now, at least, there was a Russian government that the embassy could claim to represent, even if it was a government-in-exile. Baroness Wrangel, the army commander’s wife, organized a hospital on the embassy grounds to treat the most seriously ill and injured, with her ever-present fox terrier, Jack, providing entertainment. Camps were also set up outside the city, at Tuzla and Gallipoli, to accommodate the refugees, especially the soldiers who remained formally in their military units under Wrangel’s command. It was no small irony that perhaps the greatest flowering of civil society in Russian history—the energetic and coordinated beneficence of volunteer groups, professional guilds, and charitable foundations—came only after one version of Russia had ceased to exist.

  “I think that one could say, without exaggeration, that nowhere else during the period of immigration, even in the Slavic countries that welcomed us, did the Russians feel more at home than in Constantinople,” recalled the Russian lawyer and former senator Nikolai Chebyshev. Soviet propagandists would later cast all these people as ousted aristocrats who had oppressed the peasants, led Russia into a disastrous war, and dined on caviar in the process. But the many refugees who arrived from the Black Sea represented a host of political persuasions, social classes, and ethnicities.

  “Some seem to be better off than others,” wrote a British soldier to his father, “and occupy their time by parading the Grande Rue de Pera in the exotic finery of Cossack kit complete with diagonally placed breast cartridge pockets, top boots, long black coats and elaborately decorated silver daggers. Others, some evidently sadly descended in the world, eke out a poor livelihood by selling things at the curbs.” Some had arrived after Denikin’s defeat. Others had come with Wrangel. Still others had struggled across the sea on their own from Crimea or the Caucasus. Noble families shared space on ships with lawyers, circus performers, Cossack cavalrymen, and household servants. The White leadership assiduously avoided discussion of politics and ideology for fear that the many currents within the movement—nationalist, liberal, agrarian, even antisemitic—would strike out on their own or make a separate peace with Lenin’s regime. They were united in exile by a desperate effort to get by in an unfamiliar city that was itself still reeling from the privations of war.

  Dmitri Shalikashvili was part of the tidal wave of nationalities that descended on Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a Russian subject but not a Russian, born into a princely Georgian family, educated in St. Petersburg, and decorated as an Imperial Guards officer during the First World War. When the Russian Empire collapsed, the mountainous Caucasus region of Georgia declared itself independent and socialist, but not Bolshevik. It was the only remnant of the old empire to be governed by the Bolsheviks’ archenemies on the left, the Mensheviks. Although Shalikashvili had little in common with the Mensheviks’ ideology of workers’ rights and land reform, their commitment to building a national Georgian state appealed to many people in his social class. He turned his experience and military skills to the service of his ancestral country. Yet when the Bolsheviks swooped into Georgia in 1921, ousting the Mensheviks and putting the entire Georgian government to flight, Shalikashvili ended up trapped in Istanbul.

  “Thus, on one beautiful springtime day began our sad life of refugees,” Shalikashvili recalled. He soon traded his cavalry uniform for civilian clothes and moved out of the small camp that had been created for the Georgian refugees on the outskirts of Istanbul. The streets were full of people of all nationalities wearing all manner of clothes, often some mixture of military uniforms and civilian attire. The refugees—Russians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, and others—had blown into Istanbul carrying remnants of past lives and disappeared nations. Massive sheets of paper imprinted with the Russian double-headed eagle could be seen pasted onto walls, laid on tabletops at restaurants, wrapped around parcels, or on offer in stationery shops. The sheets had been used for manufacturing currency in the territories controlled by White Russian troops, but now the money was literally worth only the paper on which it was printed.

  For those who had managed to escape with jewels and gold in their luggage, a small amount of capital and moderate ambition could yield a good income. Sometime in 1921, a few months after Shalikashvili arrived, Prince Gigusha Eristavi, Count Petya Zarnekow, and a Colonel Ladyzensky managed to lease a strip of beach near Florya, on the Sea of Marmara not far from central Istanbul. The site was overgrown and rocky, but with some sprucing up, it made a good bathing spot. Using some old tents lent by the British, they opened a ragged but welcoming beachfront resort.

  Shalikashvili signed up as manager. He was provided food and lodging on the beach, along with a small salary. He spent his time keeping the beach clear of debris and supervising the building of changing cabins inside the big canvas tents. Muslims had their own bathing areas elsewhere in the city, with rectangles of water curtained off so that women could splash in the sea without offending anyone’s sensibilities. Florya was open to both men and women, with no sea curtains to separate the sexes, but it was chastely placed under the sponsorship of the Princess Eristavi and the Countess Zarnekow, the wives of its founders, whose titles lent respectability.

  With Europeans providing a ready clientele—former Russian subjects but also members of the Allied occupation forces and their families—Florya was booming. A property dispute with the widow of a Cossack general, who had hoped to open her own beachfront establishment on the same spot, threatened to disrupt the trade, but things were worked out amicably. The Cossacks supplied the food while the Georgians supervised the changing rooms. Music was provided by the silken-voiced Snarsky brothers, late of Georgia’s capital, Tiflis.

  For the whole summer season, people arrived in droves, enjoying the sea as if it were Yalta or one of the other holiday haunts in the old empire. But as the weather cooled and the skies clouded over, the number of customers dwindled. The tents were soon folded up and returned to the British. Shalikashvili’s income likewise dipped, but he heard via a friend about another venture that two Georgian princes had launched in Pera.

  Koki Dadiani and Niko Nizharadze—scions of the princely houses of Samegrelo and Imereti, one slender and clad in a well-tailored cherkeska, the other stocky and exuding the air of a bon vivant—opened a small wine cellar. Located on a Pera side street, Koki and Niko’s, as the place was usually called, served up hearty soups, wine, and dollops of Georgian hospitality, with table service provided by the middle-aged widow of a Russia
n general and the sister of a storied Russian naval adventurer. Given his experience in Florya, Shalikashvili was offered a bartending job, chatting up customers and managing the cash flow.

  Koki and Niko’s quickly became something of an unofficial welfare office for a string of imperial down-and-outers. The Gypsy guitarist Sasha Makarov, one of the legends of the St. Petersburg cabaret circuit, was featured as a nightly entertainer. Grizzo, a dashing imperial naval officer, was put to work roasting shish kebabs. A certain Nelidov, a ne’er-do-well with apparently no marketable skills, was given the honorary post of legal counsel, since the princes could not bear to turn him away. Soon, the princes’ generosity threatened to bankrupt the establishment. Koki’s gambling and Niko’s drinking hurt the bottom line as well, and the restaurant was shuttered.

  Shalikashvili—who recorded his travails in an unpublished memoir—was at a loss. He moved out of Pera into inexpensive lodgings in a predominantly Muslim section of the city. Food was still cheap and plentiful: mackerel caught fresh and cooked streetside, tinned sardines, olives, and sticky halva on good days or nothing more than Turkish flatbread on bad ones. But steady work was hard to find. Some of his friends found positions with the Allied authorities, serving as warehouse guards or firefighters. Shalikashvili spent most days trading stories with other Georgian men in a neighborhood teahouse. Days that had once been taken up with hunting, cavalry drills, and society masquerades were now passed just waiting for something to happen. Occasionally someone would announce that he was going back to Georgia to join the partisan movement against the Bolsheviks. News would arrive sometime later that he had been killed. Other young men would leave the teahouse to find a drink and, after a night of vodka and wine, lose their way in Istanbul’s twisting streets.

  Shalikashvili had one skill he could fall back on—his soldiering—and in time he managed to arrange a billet in the Polish army. Poland had fought its own war against the Bolsheviks in 1919 and 1920; in fact, it was the ceasefire in that conflict that had allowed the Red Army to pivot and turn its full attention to defeating Wrangel’s Whites. Now, the Poles were eager to entice Georgians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, and others who had been ousted from their homelands into a kind of anti-Bolshevik foreign legion, the spearhead of an emerging alliance against Lenin.