The King of Vodka

by Linda Himelstein

  It was the unleashing of what people in the region dreaded. Vladimir and Valentina were forced to move several times since they could no longer safely remain at the much-watched dacha. It was assumed that Vladimir was now in the sights of local authorities, a man to be hunted and caught. The police returned repeatedly to search the premises shared by the couple. One evening, during a search, Vladimir hid from the officers, climbing up a large tree. When asked where he was, Valentina replied that she had kicked him out after they had quarreled. After four days of hiding out in the tree, with Valentina secretly bringing him food, Vladimir could take it no more. He refused to behave like a coward and began to move about town again, going to restaurants and other public places. It did not take long for the authorities to confront Vladimir. This time, though, their actions were decisive. Smirnova-Maksheyeva recorded her husband’s memories: “They gave him a document that read ‘Vladimir Smirnov, stud-farmer, capitalist who used to sell vodka, enemy of the people….’ After his arrest, they put him in prison. Soon there was a trial during which he was sentenced to the highest punishment—execution by shooting.”14

  The verdict was devastating. Conditions in the prisons throughout Russia were known to be wretched, filthy holes crammed with diseased or malnourished bodies. An inspection of a prison run by the Cheka in Moscow in October 1918 found “overcrowded cells, no water, grossly inadequate rations and heating, and sewage dumped in the courtyard. Nearly half of the 1,500 inmates were chronically sick, 10 percent of them with typhus. Corpses were found in the cells.”15

  Valentina tried her best to save Vladimir—or at least soften the blow. She had ties to officials who admired her acting and delighted in her charms. These relationships were extraordinarily valuable—and they were also well-known. Other women with loved ones at the mercy of the Bolsheviks in Pyatigorsk sought out Valentina’s powers of persuasion. One woman whose husband was behind bars sought out the actress on the advice of some of her confidants, imploring her to gather some news about his situation. “She [Valentina] had connections and friends in the Cheka,” the woman recalled. “These relations were pretty old, made during her past performances on stage.”16 Valentina asked her contacts about this woman’s husband, a high-ranking member of the social elite. What she learned, though, was inconclusive. Valentina reported back to the woman that twenty-eight hostages from her husband’s prison had been executed. She was unable to find out whether this woman’s husband had been one of them.

  On Vladimir’s behalf, Valentina begged local officials to spare his life. She sought out the wives of the commissars, giving them her remaining furs and jewels. She may even have offered sexual favors in return for her beloved’s safety. But all this pleading ended up buying her, or so it seemed, was a chance to tell her lover goodbye. Smirnova-Maksheyeva’s recorded remembrances reveal what happened next.

  “Vladimir and other prisoners were loaded onto a tall truck bound for Pyatigorsk. The guards were instructed to shoot them on the way, at the foot of Mount Mashuk. Vladimir, thinking of his imminent death, turned to an old passion for comfort. He began to sing, loudly, encouraging his fellow condemned and the guards to join him. The two groups soon were singing in unison, with the guards forgetting their orders. They were several miles past Mount Mashuk when they realized they had passed their destination. Darkness was looming and the soldiers had to be fed. The officer in charge determined it was too late to turn back. ‘Let’s take them all to Pyatigorsk, hand them over to the prison, and then they can do what they want with them there,’ the officer said.”

  This incident turned out to be the first of several times that Vladimir cheated death.

  PYATIGORSK WAS HOME to a trio of prisons, and it is impossible to verify which one held Vladimir. He did not make the distinction when reminiscing years later about his captivity, and the archives from the facilities have long since been lost or destroyed. All three, though, offered heavy doses of torment and humiliation. At least two practiced merciless murder. One of the prisons, known as “the hole,” was especially horrific in its dark, dehumanizing treatment of its enemies. It is likely that Vladimir passed at least some of his time here since it tended to be a holding location for the recently incarcerated as well as for those awaiting execution. The hole, like many of the Bolsheviks’ prisons created out of structures that previously served as restaurants, hotels, or theaters, was located in the cellar of a home. The entrance to the hole was through an opening dug into the yard of the property. Once inside, the height of the room from floor to ceiling was about ten-and-a-half feet. The glass from the few grated windows peering out from the ground had been knocked out, leaving an unrelenting musty and moist cold. There were no beds. Just a few desks, which were guarded by inmates panicked at the thought of having to sleep on the dirty, bug-infested cement floor. Sometimes as many as seventy men were packed into one of the cellars at a time.17

  The commandant of this prison had a malevolent reputation. He reveled in his power, cruelly and spontaneously whipping or beating his prisoners. One of his favorite pastimes was watching the tsar’s former generals and colonels clean toilets using only their bare hands and wearing filthy clothing. He executed several prisoners without a moment’s hesitation. According to an investigation years later into crimes committed by the Bolsheviks, the commandant of the hole “confessed that he got inspired by shooting people, that it was a meaning of his life.”18 Vladimir learned this fact firsthand.

  He spent his days in a cell crammed with some thirty prisoners. The stench was overwhelming, the food was rotten. Occasionally, guards would call out the name of an inmate for questioning who often would never return. One day, they called Vladimir’s name. He was led outside to the yard surrounding the prison and told to stand against a wall. Soldiers a few feet away faced him, their rifles aimed at his body. Vladimir waited, listening for the expected pop of the guns. It never came. The soldiers lowered their rifles and laughed. The mock execution was repeated five times, always ending in the same horrible manner. According to Smirnova-Maksheyeva, Vladimir grew so weary of the torment that he wished for death.

  This kind of heartless theater was a known method of psychological torture and may well have been the unforeseen consequence of Valentina’s pleas on behalf of Vladimir. It is quite possible that she succeeded in convincing the commandants to spare Vladimir’s life. In return, however, they may have kept him behind bars and used him for their own sadistic entertainment. This and other methods of torture, known as the Red Terror, were commonplace during this era of tumult and often resembled the same techniques employed by the tsar’s former secret police. Indeed, many of the Bolshevik’s most effective tormenters had spent time in jail during the tsar’s crackdown. Gorkiy protested the Bolshevik’s brutality, calling it “barbarism.” He even addressed some of his outrage directly to Lenin, a man whom he had previously admired.19

  Still, the bloodletting went on as if it would never end. Winter descended upon the region, though not the kind of strangling chill that smothered Moscow, Petrograd, and other more northern cities. Nonetheless, the cooling air would have felt frigid inside the moist and dark cells, as if it were freezing in place the daily horrors endured there. It would have continued, too, had it not been for the well-armed White Army. Its ranks swelled to as many as fifty thousand recruits at its height, though still it paled in comparison to the manpower of the Red Army. Its leaders were culled largely from the tsar’s former military while the rank-and-file depended on rebels and the Cossacks, who saw the Bolsheviks as a menacing threat to their independent way of life.

  In January 1919 a division of Cossacks overpowered the forces guarding the Pyatigorsk region, freeing all the prisoners and residents. The young general who led the charge, Andrey Shkuro, recalled the relatively bloodless battle for control. “Realizing that they were surrounded, the Bolsheviks escaped from Yessentuki [the place Vladimir and Valentina had first come], which we easily captured after an attack of part of our troop. On January 5,
I sent the First Volzhskiy regiment to Pyatigorsk. January 6, the regiment invaded the town…. The loot was very considerable: Several thousands of captives, guns, cannons…. I was met enthusiastically by the local population, which had suffered under the Bolshevik regime.”20

  Vladimir and other freed men received passes that enabled them to leave the region—and Russia if they chose—immediately. He scooped up Valentina, and the two joined a long procession of refugees traveling south to Yekaterinodar, a city in southern Russia named to honor Catherine the Great. Renamed Krasnodar in 1920 (from the Russian word for red), it was a stronghold of the White Army and a center for refugees fleeing the civil war. According to a 1919 census, Yekaterinodar experienced a surge in its population, growing by thirty-four thousand residents. This rapid growth caused a variety of logistical problems, from a shortage of food and fuel to overcrowded dwellings to an outbreak of typhus. The problems intensified to the point where the town, a few months after Vladimir and Valentina arrived, closed off its city to nonresidents.

  Vladimir’s decision to go to Yekaterinodar and then eventually leave his motherland was clear-cut. He had no hope of reviving his father’s business in Russia even if he had wanted to. By this time, the Bolsheviks had nationalized the vast majority of the liquor industry as prohibition reigned. He also likely had no idea what had happened to his remaining siblings, whether Nikolay had survived the revolution, whether Aleksey still resided in Moscow. He could not even imagine what might have befallen his former wife, Aleksandra, and his son, who he must have assumed were still in Moscow. He may have feared a worse fate for them than his own. As Vladimir explained, the risks of remaining, given his background and known name, were far outweighed by the possibility of finding passage to a safe, albeit unknown, haven.

  It is most likely that Vladimir and Valentina wasted no time once they arrived in Yekaterinodar, stopping only long enough to make plans to reach the border. Trains were the fastest way to get to Novorossiysk, a port city on the Black Sea, but they were often stuffed with refugees. Luggage blanketed the platforms in the stations, making it difficult to move about. Once on the train, passengers stood for long stretches, unable to find comfort in a seat or on the floor. Once in Novorossiysk, the wait for a ship heading west commenced. It could be an Allied warship or a Russian cargo vessel, anything that was seaworthy. Space was at a premium, as thousands of desperate refugees clawed for a ticket out of Russia. Consequently, no baggage was allowed once aboard. Passengers could take with them only what they could carry compactly—mainly a few personal items, money, and enough food for the journey to Constantinople.

  In the three years following the revolution, an estimated two million Russians emigrated.21 Such luminaries as composer Sergey Rachmaninov, prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, writer Vladimir Nabokov, and Nobel Prize–winner Ivan Bunin were among them. Vladimir and Valentina were there, too. They probably had enough valuables and important connections left to secure passage. The ship’s typical route stopped in towns along the Crimea, including Yalta, before docking in Constantinople. This city was the first place to which thousands of Russians fled before migrating farther west, and the city to which Vladimir and Valentina escaped. They had only a fraction of their worth left when they disembarked. Unsure of how they would scratch out a living, where they would go, who they could trust, they had arrived—and survived—and that opened up possibilities for a future that neither could have anticipated.

  Chapter 23

  Smirnov with an “F”

  The faces of the new arrivals to Constantinople, as many as 140,000 in one month during the evacuation of the White Army in November 1920, were at once relieved and bewildered. They were relieved that the life-threatening horrors they had faced were now far beyond the Black Sea, and bewildered upon realizing that they had nothing, knew no one, and had not a clue as to what they were going to do next. These refugees had to adapt to the local language and new customs. As one American relief worker in Constantinople observed: “It is pitiful. There are Russians who were colonels and generals in the army who are selling papers on the street, scarcely getting anything, trying to do what they can in order to get something to eat, but they can only get a little. They don’t know the language; they have nothing to do; and with no business in Constantinople, there is no hope for them.”1

  This was the place Vladimir and Valentina now called home. Unlike many Russians who relied on Constantinople as little more than a way station on the road to cities farther west, Vladimir and Valentina decided to stay put. They had managed to bring some money and valuables with them from Russia, but it was not nearly enough, certainly not for a couple used to a privileged life. They needed time to generate some income and replenish their resources—and they knew just how to do it. The two enjoyed one pivotal advantage that most other new arrivals did not. They had recognizable names and well-established reputations.

  Almost simultaneously, Vladimir and Valentina sought to revive the businesses and careers they knew best. For Vladimir, it was unquestionably vodka making. Even though he had tried to distance himself from the brand and industry that had made his father wealthy and famous, he realized it was his only real vocation. All his other pursuits, including horse breeding and racing, had been aristocratic pleasures, indulgences he could now not afford. It did not seem to matter that Vladimir had sold his interest in his father’s vodka enterprise to his older brother, Pyotr. He was gone now, and no one probably knew what had become of his two other surviving brothers, Nikolay and Aleksey. The Smirnov brand was his heritage—and his only hope for survival.

  Awhile after docking, he ventured into the heart of Constantinople in search of a suitable space for a vodka factory. He found one. It was to be a small operation, presumably producing mainly the pure and flavored vodkas for which his family had been best known. Vladimir still remembered many of the recipes his father had concocted. On January 10, 1920, the Russian consulate in Constantinople granted Vladimir a license to open his new firm. The certificate was full of references to a Russia that had been cast into history, calling Vladimir the son of a first guild merchant and the manager of a vodka distillery that once supplied the Imperial Court.2 In Turkey, such references still had meaning within the bulging immigrant community.

  Valentina was also working hard to reestablish herself. Constantinople had a thriving theater community, thanks in part to dozens of Russian actors who had settled in the city after the revolution. With Vladimir as manager, Valentina founded a cabaret theater called Parisiana. Its French-sounding name was meant to entice Russia’s French-loving ex-aristocracy, which had always held France as the epitome of good taste and refinement. At first, Valentina found a loyal, appreciative audience, attracting “the cream of the [Russian army],” according to Pyotr Isheyev, formerly a high-ranking military officer who had come to live in Smirnov’s vodka factory after escaping the revolution. However, that venture did not last long. Indeed, both Vladimir and Valentina struggled to keep these enterprises afloat, but the Russian customers to whom they catered were primarily a newly impoverished, inward-looking group, either unable or unwilling to spend their remaining rubles on drinks or entertainment. As for the Turks, they were merely uninterested in what Vladimir or Valentina had to offer. “The factory business did not go well. Turkish people didn’t drink vodka,” wrote Isheyev, a distinguished-looking man with a softness in his eyes. “And Parisiana, which had flourished in the beginning, for some reason became unpopular.”3

  Isheyev and other witnesses wrote about the unending difficulties faced by Russian refugees in Constantinople. Apart from shortages of everything from housing to food, Russians found themselves largely unwanted. Turkey was in the midst of a protracted struggle for national independence, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. The country had no ability or incentive to absorb another country’s needy cast-aways, and the government was concerned that Turkish rebels might try to recruit ex-Russian soldiers for its own agenda. The local
culture was also alien to Russians, culminating in a political, economic, and social environment that was often hostile.

  Vladimir and Valentina accepted this unfortunate reality, but they were tired of running. They made a last-ditch effort to get something sustainable going in Constantinople. Valentina reprised her starring role in Offenbach’s Beautiful Helen at a summer theater called Buff. The production had always been a favorite of her audiences, and it did well in Constantinople, too. Beautiful costumes, original staging, and inspired music and dancing helped lure a constant stream of enthusiastic attendees, according to the memoirs of several Russian exiles.

  That success, though, came at a price: It piqued the interest of the Turks—at least the government’s tax collectors. Nearly two years after Vladimir and Valentina arrived in Turkey, the tax agents showed up one morning and presented them with an enormous tax bill. It requested payment of an amount far beyond the pair’s financial means.4 Not satisfying the bill would mean certain jail time. Once again, regretfully, Vladimir and Valentina packed their bags and crossed the border into Bulgaria, a common stop for Russian immigrants after Constantinople. The couple landed in the capital city of Sofia where they met up with Isheyev, who had fled there a few months earlier with a small group of actors.

  BULGARIA WAS A far more hospitable location for Russian émigrés. The languages were much closer to one another—as were the cultures. Both Russians and Bulgarians were of Slavic origin, creating a common bond between the two nations and its people. The Bulgarian government, too, was welcoming. It used public funds to provide Russians with a variety of social services. The government also offered certificates enabling Russians to take jobs with the state and to travel without needing Bulgarian citizenship.