The Black Russian (18 page)

Frederick successfully countered this accusation by continuing to demonstrate his Russianness at every opportunity, to the extent of assuming a leading role in a grand patriotic demonstration that began in Moscow on May 19, 1915, just a few days after his application for citizenship had been approved. This was a momentous time in the Russian conduct of the war. A German advance in Galicia inflicted huge Russian casualties, and a retreat that had been orderly at first degenerated into a “mad bacchanalia” all along the front, with troops fleeing their positions and hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees also streaming east. The combined German and Austro-Hungarian advance lasted five months. By October 1915, the Russian armies not only had lost everything they had won but had been pushed back one hundred miles and forced out of what had been Russian Poland since the end of the eighteenth century.

In Moscow toward the end of May, however, the full extent of the developing catastrophe was still not clear and, in an atmosphere of buoyant patriotism, the Moscow Red Cross planned a three-day event that was named “Tobacco for the Soldier.” May 19 began with
several thousand actors and other performers from variety theaters across the city gathering in Aquarium’s garden, which Frederick and Tsarev had made available as a staging area. Participants formed into a long parade and left the grounds at 4 p.m., heading down Tverskaya Street toward the Kremlin. Leading the procession were actors from Aquarium riding in decorated wagons and dressed in the national costumes of the countries of the Entente. Then came numerous other groups, vehicles, and floats. Participants numbered in the thousands and attracted huge crowds.

As the lead elements of the parade began to enter Red Square, an outdoor prayer service led by a bishop assisted by a multitude of priests began at Lobnoye Mesto—a raised, circular stone
platform
traditionally used for imperial proclamations. The icon of the Iberian Mother of God—long venerated by Muscovites as “wonder-working”—was brought from its nearby chapel to the platform, as were other icons and religious banners from St. Basil’s Cathedral a few dozen yards away. Wounded soldiers from
Moscow’s
hospitals gathered around, accompanied by their nurses. The remainder of the vast square between the soaring redbrick walls of the Kremlin and the ornate facade of the Upper Trading Arcades filled with tens of thousands of people—the men’s heads bared; women on tiptoes straining to see, some holding their
children
up—while the bishop, priests, and deacons intoned prayers for the army’s valiant warriors, for the emperor and his “august family,” for all faithful Russian Orthodox Christians during this time of dreadful travail. A reverent hush spread over the crowd. The gold brocade raiments of the churchmen gleamed in the
afternoon
sun as wisps of sweet incense wafted from their swinging censers and the hymns of the deep-voiced male choir rose, fell, and rose again. At the end of the service, the enormous crowd broke into singing “God Save the Tsar” and repeated it over and over again. The actors from Aquarium who had led the parade stayed together as a group by the monument to Minin and Pozharsky,
two seventeenth-century Russian national heroes in the war to liberate Moscow from the Poles.

After the service, the parade returned to the Aquarium garden, with the troupe of its actors again leading the way. That evening and during the next two days, special performances to benefit the
soldiers
took place in theaters all over the city; hundreds of volunteers also took up collections on the streets, in stores, and in restaurants. Frederick and Tsarev themselves worked the crowds in Aquarium with collection cups in hand and were singled out for special praise several times in newspaper and magazine reports.

A native son of Russia could not have done more to
demonstrate
his loyalty. Frederick’s actions were seen by hundreds if not thousands of Muscovites and were known to many more, including the city’s leading citizens. He had also inscribed himself convincingly in the tradition of philanthropy for which Moscow merchants and businessmen were famous throughout Russia. Whatever vengeful designs Serpoletti might have had against the black former
American
could not pierce the armor of goodwill that Frederick created around himself.

Frederick demonstrated his Russianness with uncannily accurate timing; a week later Muscovites revealed the inevitable other face of patriotic fervor—hatred of the enemy and paranoia regarding
outsiders
. For many, the calamitous retreat of Russian forces in Galicia seemed inexplicable without sabotage or treason on the home front. Anti-German and then broadly antiforeign riots erupted in the city in late May. Hundreds of stores were sacked and entire streets were set ablaze. One horrified Englishman recalled seeing grand pianos being pushed out of the fourth-floor windows of Zimmermann’s famous music store on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow’s toniest shopping street, and crashing to the sidewalk with a doleful ringing sound as pages of sheet music swirled in the air like flocks of white birds. Some of the mobs swarmed partway up Tverskaya Street, which led to Aquarium. The financial and social costs of the riots were huge: damage was
estimated at what would be about $1 billion today. There was also a heavy political cost: the mostly lower-class rioters had gotten a taste of taking the law into their own hands and using street violence to show their frustration with the government’s conduct of the war. Few observers realized it at the time, but Moscow’s “anti-German” pogrom was a harbinger of far worse things to come.

By the first anniversary of the war, Frederick and his adopted
homeland
were starting to move in different directions. Russia had lost a million men killed or wounded and another million captured; all evidence showed that the country had been woefully unprepared for a war of this length and magnitude. Blundering through historical events that he could not understand, much less control, Nicholas II in September 1915 dismissed the army’s commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, who was not only a professional soldier but his uncle. The tsar assumed command of all the Russian forces himself, even though he had no military experience. Elsewhere, the British attempt to support and resupply Russia by forcing the Turkish Straits and opening a passage to the Black Sea ended in disaster. In one of the many ironies of the time, a hero of the Turkish defense at Gallipoli was Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later to become the savior of his country and arbiter of Frederick’s fate.

But Frederick remained unaffected by these problems and was making so much money that he began to search for new ways to
invest
it. His vehicle of choice was real estate. During the summer of 1915, news had begun to spread that the Ciniselli Circus in Petrograd was going to be put up for auction. This was an exciting possibility, because for all of Moscow’s economic and cultural importance, it was still the country’s second city. Ciniselli Circus was a prestigious and potentially very lucrative venue. It was the oldest permanent building of its kind in Russia as well as one of the most famous in
all of Europe. It was also very popular with the cream of Petrograd society, from the imperial family on down.

The auction was scheduled for December 7 and Frederick
traveled
to Petrograd to take part in it. A motley array of other major players also participated, including Fyodor Chaliapin, the famous operatic bass whom Frederick had met at Yar several years before, and who was represented by an agent. The stakes were for the
highest
of rollers: bidding would start at an annual rent of 60,000 rubles (approximately $2 million today) and all participants had to provide a deposit of 30,000 rubles to show they were serious.

The minimum was quickly left behind. An entrepreneur from Petrograd bid 73,000 rubles; another one from Moscow offered 76,000; then Frederick topped him with 78,000. But someone quickly offered 80,000 and Frederick decided that he was out. It is possible that he had gotten wind of something underhanded in the entire affair. Several months later, when the old leaseholder unexpectedly emerged as the winner, rumors began to circulate that the auction had been rigged from the start.

But Frederick still had money to invest and turned his attention to the south and to Odessa. He went there initially to search for new acts to put on Aquarium’s and Maxim’s stages. Because the war had made it difficult to travel to and from Western Europe, the only ready source of new talent was what could be found in other Russian cities. Odessa was polyglot and cosmopolitan and had a very lively theatrical life. On the eve of the war, its population was 630,000, a third of them Jewish and thirty thousand of them foreigners, including Greeks,
Armenians
, Germans, Romanians, Italians, and many others. During two trips in February and July 1916 Frederick booked a variety of catchy acts—a singing duet, a female impersonator, an actress who was a local star, a ten-year-old moppet who belted out Gypsy romances—and also negotiated with entrepreneurs who wanted to lease his Aquarium theater for the following season. Frederick must have liked the city
itself very much, because during his second trip he also bought a fancy villa there for 100,000 rubles, around $3 million in today’s money.

The climate was a bit milder in Odessa than in Moscow, but the city’s chief appeal was its location on the shore of the Black Sea. With its wide, straight, tree-shaded streets and elegant stone
buildings
, it would not have looked out of place on the Mediterranean. In Frederick’s time Odessa was an important commercial center and despite its distance from the two capitals was neither quiet nor
provincial
. Fashionable hotels and restaurants, elegant shops, popular cafés, and several theaters attracted an urbane and moneyed crowd to its famous thoroughfares. Sailors from exotic ports mixed with the city’s criminals in the raucous, beer-smelling dives near the
commercial
harbor. On the city’s outskirts, the banks of the lagoons were dotted with villas facing the shimmering expanse of the sea. In 1916, Frederick could not have anticipated the role that Odessa would play in his life in just two years.

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.