“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.