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.