Frederick would have had good reason to worry about both of his families’ well-being and about his properties. By November 10, streetcars had stopped running and telephones were not working. Banks and businesses closed. Out of fear of being hit by bullets or shrapnel, people avoided leaving their homes except for necessities. Patrols of bellicose Bolshevik soldiers and rough-looking factory workers with rifles slung on pieces of rope began to appear on the city’s streets. In apartment buildings, members of residents’ committees collected whatever handguns they could find and took turns guarding the entrances against marauding bands of armed men whose allegiance was uncertain; other residents slept fully clothed to be ready in case anyone tried to break in.
By the end of the week, scores of buildings in central Moscow had been badly damaged by rifle, machine-gun, and artillery fire, including some of the most revered cathedrals in the Kremlin itself. As a horrified city dweller characterized it, the damage to Russia’s symbolic heart during this fratricidal fighting exceeded what Napoleon’s foreign invaders had caused in 1812. An American described what he saw outside his residence in the city center.
The house we are in is almost a wreck, and the boulevard in front is a most singular and distressing panorama of desolation. The roads are covered with glass and debris; trees, lampposts, telephone poles are shot off raggedly; dead horses and a few dead men lie in the parkway; the broken gas mains are still blazing; the black, austere, smoking hulks of the burning buildings stand like great barricades about the littered yards of the boulevard.
Between five thousand and seven thousand people had been killed. But on November 20, Moscow’s Military-Revolutionary Committee announced that it had won and that all the cadets and its other opponents had either surrendered or been killed.
The first weeks after the fighting stopped were an anxious time in Moscow. No one knew exactly what to expect from the Bolsheviks, but the fact that they had seized power in Petrograd by force and had used it indiscriminately throughout the city was an ominous sign. Nevertheless, people in Frederick’s world had little choice but to try to live as before, despite the widespread destruction, dislocations, soaring prices, and scanty food and fuel supplies. Maxim had escaped damage in the fighting, and the theater director who had leased it tried to continue with his old repertory—a hodgepodge of melodramas, comedies, lighthearted French song and dance numbers, and, in a gesture to the times, an occasional, ponderously serious play (this unappetizing mix would not survive for very long). Similarly, during the last months of 1917, Aquarium continued serving up its mostly high-minded fare as the official theater of the Moscow garrison. Since both places were still functioning and making money, so was Frederick.
However, as an especially harsh winter descended on Russia, the new regime began to reveal its fundamentally belligerent face, and the danger to Frederick and his ilk became apparent. The Bolsheviks’ most urgent task was to secure their grip on power by eliminating all external and internal threats to it. They would eliminate the external threat by getting Russia out of the Great War, and the internal threat by unleashing a new kind of war against entire classes of people they considered their enemies.
In the Bolsheviks’ Marxist worldview, the war that had engulfed Europe was being waged by “bourgeois capitalist” powers with selfish economic and geopolitical interests that had nothing to do with, and in fact were opposed to, the genuine needs of the workers and peasants. Thus, immediately after seizing control, the Bolshevik regime offered a cease-fire to the Germans, and on March 3, 1918, the two sides signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks agreed to give up one-quarter of what had been the Russian Empire’s territory, population, and arable land; three-quarters of its iron industry and coal production; and much else besides. The terms were brutal, but the Bolsheviks were now free to turn their attention to their enemies within.
Their identification of who these were might have struck Frederick as grotesquely familiar. Just as a black person could not escape racist categories in the United States, everyone in the new Soviet state was now defined by socioeconomic class; and despite the seeming differences, the Marxist and communist concept of “class” functioned, perversely, as a quasi-racial label. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, you were indelibly marked by what you did or had done for a living, and people with money, people who owned property or businesses, as well as the nobility, the clergy, the police, the judiciary, educators, army officers, and government bureaucrats—in short, all those implicated in maintaining or serving the old imperial regime—were on the wrong side of history. An American visitor to Russia at the time described the extreme forms that this attitude took.
The Bolsheviks are out to get the scalps of all “capitalists”—the “bour-jhee,” as they call them; and in the eyes of a Bolshevik, anyone belongs to the bourgeoisie who carries a handkerchief or wears a white collar! That is why some of our friends are begging old clothes from servants; rags are less liable to be shot at in the street!
Frederick’s origin as a black American would have done nothing to mitigate his class “sins.” The Bolsheviks hated the Americans, the French, and the British, believing that the Entente was trying to keep Russia in the war (which was true). And Frederick’s past oppression as a black man in the United States was trumped by his having become a rich man in Russia. In the end, he could no more escape how the new regime saw him than he could change the color of his skin.
The October Revolution also changed Frederick’s strained relations with Valli, and what had been a stable if awkward arrangement was transformed into a toxic mixture of the personal and the political. In the crazy inversion of Russian norms that the revolution caused, it was as if Valli were a white American woman who suddenly decided that her estranged husband was a “Negro.”
Frederick had known for over a year that she had taken a lover. This was a complication because Irma, Mikhail, and Olga continued to live with Valli in the big apartment at 32 Malaya Bronnaya Street; but considering how he had treated Valli himself, Frederick could not have cared all that much. Neither the lover’s name nor his occupation before the October Revolution is known, although he must have been an ardent supporter, because he emerged from it as a “Bolshevik Commissar,” in Frederick’s later characterization. As such, he had become a person of importance in Moscow’s new regime, and his involvement with Valli became dangerous. He could back up the animosity she felt for her husband with his political power.