It would not take long for Frederick to be confronted by Valli’s wrath. In addition to casting about for ways to accommodate himself to the new regime, he also began to search for a place where his family could escape the threats, restrictions, and shortages in Moscow. Everything suddenly changed when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In February, the Germans started their occupation of the Ukraine, and by mid-March they were in Odessa. What had been a disastrous loss of territory for the new Soviet regime proved a godsend for Russians with money and others who wanted to escape the Bolsheviks. Despite the fact that until recently the Germans had been a vilified enemy, many Russians now began to see them as the lesser evil. At a minimum, they could be relied upon to restore, in the occupied territory, a more familiar social order than what the Bolsheviks were imposing on the rest of Russia. Frederick could now get Elvira and his children out of harm’s way by sending them to the villa he owned in Odessa. Moreover, Elvira was German and had relatives in Berlin, and this would surely be to her advantage with the region’s military government.
But finding a place to go was just the beginning of the difficulties that Frederick and his family now had to overcome. The Bolsheviks did not want people to escape their rule, and anyone seeking to leave Moscow had to obtain a special permit. Frederick’s own application was peremptorily denied, and that did not bode well for his future. However, he managed to get permission for Elvira and the children by exploiting a loophole that applied to actors and other performers. He claimed that she was still active onstage and had to travel to cities in the south to practice her profession.
Additional obstacles still lay ahead. During the past year, train travel had deteriorated very badly throughout the country: schedules became irregular, tickets were scarce, the rolling stock was ramshackle, and delays because of engine breakdowns were frequent. Getting on a train in Moscow was also no guarantee that you would actually reach your destination. At every station, so many people would try to climb on board that passengers had to fight to keep their places. However, Frederick persevered once again and was able to secure passage for all six. This left only the chore of gathering up the entire group from the two separate households.
On the eve of Elvira’s departure, Frederick went to his apartment on Malaya Bronnaya to fetch Mikhail and Irma. Valli was not expecting him. When he walked into the bedroom he was surprised to see that her lover was there with her. The scene left nothing to the imagination: “I ketched her upstairs of my eight-room flat, in baid wid one o’ dem commissars,” was how Frederick described it to an acquaintance later.
Valli was infuriated by Frederick’s sudden appearance as well as by his reason for coming to the apartment. Turning toward her lover, she began to goad him to avenge the humiliations that she had suffered at Frederick’s hands for years. This was not an idle threat: commissars at this time carried guns. Moreover, Frederick was not only an adulterous husband but also a class enemy. A hysterical scene followed, as he later described it in a letter: “the Woman forced her Bolshevik Lover to attempt to kill me and only my little Girl and my Son, who was a Child then too… saved me from beeing thus killed, because they screamed aloud and the Bolshevik let me go.”
During the ensuing confusion and in his haste to escape, Frederick managed to take only Mikhail with him. Irma remained in the apartment, and Frederick would never see her again. Whether she stayed with Valli willingly or was kept by her, and whether Valli kept Irma out of love or calculation, the little girl was the victim of the adults’ emotional battle. She would remain a pawn between the two for years after they parted.
Following the grotesque encounter with the commissar, Frederick realized that he had to put as much distance between himself and Valli as possible. This is when the radical revision of family laws, which the new regime introduced only two months after the revolution, played into his hands. In a coordinated series of steps, he divorced Valli, married Elvira, and legalized the status of Fedya and Bruce; thereafter, Elvira always used “Thomas” as her surname. She and the four children then set out on their long, arduous journey to Odessa.
Frederick could now concentrate on trying to figure out what to do with his businesses. All of his actions in the early months of 1918 show that he did not expect the Bolsheviks and their policies to survive the year, even after they had dispersed the Constituent Assembly, a democratically elected body that was supposed to create a new representative government. In January 1918, an armed rebellion of “White” forces against the Bolsheviks had begun to brew in the Don Cossack lands in the southeast. In Moscow that spring, the Bolsheviks had to use artillery, armored cars, and heavy machine-gun fire to dislodge anarchist groups from the city center. There were even Russians who hoped that the Germans would ignore the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and occupy the rest of the country.
Frederick began a series of determined efforts to adapt to the new trends as much as he could and to save what he had created. His lessee had by now abandoned Maxim and Frederick tried to revive its old style and programs. He signed a new lease to rent its theater for a highly optimistic term of five years and an impressive seasonal fee of 105,000 rubles. Despite the fact that Aquarium’s winter theater had been taken over by the Moscow garrison, in January 1918 Frederick signed a new deal with the entrepreneur Boris Evelinov to stage operettas and farces in both of Aquarium’s theaters during the coming summer. Evelinov paid Thomas a very substantial advance of 175,000 rubles—roughly $3 million in today’s currency—a hefty wager that they would be making even more money in the future.
Within weeks, however, virtually all of Frederick’s hopes would prove to be chimeras. By March, the Bolshevik regime’s wave of theater takeovers reached Frederick and he was forced to abandon his properties. Maxim’s main theater was nationalized and given over to a succession of theatrical companies with higher artistic aims than the kind of entertainment in which Frederick had specialized. All that he could recoup for himself was one of the smaller spaces in the building, where he was allowed to open a simple dining room that would provide cheap meals, at three rubles apiece, to theatrical workers and actors who were members of professional unions. This was a precipitous drop for someone who had presided for years over some of the city’s most renowned restaurants. The final ignominy came when Frederick was hired as the director of what had been his own theater.
The situation with Aquarium was initially more complicated and confusing, but it ended the same way. After some vacillation on the part of the new regime, Frederick and Boris Evelinov’s plans came to naught. The Bolshevik regime, which managed to combine bloodlust with prudery, decided against allowing Frederick and Evelinov to stage their “bourgeois” risqué farces and frivolous operettas.
After this failure, they made one final attempt to find a niche for themselves in the only world they knew and came up with the idea of a summer season of classical ballet at Aquarium. This was in keeping with the “cultural and enlightening” function that revolutionary theater was now supposed to have for the benefit of soldiers and their ilk. It was here that Frederick’s well-honed sense of theatricality emerged again, although for the very last time in Moscow. He knew which ballets were popular because short performances by famous ballerinas were staples of the variety stage. Frederick suggested that Giselle, a well-known nineteenth-century French romantic ballet, would be a certain success. He was right, and this production of Giselle remained on the Aquarium stage for several years after he had fled from Moscow.