The nationalization of Maxim and Aquarium was just the beginning of the changes sweeping through Moscow. Frederick had now gotten caught in an historical rip current that was threatening to pull him under. The country was moving in directions that no one could have imagined. In keeping with Marx’s proclamation that a communist revolution signaled the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of private property, the Bolsheviks systematically dismantled all the social and economic foundations of the Russian Empire. They eliminated former ranks and titles; they gave control of businesses and factories to committees of workers; they decreed that peasants should break up landowners’ estates. Foreign trade was made into a national monopoly; banks and church property were nationalized; the old judicial system was replaced by revolutionary tribunals and “people’s courts”; education and entertainment were placed under strict ideological controls. Shortly after their coup, the Bolsheviks had established the “Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation”—the notorious political police that became known by its Russian abbreviation, Cheka, and that initiated a reign of state terror lasting the entire Soviet period of Russian history. After the Constituent Assembly was disbanded in January, all political parties were declared counterrevolutionary, including those that had originally allied themselves with the Bolsheviks. On January 31, 1918, the government marked a new era by adopting the New Style (N.S.) calendar.
This revolutionary transformation of the country was not meant to be impersonal or peacefuclass="underline" in Lenin’s words, the newly empowered proletariat’s mandate was to “rob the robbers.” The peasants and workers took this literally and in cities as well as the countryside began a campaign of confiscating and pillaging wealthy homes and estates, businesses, and churches. The boundary between state-sponsored expropriation and armed robbery had disappeared.
Many Muscovites suffered confiscations, thefts, and extortions at the hands of Red troops and the Cheka. Residential properties throughout the city were seized as the new regime saw fit, with owners and tenants often thrown out onto the street and members of the new order moving into their houses and apartments. This was very likely the fate of Frederick’s upscale apartment buildings on Karetny Ryad Street, but Valli’s commissar could have shielded her in the big apartment on Malaya Bronnaya.
Like all other members of his class, Frederick was at risk of being physically attacked anywhere. Bolshevik soldiers in gray overcoats and shaggy fur hats skulking in dead-end streets and alleyways would target likely apartments and suddenly burst in, ostensibly to search for army officers on the run or for concealed foodstuffs, but often just to rob the inhabitants. Venturing out at night for any reason became especially dangerous. In mid-March on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, just down the street from Maxim, a popular actress was robbed of two expensive fur coats in which she was going to perform that evening. The same month, six armed men walked into the popular restaurant Martyanych and robbed all the patrons of several hundred thousand rubles’ worth of money and jewelry. No one even attempted to protest because there was no recourse; if victims tried calling the local police station, they were likely to be told: “They acted on the basis of the law. If you resist—we’ll arrest you!”
One of Frederick’s business acquaintances, the theatrical entrepreneur Sukhodolsky, was a prominent victim. In early March, a group of fifteen men pulled up outside his home in a well-to-do neighborhood, blocked all the entrances so that no one could escape, drew weapons, and forced their way into his apartment. After ransacking it, they beat up Sukhodolsky and his wife and left with 24,000 rubles and other valuables. The couple were lucky to have survived.
The regime’s efforts to redistribute wealth were not restricted to sending out marauding bands to attack individuals in their homes. When the first wave of bank seizures by the Bolsheviks failed to generate the money they wanted ($100 billion to $150 billion in today’s currency) to consolidate their power internally and to start projecting it abroad, where they hoped to ignite a worldwide revolution, they turned to the contents of private bank safe-deposit boxes. In Moscow alone by the summer of 1918 they confiscated the contents of 35,493 safes, which yielded half a ton of gold, silver, and platinum bullion; some 700,000 rubles in gold, silver, and platinum coin; 65 million tsarist rubles; 600 million rubles in public and private bonds; and large sums in foreign currencies. This was only a fraction of the total number of safes in the city; the others were cracked later.
By the summer of 1918, Frederick was determined to escape from Moscow. Many people he knew well were leaving for the south, including his former business partner Tsarev, who had rented, for the winter, a theater in Kiev, which was under German occupation. In early June, the Moscow government announced a ban on middlemen in the city’s theaters, which deprived Frederick of his job as director of a nationalized Maxim. Cholera and typhus began to spread in the city as health and sanitary conditions deteriorated. In July, fighting broke out when the Socialist Revolutionaries assassinated the German ambassador in an attempt to scuttle the peace treaty with the Germans, and then tried to start an uprising by seizing key positions throughout the city. The Bolsheviks brought in troops and quickly crushed the rebels, but they also exploited the occasion to consolidate their power further. Later the same month, news reached Moscow that Nicholas II and his wife, son, and four daughters had been executed by a local soviet in Yekaterinburg in the distant Ural Mountains.
The only livelihood Frederick had left was the cheap restaurant that he had been allowed to open in part of the Maxim building. Running a restaurant of any kind at this time in Moscow required connections or ingenuity because normal wholesale distribution was in complete disarray. The city was near famine, with rationing of basic foodstuffs and soaring prices on the black market. This is when small-scale entrepreneurs who came to be known as “sackers” (“meshochniki”) emerged to partially fill the gap. Crowds of peasants started coming into the city from outlying villages with sacks of locally produced food—flour, baked bread, butter, cereals, eggs—which they bartered for manufactured goods that could still be found in the city’s black market, such as head scarves, calico, thread, sugar, soap, and matches. Hungry city dwellers made the same trip in reverse. Bolshevik guards saw the trade as a form of illicit speculation and tried to stop it, but the need in the city was great and the price discrepancies between the city and the countryside were large, making the risks both necessary and profitable. Inevitably, train stations in Moscow became one of the main meeting places for buyers and sellers. This is where Frederick was able to get the provisions he needed for his restaurant and how he was also able to plot his escape from the city.
Frederick fled from Moscow in August 1918, when he learned that he was slated for arrest by the Cheka and that his life was in danger. Some years later, he told the story to a tourist from Texas, who was so impressed that he wrote it up for a newspaper after he got home. He summarized how Frederick’s work at his restaurant
permitted him to go to the station daily as a porter. This he did regularly for about six months and thus disarmed suspicion until, by the aid of a friend traveling under a permit, he was able to conceal himself in a train compartment and escape to one of his villas, outside of the reach of the new Government.
Thomas’s trip would have been more dangerous than Elvira’s because he was traveling illegally. He could be arrested on the spot by any Bolshevik soldier, official, or member of the Cheka who might want to check his papers, although even without official permission to leave, Frederick could buy any document he needed if he had the cash; in 1918, the going rate for a passport from a police station in Moscow was around 1,200 rubles. After one got onto a train, it was a matter of luck what sort of trip it would be. Frederick was taken in by a friend who may have had his own compartment; this implies that the friend had influence or connections—travelers with neither had to manage as best they could. What happened during the journey south also depended on one’s luck. Some trains made it from Moscow to the border of German-occupied Ukraine in only a couple of days, even though there were long stops at intermediate stations. However, other trains heading south were blocked at remote road crossings by bands of armed men who were either Bolsheviks or criminal gangs—it was frequently hard to tell which—and who would open fire on the cars to chase everyone out; they would then loot the passengers’ belongings before letting them back on. Conditions on the trains themselves were miserable: they were not only overcrowded but dilapidated and unsanitary; windows were broken; theft was rampant; food and water were hard to get; and stops at stations, which were usually pillaged, failed to provide relief. Young women traveling alone were especially at risk.