Passengers who reached the frontier of German-occupied Ukraine typically felt a mixture of elation and resentment. On the one hand, they were escaping the Bolsheviks. But on the other, the Germans acted like arrogant conquerors and herded disembarking passengers across the border with little wooden switches, as if they were farm animals. Officers checked the passengers’ papers at tedious length. In an attempt to stop the spread of typhus, influenza, smallpox, and other diseases, the travelers were sent off for days of quarantine in hideous and filthy temporary barracks before being allowed to continue on their way.
ODESSA
Although the act of crossing the border into German territory immediately removed the class stigma and the threats that had dogged Frederick on the Bolshevik side, new difficulties would have appeared at every step, beginning with his having to insist that he was Russian and not American (he would soon find it necessary to claim the opposite). The United States had been at war with the Central Powers since April 1917 and an American entering their territory would have to register as an enemy alien and would be their nominal prisoner. Frederick’s appearance and the way he spoke English would give him away to any German who had ever met other American blacks.
Odessa was also a dangerous place for anyone who was rich or looked rich. When the Germans and Austrians occupied southern Russia, they set up a puppet state in the Ukraine, including Odessa, which they garrisoned with thirty thousand troops. Their presence put an end to the reign of terror against the “bourgeoisie” that the Bolsheviks had unleashed in the city after their October takeover. But not all the Bolsheviks had fled: some went underground instead, plotting how to expel the occupiers and their local allies, and waging a persistent, low-grade guerrilla war that marked daily life in Odessa.
As in Moscow, the Bolsheviks had thrown open all the prisons in Odessa, and several thousand thieves and murderers had spilled out onto the streets. Thus reinforced, the city’s notorious criminal gangs—which in their larger-than-life brazenness were comparable to the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s—instituted their own reign of terror against the city’s inhabitants, whom they burglarized, robbed, and murdered on the streets, in their homes, and at their businesses.
Odessa was especially dangerous at night. A prominent lawyer who risked walking to the well-known London Hotel late one night counted 122 gunshots from various directions during the twelve minutes that he was outside. Such firing lasted all night long and it was hard to tell who was shooting at whom—Bolsheviks at soldiers or criminals at barricaded home owners.
Expensive villas like Frederick’s were typically in outlying, sparsely populated areas and would have been easy prey for thieves. Frederick was also sufficiently well known to have been mentioned in local newspapers when he arrived, together with other notable entrepreneurs and entertainers from Moscow and Petrograd, and this publicity increased his chance of becoming a target. Between Bolsheviks on the one hand, who were still eager to finish settling accounts with the “bourgeoisie,” and traditional thieves on the other, he would have found it prudent to move himself and his family to the city center, where there was at least some military protection and safety in numbers.
But even with the threats swarming around them, Odessites were still free in ways that had become impossible in the Bolshevik north. The Germans and Austrians had no interest in establishing a radically different social and economic order and thus largely left the local population to its own initiatives. As a result, the city’s residents could pursue all their favorite pastimes and forms of dissipation, which they did with a feverish zeal that contemporaries likened to a feast in time of plague.
During the day, the handsome streets overflowed with polyglot southern crowds. Well-dressed people filled the stores, restaurants, and popular cafés like Robinat and Fanconi, which also doubled as exchanges for crowds of speculators trading currencies, cargoes from abroad, abandoned estates in Bolshevik territory—anything of value. At night, people flocked to theaters, restaurants, cafés chantants, and gambling dens, as well as to dives specializing in sex or drugs. They threw money around as if it had lost all value, trying to grab as much pleasure as they could and to forget the horrors of recent years as well as those still lurking outside. As the champagne corks popped and singers warbled indoors, businesses and home owners alike bolted their iron shutters and locked their entrance doors. The city center took on an eerily empty appearance late at night, as if the entire population had died out. The sudden noise of a crowd leaving a theater or cinema and scattering rapidly broke a silence that was otherwise punctuated only by sporadic gunshots. Cabs were hard to find and drivers demanded enormous fares to venture out, forcing people to take special precautions in case they had to walk any distance. One naval officer recalled being instructed about how to behave: if you saw someone on the street, and especially two or three people together, cross over to the other side immediately and take the safety off your revolver; if anyone follows you, open fire without warning.
This is the world in which Frederick lived for nine months, until April 1919. What did he do in Odessa at this time? Among the refugees were many entrepreneurs and performers from Moscow’s theater world whom he knew, including the singers Isa Kremer and Alexander Vertinsky, as well as Vera Kholodnaya—Russia’s first star of the silent screen. He also had numerous contacts among Odessa’s entrepreneurs and theater owners, with whom he had done business since 1916. It would have been natural and easy for him to get involved in running a café chantant, theater, or restaurant, especially because he had always worked with partners in Moscow, and new establishments were being opened everywhere. It is likely that in addition to his villa Frederick had some money and other assets in Odessa that had escaped expropriation in Moscow. Despite the regime changes in the city during the past year, a number of private banks had managed to stay in operation through the Bolshevik period and would continue to function as late as April 1919. What is certain is that like most other refugees in Odessa he was still “sitting on his suitcases,” in the phrase of the time, and waiting for the Bolsheviks to fall or be pushed out so that he could return to Moscow and reclaim what was his.
Everything suddenly changed after November 11, 1918. On that day, at eleven in the morning in a forest near Paris, Germany surrendered to the Allies and the Great War finally ended. Shortly thereafter, as the armistice agreement stipulated, the Germans started to evacuate the territories they had occupied, including Odessa.