Despite the crowds of customers and enthusiastic press reports about Stella during its second season, Frederick was still unable to make ends meet. New creditors kept trooping to the increasingly exasperated diplomats at the consulate general. As the number of complaints mounted, Ravndal’s and Allen’s tone began to change. Initially, they wrote formulaic but polite requests, but Allen in particular began to sound barely civiclass="underline" “complaints… requiring your immediate attention”; “You will furnish me at the earliest possible moment a statement”; “inform me immediately.”
Aggravating the situation was that Frederick became the target of extortionists who masqueraded as creditors and pressured the consulate general to help them get money. In light of Frederick’s tarnished reputation, the diplomats took all such complaints seriously. The worst of these swindlers was Alexey Vladimirovich Zavadsky, a Russian who in June 1920 hired a lawyer, enlisted the help of the Russian diplomatic mission in the city (which continued to function on behalf of Russian refugees, with the Allies’ blessing, even though the empire it represented had vanished), and claimed that Frederick had owed him over 300 Ltqs in wages since the previous summer. Despite pressure from the American diplomats to pay the man off, Frederick adamantly refused, labeling it “a case of chantage”—blackmail. But he was unable to erase the diplomats’ impression that all he did was generate trouble for them.
There was worse to come during the fall of 1920 and the following winter, when his ex-wife, Valli, suddenly resurfaced. Her affair with the “Bolshevik commissar” had ended unhappily and by early September she had managed to extricate herself and Irma from Soviet Russia and get to Berlin. Once there, she immediately set about trying to find and contact Frederick. On September 9, she went to the American Commission’s offices and applied for a Certificate of Identity and an Emergency Passport for herself and Irma, explaining that she wanted these in order to join her husband wherever he might be. Berlin was a far from happy place in 1920, with serious food shortages, disastrous inflation, high unemployment, and growing social unrest. Her only hope for a decent life was to gain Frederick’s financial support.
In Berlin, the consul took her application and explained official State Department policy; her claim about being married to an American would have to be investigated in Washington. When the answer arrived, it could not have been more disappointing: there was no record of the application that Valli had made to renew her passport in Moscow in 1916 (even though she had proof that she had filed one); it was also impossible to verify any passport application by Frederick or his birth in the United States; accordingly, Mrs. Valentina Thomas’s request was denied. This not only was bad news for her but did not bode well for Frederick either.
Judging by the amount of trouble Valli was able to cause Frederick from afar during the next several years, it was his good luck that she did not receive papers allowing her to come to Constantinople. In early October, even before she got the rejection from Washington, she began to write in English and in German to the American consulate general in Constantinople, and later to the British embassy as well, presenting herself as Frederick’s only lawful wife, enclosing photographs of them together as proof of their relationship, besmirching Elvira, complaining of being ill and impoverished, pleading for financial support for herself and his daughter, insisting that he could afford to help them because he was well off, and asking for his precise address.
The task of dealing with Frederick fell to Allen, who forwarded a copy of Valli’s letter to Frederick and attached a surprisingly presumptuous demand: “I request you to indicate what attention you will give this matter.” The consulate general was now involved not only in his financial problems and his claim to American citizenship, but also in what Allen referred to as his “marital relationships.” Frederick was becoming an unbearable burden to the American authorities in Constantinople.
8: The Struggle for Recognition
In the fall of 1920, Wrangel’s White Volunteer Army lost its war against the Bolsheviks, dashing the hopes of Russian refugees in Constantinople that they would be able to return home. Following a cease-fire with Poland in October 1920, the Red Army was able to concentrate its forces in the south and pushed the Whites down into the Crimean Peninsula, until their backs were to the Black Sea. The only escape was by water. In early November, Wrangel began to assemble a ragtag fleet of some 130 vessels—everything from former imperial Russian warships and transports to passenger boats and merchant ships, private yachts, and barges towed by other ships. By November 19, the motley flotilla had finished staggering across the Black Sea and dropped anchor off Constantinople, transforming the Bosporus into a floating archipelago of human misery.
There were nearly 150,000 people on board and the conditions were horrible. All of the ships were overcrowded, some so badly that they listed dangerously. Sanitary facilities had been overwhelmed and water and food supplies were exhausted. Passengers willingly traded their wedding bands and the gold crosses around their necks for jugs of water or loaves of bread that enterprising Turks offered from small boats, which had flocked to the Russian ships. There were large numbers of sick and wounded on board. Many of the refugees had only the possessions on their backs.
The remnants of the White Volunteer Army numbered nearly 100,000 men, with the rest civilians, including 20,000 women and 7,000 children. During the days and weeks that followed, the French interned two-thirds of the troops in makeshift camps throughout the region, including the Gallipoli Peninsula, the site of the disastrous Allied landings during the war. But tens of thousands of others, military men and civilians alike, flooded into Constantinople, where they created a humanitarian catastrophe.
November was already cold; the winter winds were beginning to stream down across the Black Sea from the great Russian plain; and housing, food, clothing, and medical care were all in short supply. The Allied authorities, the American Red Cross, the Russian embassy, and other civic organizations did what they could to help. Some of the refugees were herded into hastily designated shelters—abandoned barracks and other partially ruined buildings—where they endured near-freezing temperatures and starvation rations. Some lucky ones got space in the stables of the Dolmabahçe Palace. But many had to manage as best they could on their own and to survive by their wits. There was no trade or job at which they did not try their hand. Those who knew languages tried to teach them or to work in Allied offices. Others hauled bags of coal and cement on the Galata docks; sold shoelaces and sweets from trays on Pera’s streets; spun handheld lottery wheels; hired themselves out as doormen, dishwashers, and maids; or simply begged. Army officers tried to sell their medals to passersby on the Galata Bridge. The writer John Dos Passos saw a one-legged Russian soldier standing in the street, covering his face with his hands and sobbing. Out of despair some officers shot themselves. So many Russian women peddled nosegays in an arcade on the Grande rue de Pera that it is known to this day as “Çiçek Pasaji,” “Flower Passage.” Anyone who had any money tried to start a business: small Russian restaurants sprang up all over like mushrooms after a rain (as Russians liked to put it). Secondhand shops displayed the luxury detritus of a vanished empire—jewelry, watches, icons, furs—that the fortunate had managed to bring out with them. Classically trained musicians, singers, and dancers organized performances and inspired a taste for Western arts that forever changed the city’s cultural landscape. Speculators created an unofficial currency exchange on the steep steps from Pera to Galata. A few made fortunes overnight but lost them the following day.