Everywhere is brightness, but underneath is the tragedy of a great nation. Death on his pale horse is ever present on the streets of Constantinople.
—Elizabeth Cotten
In early 1920 the Nationalists seemed to threaten Allied suzerainty in Constantinople and Anatolia in so many ways that the Supreme Council in Paris repeatedly felt called upon to respond. As mentioned above, in March of 1920 the Allies had been so worried about a possible takeover of the Turkish government in Constantinople that they had thousands of British, French, and Italian troops occupy the Turkish capital and concurrently imprisoned many prominent Turks who manifested Nationalist sympathies. About the same time, not only had the Turks attacked the French throughout Cilicia, but in May, Kemal’s forces also had the temerity to attack British forces at Ismid, right near Constantinople itself. As a result of the latter affront, the Allies’ Supreme Council once again called on the Greek premier, Eleutherios Venizelos, to ask whether the Greek army might intervene in northeast Anatolia. Venizelos promised that his troops could quickly take control of the threatened area, and he ordered them to do so. Greek troops swiftly moved north from the Smyrna region, and (to everyone’s surprise) quickly routed Kemal’s forces, which retreated east.
That fall, when the two forces met again, once more the Turks were defeated decisively, and the Greeks moved their lines even further east toward Angora. In the late fall of 1920, however, back in Athens, Premier Venizelos failed a plebiscite, and King Constantine took power. By the winter of that year, the Allied support for the Greek army had begun to slacken; indeed, eventually it would become clear that the French and Italians were secretly assisting the Nationalists. Yet, instead of withdrawing his army from Anatolia, King Constantine maintained the offensive after replacing the army’s officers with officers of his own. Originally the Greek army had been the tool of the Allies. Although Britain’s Lloyd George persisted in supporting the Greeks, increasingly the war had become one between the growing forces of the Turkish Nationalists and the 200,000-man army of the Hellenic Greeks.
Meanwhile, in November of 1920, a crisis occurred in Constantinople itself that for a time drew attention away from events in mainland (Anatolian) Turkey. Virtually overnight, the residents of the city awoke to find over a hundred and twenty Russian, French, and American ships steaming into the straits and anchoring near the city. Nearly 146,000 White Russian refugees were aboard these vessels.1
Refugees on some ships were standing, packed so tightly that they could not move. “You realized with a shock, as the morning light grew clearer, that what had appeared at first to be piled-up superstructure was in reality a solid mass of men,”2 commented an American reporter. Many of these wretched people were half crazy with thirst, having received no food and little water for several days; most had to defecate in place. Americans who boarded the ships reported that the crowding and filth were indescribable.3 Drawn to these wretches like carrion birds, Levantine boatmen extorted wedding rings, watches, and fur coats in exchange for bottles of water or loaves of bread.4 Eventually, most would be tended to briefly by the Allies and the Americans (particularly the American Navy), but their numbers would overwhelm a city already occupied by tens of thousands of refugees.
The evacuation from the Crimea that produced these fugitives in late 1920 was one of the last pages of a horrific story, for as it convulsed Russia and inundated Europe, the Russian Revolution also sent successive waves of terrified refugees down the Bosporus.
A few Russians had fled to Constantinople immediately after the fall of the Aleksandr Kerensky government in late 1917. Then, in the spring of 1919, as successive evacuations of Odessa by French and Russian troops had pushed thousands of refugees into the Crimea, some vessels had steamed further south.5 In April of that year, before traveling on to Hadjin, relief worker Alice Clark had written home about seeing ships carrying thousands of Russians in Constantinople’s harbor. Many of these Russians were newly impoverished aristocrats.6
For some time afterward, White Russian forces headed by General Anton Denikin fought back against the Reds, but a series of disasters broke Denikin’s army. In February of 1920, the wing of the White army under General Schilling fell back on Odessa again and began evacuating its troops on ships steaming toward Constantinople, resulting in yet another panic.7 In the harbor at Odessa were the American destroyer Talbot and later the Biddle, one of which was carrying Admiral Bristol’s representative, Lt. Cdr. Hamilton Bryan.8 Bryan watched as snipers fired at the crowds on the docks from nearby houses and then as mobs rushed the Russian transports. Seamen aboard one of these Russian vessels, itself already filled to the gunwales, used machine guns to drive off additional maddened hundreds.9
Moved by the people’s desperation and incensed at seeing a Greek destroyer hoist a piano aboard instead of evacuees, Bryan commandeered the American merchant ship Navahoe, which happened to be in port, and filled it with hundreds of Russians, one of whom was future Broadway composer Vernon Duke, then known as Vladimir Dukelsky.10 Bryan had all these people taken down to Constantinople. The commander’s action earned the admiral’s ire, for Bryan had no authority to take control of the merchant vessel,11 and Bristol would talk of taking the costs out of Bryan’s pay.12 Eventually, however, the admiral got the Red Cross to underwrite Navahoe’s expenses, and he settled for dressing Bryan down.
According to Duke’s memoir, the scene at the port of Odessa had been worthy of Hogarth or Dore’: “Literally thousands of frenzied citizens pushed and kicked madly, all codes of decency abandoned, with men fighting women, lost children howling in a maze of luggage, bundles, and even furniture.”13 When the ships began to steam out of Odessa’s harbor, the crowds left behind went down on their knees in their great distress.14 It was to no avail: thousands were left behind. These ships eventually deposited some ten thousand refugees in Constantinople, though en route they first had to weather a terrific blizzard in the Black Sea.15 Of one such evacuation, American naval officer John Waller told his son, “It was heart-breaking. We bodily had to throw them off the ship; they were hanging on the lifelines. We would have lost them during high seas.”16
The White Russian army fought on. Serving with that army as an observer was the American admiral Newton McCully. McCully had served two significant naval tours in Russia, first as a mid-grade officer observing the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, and later in 1914, when he was assigned as naval attaché at St. Petersburg. By 1916 he could speak Russian and had become a perceptive observer of events. He informed the State Department that food shortages, corruption of officials, and general disintegration of morale might soon force Russia out of the war. In 1917 he witnessed the beginnings of the Russian Revolution. Shortly after this, he was sent back to sea duty in the Atlantic, but just before the war’s end, McCully was put in charge of some American sailors serving under a British admiral in Murmansk, when the British and Americans were helping to support Allied intervention there.17
Such work was discouraging, for the Russians did not seem to want the Allies. McCully also recognized that the Russian forces they were working with were not dealing successfully with the land distribution problem. The suffering of the Russians at every hand greatly moved the American officer (before this, McCully had been troubled by the plight of the Poles), and he recommended to his superiors that America send grain to these starving people. That recommendation was turned down. McCully later made a plea that America provide asylum in Alaska for the tens of thousands of Russians who faced likely reprisals from the Bolsheviks. Although approved by naval superiors, this request was rejected by the State Department.18
The American contingent in which McCully served was withdrawn from northern Russia in July of 1919. Admiral Bristol then suggested that his friend and Naval Academy classmate, McCully, be given orders to travel with Denikin’s White Russian army as an observer. Wanting eyes in Russia’s interior, the State Department agreed. So McCully took passage to the Black Sea via Constantinople in January of 1920. While traveling with Denikin, McCully and his assistant, Cdr. Hugo Koehler (also fluent in Russian19), kept close touch with Bristol by letter and occasional visit, for Bristol was providing successive destroyers as base, and McCully once or twice rode a destroyer down to Constantinople to confer with Bristol and others.
As McCully grew pessimistic about the growing problems of the politically inept Denikin, he continued to feel for the Russian refugees. Admiral McCully now recommended the United States grant asylum to the Russians massing in Black Sea ports, but the State Department once again said no.20 Although McCully and Bristol were friends, the contrast in their outlooks was sharp. Bristol made clear to McCully that he would not tolerate yet another unauthorized shipload of Russians on his hands like the one Bryan had saddled him with: in the event of yet another evacuation, McCully should bring no more than two hundred and fifty refugees down the straits.21
In March of 1920 an evacuation of over 80,000 troops and refugees from Novorossisk became imminent. Following Bristol’s instructions to the letter, McCully selected about two hundred upper-class women and children, some of them wives and children of Denikin’s staff officers, and had them shipped to the Island of Proti in the Sea of Marmara. The cruiser Galveston and destroyer Smith Thompson took part in this evacuation. On the destroyer, finding only one of their twenty-nine Russian passengers spoke anything but Russian, officers detailed two of their ship’s crew as translators; both the sailors spoke excellent Russian.22 McCully also used American ships to transport a thousand refugees from Novorossisk to the Crimea, where the White army was preparing a last stand, thinking that was the least that America could do in the circumstances.23 Meanwhile, besides the troops and refugees pouring into the Crimea, some 50,000 more Russians steamed down the Bosporus on Russian ships. Although a majority of this group would travel on to other countries, maybe 20,000 of these refugees remained in the city, this on top of many thousands of Russians already there.24
The tidal wave of refugees was still to come. The Russian general Denikin was replaced by the more politically astute General Peter Wrangel in April of 1920, and Wrangel tried to rally White Russian forces in the Crimea. McCully admired this man, although he knew that Wrangel faced nearly impossible odds.25 For a while, things augured better for the White Russians, and the Bolsheviks were locally held to a stalemate. Over several months, besides travel, liaison, and reporting, McCully began visiting orphanages. He had become so frustrated by America’s refusal to help the suffering Russians that he was considering a relief project of his own. McCully started writing Bristol and his diary of his notion of personally adopting maybe half a dozen Russian waifs.26
Back in February McCully had discovered a lice-covered eleven-year-old boy living in the water closet of an abandoned railroad car in Sebastopol, and after placing him in a hospital and visiting him regularly for three weeks (the child had developed typhus), the admiral had him taken to a refugee camp on one of the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara.27 Now he began befriending other children who he found living in ghastly conditions in the Russian orphanages.28 Soon he would have a couple of young Russian girls taken down to that same refugee camp. Eventually, recognizing that his requests to adopt children through regular channels would likely be snarled in red tape, he decided to engage a nineteen-year-old Russian governess, take seven children home with him, and present the matter to the State Department as a fait accompli. He anticipated receiving some disparagement here and there, but he was an admiral, and Navy gossips could safely be ignored.29
Occasionally, the American Navy ships would get a glimpse of the Russian conflict. In early June, Admiral McCully had Smith Thompson carry him and Commander Koehler from Sebastopol toward the Sea of Azov; McCully had heard of a White Russian landing to be carried out in Eastern Russia from within that body of water. So the American destroyer entered the Kerch Strait on June 6, keeping to the port side away from the Bolshevik batteries to starboard. They were taken under fire, and the first shot came very close. The ship came up to twenty-five knots, turned even further to port, and hugged the western side of the strait. Despite a brief fusillade, Smith Thompson made it through unharmed and eventually joined the Russian ships supporting the troop landing.
McCully and Koehler left the destroyer and joined the Volunteer Army to observe the battle. After several hours, McCully returned with ten badly wounded Russians, and Smith Thompson took them on board. That night the destroyer exited the Kerch Strait at darken ship, this time without being noticed by the Bolshevik batteries. On the ship’s arrival in Sebastopol, a boat from the British ship Ajax took the wounded Russians aboard. Apparently McCully stayed in the city, while the Smith Thompson steamed on.30
In late October, the slight prospects of Wrangel’s small army completely dissolved. General Wrangel had counted on the tidal marshes at the neck of the Crimea to hold out the Bolsheviks, but when in November a series of extremely low tides drained many of the marshes and a violent cold snap froze the rest, the Bolsheviks suddenly poured across the frozen marshes and sent Wrangel’s army into full retreat.31 That the end was near was very clear now; everybody had to go.
McCully cabled a request that the United States be allowed to aid in the evacuation but did not wait for the State Department’s response. He ordered Cdr. Alexander Sharp of the destroyer John D. Edwards to gather a group of refugees and then steam to Constantinople to present a letter to Bristol asking for more ships. Sharp collected five hundred and fifty Cossacks and other Russians off the Sebastopol dock. As the destroyer sped south, these men, women, and children spread all over his ship and hungrily wolfed down as much food as his cooks could dish up. The ship moored in the city, and the destroyer’s captain reported personally to the admiral. According to Sharp, on reading McCully’s letter Bristol ordered up all the ships he could find.32 John D. Edwards offloaded its passengers at the Russian summer embassy and soon headed back north. In its wake were four other destroyers, the American merchant ship Faraby, and the cruiser St. Louis. The destroyer Overton (already at Sebastopol) also took part in the evacuation.33
Although most of this final rescue operation was carried out by French and Russian vessels, the American vessels took human cargo too. Besides evacuating all the American citizens in the vicinity (consuls, relief workers, Red Cross and YMCA workers, and more), over several days the American ships loaded some thirteen or fourteen hundred refugees from Sebastopol and Yalta. Seven hundred refugees piled on Faraby, five hundred boarded Humphreys, a few dozen boarded other destroyers, while St. Louis took seventy-eight.34
When the latter vessel had initially arrived in Sebastopol, Charles Olsen had been astonished to see the people on all the ships there all packed in, “Nothing to eat and all exposed to the cold.” Apparently most refugees had already gotten away there, so the next day the cruiser loaded some upper-class passengers at Yalta. The young Russian women who came aboard told of their parents having been killed, of their money inflating to nothing, of having no food at all, of only possessing the clothes on their backs. One woman had been parted from her mother, sister, and baby on the docks, and Olsen took her back to look for them without success. The last boat brought out the sister and the baby, but the missing mother had not been found when St. Louis put to sea.
Though Olsen was angry that some officers quartered a group of pretty Russian women near the wardroom and ignored the rest, he himself talked with many of the White Russian refugees, and St. Louis’s crew fed and helped them in every way they could. On an evening en route to Constantinople, the wardroom showed movies, after which a Russian girl danced, her husband played the piano, and the two sang a number of Russian songs. It was a pleasant evening.35
Much less pleasant was the ship’s encounter with a big Russian steamer named Rion. Although many other refugee ships that St. Louis passed had neither food nor medical supplies, they did have fuel enough to reach port. Rion, however, was adrift when the cruiser ran across it in the midst of the Black Sea, having run out of coal. St. Louis sent a party to investigate, under the direction of one Lt. A. C. Hoyt. Hoyt reported that the six thousand men, women, and children on the ship, packed like “sardines in a box,” had had nothing to eat for days, and for drink had only been able to scoop a little rain from the ship’s waterways. The cruiser sent over some bread and water in a motor sailor and ordered a destroyer alongside the transport to transfer a thousand gallons of water, but heavy swells forced the destroyer to desist. Fortunately, the weather was relatively calm; had it not been, not only Rion but many of the Russian ships would have foundered, being little better than derelicts. As St. Louis officers estimated they were only forty-eight miles from port, they took Rion in tow at three knots.36
When the cruiser reached the Bosporus, a tug took over their tow. St. Louis offloaded its own refugees on the evening of November 16, and then Hoyt returned from Rion. He reported the continuing distress of its passengers: “two suicides, two insane, and one childbirth” in the short time he had ridden the ship, with conditions aboard ripening toward an epidemic. Sailors and officers passed a hat and collected several hundred dollars. On taking provisions aboard Rion, Olsen was astonished at the Russians’ civility: the men stood aside to ensure that women, children, and the wounded all ate first.37 As the Navy relief party left, it was given three cheers, and a letter of thanks from the Russian women on Rion followed soon after.38
Still, Olsen knew that many Russians were in even worse shape, and indeed, two days later, McCully was to count fifty-four vessels in the Russian refugee fleet at Buyukdere Bay, most of them still loaded with an average of a thousand refugees apiece.39 Prospects for all these Russian people were very grim. There was little work to be gotten in Constantinople, and about the only thing the women among the refugees would be able to do, Olsen thought, was to turn to the streets. That trade, however, was already very much overpopulated.40
Admiral McCully left Yalta with Overton, the last American ship to leave Russia; another destroyer had brought McCully’s own remaining orphans down a bit earlier. When he arrived in Constantinople, the admiral discovered that the State Department had at last officially authorized the Navy to help with the Crimean evacuation. While recognizing that had he known of this order earlier, he could have saved even more, McCully was pleased that the Americans had accomplished what they had.
During the next several weeks, the admiral again attempted to get America to offer some Russians asylum; once again he was unsuccessful. Hearing that the Near East Relief had filled a hospital with three hundred children from Rion, he found himself wishing he could take a dozen more children home.41 However, he already had quite enough to manage. At the end of November, with his small charges and their governess, Adm. Newton McCully took passage home in the Navy tanker Ramapo, noting in his diary, “We are off on the biggest adventure I ever undertook—an old bachelor with seven children.”42 Though the immigration officials initially balked and kept the children at Ellis Island, McCully’s “fait accompli” eventually worked. It also ended his bachelorship. Before long, he had married the governess.
Meanwhile, other Americans were expending great effort to help cope with the enormous relief problem that the city had suddenly been saddled with. Admiral Bristol set up an American disaster relief committee to coordinate all the American efforts (not just the Navy’s and the embassy’s), and this committee would continue operation for many months. With an American doctor, many members of St. Louis’s crew reported to the Isle of Proti to help disembark and clean the Russian ships. While some of the sailors washed down and fumigated the vessels, others tended the refugees ashore. They recorded the refugees’ names, inquired if they had any support, helped them clean themselves up, and gave them a run on a beach. Most important, they provided them with two square meals apiece (corned beef and canned milk). The idea was to put them back aboard their ships with another twenty-four-hours’ ration and then send the ships off to some other port. However, although Serbia took many, few other nations would accept refugees without a great deal of negotiation, so usually the passengers ended up in a nearby refugee camp or spilled onto Constantinople’s streets.43
Other St. Louis sailors worked for a week with Admiral Bristol’s wife, Helen, and a committee of American women who set up a soup kitchen in a train yard near Sirkedji train station in Stamboul. They fed daily about four thousand refugees who were being offloaded into makeshift camps. Admiral Bristol was to write that most of these Russians were people “like ourselves, brought up in comfortable homes: doctors, lawyers, editors and writers, musicians and artists, ladies of birth and title, officers of the army and navy.”44 Now they were starved, exhausted, soiled, and penniless. Many children were part of the mix. In “drizzling rain and mud ankle deep,” Mrs. Bristol’s team doled out great quantities of hot chocolate, tea, and bread and kept the canteen operating from early morning till as late as two at night. The Americans also set up a restroom and dressing station for the women and continued the whole operation until some 22,000 Russians under the Americans’ care had been put up in makeshift quarters somewhere about the city. Meanwhile, the much larger contingents of British and French in Constantinople were also furiously at work.45
Some of the refugees stayed in the camps or hospitals; others stole away to join the thousands on the streets or sometimes in places of business, for many Russians who had come earlier had made a place for themselves. As journalist and novelist-to-be Kenneth Roberts reported on his visit to Constantinople in early 1921, “There are Russian restaurants, Russian newspapers, Russian tea shops, Russian gambling houses, Russian dance halls and Russian shops of every description. Some shops drive a thriving trade in good Russian vodka.”46 As for the vodka, Vladimir Smirnoff (whose grandfather had been a vodka-taster for the czar) set up a vodka factory in Constantinople, and also opened a high-class nightclub called the Parizyen (often visited by Americans). Eventually Smirnoff left Constantinople for Paris, where he continued producing the famous Russian liquor. For him Constantinople was a jumping-off point.47 Other Russians opened restaurants like Le Grand Cercle Moscovite (or simply the Muscovite), the Petrograd Patisserie, and the Black Rose.48 But the vast majority of refugees owned no shops or restaurants or nightclubs, and after they sold their furs and diamonds, or fans and snuffboxes, or traded their rifles and swords for pieces of bread,49 they scrambled to get any work at all.
“Scrambled” is a polite word for it. Male Russians worked as carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons, chauffeurs, gardeners, fishermen, deckhands, or mechanics.50 But these were the lucky ones; compared to the numbers, there were few who could find such work to do. Women washed, cooked, and darned socks; they also made dresses or hats, manicured nails, and dressed hair, if they were lucky or particularly good at such work. Others hawked flowers, kewpie dolls, cakes, trinkets, shoelaces, and jumping jacks.51 Some handsome Russian women (often former aristocrats) became waitresses in Constantinople’s restaurants. Others took to the streets. And, as we’ll see later, many fine Russian musicians made a rather decent living playing or singing in the restaurants and nightclubs. For music, Constantinople had never had it so good.
Some refugees were quite ingenious. The June 1922 National Geographic mentioned one enterprising refugee who installed electric lights in the Basilica Cistern with its three hundred pillars and charged half a Turkish pound to row visitors around the beautiful, dim spaces.52 Red Cross worker Eugenia Bumgardner spoke to a Russian officer who had earned enough money to buy a ticket to Paris; he had made a small fortune in the Turkish morgue by washing dead bodies that had been fished out of the Bosporus or that had been found murdered in the streets. (The decedents’ relatives paid him handsomely.) She also found a former financier who had “cornered the market” on scented toothpicks and sold them at an 80 percent markup to local restaurants. Perhaps strangest was the fellow she ran into who was earning a “living” (twenty-five cents a day) working with the boiled heads of sheep. He was making them more attractive to customers by cleaning their teeth.53
Especially poignant was the juxtaposition of the trivial or low kind of work being done with the upper-class status of many of the refugees. “You found titled ladies trading jewels and caviar for American flour and pork and beans; defunct czarist courtiers hawking papers on the street, while former premier dancers of the Petrograd and Moscow ballets were singing jazz songs and teaching the fox-trot in the restaurants,” reported Isaac F. Marcosson in the Saturday Evening Post.54 Clover Dulles spoke of the Russian officers who peddled sausages at one’s door, and of the former millionaires’ sons on ladders around her house, washing the upper windows: “If it weren’t such a tragedy it could be looked at first as a wonderful romance—such a turning up-side down of things.”55 Ens. James Clay accompanied a distinguished Russian on a train out into the marshes. This former aristocrat had once used a shotgun for sport, and Clay noted with admiration that even now he never missed a shot. He was making a little cash by shooting ducks and supplying them to several restaurants.56 Kenneth Roberts was shown a Russian who had set up operations in a vacant lot in Pera. Wealthy before the revolution, he had earned some minor fame as an amateur astronomer. Now he had begged enough cash from someone at the American embassy to buy a telescope and was selling views of the stars for five piasters, or about five cents apiece.57
Not all the money earned was spent prudently, of course, nor was everybody diligent. Helen Ogden was amused that princesses, generals’ wives, and countesses (or whatever they called themselves) were mending shoes, running laundries, making furniture, and peddling, yet would buy violets or rouge or powder with their last cents, going hungry as a result.58 The young naval officer Ash Pleasants met a man selling pistachio nuts who had been one of the czar’s ambassadors. This man spent all of his sparse earnings once a month at a famous local restaurant so that, for at least a few hours, he might live the life to which he had once been accustomed.59 Warm overcoats given out to the needy found their way into the pawnshops at lightning speed, merely so the recipient could go on a spree. And more than one individual was given the passage money to America or elsewhere only to hold a farewell dinner at the Muscovite the night before he was scheduled to leave, and spend all his passage money on a specially good champagne.60
Some Russians refused to work, while thousands had no employment at all, or simply gave up. It was common to find people sleeping on stone doorsteps in the street across from the Red Light district in Pera.61 At the YMCA shelter, then-journalist Roberts witnessed a young woman go mad and choke her child.62 Roberts also pointed out that you might be walking behind a Russian man in an overcoat, and suddenly realize that underneath he had nothing on but underwear.63 All these were the ones you saw. The many you did not see, naked, starving, diseased (or caring for those who were), were often the very worst off.
And it was all these destitute who the Americans (again, their work coordinated by the embassy committee), along with some Turkish institutions like the Red Crescent, many Allied organizations, and dozens of Russian self-help groups, did their very best over many months to get on their feet, or, better yet, to get on to a more hopeful spot. (Getting the Russians off to other countries in Europe was the major preoccupation, which took great patience and negotiation and soaked up much of the cash.) Of all the American institutions other than the embassy, the American Red Cross no doubt did the most good. In April of 1921, it was feeding six thousand a day in the city proper and was in the process of giving out ten thousand men’s suits, countless outfits for women and children, and all the clothing for the city’s many orphanages.64 With the YMCA, the Red Cross helped to operate schools in subjects ranging from carpentry to chauffeuring. Before pulling out most of its resources in October of 1921 (to the consternation of most of the city), the American Red Cross had also aided countless individuals with loans or small grants.65
The two American colleges gave some of the refugees employment, and admitted many Russian students, whose academic preparation was often superior to those students who had grown up in the Near East. In 1921 twenty young Russian women were admitted free of charge to the women’s college.66 The author interviewed Tatiana Boyadjian Erkmen in Istanbul in May of 2001. She reported that her father, fearing the Bolsheviks, had traveled to Constantinople in 1920 to talk to Dr. Patrick. Boasting of his daughter’s talent for languages, he got her admitted. He then rushed back to his summer house in Georgia and had Tatiana shipped off to Constantinople, while he and his wife made plans to follow. After landing in the city, Tatiana went up to the college with several Armenian girls and addressed Dr. Patrick with great trepidation. She was not yet twelve. Dr. Patrick embraced her, kissed her, and responded, “You’re our daughter now, Tanya. Now go to your bed and relax.” For months the Boyadjians failed to come, and when on a blessed day they finally did arrive, they were virtually penniless (they had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and robbed of all they had). The college kept Tatiana anyway. Like all the Russian students, Tatiana was enormously grateful to the college, and she performed some domestic work to help pay the costs.67
Robert College had as many as sixty Russian students at one point. A few Russians even became teachers there. Beyond that, the college’s kitchen became “a colony of White Russian cooks, scullions, and waiters,” according to President Gates, and two White Russians experienced in the restaurant business became the school’s concessionaires. At the women’s college, a Russian choir performed on “Charter Day.” This group was composed of all the young Russian women students and many older Russian men who were employed as groundskeepers, “some of them men of great culture and education.” According to Dr. Patrick, the gratitude shown by all these Russians was “a wonderful thing.”68
Other American organizations also pitched in. The American embassy itself sponsored tea dances and benefit concerts for Russian musicians, while the admiral and his chief of staff and both of their wives posed for portraits by the Russian artist Nicholas Becker, then down on his luck, but very, very good at his work; Becker’s beautiful painting of Captain Hepburn’s wife, Louise, is still in the family.69 Several Navy people hired Russians to teach them French, including officers, officers’ wives or sisters, and even some enlisted men. The admiral saw to it that groups of Russian refugees (rather than Turks) were hired to scrape the bottoms of his ships in dry dock and to unload American cargo ships.70 More than once so many Russians rushed to the docks at the naval base for the latter purpose that hoses had to be turned on them.71
American businesses in the city gave cash and contributed in other ways. The head of an American steamship company happened one day to speak to the company’s night watchman down at the docks. This man, as it happened, had had a splendid record in the Russian navy; he had reached the rank of admiral. Among other things he had commanded the cruiser Admiral Makaroff at the time of the earthquake at Messina, in Italy. This ship had reached that disaster scene before all other warships and had rushed a thousand Italians off to safety at Naples, though the captain had contracted typhoid in the process. Hearing this account, the American official sent a message to the Italian government, with the result that the admiral, with his family, was soon provided free transportation to Messina, where he was given a house and a piece of land for himself and his descendants. That house was back near the site of the earthquakes, to be sure, but it was far from the human cataclysm that was Constantinople.72
The Red Cross financed a maternity clinic for Russian women, the YMCA ran an employment agency and several schools for the Russians as well as a club called the Russian Lighthouse,73 while the YWCA provided lodgings for young women. Helen Ogden ran one of the YWCA houses. Since she had nothing to offer beyond the lodging, she was greatly distressed when two Russian women came to her, one who had eaten only bread and water for three days and was nursing a sick husband, and the other attempting to care for six of her brother’s children. Helen had to send them on to somebody else. But the lodging she was able to provide was a priceless commodity. Among those to whom she offered a room was a pretty Cossack woman of about eighteen, originally dressed in a big black sheepskin hat, a soldier’s coat, and big Russian boots. This girl had served several months in the White Russian army, right in the battlelines. Her first husband (an army officer) had been killed, and her current officer husband (who she had rescued when wounded in battle) was now living somewhere on the streets of Constantinople, suffering from tuberculosis.
Moved by the girl’s predicament, Helen gave her board and room and a small salary to act as their maid, although she insisted that the girl wear a skirt. Then Helen was progressively shocked, first when the girl brought her husband into the house for a marital visit (the other women scattering off), and later to find that rather than offer some of her earnings to her destitute husband, she was paying a doctor to treat her for venereal disease. Soon enough the girl left the house, and Helen was frankly relieved.74
A couple of months later two young lodgers further stretched Helen’s patience by attempting suicide while in the house. Helen thought it was remarkable more refugees didn’t try it. Her other girls were in a nervous state over the affair, but Helen seems to have taken the trouble in stride.75 Tending for the distressed Russians was said to have taken its toll on some Americans, however, who were overwhelmed by the great need, and who became depressed at the impossibility of meeting it.76
One member of the American diplomatic community made particularly distinctive contributions to the Russian relief work. Before marrying Allen Dulles, Clover Todd had done volunteer work as a “canteen girl” for the YWCA in France during the Great War, where she once had dressed in rags as a mendicant and strolled the streets of Paris to feel what it was like to beg for bread.77 She arrived in Constantinople with diplomat husband Allen a month after General Wrangel’s defeat and found the Grande Rue jammed with “ragged and tragic” Russians. While Allen worked at the embassy, Clover took off on her own to help.
She began by visiting a little village on the Sea of Marmara that featured one of the worst of the Russian soldier camps. Some invalids there were forced to stay in bed for lack of clothes to wear. (The Red Cross had apparently not yet reached them.) On her visits to these desperate people she typically brought along cigarettes and Russian newspapers, remarking the pathetic happiness she provoked among the refugee news sellers by buying their papers for a few cents apiece. Clover began to visit eight of these men regularly to teach them English. “The men seem tremendously interested and learn very fast.” Another Russian that Clover was introduced to was a brilliant, though desperate, lad who had learned to speak English in ten days from a book, hoping to get employment with an American. Clover was trying to invent some work for him. She also told her parents of her delight in getting a Princess Gortchakoff “launched on Therapia high life”; the princess was superb at sketching pencil portraits.78
In her journeys about town Clover eschewed the official car and chauffer that anxious embassy officers urged her to take, preferring more immediacy with the refugees’ predicament. Sometimes she was accompanied by General Wrangel’s wife, Olga, a saintly woman doing everything she could for her fellow Russians. General Wrangel himself would decorate Clover for her refugee work, which she kept up until, after a year, she became pregnant and had to return home. At about the same time, Allen was transferred to the Near East branch of the State Department.79
Anna V. S. Mitchell, a relief worker with the Russians who had come to Constantinople in December 1921, happened on a superb manner of fund-raising. At one of Admiral Bristol’s “disaster relief” meetings, somebody suggested selling refugee products on visiting liners. So, over a period of about twenty days, Mitchell boarded five successive vessels with a little group of Russians who would either sell what they had made themselves, or peddle some of their former possessions, including laces, jewelry, furs, and old silver. “I often heard people say to one another what beautiful things we had. It seems sad to think of selling them but one lost this feeling when one saw the owner’s feverish desire to do so, and their joy when they had the money which meant actual food, for so many days to come.” Mitchell oversaw the currency exchange on the liners’ decks. Over those three weeks, her small group made several thousand dollars, and until the competition ratcheted up, they held the sales whenever passenger ships were scheduled in.
Their success resulted, in part, from Mitchell’s great energy. She had to get all the permits to board the vessels beforehand, organize her Russian group, do liaison on the spot with the ships’ officers and the Allied police, and (particularly challenging) fend off each ship’s outraged tour guide, who regarded the local doings of the ship’s passengers as his own prerogative. Indispensable to Mitchell’s enterprise, by the way, was the strong backing of the U.S. embassy. This included key phone calls from Mrs. Bristol and the supporting presence of the admiral’s aide, Lt. Julian Wheeler.80
Still, Mitchell’s most reliable way to raise money was to write letter after letter, filled with descriptions like these:
I am supporting a baby, with its father, whose mother . . . has tuberculosis, and was nursing the baby. I am feeding up, temporarily, a very nice Doctor, who after supporting himself here for the past year, was lying ill in a little attic room from which his Greek landlady was about to turn him out as he had no money for rent. There is a very sweet looking woman who supports herself, six children, a husband, and an old father by making cakes and selling them at different houses. She has had bad luck lately and I have given her a bag of sugar bought at relief prices. A man who has eked out his and his family’s livelihood by selling chocolate on a little tray was burned out. . . . I have set him up again in business. . . . I am giving some [qui]nine and pillows to the most horrible looking hospital I have ever seen. I only saw it the other day.81
These descriptions go on for page after page, but after the letters circulated back home, the money would keep coming in too.
However, the most influential individual in all this work was probably Helen Bristol, in part because she was the “first lady” of the embassy, but also from her deeply generous nature. The canteen she set up was just the beginning of her great exertions. With her husband’s encouragement, the admiral’s wife was constantly arranging benefit dances and dinners and auctions, attending others’ benefits, listening to concerts, and writing notes of introductions to employers and institutions, which ran into the hundreds. She raised funds by speaking to tourists from liners, and as the admiral’s wife, she had implicit credibility here; donations from a single ship sometimes reached four or five thousand dollars. She also visited orphanages, refugee homes, and hospitals.
Moreover, like Anna Mitchell, Helen was also penning descriptive letters. She was writing a Mrs. Jaspar Whiting, who, after visiting Constantinople and seeing the terrible plight of the refugees, began running a large fund-raising operation in Boston.82 Ironically, the letters from the admiral’s wife about the suffering of the White Russian refugees closely resembled another kind of “propaganda” to which the admiral furiously objected. The publicity office of the Near East Relief in New York frequently asked American relief workers like Elsie Kimball (then in the Caucasus) to send stories about the Armenian massacres. They wanted to hear firsthand accounts from Armenians, for this was the most effective technique to stir sympathy, and thereby to help raise more money.83 Helen Bristol was doing the very same kind of thing to help the Russians.
To be sure, virtually no American was out there asking for stories from Turkish refugees, of whom there were a great many, thousands (or at times maybe even tens of thousands) in Constantinople itself.84 Given the historical circumstances and all the Armenian-Greek publicity, such lack of effort for the Turks on the part of the Americans was not surprising, but the Turkish refugees’ suffering could be terrible too.
Anyway, for years Helen Bristol would continue to use her position to help the Russians. For instance, to guests at the embassy she would tout a store where refugees were selling handicrafts and pleasantly bully her guests to buy.85 The episode described below took place long after the other events narrated here, but it was characteristic of her actions.
In 1925 a group of Russian refugees was stranded somewhere on the side of the Bosporus, after their voyage from the Black Sea had ended in shipwreck. They had almost drowned, and now they were starving, too. The English sculptor Clare Sheridan (then living in Constantinople with her children) had pleaded to the Russian embassy on their behalf, but she had had no success—perhaps not surprising, for the Russian embassy by then was being run by Bolsheviks. So Sheridan went to Helen Bristol:
Mrs. Bristol was in the throes of organizing a ball supper for that very night. I hesitated to intrude my story at so inopportune a moment. Mrs. Bristol urged me. I blurted it out hurriedly. Her advice was: “Come to-night—there will be people whom you can talk to who might help!” I said I couldn’t; “Not at a ball—people don’t want to hear about the starving.” I didn’t go, but the next morning she telephoned to me triumphantly. She had in the midst of dancing collected enough to save them for a month.86
It is worth noting that Russians did not stop fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920; they kept dribbling out in smaller numbers for years after that. It wasn’t fast enough. Although a bureau operated that kept trying to locate missing relatives and pass along word about those left behind, the vast majority were never heard from. As the French writer Paul Morand aptly put it in a short story, out of the “abyss” of Red Russia came “nothing but cries, gunshots, whipcracks, never any news of one’s relatives, shut in there, hopeless.” This lack of contact with family was yet another aspect of the tragedy of the Russians who had fled their homeland.87
American Navy and embassy people, in particular, kept helping Russians for years, even after they returned to the United States upon the completion of their tours of duty. In late 1923 Commander Hamilton and Margaret Bryan put up Olga Wrangel (the sainted wife of the Russian general) for at least a month while she was raising funds in the States for her compatriots. Olga was just one of many Russians the Bryans hosted, and Margaret had also brought her own White Russian maid with her to America.88 During their tour in Constantinople, Capt. Japy Hepburn and his wife had engaged the Prince and Princess Gagarine to manage the summer cottage they had rented on the Russian embassy grounds near Therapia. The Hepburns treated the Gagarines like friends of the family. For years they continued to help this Russian couple, particularly when the Gagarines immigrated to the United States.89
Most enlisted men could give no more than temporary help, but for one Russian boy of fifteen, the men of the destroyer Litchfield did much more than that. Having found the boy in Varna, Bulgaria; learned the tragic story of his family; and noted how bright the lad was (he quickly learned to read and write English), they named him “Pete” and put him in first division. When the admiral inevitably ordered all such foreign nationals put ashore, Litchfield’s crew held a tarpaulin muster and raised enough funds to send Pete to New York. Then they practically adopted the boy when the ship returned to its home port. When last heard from, Pete was serving as a radioman in the U.S. Coast Guard and was married to a “little Irish girl in Flatbush.”90
But the vast majority of those who owed their evacuation, feeding, support, or relocation to the Americans lived out their lives in Europe. In May of 1923, the United States agreed to take in nineteen hundred selected refugees,91 a pitiful number, really, although by hook or by crook at least a few hundred others had gotten in before that. Some (like Vernon Duke) would become celebrities in their new homeland. Most, however, soon disappeared into the fabric of American society. Occasionally they would briefly surface, as the following anecdote, narrated to the author in the year 2000, will indicate.
As a young naval officer, John Waller had served his time in Bristol’s small navy. Over the next twenty years he continued to pursue his naval career and pretty much forgot those early days. During World War II, having reached the rank of captain, Waller became skipper of Tuscaloosa, a heavy cruiser. In 1943 Tuscaloosa escorted Winston Churchill and his staff on Queen Mary from England most of the way to New York. Then the cruiser entered drydock in Brooklyn.
Waller seized this rare wartime interlude to invite his wife to stay with him at the famous hotel called the Sherry-Netherlands; it was a kind of second honeymoon. The two had dinner one night at the hotel. When Waller asked for the check, the waiter indicated another table and said, “That gentleman has paid the bill.” Intrigued, Waller walked over and spoke to the man, who was either the hotel’s owner or its manager. (Waller could never remember which.) The man related that as a young Russian boy, he had been evacuated from Yalta to Constantinople in 1920 by USS Whipple. He remembered Waller from that evacuation.92
Indeed, it was true. In 1920, during all the Russian chaos in which the American Navy had participated, Waller had been Whipple’s executive officer.
