The Black Russian

3: Nothing Above Moscow

Crossing the border of the Russian Empire was unlike anything that Frederick had experienced before. Foreigners were suspect, and having their passports visaed abroad was just the beginning. Western European trains could not run on the more widely spaced Russian tracks, which Russia had adopted in part to thwart an enemy’s ability to utilize railroads during an invasion. As a result, all passengers arriving at the frontier had to transfer to Russian trains for the trip farther east. But the stop also gave uniformed officials time to examine travelers’ passports in detail and to search their luggage thoroughly, a process that could sometimes take several hours. Hapless individuals whose papers were not in order were sent back on the same train that had brought them.

The government’s oversight did not end at the border. In every place he stayed, Frederick would have to show his passport to the police, although the hotelkeeper or landlord would usually do this for him. Also, a visitor who had completed his trip to Russia could not just pack up and get on a train; he would have to report his intention to the police and get a certificate from his district superintendent that he had done nothing to prevent his departure. In Frederick’s case, because he would stay in Russia longer than the usual six-month term provided by a visa, he would have to deposit his American passport with the government passport office in exchange for a residence permit that he would then need to renew once a year.

Russian customs restrictions on tobacco and alcohol were the same as those in the rest of Europe. But there were also bans on items that struck visitors as odd, such as playing cards, which happened to be under a monopoly that funneled proceeds from sales to an imperial charity. Published materials dealing with a variety of topics could be confiscated on the spot because of censorship laws. Baedeker’s popular guidebook suggested that travelers to Russia avoid trouble by not bringing in any “works of a political, social, or historical nature”; and “to avoid any cause of suspicion,” they were even advised not to use newsprint for packing.

When Frederick arrived in 1899, the Russian Empire was entering its final years, although few could have predicted how quickly and violently it would collapse. Under the young, weak Tsar Nicholas II the autocratic regime seemed to be slipping ever more deeply into senility. Incompetent, corrupt, and reactionary, it could no longer distinguish between real threats and its own delusions. Radicals were advocating sedition, revolutionaries fomenting unrest, terrorists assassinating high government officials and members of the imperial family. But as the regime tried to defend itself against enemies, it also lashed out at those who could have been agents of its reform—progressive lawyers and newspaper editors clamoring for a civil society, university students avidly reading Western political philosophy, world-famous writers portraying the darkest corners of Russia’s life. In between lay the vast majority of the population—largely rural, illiterate, and poor.

Once trains left the Russian border and began their long journey into the country’s heartland, visitors were often struck by how the empire’s preoccupation with control extended even to the regimentation of its male population. Half the men on the platforms of the major stations appeared to be wearing uniforms of one kind or another—police officers, soldiers, railway men, teachers, civil servants, even students. And few visitors failed to note that time itself ran differently in Russia, as if it too echoed the regime’s reactionary policies. Because Russia used the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar that was widespread in the West, a visitor crossing into Russia from Austria or Germany in 1899 would discover that he had gone back twelve days in time, so that May 22 in Vienna or Berlin was May 10 in Moscow or St. Petersburg. This discrepancy actually got worse in 1900, when it increased to thirteen days.

Time also seemed to flow differently when visitors were traveling across Russia, because of the vastness of the country. The landscape was generally flat and the scenery monotonous. Passengers heading to Moscow faced a thirty-hour trip of some seven hundred miles after they crossed the Russian border with East Prussia at Verzhbolovo. The train crept along at a soporific twenty-five miles an hour, with long stops at stations. Cities and towns were small, far apart, and mostly uninteresting. Telegraph posts slipped past, echoing the regular clatter of the train wheels. In late May, ponds and streams still overflowing after the spring thaw glistened bleakly in the distance. Forests of white birches and firs that looked almost black interrupted the greening fields that ran to the horizon. There were few roads, and rarely was there anything on a road other than a shaggy-headed peasant riding in a cart behind a plodding horse.

Frederick spent the better part of his first year in Russia traveling to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa, again working in hotels or restaurants and getting a feel for each city. In the end, he settled in Moscow, and this choice is notable. St. Petersburg, the starkly beautiful imperial capital on the northern edge of Russia that Peter the Great had founded by decree in 1703, looked like a modern Western city, with broad boulevards and grand palaces and ministries that rivaled anything in Paris or Berlin. Most of the city’s best restaurants in which Frederick could have worked belonged to Frenchmen and Germans and had a Western cuisine and atmosphere. Odessa, the major port on the Black Sea that lay a thousand miles to the south, was also a modern, planned city with handsome squares and buildings, tree-lined streets, and a cosmopolitan character. By contrast, Moscow, which lay approximately in between, had grown gradually over eight centuries, like a tree adding rings, and looked like nothing Frederick had ever seen before.

Originally the capital of the early Russian state, Moscow was the country’s historical and religious heart. “If ever a city expressed the character and peculiarities of its inhabitants,” Baedeker declared, “that city is Moscow.” The first sight that struck newcomers was the bulbous golden domes and three-barred crosses on the hundreds of Orthodox churches gleaming everywhere above the rooftops. At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the buildings in Moscow were two or three stories high, with only a handful of taller ones in the center, so churches were visible from afar, and hardly any address in the city was more than two or three streets away from a church. To Western eyes, Russian churches with their bright colors and multiple cupolas reaching skyward looked exotically different. To Napoleon Bonaparte, when he paused on a hill before his army entered Moscow in 1812, the innumerable cupolas and bell towers shimmering in the distance looked positively Oriental.

Once you reached the center of the city, another architectural wonder came into view. On a rise by the Moscow River stood the Kremlin, a giant, redbrick medieval fortress over a mile in circumference with nineteen pointed towers above the swallowtail crenellations on its sixty-five-foot walls. Next to it spread the vast expanse of Red Square, at one end of which the sixteenth-century Cathedral of Saint Basil the Blessed, an extraordinary whirl of brightly colored shapes topped by faceted and striped cupolas, seemed to be twisting itself into the sky. For Muscovites, this ensemble of fortress, square, and church was a revered place and a living connection to a cherished past. The early tsars who had established Moscow’s greatness and laid the foundations of the empire were entombed in the Cathedral of the Archangel within the Kremlin’s walls. All Russian tsars still traveled from St. Petersburg to the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin to be crowned. And it was Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Kremlin that first proclaimed coronations to the city, the empire, and the world. “There is nothing above Moscow,” a Russian proverb says, “except the Kremlin, and nothing above the Kremlin except Heaven.”

A newly arrived visitor like Frederick emerging from one of the four main train stations onto the Moscow streets would be enveloped by a rich tapestry of sounds, sights, and smells that were both alien and familiar. The city was a bustling, noisy place. Ringing church bells marked the daily cycles of services, their intricate patterns an analogue to the gaudy splendor of the churches themselves and an indelible part of the city’s “soundscape”: the quick tinkling of the small bells coursing through the measured tolling of those in mid-range and the deep, slow drone of giants weighing many tons. Horses’ hooves beat a sharp staccato as they trotted by; carriage and wagon wheels clattered and thundered over the city’s cobblestone streets and squares. Motorcars were just beginning to appear in Moscow when Frederick arrived, and one would occasionally roar down a street, leaving acrid exhaust and rearing, frightened horses in its wake. The first electric tramway had been built in 1899, but Moscow still ran mostly on horsepower. All over the city, barnyard whiffs of manure mingled with the smell of charcoal and wood smoke from the chimneys of thousands of kitchens and samovars—portable brass water heaters for making tea that were fired up several times a day in every household.

The crowds thronging Moscow’s central streets were strikingly mixed. Many passersby wore European clothing, or what the simple Russian folk termed “German” dress. Gentlemen in top hats and frock coats; ladies in elegant gowns, trailing scents by Coty or Guerlain; military officers in dress uniforms with shining epaulets—all would have looked at home in Vienna or London. Foreigners were also a common sight in Moscow, and German and French names were everywhere on shop signs in the city center. But side by side with them was old Russian Moscow: heavily bearded peasants in gray sheepskins and bast sandals; Orthodox priests in robes sweeping the ground, their faces bearded, their straight hair topped by wide-brimmed hats; old-fashioned merchants in long-skirted coats, their demonstrative portliness a sign of their commercial success. The unabashed displays of piety on the streets always struck foreigners. Whenever members of the simpler classes passed churches or sidewalk shrines, the men would doff their hats, and all would bow and cross themselves with a broad sweeping gesture—forehead, stomach, right shoulder, left. If an icon was within reach, they would then lean forward, gingerly, to venerate it with a kiss.

Unlike what Frederick saw in Western Europe, not everyone’s skin in Moscow was white and not all eyes were round. The empire’s Slavic heartland was ringed by countries that the Russians had conquered or absorbed during the past centuries, and two-thirds of the empire lay beyond the Ural Mountains, in Asia. Subject peoples from all over could be seen on Moscow’s streets as well: Circassians from the Caucasus, Tatars from the Crimea, Bukharians from Central Asia. Their colorful national dress was a reminder of how far east Moscow lay and reinforced the belief of many Europeans that Russians had, at the very least, an Asiatic streak in them. Of the three great human “races,” only the “black” was rare: unlike many countries in Europe, Russia never pursued colonial ambitions in Africa; and unlike many countries in the Americas, it never enslaved people of African descent. Except for occasional entertainers who passed through on European tours, few blacks had any occasion to visit Russia, and hardly any chose to settle there. During Frederick’s years in the city, there were probably no more than a dozen other permanent black residents amid a population of well over a million. But because the parade of humanity on the city’s streets was so varied, Frederick did not stand out nearly as much as his actual rarity might have led one to expect.

The black Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay experienced this when he visited Russia a few years after the 1917 Revolution and was struck by “the distinctive polyglot population of Moscow.” He was also charmed to discover that “to the Russian, I was merely another type, but stranger, with which they were not yet familiar. They were curious with me, all and sundry, young and old, in a friendly, refreshing manner.” By contrast, white Americans brought their racial prejudices with them when they went abroad. Emma Harris, a black singer who settled in Russia before the Revolution, was introduced to this fact by Samuel Smith, the American consul in Moscow, whom Frederick also met. After having been arrested in the Russian provincial city of Kazan on an invented charge of being a Japanese spy, she appealed to the consulate for help and Smith’s intervention gained her release. But when he saw her after she reached Moscow, he exclaimed, “How strange! We did not know that you are a Negress!” She understood that she might not have been helped if her race had been known, and that she should not count on any further assistance in the future.

As a result of the Russians’ attitudes, the few black people who visited or lived in Russia did not encounter any racial prejudice and were free to pursue whatever livelihoods they chose. Frederick would himself acknowledge this years later, when he shocked a tourist who proudly styled herself “a Southern woman from America” by explaining that “there was no color line drawn” in Russia.

This made Russia look very different to black and white Americans. Frederick could exult that in tsarist Russia he was not judged by the color of his skin and was as free—and unfree—as any Russian. However, for a white American who staunchly believed that his country was a light unto other nations and that his citizenship granted him unique liberties, Russia was something else entirely—a reactionary autocracy riddled with obscurantist beliefs, which were, moreover, concentrated most vividly in Moscow’s semi-Asian appearance and hidebound religious culture.

On a map, Moscow looks like a wheel. From the Kremlin at the hub, the main boulevards radiate outward like mile-long spokes toward the Sadovoye Koltso (Garden Ring), a continuous band of broad boulevards encircling the core of the city. All of Frederick’s addresses in Moscow, and his future business ventures as well, clustered in the same northwestern sector of the city, in the vicinity of Triumphal Square, which was, and still is, a major intersection of the Sadovoye Koltso and Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, one of the main spokes of the wheel. This area had concentrated in it several of the city’s most popular light theatrical venues and is probably where Frederick sought employment when he first arrived.

Little is known about what exactly he did during his first several years in Moscow. He later said that he began as a waiter in a small restaurant, but he also claimed that he worked as a valet and then as a head butler for a Russian nobleman. What is certain, however, is that shortly after arriving he made the momentous decision to start a family.

In 1901, Frederick was almost thirty, and what was left of his youth was fading. He met Hedwig Antonia Hähn early in 1901, about a year after he had settled in Moscow. They married on September 11 at Saints Peter and Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the Kremlin. She was a twenty-five-year-old German, originally from Putzig, a small town in West Prussia on the shore of the Baltic, and came from a humble background—her father was a telegraph operator. Hedwig was no longer in the first blush of youth either. But she was pretty and thus a good match for Frederick—a bit tall for a woman at five feet eight, with dark brown hair and eyes, an oval face, a high forehead, a fair complexion, a straight nose, and a pointed chin. She was also no prude and did not resist intimacy outside wedlock with the exotic-looking foreigner: their first baby, Olga, was born on February 12, 1902, five months after the wedding. Despite the fact that Frederick and Hedwig came from vastly different worlds, their love for each other proved genuine and she found fulfillment as his wife and as a mother. Olga would be followed in 1906 by a son, Mikhail, whose birth especially delighted Frederick, and then by another daughter, Irma, in 1909.

In their early years together, Frederick and Hedwig lived at 16 Chukhinsky Lane in what could be called a “middle-class,” semi-suburban neighborhood just outside the Sadovoye Koltso and a convenient twenty-minute walk from Triumphal Square. By then Frederick was earning enough for Hedwig to be able to occupy herself only with “home duties.” In contrast to more developed parts of the city on the inner side of the Sadovoye Koltso, the neighborhood where the Thomases lived had the feeling of a provincial town, like many other areas on Moscow’s outskirts in those days. There were still big empty lots interspersed with small and large ponds. Most of the houses were one or two stories high and built of wood; only some of the streets were paved with cobblestones while the rest were dirt; streetlights were scarce and used kerosene.

The church records pertaining to the wedding do not make any reference to Frederick’s race, but they do contain the surprising revelation that he identified himself as a Roman Catholic, which means that he chose not to attach himself to one of the Protestant churches in Europe that were closer to what he had known as a child. The differences between the Catholic and A.M.E. churches could hardly have been greater in terms of history, geography, power, architecture, art, music, and ritual. Overall, there is little evidence suggesting that any religious faith was important for Frederick. But his choosing Catholicism is nevertheless significant. By identifying with the most venerable and “highest” of the Old World churches he was taking another decisive step on his path of reinventing himself by abandoning American cultural markers for those of a cosmopolitan European.

It did not take long for Frederick to find a job commensurate with his skills and experience. In 1903, he began to work as a maître d’hôtel at Aquarium, an entertainment garden occupying several park-like acres just west of Triumphal Square, at what is now 16 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. Aquarium was a focal point of Moscow’s lively nightlife for a clientele drawn from the more genteel and prosperous classes of society, especially those who were not put off by the frivolous nature of the garden’s entertainments. It retained its aquatic name even after the fountains, grottoes, and artificial streams flowing into a pond with goldfish that had existed there in 1898 were long forgotten.

Frederick’s employer, Charles Aumont, was a Frenchman. He had rebuilt the garden in a style intended to make visitors feel that they were arriving somewhere grand and magical: a giant white colonnade topped with sculptures greeted them at the entrance, and a marble staircase bathed in electric light led into the garden. A magnificent building decorated with carved cupolas, columns, and arches meant to evoke a Moorish palace housed a restaurant on the left. In the depths of the garden was a spacious concert stage. Bands in pavilions played fashionable tunes; people strolled along gravel walkways among trees strung with bright lights; vendors offered snacks and souvenirs from booths; barkers invited passersby to try their hand at bowling and other games. The garden provided a chance to get away from the noise and bustle of the city streets, to see and to be seen, to have some fun, perhaps to enjoy a brief flirtation or even a dalliance. A modest fee allowed a customer to enter the Aquarium grounds at dusk and to stay there until the garden closed in the early morning.

More expensive tickets gave entry to a large enclosed theater on the grounds that featured lavish productions of fashionable operettas and comedies imported directly from Vienna, Paris, London, and Berlin. The subjects were invariably lighthearted, the plots quick-paced, and the humor often risqué. The theater’s private rooms were also available, curtained in a way that shielded those inside from public view but not from the stage. In the early 1900s, the most famous customer for these was the biggest name in Moscow—Grand Duke Sergey, the tsar’s uncle and the city’s governor-general. Younger grand dukes sat openly in first-row orchestra seats. After the performance at the enclosed theater was over, patrons could continue their evening by moving to the “café chantant.” This was a different, open-air theater that included a restaurant where customers would sit at small tables facing a stage and order food and drink while they watched, or ignored, a variety show of twenty or thirty acts in quick succession—everything from trained animals to acrobats to operatic singers.

Aumont was a very successful, talented, and ruthless businessman, and Frederick learned a great deal from him (including how not to behave). For owners of establishments like Aquarium, sales of food and especially of drink were major components of their income, and cynical observers of Moscow nightlife often complained that the variety shows were really just magnets for successful restaurants. The managers of the gardens certainly did what they could to link the two. Many of the song and dance acts featured attractive young women whose primary talent was projecting their allure to a largely male audience. But the enticements did not stop there. According to the norms of the time, a client seated in the restaurant who was particularly taken with a performer—and who had the money and the courage—could send her an invitation to join him at his table after she had taken her turn onstage.

The exploitation of chorus girls and other female performers was one area where Aumont sinned but Frederick did not. Frederick became personally involved in the fate of one such young woman in 1903. Natalia Trukhanova was a sweet-faced actress with dreamy eyes and a voluptuous figure who aspired to a career on the stage of the celebrated Moscow Art Theater, which had recently launched Chekhov’s plays and had become the center of a revolution in Russian theatrical practice. But she did not succeed, was in desperate need of money, and—following a friend’s advice—applied for a job at Aquarium. Aumont liked her and hired her on the spot to perform in light comedies. He also offered her a monthly salary that exceeded her wildest dreams and, glossing over some of the fine print, urged her to sign a contract at their first meeting.

She did not realize what she had gotten herself into until she finished her first performance and was preparing to go. Her costar ran into her dressing room and began to upbraid her in a loud, harsh tone for not knowing the ropes: “Have you lost your wits? They’re going to start asking for you in the private rooms any second! And you want to relax? You want to earn your bread without working? No, missy! That won’t work here! Please be so kind as to sit and wait in your dressing room until you’re called. One of the maîtres d’hôtel will fetch you.” A few minutes later, one of them did appear—“the negro Thomas” as Trukhanova referred to him. He announced very politely that a party was asking for her in private room 18 and that everyone there was entirely decent and sober. She obediently followed Frederick to the door, and thus began what she called her yearlong “path of sorrow,” working every night like a “real geisha.”

Her fate would have been worse were it not for Frederick and the other maîtres d’hôtel, who looked out for her like “tender nursemaids,” as she put it. Trukhanova described how, whenever she was entertaining customers in a private room, one of the maîtres d’hôtel would take care to place a bottle of her “personal” champagne in front of her. This was actually a rather foul-tasting mixture of mineral water colored with tea, but it looked like the real thing and allowed her to avoid drinking anything alcoholic. And if a client happened to pour some wine or liquor into her glass, the maître d’hôtel who was keeping an eye on the room would immediately swoop in and remove it. Trukhanova reciprocated and won the affection of the Aquarium’s restaurant staff by donating her commissions to the general pool for tips. Her distaste for her work was so strong that she would also not keep anything that her clients bought for her and saw “every flower, every piece of fruit” as “defiled.” Frederick noticed this and remembered it in a way that touched her deeply. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1904, he presented her with an enormous bouquet from the grateful staff and began his speech by announcing: “Not a single one of these flowers comes from the restaurant, and the ribbon is… straight from Paris!”

The success that Frederick quickly achieved at Aquarium made it seem as if he had become master of his own fate by settling in Russia. But there were subterranean historical forces at work in his adopted country, even if they were initially hardly noticeable to people like him caught up in their daily lives. They erupted for the first time scarcely five years after he arrived and did so with a violence that would show the fragility of the life he had built for himself—indeed, the fragility of his whole surrounding world.

On the night of February 8, 1904 (N.S., that is, by the New Style calendar), the imperial Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific fleet lying at anchor in the outer harbor of Port Arthur in China, “thus accomplishing the original Pearl Harbor,” as an American historian put it. The two countries’ imperialistic ambitions in Manchuria had come into conflict, and the Japanese naval attack that launched the Russo-Japanese War proved to be only the first of the military disasters that the giant Russia would suffer at the hands of little Japan during the next year and a half. The Japanese besieged and eventually captured Port Arthur itself, then defeated the Russian army in Manchuria. Finally, between May 27 and 29, 1905, in the Battle of Tsushima Strait, the Japanese annihilated the antiquated Russian fleet, which had sailed for over half a year and had traveled nearly twenty thousand miles from the Baltic to the coast of Japan. The president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, brokered a peace conference between the belligerents in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905—none too soon for Russia. The country had already been experiencing revolutionary turmoil for months. The war that began six thousand miles to the east of St. Petersburg had initiated upheavals that shook the Russian Empire from top to bottom, leaving cracks that would help to bring it crashing down a dozen years later.

As an erstwhile American citizen, Frederick was in a strange position because of the war and the events that followed. Some decades earlier, during and after the American Civil War, Russian-American relations had been amicable; the United States was grateful for Russia’s support of the Union. There were also mutually profitable political and commercial relations between the two countries, including Russia’s momentous sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. However, as the twentieth century approached, American public opinion began to turn against Russia for two dominant reasons—abhorrence of the tyrannical absolute monarchy and revulsion against Russia’s treatment of Jews. Indeed, during the Russo-Japanese War, the United States sympathized with Japan, and New York bankers made large loans to Japan in the hope that this would help to defeat Russia.

Frederick was thus making a life for himself in a country that was increasingly being vilified in the land of his birth. Another ironic twist was that not only were Jim Crow laws continuing unabated in the United States, but a newer animus had appeared against the Chinese, whose entry into the country and ability to acquire citizenship were blocked by explicitly racist federal laws. The Russians thus considered the Americans hypocritical, and vice versa. When President Roosevelt’s administration transmitted a petition to the Russian government protesting against widespread anti-Jewish pogroms, the Russian ambassador to Washington complained that it was “unbecoming for Americans to criticize” Russia when blacks were being lynched and Chinese beaten up on the streets of the United States.

The disastrous war with Japan could hardly have come at a worse time for the Russian Empire. As the twentieth century opened, waves of turmoil had begun to spread across the country. Workers struck against onerous conditions in factories; students demonstrated for civil rights; peasants in the countryside tried to seize land from the nobles. Committees of citizens sprang up demanding broad-ranging reforms in political life, the economy, and education. The Socialist Revolutionary Party resurrected its “Combat Organization,” which carried out a series of spectacular assassinations—two ministers of the interior in 1902 and 1904, and then, in February 1905, Grand Duke Sergey, former governor-general of Moscow and visitor to Aquarium (where Frederick may well have met him), who was literally blown to bits inside the Kremlin.

What subsequently became known as the “First” Russian Revolution erupted shortly after the New Year in 1905, when a strike by a hundred thousand workers paralyzed St. Petersburg. On January 9 (January 22 in the West), a day that would reverberate throughout Russia and around the world as “Bloody Sunday,” troops fired on peaceful demonstrators. Outrage against the tsar and the government swept the country and further fed the revolutionary turmoil, prompting new massive strikes, uprisings among peasants and national minorities, and even rebellion in the armed forces. Finally recognizing the magnitude of the opposition, Nicholas II issued a manifesto on October 17/30 that guaranteed civil liberties and established a legislative body called the Duma. The Russian Empire had taken a major step toward becoming a constitutional monarchy, although many of these early promises and achievements would be undone by the emperor and his ministers in the following decade.

Despite the October Manifesto, which was meant to calm the country, the revolutionary upheavals grew stronger. Moscow was the scene of the greatest violence, exceeding even that in St. Petersburg. On the evening of December 8, 1905, what became known as the “siege” of the Aquarium Theater took place. More than six thousand people gathered for a huge rally and to hear orators in the theater, which was a popular meeting place because it was not far from the industrial quarter where many of the most militant revolutionaries worked and lived. Troops and police surrounded the building and the grounds but the siege ended relatively peacefully.

The following day things got worse. On Strastnaya Square (now Pushkin Square), closer to the city center and a fifteen-minute walk from Aquarium, a crowd of peaceful demonstrators inadvertently provoked a jittery unit of dragoons, whose berserk response was to fire several artillery rounds at the civilians. Many Muscovites who had previously not had any sympathy for the revolutionaries were appalled and enraged. People began to build street barricades out of anything that was handy—fences, doors, telegraph poles, iron gates, streetcars, placards. Aquarium was in the middle of it, and barricades went up just outside the entrance. Skirmishes between revolutionary militiamen and troops flared up throughout the city. The American ambassador in St. Petersburg, George von Lengerke Meyer, sent a coded telegram to Washington: “Russian nation appears to have gone temporarily insane; government practically helpless to restore law and order throughout the country; departments at sixes and sevens; also crippled by postal and telegraph strike. Only the socialists appear to be well organized to establish strikes when and wherever they like.”

By far the worst fighting in Moscow took place in the Presnya district just outside the Sadovoye Koltso, a half-hour walk from where Frederick and his family lived. The government was finally able to crush the rebellion by December 18. During its course, some 700 revolutionaries and civilians were killed and 2,000 were wounded. The police and military combined lost 70 men. These numbers were far lower than what foreign newspapers reported initially, but more than enough to justify horror abroad and despair and outrage at home.

The reverberations from those days lasted for years. In 1906, 1,400 officials and police officers, as well as many innocent bystanders, were killed by the Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1907, the number climbed to 3,000. The following year, 1,800 were killed. The scythe swung in the opposite direction as well, and during the same period the imperial regime arrested and executed several thousand terrorists and revolutionaries. But all this would later seem like a trickle in comparison with the rivers of blood that started to flow after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917.

What happened to Frederick and his family during these days of chaos and mayhem in Moscow, if they were there? Like hundreds of thousands of others throughout the city, they probably huddled indoors much of the time, away from windows, venturing out only to find a food shop that was open or to catch rumors about what was going on.

But it is also possible that they saw little or none of it. On December 26, 1905, the American ambassador to St. Petersburg sent a report to the secretary of state on the status of American citizens in the capital and in Moscow and attached lists of all those known to be living in both cities. The totals are surprisingly small—only 73 in St. Petersburg and 104 in Moscow. For Moscow, the list had been compiled by Consul Smith, but Frederick and his family are not on it. There is no doubt that Smith knew both Frederick and Hedwig: he had met them at least twice, when he signed their passport applications in May 1901 and again as recently as July 1904.

In fact there is some evidence that Frederick did leave Moscow for a period during the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution—specifically, sometime between November 1904 and September 1906. As he explained to American diplomats more than a dozen years later, “In 1905, I was on my way to San Francisco and stopped in Philippine Islands, Manila, when Russo-Japanese War broke out. I was accompanying a Russian nobleman as interpreter.” He also told an American tourist a more detailed variant of the same story.

Was this the truth or invention? If Frederick was trying to persuade the diplomats that he was a loyal American despite having lived abroad for twenty-five years, what good could it have done him to make up an aborted trip to San Francisco with a stop in the Philippines (which had recently become an American colony)? As it happens, there is evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Frederick had family ties to Berlin through his wife. It is possible that he moved there temporarily to escape the violence in Moscow; it is also possible that he went there to open a restaurant. However, after World War I, with Germany defeated and widely reviled, it would not have been in Frederick’s interests to acknowledge any connections to that country, especially when dealing with American officials. Nevertheless, judging by the fragmentary evidence available, Berlin is the more likely version.

Although Aquarium had survived serious damage, Aumont had been frightened by the violence and destruction he witnessed during the revolution. His self-indulgent business practices also caught up to him, and by early 1907 bankruptcy was looming. Aumont decided to escape to France (he stole his employees’ money when he left), and Aquarium fell on hard times for a number of years.

Frederick needed a new job, and the next one he got marked his emergence into the topmost ranks of his profession. Among Moscow’s many celebrated restaurants, one stood out because of its age—it dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century—and its fame. Yar Restaurant, or simply Yar, as Muscovites called it, was considered by many connoisseurs to be the finest in Russia and one of the best in all of Europe. Jobs in Yar were coveted by waiters not only because of its prestige but because of the generosity of many of its famous and wealthy clients. That Frederick became a maître d’hôtel there, probably starting in 1908 if not before, is testimony to how far he had come in Russia. By then he had probably already developed his glib, if often grammatically flawed, command of spoken Russian. His French would have been useful with some patrons, but he would need to communicate readily in Russian with most of the others as well as his employer and the restaurant’s staff.

Yar was located on the northwestern edge of Moscow. To be near his new job Frederick moved his family from the calm of Chukhinsky Lane to 18 Petersburg Highway, which was the main road to the imperial capital about 350 miles to the northwest. Although two miles farther out from the city center than Frederick’s old neighborhood near Aquarium, Yar was well situated in terms of attracting clients. Directly across the highway, on the edge of Khodynka Field (where over a thousand people had been trampled to death during a celebration commemorating the 1896 coronation of Nicholas II, a tragedy that many took as a bad omen for his reign), were the Moscow racetrack and the airport of the Moscow Society of Aeronautics. During the early years of the twentieth century, airplanes were a new craze in Russia, as they were elsewhere around the world. Muscovites saw their first airplane on September 15, 1909, when the French aviator Legagneux demonstrated his Voisin biplane at Khodynka Field. Thousands thrilled at the sight, and spectators flocked in ever-increasing numbers to subsequent displays of aerial acrobatics. Yar was happy to provide champagne and other potables to celebrate exhibitions of hair-raising stunts by the spindly aircraft, as well as to mourn the victims of their disastrous crashes.

When Frederick began to work at Yar the owner was Aleksey Akimovich Sudakov, who had bought the restaurant in 1896 and nurtured it to its great success and fame over the next twenty years. Sudakov was an absolute perfectionist and would not have given Frederick a visible and responsible position without being certain of his professionalism and polish. Despite the obvious differences between them, there are also several striking parallels between Frederick’s life path and Sudakov’s. Sudakov was born a peasant in Yaroslavl province and went through a demanding apprenticeship as a lowly assistant waiter before becoming a manager and finally buying a small restaurant of his own. This background is not unlike Frederick’s origins in black, rural Mississippi and his work in big city restaurants and hotels. Both men succeeded only because of their own talents and because they had learned all aspects of the restaurant and entertainment business from the ground up.

But it was not only Sudakov who could serve as a mentor—there also was Aleksey Fyodorovich Natruskin, the “king” of Yar’s staff, as Sudakov himself described him. Natruskin was the senior maître d’hôtel when Frederick worked there and had held this position without interruption for thirty years. As such, he was Frederick’s immediate superior and would have played a role in honing his already advanced skills, either actively or by example. Well known to several generations of Yar’s loyal customers, Natruskin was much admired and respected by them for his ability to balance his dignified manner with the utmost attention to their desires and tastes, a combination that they found very flattering (and that many later remembered as Frederick’s salient traits as well). Natruskin’s calculated skills were well rewarded by the clients he charmed and made feel at home. Visiting grand dukes gave him jeweled gifts as mementos while businessmen and others tipped him lavishly in cash. By the time he retired, he had saved 200,000 rubles, the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money, which he used to buy an investment property in Moscow. There was much in his life and career that Frederick would imitate; there was also much in it that he would surpass.

As might be expected in view of Frederick’s success in working with such exacting colleagues, the relations among them were rooted not only in pragmatic considerations but also in mutual respect and even affection. There is evidence for this in the grandest event in Yar’s twentieth-century history—an event that Frederick helped orchestrate—the celebration on December 19, 1909, of Yar’s reopening following a major reconstruction. The day was filled with many remarkable tributes to Sudakov, and Frederick joined the five other senior employees in composing and signing a memorable one of their own (in Russian, of course). Identifying themselves as Sudakov’s “closest assistants and collaborators,” they proclaimed that they “saluted” him as “an energetic and conscientious proprietor” and “bowed down” to him as “a person of rare humanity.” They assured him of their “genuine affection,” not only because of his “skillful management,” but also because of his “sensitive soul, which responds to all that is honest and good.” They concluded their tribute by wishing Sudakov “Many Years” (“Mnogaya Leta”), which is actually the name of a Russian Orthodox hymn asking God to grant the celebrant a long life. Proclaiming the hymn’s title at the end of congratulatory remarks such as these would traditionally serve as the prompt for singing it, and the six signers of the address almost certainly did so, together with many of the others present.

To Western eyes and ears it might seem odd that a famous restaurant’s reopening would be accompanied by an expression of religious faith. After all, Yar was a place where people went to overindulge in food and drink, and to have their passions stirred by Gypsy choirs and comely chorus girls. But a prayer service in a place like this was entirely in keeping with Russian norms of the time and demonstrates the extent to which religious rituals and beliefs penetrated all aspects of social life, and at all levels of society (even though there was always a minority that complained about the unseemliness of such mixing). The service in Yar also illustrates the easy coexistence of transgression and forgiveness in the Russian consciousness—not as hypocrisy but in the sense that contrition would always be able to expiate sin, and the passions, if properly guided, could lead to spiritual salvation. In later years, one of Yar’s most notorious fans, the sinister religious mountebank Rasputin, would become a visible emblem of this duality.

What was Frederick like at his job? Fred Gaisberg of the American Gramophone Company saw him in action a number of times at Yar and was struck by his sophistication and charm. Gaisberg came to Moscow to persuade the internationally celebrated Russian operatic bass Fyodor Chaliapin to sign a long-term recording contract. What impressed Gaisberg was not only that Frederick knew “every nobleman and plutocrat in Moscow” but how “he was always perfectly dressed and would personally welcome his patrons with a calculating eye in the vestibule.” Frederick’s skill at figuring out quickly where the client stood on the ladder of celebrity and how much money he was likely to spend, and remembering what food and drink he had enjoyed during previous visits—all of which required an unusually retentive memory and a knowledge of people—was one of the reasons he had proved exceptionally successful at Yar. The other was that he was very accommodating, and Gaisberg underscored that Frederick “was a general favourite everywhere, especially amongst the ladies, who made a pet of him.” Moreover, implying that Frederick at Yar, like his peers in other famous Russian establishments, had set new standards for memorable hospitality, Gaisberg concluded that “Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest—none of them could compare in my opinion with St. Petersburg and Moscow if one wanted carefree night life.”

A maître d’hôtel’s skills would be exercised routinely in any good restaurant that attracted a well-heeled clientele, but at Yar there were times when such skills were challenged and pushed to the limit. One reason was Moscow’s cultural norms, especially among some of the rich and successful members of its merchant class, who valued the ability to demonstrate bravado or unbridled passion in a way that would make people notice and remember their Russian “broad nature.” The other was the reputation Yar acquired as a favorite destination for especially extravagant sprees. The result was some truly memorable escapades. An American writer, Roy Norton, visited Yar around 1911, when Frederick was still working there. Although Norton had already spent some time in Europe studying the behavior of “spendthrifts” in various countries, he quickly concluded that Russians were by far the most extravagant, and that Yar was the place in Moscow where one could see them at their best. Norton was especially impressed by one such reveler who decided that it would be fun to play football in the dining room with hothouse pineapples, which were selling in Moscow that winter for around 44 rubles, or $22, each: around $1,000 in today’s money. He ordered a whole cartload and proceeded to kick them all around, smashing china, overturning tables, and spilling imported champagne. His bill from the proprietor, who approached him with a smile, was supposedly 30,000 rubles, or around $750,000 in today’s money. Frederick told Norton that there are “probably an average of fifty bills a month, paid for one evening’s entertainment, that will average seven thousand five hundred rubles each.”

Within a decade of Frederick’s arrival in Russia, his life was looking very bright. He had a lucrative position at a famous restaurant and his family was about to grow once again: Hedwig was expecting their third child. Irma was born on February 24, 1909, and baptized at home on March 31 by a pastor from the Saints Peter and Paul Church. Frederick’s happiness over Irma’s arrival was poisoned, however, by the debilitating effect that her birth apparently had on Hedwig’s health. As the Thomas family’s oral history suggests, Frederick’s subsequent distance from Irma was due to his seeing her as somehow responsible for the loss of his wife, whom he cherished deeply. Irma’s tragic fate and the way she suppressed any recollections of her family past when she grew up also imply that a chasm had developed between her and her father—a situation that darkened her entire childhood and that she was never able to overcome.

There is no direct evidence regarding the nature of Hedwig’s illness after Irma’s birth, although there was much that could have happened to her. Despite improvements in hygiene and the growing use of birthing hospitals in early-twentieth-century Moscow, childbirth was still beset with potential dangers for both the baby and the mother, with puerperal fever leading the way and a troop of other ghastly complications following. Hedwig died of pneumonia, with the additional complication of blood poisoning, on January 17, 1910, at the age of thirty-four, and was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery of Foreign Confessions in Moscow, also known as the “German Cemetery.”

Olga was almost eight when her mother died and thus just old enough to understand some of what this meant. But Mikhail was only three and Irma not yet one, so for them their mother’s death was a confusing and distressing event that they could not fathom; also, they would not remember her. Hedwig’s death was Frederick’s first close personal loss since his father’s murder in Memphis. He would continue without Hedwig, of course, but the uncomplicated harmony of the family life he had built with her is something he would never know in quite the same way again.

Frederick’s most urgent task after Hedwig’s death was to find a way to care for his children. His income at Yar was more than sufficient for him to hire the domestic help he needed, and the obvious solution was to find an experienced nanny. His choice fell on Valentina Leontina Anna Hoffman, and it would prove to be a fateful one. “Valli,” as she was often called, was twenty-eight years old and came from Riga, the capital of Latvia, a small province on the Baltic Sea that had been part of the Russian Empire since the eighteenth century. Her surname and the fact that she knew German as well as English—in addition to Russian, of course—suggest that she belonged to the Baltic region’s dominant German population and was educated. Judging by surviving photographs, she was a plain and rather large woman; and given subsequent developments, her appearance played a role in how Frederick treated her.

While working at Yar, Frederick had also begun to prepare for the next major step in his life, one that must have been in the back of his mind for years. The tips he received at work continued to be generous and he was accumulating a sizable sum in savings; in fact, he now had more money than ever before in his life. The time was right to decide what to do next—continue like Natruskin until retirement, which was the safe route, or take a calculated risk like Sudakov and invest in a business of his own. Frederick decided to follow Sudakov’s—and his father’s—example and to bet on his own skills and energy.

The business risks that Frederick faced could not be separated from the bigger ones threatening the entire country, although the energy with which he pursued his personal ambitions suggests that he thought Russia would somehow get through it all. The Revolution of 1905 showed the fragility of the Russian Empire’s social and political system, and what happened then could happen again. Although terrorism had declined from 1908 to 1910 in comparison with previous years, over 700 government bureaucrats and 3,000 civilians were murdered during this period (these deaths included the shocking assassination of the powerful prime minister Peter Stolypin in 1911). Strikes by workers demanding political and economic reforms dropped in 1910 to their lowest level in several years, with only some 50,000 workers participating in 2,000 mostly small job actions. But this relative lull was hardly a sign that the country’s underlying problems had been fixed, despite an economic boom that began around 1910. Strikes increased the following year and would grow to crisis proportions by 1914 as the government continued to suppress workers with blind, stupid brutality. An especially notorious incident occurred in 1912, when troops fired on thousands of peacefully demonstrating gold miners in Siberia, killing 147. The Duma demanded a full investigation, but little came of it. By this point in the country’s history, nothing could dispel the impression that the imperial government was dangerously, even catastrophically, adrift.

However, these threats flickering and rumbling in the distance did nothing to dampen Muscovites’ enthusiasm for revelry. Many observers noted that people in the city began to seek pleasure with increasing frenzy as the century’s second decade began. Frederick saw how others around him were making money and was ready to start doing so as well.