The Black Russian

5: Becoming Russian

For fifteen years, Frederick had lived in a kind of charmed circle in Russia that allowed his talents to develop largely unaffected by strikes; assassinations; executions; the revolutionary turmoil that convulsed the country in the aftermath of the war with Japan; or the arrests, pogroms, and repression that followed. Even when the forces of history took on flesh and blood in Moscow’s streets, Frederick could stand on the threshold of his music-and laughter-filled world, his arms open in welcome to the crowds seeking respite inside. Money was all one needed to enter Aquarium and Maxim, and no matter what was going on outside there were always people who had enough. It is a paradox that the politically unstable and depressing period in Russia after the war with Japan was also marked by rapid improvements in industry, agriculture, and the economy in general. More people were making more money than at any other time in Russian history. Before the summer of 1914, there was no reason for Frederick to think that this would ever change.

On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a small Balkan state that was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a teenage Serbian member of the Black Hand terrorist organization assassinated the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, believed that he had struck a blow against Austrian domination of the South Slavic peoples. In fact, his pistol shots set off a new kind of war that would engulf Europe as well as parts of Asia and Africa; draw in the United States; and destroy the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish Ottoman, and Russian empires. Millions of lives would be lost and irrevocably changed in a dozen countries, including Frederick’s in distant Moscow.

In 1914 the major European powers were entangled in two alliances that pitted the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary and Germany—against the Triple Entente: France, Great Britain, and Russia. On July 28, one month after the archduke’s assassination, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia, claiming that the Serbian response to a harsh ultimatum had been unsatisfactory. Russia automatically backed Serbia for a reason that was largely sentimental —a belief that the two countries shared the same “blood and faith.” Germany then declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3. On August 4, after Germany invaded Belgium while attacking France, Britain declared war on Germany. On August 23, Japan entered the war on the side of the Entente, and on October 29, the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia. Italy joined the Entente in 1915, as did the United States in 1917. The world had never before seen a war that was as vast, destructive, and unnecessary.

Within two weeks of the war’s beginning Frederick made the fateful decision to step out of his charmed circle. The way he chose to do this not only was remarkable in itself but may have been unprecedented in the experience of black Americans in Russia: he asked to become a subject of the tsar. Frederick did so in response to several threats that rose around him when the war began and that he could not have avoided by continuing to maintain his purely paper-based American citizenship. In the short term, his dramatic action would succeed and he would prosper for several more years. But he could not have foreseen that his decision would rebound upon him later, when he was most vulnerable and the threats against him were far more serious.

On August 2/15, 1914, Frederick composed a petition to the minister of internal affairs in St. Petersburg requesting citizenship for himself and his family. (The imperial capital would soon be renamed Petrograd because the original name, which was actually derived from the Dutch, sounded too “Germanic” to Russian ears newly sensitized by war.) This petition was first vetted by the governor-general of Moscow, Major General Adrianov, and then forwarded by him to the minister on December 19, 1914. Adrianov would certainly have heard of Frederick’s role in Moscow’s nightlife, and probably knew him personally. He sent the petition off with the necessary supporting documents and a cover note in which he referred to the petitioner as “Fridrikh Brus (Fyodor Fyodorovich) Tomas,” a “negro citizen of the North American United States,” and added, “There is no opposition on my part toward the satisfaction of Tomas’ petition.” (Probably for reasons of cultural inertia, Adrianov had automatically converted “Frederick” into its Germanic form, “Friedrich,” which was more familiar to him.)

Frederick’s petition is such an unusual document that it deserves to be quoted in full. In the heading, he refers to himself in a way that underscores his hybrid identity—“Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas (Frederick Bruce Thomas), citizen of the United States of America.” He then signs the document with his American name transliterated into the Russian alphabet. An English translation cannot do full justice to all the bowing and scraping in the original.

One clear way of measuring how far Frederick had traveled in his life is to juxtapose his avowal of love for Russia and its tsar with his birth on a farm amid the roadless forests, swamps, and cotton fields of Hopson Bayou, Coahoma County, Mississippi.

Frederick’s reference to having lived in Moscow for “17 years” is off by two, and is typical of other inaccuracies and inventions in the documents that accompanied his petition to the minister of the interior. The heart of the petition is a form on which he had to provide answers to a series of questions that were then certified by the superintendent of police in the district where he lived. Here Frederick told the truth when necessary, exaggerated where possible, and burnished his past when he could get away with doing so. An example is his claim that he spoke and read Russian well, which was only a half-truth; although he could communicate readily in Russian, he made many grammatical mistakes. To enhance his education, he replied that he had completed studies at “an agricultural school” in Chicago. Presumably, this sounded better than saying he had worked as an errand boy, a waiter, or a valet.

The notoriously inefficient Russian bureaucracy revolved around the all-powerful tsar and moved sluggishly at the best of times; it slowed even more after the war began and numerous problems accumulated on the front lines and in the rear. It took until May 2, 1915, for the minister of the interior to send all the new petitions for citizenship (there were only 112) to the Imperial Council of Ministers. After the council approved them on May 14, they were presented to the tsar at his summer palace in Tsarskoe Selo outside Petrograd. The following day, Nicholas II wrote on the document—in blue pencil—“Agreed.” Frederick had officially become Russian on May 15/28, 1915. His race had been mentioned several times in the paperwork but it never became an issue.

Despite Frederick’s seeming candor, his application was a calculated and well-timed move with a hidden agenda. On June 24/July 7, 1914, about five weeks before he filed his petition and four days before Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo, Frederick had gone to the American consulate in Moscow to renew passports for himself and his “official” family—Valli and the three children by Hedwig—because the ones he received in 1912 had recently expired. Frederick of course signed the renewal application, as he had always done before, despite its statement that he was only “sojourning” in Moscow “temporarily” and that he intended to return to the United States “in two years.” In other words, when international affairs in Europe seemed relatively normal, Frederick saw no reason to change his nationality. It was not until a month later, after war had been declared and its consequences for him became apparent, that he suddenly discovered his “love” for Russia and the tsar (although there is every reason to believe that by 1914 he had indeed gotten very “accustomed to everything Russian”). If there had been no war, Frederick would have continued to live and work in the special space that he had found for himself between the real Moscow and his “virtual” American citizenship.

Frederick made other evasions as well, and one was especially daring. At the same time that he sought the protection of Russian citizenship for one set of reasons, he tried to conceal what he was doing for another. The maneuvering this necessitated between his purely personal interests and his prominent role as a Moscow entrepreneur could not have been easy. His duplicity would remain hidden to this day from everyone except, presumably, Elvira; possibly Olga; and the author of this book. The Thomas family’s oral history does not allude to the matter, and this implies that even his oldest son, Mikhail (who later modified the spelling of the surname to “Thomass”), did not know about it.

Frederick concealed from the American authorities that he had decided to become a Russian citizen. The Moscow governor-general’s office and the Russian Imperial Ministry of the Interior did not inform the Americans either. As a result, neither the American consulate general in Moscow nor the embassy in Petrograd nor the State Department in Washington, D.C., ever found out that Frederick Bruce Thomas had officially expatriated himself. This would have two remarkable consequences. Four years later, in Odessa, during what were some of the most perilous days of his life, he would be able to save himself and his family by concealing that he had formally surrendered his American citizenship. And in 1931, three years after his death, his two youngest sons, who were born in Russia, would be recognized as Americans on the strength of their father’s (nonexistent) American citizenship and only because the State Department did not know that he had given it up in Moscow.

Another extraordinary move on Frederick’s part is that he concealed his Russian citizenship from his wife Valli. On July 27, 1916, well over a year after Frederick and his three oldest children had been accepted into the Russian fold, Valli applied to renew her American passport, which had been issued in July 1914. Her application was approved and she was informed that she had been “duly entered on the Consular register, and that her national passport has been forwarded to the Department of State at Washington to be substituted by a fresh one.” Valli could not and would not have done this if she had known that Frederick had expatriated himself because, as she realized, her American citizenship was entirely dependent on his. The attestation that Valli received from the consulate in 1916 also corroborates that the American authorities did not know Frederick was a Russian citizen. Valli’s application underscores as well that Frederick had effectively abandoned Irma, who is listed on the form as Valli’s “daughter” (in future years, Irma would refuse even to talk about her father).

Why would Frederick have bothered to apply for Russian citizenship? Against his will and despite his best efforts to resist such things, he had been swept up by a new, European stream of history and had to defend himself from its consequences as best he could. When Austria-Hungary began to menace Serbia in July 1914, Russia responded with an explosive mixture of patriotism and belligerence. In Moscow on the nights of July 14/27 and 15/28, for example, demonstrations broke out in several central locations, with thousands of people repeatedly singing the Russian imperial anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” demanding that it be played over and over again by orchestras and bands summoned out of restaurants; shouting “Long live Russia and Serbia”; and angrily denouncing Austria-Hungary and Germany. When on the first night large crowds started heading toward the consulates of both countries with the intention of demonstrating their defiance more forcefully, mounted police intervened to prevent it. Within a year, however, hatred of the Central Powers grew to such an extent that when anti-German riots broke out in Moscow, the police did nothing to stop them and German nationals began to be rounded up and expelled from the city.

For as long as he had lived in Moscow, Frederick had numerous and close family connections to Germans and Germany. His ties were hardly an exception, however. Baltic Germans were numerous in European Russia and played a major role in all aspects of the empire’s life, especially the civil service and the military. Economic, cultural, and political ties among Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary had also been long-lived and extensive. In 1913, almost half of all foreign goods imported into Russia were German and 30 percent of Russian exports went to Germany. Perhaps the most visible embodiment of Russian ties to Germany was Alexandra—the tsaritsa, or empress—who, like a number of her predecessors, was born a German princess. All such associations became poisonous after August 1, as did the tsaritsa herself: her loyalty to Russia would become deeply suspect during the war. Frederick’s decision to take Russian citizenship would thus go a long way toward defusing possible accusations of Germanophilia (and he would start claiming Elvira was Swedish).

Simultaneously with filing his petition for citizenship, Frederick began to take part in extravagant public expressions of Russian patriotism. At the end of August 1914 (N.S.), news reached Moscow of a major battle taking shape in East Prussia between massed Russian and German forces. Named “Tannenberg” by the Germans, it ended several days later with the utter destruction of two Russian armies and the suicide of one of the disgraced commanders. Frederick and Tsarev responded to the unfolding events by organizing a benefit evening at Aquarium on August 16/29, with all the proceeds from the garden’s entry fees and sales of theater tickets going to the wounded, thousands of whom were starting to pour into Moscow and other cities in the Russian heartland. Publicity from evenings like this earned Frederick a lot of goodwill.

Nightlife in Moscow went on, although nothing about it could remain quite the same against the background of the Great War, which kept unfolding with grim relentlessness. On the Russian front, the fighting took on a character very different from how it was being conducted in the West. After an initial, rapid, wheeling advance through Belgium into France in August and early September of 1914, the Germans were stopped just thirty-five miles outside Paris. It was the fatal Russian incursion into East Prussia, ending in the Battle of Tannenberg, that had helped save the French capital. Thereafter, for much of the rest of the war, the western front congealed into brutal trench warfare with relatively little movement but hecatombs of deaths along a curved line that ran from the English Channel to Switzerland. In the east, the war was more wide-ranging and mobile, and even more bloody. After Tannenberg, in early September 1914, Russian armies four hundred miles to the south attacked the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, seized an important fortress, laid siege to another, and captured over a hundred thousand prisoners. For much of the war, this province would be the site of massive retreats and advances by both sides, with horrific losses every time the scythe of war changed the direction of its swing.

However, not all evidence of the war’s carnage came from dispatches about events hundreds of miles away. As the mobilization of Russia’s enormous army grew—it would eventually reach 15 million men—actors and other theater workers in Aquarium, Maxim, and other venues began to be called up. Men in military uniforms appeared everywhere in Moscow—on the streets, in theaters, and on streetcars. Refugees escaping the battles on the empire’s western frontier started to arrive as well; masses of the wounded filled hospitals and clinics; trainloads of Austrian prisoners of war passed through to points farther east.

But the biggest change for those in businesses like Frederick’s was prohibition. Although never announced as the official law of the land, as it was in the United States in 1920, Russia’s “dry law” began as a series of restrictions on sales of alcoholic beverages during mobilization leading up to the war and ended with the tsar’s “wish” that the sale of alcoholic beverages be stopped throughout the empire for the war’s duration. The actual regulation of sales was left to the discretion of local governments, although all of them rapidly signed on. Moscow was the first to restrict sales by restaurants in accordance with their classification; then came Petrograd, and finally the rest of the country.

At first, the effects appeared to be dramatic. Some Russian and foreign observers concluded that the country’s population had genuinely embraced sobriety. The army’s mobilization seemed to take half the expected time because the recruits were not drunk when they showed up, as they had been during the war with Japan. “Drunkenness vanished in Russia,” proclaimed the New York Tribune; “there never has been anything like it in the history of the world,” reported an excited Englishman living in Moscow; “one of the greatest reforms in the history of the world,” exclaimed another. The Russian Duma, or parliament, received an official request from the United States Senate for information about the practice of prohibition, and an American delegation traveled all the way to the provincial city of Samara to investigate matters there.

But—as Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev is reported to have proclaimed as far back as the tenth century—“Russia’s joy is to drink,” and the old habits quickly reasserted themselves. The highly unpopular ban quickly dissolved in an ocean of evasion, corruption, and bootlegging, just as it would in the United States a few years later. With his decade and a half of experience in Moscow’s restaurants, cafés, and bars, Frederick would not have been surprised.

Russians began to take steps to avoid the restrictions even before they were fully in place. In mid-November 1914, for example, an American in Petrograd saw thousands of men, women, and even children lining up outside liquor shops as early as 4 a.m. during a driving snowstorm because that was the last day when they could buy wine and beer before prohibition took effect. In Moscow after prohibition, residents had only one legal method of obtaining any alcoholic beverage, whether it was vodka or wine—with a doctor’s prescription, in a limited amount, and one time only. However, what was supposed to be a controlled trickle soon became a flood as the “medicinal” spigot was wrenched open by bribes; illegal stills and moonshine production began to proliferate as well.

If you had money and knew where to go in Moscow, you could buy anything. Frederick’s well-heeled clients expected nothing but the best, and it was his ability to satisfy them during prohibition that made him a millionaire several times over in the short span of three years. In upscale places like Aquarium and Maxim, the owner’s normal practice was to pay off the police officials in charge of enforcing the ban on liquor sales. Such bribes could be substantial. For example, a certain Richard Fomich Zhichkovsky, the police superintendent in the district where Aquarium was located, and whose palm Frederick doubtless greased, accumulated enough money to be able to buy an automobile for the two mistresses he had, as well as a pair of horses and a two-seater motorcycle.

Some eating and drinking establishments in Moscow took the trouble to maintain outward appearances by serving alcoholic beverages in pitchers or in bottles that had originally held fruit drinks and mineral water. Waiters also brought vodka to the table in teapots, and clients drank it out of porcelain cups. But other restaurants flouted the law and sold everything openly. Because of shortages, prices skyrocketed and bootlegging became highly profitable. In 1915, a bottle of French champagne in a fancy café chantant could cost as much as $1,000 in today’s money. The sale of vodka had been a Russian government monopoly prior to prohibition, earning the imperial treasury enormous sums. Part of these huge profits also started to pour into private hands as distillers now sold their bootleg vodka at several thousand percent over the cost of the raw ingredients, and with no government middleman. Even Nicholas II was reputed to have ignored the prohibition he initiated and continued to enjoy his cognac with lemon, although, in a concession to the times, when he and members of his retinue visited the front, they eschewed crystal glasses for silver cups.

The result of this freewheeling atmosphere was that a year after the war began, word spread in Moscow that Frederick was enjoying an “unheard of success” in Aquarium and “harvesting laurels and silver rubles” in “colossal” amounts. What made this possible, in spite of the soaring prices of drink, was the new money that appeared in Russia because of the war and the new, frenzied atmosphere of Moscow’s nightlife. As soon as mobilization began, well-soaked send-offs for officers became obligatory in the better restaurants. Such occasions, with bravura regimental marches booming from the orchestras, were clearly not the time to skimp on toasts to the victory of Russian arms over the “hordes of Teutonic barbarians.” Later, as reports of appalling losses began to accumulate, a nervous and febrile note crept into such celebrations, but they also became more urgent.

As the war ground on, new sorts of moneyed clients started to appear in the fashionable and expensive establishments as well. Some were in the military, although they were “heroes” of the home front rather than of the front lines—quartermasters who had successfully skimmed tidy sums from the torrents of supplies that passed through their hands; military doctors who sold exemptions from the draft to the sons of rich families. And then, as in all wars, there were swarms of businessmen making money hand over fist from contracts to supply the army with everything from boots and canned meat to high explosives. Maxim especially reconfirmed its status during these years as “The Favorite Place of Muscovites,” a slogan that Frederick adopted in his numerous advertisements.

In January 1915, in the dead of a bitterly cold winter, Muscovites’ attention became riveted on another massive swing of the scythe of war in Galicia. The Austro-Hungarian armies launched a counteroffensive in the Carpathian Mountains against Russian forces. However, the attack failed miserably and by March the advancing Russians had captured the enormous fortress Przemyśl, thus potentially aligning their armies for a march through the mountain passes toward Budapest and Vienna, the twin capitals of the Hapsburg Empire.

There were also dramatic events to the south that Muscovites followed with a mix of anxiety and excitement. A second front had opened for Russia at this time, in the Caucasus Mountains and on the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire was an old enemy that had recently allied itself with the Central Powers. Two months after the war began, Turkish warships shelled cities on the south coast of Russia, including Odessa. The great prize that beckoned in this part of the world was Constantinople. If Russia could take this ancient city, to whose Byzantine Christian past the Russians felt a visceral tie, it would have free passage from the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean, and from there to all the oceans of the world. (In fact, in a secret treaty planning the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the war, France and Great Britain formally promised Constantinople and the Straits to Russia.)

Muscovites responded to the news from both fronts with an outpouring of patriotic generosity. In early February, leaders of the city’s theaters organized a campaign they called “For the Russian Army, from the Artists of Moscow.” Frederick played a visible role in the weeklong series of benefit concerts and performances to collect gifts for the troops, and Maxim was mentioned prominently in the press. The campaign began with a solemn prayer service in the enormous, white marble Christ the Savior Cathedral south of the Kremlin. (Stalin dynamited it in 1931, using much of its decorative stone to line the walls of Moscow’s new subway stations; it was not rebuilt until 2000.) The week ended with a gala show in the Great Hall of Moscow’s Nobility Club, located on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street near the Bolshoy Theater, during which performers from all of Moscow’s theaters and circuses appeared onstage. The campaign was a resounding success and won the actors and the theaters that sponsored them a great deal of public appreciation.

Frederick would need this and any other goodwill he accumulated when two months later he got into trouble with the city authorities. In April 1915 Maxim was shut down, ostensibly for letting in Moscow high school students and law students from Petrograd. As in the case of selling alcoholic beverages despite prohibition, there was too much profit to be made to take age and other legal restrictions overly seriously: fines and closures were often just the cost of doing business. Frederick certainly did not break stride because of the temporary problems with Maxim, whose winter season was coming to an end anyway. Rather, as a journalist reported, he continued to “prepare energetically” for Aquarium’s summer season, which was only a few weeks away. The coming spring was also heralded by a joyous event in his personal life—the birth on April 25 of his and Elvira’s second son, whom they gave his father’s middle name, Bruce.

However, other threats loomed. Frederick’s prominence and success attracted not only greedy officials looking to wet their beaks but also envious competitors who wanted to humble and hurt him. That same April Frederick came under attack from Andrey Z. Serpoletti (whose real surname was Fronshteyn). He was the pugnacious editor of a Moscow theatrical journal, also a variety stage satirist, and was always looking out for the interests of his fellow performers—as well as for opportunities to settle scores with old enemies. He complained that directors of variety theaters were adding to their soaring profits from illegal liquor sales by cutting the salaries of the actors they hired and targeted Frederick specifically, making fun of his broken Russian.

If this initial attack of Serpoletti’s was relatively mild, the one he initiated a year later was dangerous, especially in the intensely xenophobic atmosphere that had developed in Moscow by that time. What Serpoletti wrote in the guise of a malevolent short story is also the only unequivocal attack that Frederick was subjected to as a black man in Russia. However, it is noteworthy that even in this case he was not attacked primarily for being black.

Trying to be witty, Serpoletti first throws some silly camouflage over Frederick’s name and business, and then provides an encoded summary of Frederick’s biography, which he obviously knows well. This “citizen,” as Serpoletti pointedly calls him, who was “despised” in his native “Egyptian Colonies” (these are allusions to Frederick’s application, his African blood, the status of blacks in the United States, and the nation’s origin as English colonies), came to Russia from Paris as a lackey; “got fat” on Russian bread; benefited from Russians’ good nature; made a lot of money; and became a captain in a restaurant, a maître d’hôtel, and finally the owner of an entertainment garden. Serpoletti’s main point is that despite such humble origins and “undeserved” success—which Serpoletti bitterly envied—Frederick “puts on airs because of his position” and assumes a “negro-dully-arrogant” (“negrityanski-tuponadmenno”) attitude toward Russian artists, whom, moreover, he calls “pigs.” Then comes Serpoletti’s final, vicious thrust—an accusation that was as dangerous to make in Russia during World War I as was calling someone a “communist” in the United States in the 1950s: Frederick is “great pals with foreigners in general and with Germans in particular.” Despite all this scaffolding, the reason for Serpoletti’s animus is clear: Frederick supposedly preferred to hire foreign performers for Aquarium and Maxim rather than native Russians (including Serpoletti and his protégés).

Frederick successfully countered this accusation by continuing to demonstrate his Russianness at every opportunity, to the extent of assuming a leading role in a grand patriotic demonstration that began in Moscow on May 19, 1915, just a few days after his application for citizenship had been approved. This was a momentous time in the Russian conduct of the war. A German advance in Galicia inflicted huge Russian casualties, and a retreat that had been orderly at first degenerated into a “mad bacchanalia” all along the front, with troops fleeing their positions and hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees also streaming east. The combined German and Austro-Hungarian advance lasted five months. By October 1915, the Russian armies not only had lost everything they had won but had been pushed back one hundred miles and forced out of what had been Russian Poland since the end of the eighteenth century.

In Moscow toward the end of May, however, the full extent of the developing catastrophe was still not clear and, in an atmosphere of buoyant patriotism, the Moscow Red Cross planned a three-day event that was named “Tobacco for the Soldier.” May 19 began with several thousand actors and other performers from variety theaters across the city gathering in Aquarium’s garden, which Frederick and Tsarev had made available as a staging area. Participants formed into a long parade and left the grounds at 4 p.m., heading down Tverskaya Street toward the Kremlin. Leading the procession were actors from Aquarium riding in decorated wagons and dressed in the national costumes of the countries of the Entente. Then came numerous other groups, vehicles, and floats. Participants numbered in the thousands and attracted huge crowds.

As the lead elements of the parade began to enter Red Square, an outdoor prayer service led by a bishop assisted by a multitude of priests began at Lobnoye Mesto—a raised, circular stone platform traditionally used for imperial proclamations. The icon of the Iberian Mother of God—long venerated by Muscovites as “wonder-working”—was brought from its nearby chapel to the platform, as were other icons and religious banners from St. Basil’s Cathedral a few dozen yards away. Wounded soldiers from Moscow’s hospitals gathered around, accompanied by their nurses. The remainder of the vast square between the soaring redbrick walls of the Kremlin and the ornate facade of the Upper Trading Arcades filled with tens of thousands of people—the men’s heads bared; women on tiptoes straining to see, some holding their children up—while the bishop, priests, and deacons intoned prayers for the army’s valiant warriors, for the emperor and his “august family,” for all faithful Russian Orthodox Christians during this time of dreadful travail. A reverent hush spread over the crowd. The gold brocade raiments of the churchmen gleamed in the afternoon sun as wisps of sweet incense wafted from their swinging censers and the hymns of the deep-voiced male choir rose, fell, and rose again. At the end of the service, the enormous crowd broke into singing “God Save the Tsar” and repeated it over and over again. The actors from Aquarium who had led the parade stayed together as a group by the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, two seventeenth-century Russian national heroes in the war to liberate Moscow from the Poles.

After the service, the parade returned to the Aquarium garden, with the troupe of its actors again leading the way. That evening and during the next two days, special performances to benefit the soldiers took place in theaters all over the city; hundreds of volunteers also took up collections on the streets, in stores, and in restaurants. Frederick and Tsarev themselves worked the crowds in Aquarium with collection cups in hand and were singled out for special praise several times in newspaper and magazine reports.

A native son of Russia could not have done more to demonstrate his loyalty. Frederick’s actions were seen by hundreds if not thousands of Muscovites and were known to many more, including the city’s leading citizens. He had also inscribed himself convincingly in the tradition of philanthropy for which Moscow merchants and businessmen were famous throughout Russia. Whatever vengeful designs Serpoletti might have had against the black former American could not pierce the armor of goodwill that Frederick created around himself.

Frederick demonstrated his Russianness with uncannily accurate timing; a week later Muscovites revealed the inevitable other face of patriotic fervor—hatred of the enemy and paranoia regarding outsiders. For many, the calamitous retreat of Russian forces in Galicia seemed inexplicable without sabotage or treason on the home front. Anti-German and then broadly antiforeign riots erupted in the city in late May. Hundreds of stores were sacked and entire streets were set ablaze. One horrified Englishman recalled seeing grand pianos being pushed out of the fourth-floor windows of Zimmermann’s famous music store on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow’s toniest shopping street, and crashing to the sidewalk with a doleful ringing sound as pages of sheet music swirled in the air like flocks of white birds. Some of the mobs swarmed partway up Tverskaya Street, which led to Aquarium. The financial and social costs of the riots were huge: damage was estimated at what would be about $1 billion today. There was also a heavy political cost: the mostly lower-class rioters had gotten a taste of taking the law into their own hands and using street violence to show their frustration with the government’s conduct of the war. Few observers realized it at the time, but Moscow’s “anti-German” pogrom was a harbinger of far worse things to come.

By the first anniversary of the war, Frederick and his adopted homeland were starting to move in different directions. Russia had lost a million men killed or wounded and another million captured; all evidence showed that the country had been woefully unprepared for a war of this length and magnitude. Blundering through historical events that he could not understand, much less control, Nicholas II in September 1915 dismissed the army’s commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, who was not only a professional soldier but his uncle. The tsar assumed command of all the Russian forces himself, even though he had no military experience. Elsewhere, the British attempt to support and resupply Russia by forcing the Turkish Straits and opening a passage to the Black Sea ended in disaster. In one of the many ironies of the time, a hero of the Turkish defense at Gallipoli was Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later to become the savior of his country and arbiter of Frederick’s fate.

But Frederick remained unaffected by these problems and was making so much money that he began to search for new ways to invest it. His vehicle of choice was real estate. During the summer of 1915, news had begun to spread that the Ciniselli Circus in Petrograd was going to be put up for auction. This was an exciting possibility, because for all of Moscow’s economic and cultural importance, it was still the country’s second city. Ciniselli Circus was a prestigious and potentially very lucrative venue. It was the oldest permanent building of its kind in Russia as well as one of the most famous in all of Europe. It was also very popular with the cream of Petrograd society, from the imperial family on down.

The auction was scheduled for December 7 and Frederick traveled to Petrograd to take part in it. A motley array of other major players also participated, including Fyodor Chaliapin, the famous operatic bass whom Frederick had met at Yar several years before, and who was represented by an agent. The stakes were for the highest of rollers: bidding would start at an annual rent of 60,000 rubles (approximately $2 million today) and all participants had to provide a deposit of 30,000 rubles to show they were serious.

The minimum was quickly left behind. An entrepreneur from Petrograd bid 73,000 rubles; another one from Moscow offered 76,000; then Frederick topped him with 78,000. But someone quickly offered 80,000 and Frederick decided that he was out. It is possible that he had gotten wind of something underhanded in the entire affair. Several months later, when the old leaseholder unexpectedly emerged as the winner, rumors began to circulate that the auction had been rigged from the start.

But Frederick still had money to invest and turned his attention to the south and to Odessa. He went there initially to search for new acts to put on Aquarium’s and Maxim’s stages. Because the war had made it difficult to travel to and from Western Europe, the only ready source of new talent was what could be found in other Russian cities. Odessa was polyglot and cosmopolitan and had a very lively theatrical life. On the eve of the war, its population was 630,000, a third of them Jewish and thirty thousand of them foreigners, including Greeks, Armenians, Germans, Romanians, Italians, and many others. During two trips in February and July 1916 Frederick booked a variety of catchy acts—a singing duet, a female impersonator, an actress who was a local star, a ten-year-old moppet who belted out Gypsy romances—and also negotiated with entrepreneurs who wanted to lease his Aquarium theater for the following season. Frederick must have liked the city itself very much, because during his second trip he also bought a fancy villa there for 100,000 rubles, around $3 million in today’s money.

The climate was a bit milder in Odessa than in Moscow, but the city’s chief appeal was its location on the shore of the Black Sea. With its wide, straight, tree-shaded streets and elegant stone buildings, it would not have looked out of place on the Mediterranean. In Frederick’s time Odessa was an important commercial center and despite its distance from the two capitals was neither quiet nor provincial. Fashionable hotels and restaurants, elegant shops, popular cafés, and several theaters attracted an urbane and moneyed crowd to its famous thoroughfares. Sailors from exotic ports mixed with the city’s criminals in the raucous, beer-smelling dives near the commercial harbor. On the city’s outskirts, the banks of the lagoons were dotted with villas facing the shimmering expanse of the sea. In 1916, Frederick could not have anticipated the role that Odessa would play in his life in just two years.

During the war’s second year, its effects were becoming harder to ignore in Moscow. The city started to be overwhelmed by trainloads of wounded soldiers being evacuated from the European and southern fronts. As with most other Russian military preparations, the number of hospitals proved to be inadequate, and the authorities were forced to look for private property that could be requisitioned until dedicated new facilities could be arranged. Yar was closed to the public for nearly a year and its restaurant transformed into a hospital, with the tables replaced by neat rows of cots occupied by meek and stoically suffering, mostly peasant soldiers. Military commissions also examined Aquarium and Maxim with a view toward using the spacious theaters as clinics or storage depots for medical supplies. But Frederick was characteristically deft in the deals he made, and only part of each of his large properties was taken over for military needs in 1915 and again in 1916.

Other wartime impositions on entrepreneurs began to accumulate as well. Starting in late 1915, fuel and electricity shortages forced the commander of the Moscow military district to announce that all theaters would have to observe shorter hours, starting at 8 p.m. and ending at midnight. New taxes to support the war effort, and coercive “donations” to the official imperial charities, known collectively as “Empress Maria’s Department of Institutions,” were also imposed on theatrical entertainments. In some cases, taxes were estimated to be as high as 30 percent of an establishment’s gross income.

The news from Petrograd was also becoming progressively more unnerving and there was a growing sense that the empire’s center was not holding. Nicholas II was at the army’s headquarters in Mogilyov, four hundred miles south of Petrograd, and effectively removed from direct control of his government. Russia’s nascent parliament had tried to build on the genuine surge in patriotism accompanying the outbreak of the war and could have mediated between the government and an increasingly anxious public. But because Nicholas was unwilling to consider any form of cooperation with it, he left a dangerous power vacuum in the capital. It was partially filled by his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, a narrow-minded and credulous woman, who intervened in government affairs while being herself under the influence of Grigory Rasputin, imperial Russia’s extraordinary evil genius. As a result, during the year and a half following Nicholas’s departure from the capital a process that came to be labeled “ministerial leapfrog” took place: in quick succession, it gave Russia four different prime ministers, five ministers of internal affairs, three ministers of foreign affairs, three ministers of war, three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture. A few were competent; most were craven and inept.

As the country’s mood darkened, a febrile atmosphere began to creep into the entertainments and distractions that were sought by civilians and military men. On the eve of the war, a new dance craze had emerged from Argentina, leaped to Paris, and swept around the world—the tango. Its popularity in Russia was so immediate and so great that Frederick, who was always alert to novelty, decided to capitalize on it by refurbishing large spaces in his theaters and naming them after the dance, leading a journalist to proclaim that Maxim had become Moscow’s “kingdom of the tango.” During the war, the tango’s popularity increased, with some professional dancers and singers adding macabre overtones to its elegant, stylized eroticism. One couple became famous for their “Tango of Death,” in which the man, who was otherwise impeccably dressed in evening clothes, had his face made up to look like a skull. It was a melodramatic echo of the lurid news arriving from the fronts, as were such other popular tunes as “Wilhelm’s Bloody Tango” (named after the German kaiser) and “The Last Tango,” in which a jilted lover stabs the woman to death.

The emotional abandon that Russians sought from the tango during the war, and the elation that they got from vodka and wine, found a new blood relative in drugs, especially cocaine. In certain urban circles cocaine became the path of choice to euphoric oblivion in the face of the hopeless problems swirling all around. And it quickly emerged as an emblem of decadence, of failing national spiritual health: the tides of battle on the fronts ebbed and flowed; ministers and courtiers intrigued; profiteers schemed. For many, daily life was becoming more difficult, and for others it seemed pointless.

“Cocainomaniacs,” as the addicts came to be called, were a common sight in Moscow’s theatrical world, and Frederick grew to know one of the most famous very well. Aleksandr Vertinsky, who performed in Maxim and would work for Frederick in Constantinople as well, became wildly popular at the end of 1915 for his songs of resignation in the face of life’s sadness and pain, as well as for their complement—escapist longing for exotic locales. A well-known example of his repertoire is “Kokainetka,” or “Little Cocaine Girl,” which dates from 1916 and laments “a lonely and poor young woman/Crucified on Moscow’s wet boulevards by cocaine.” (Later he would stage a dance on a related theme—the “Hashish Tango.”) On stage Vertinsky dressed as Pierrot, the sad, naive clown of the Italian commedia dell’arte, whose heart is always broken by Columbine. His face powdered a deathly white, his eyes and eyebrows exaggeratedly made up with tragic black, and wearing crimson lipstick, he looked like a haunted character from another world.

By 1916, Frederick’s and Russia’s fates had diverged dramatically. Aquarium and Maxim were still thriving and money was pouring in. But his new homeland was succumbing to myriad diseases that were eating away its insides and that no one knew how to slow, much less cure. The country was bleeding men. Popular support for the disastrous war had plummeted and revolutionary agitation against the imperial regime was growing. Shortages of fuel and foodstuffs worsened. Workers struck against the high cost of living; strikes included those in such critical industries as the giant Putilov munitions factory in Petrograd, which was the largest in Europe and employed 30,000 men, the Nikolaev naval shipyards on the Black Sea, and the Donbas region in the Ukraine, with 50,000 coal miners. The authorities responded brutally by drafting the physically able and arresting and prosecuting the rest. When labor shortages led the government to conscript several hundred thousand Muslims in Turkestan and Central Asia to work in military factories near the front, a rebellion broke out and troops had to be dispatched to put it down by force, resulting in thousands of deaths.

But the most grotesque sign of the empire’s sickness was Rasputin, the self-styled “holy man” who, for nearly a decade, had had a cancerous grip on Tsaritsa Alexandra and, through her, on Nicholas II and the rest of the government. A semiliterate, cunning, and libidinous peasant, he combined greed with primitive mysticism and a beguiling manner that attracted sycophants and hypnotized the gullible. The empress was a painfully shy and haughty woman whose life was dominated by piety, spite, and frantic worry about the health of her only son, Tsarevich Alexis, the heir to the throne and the most famous hemophiliac in history. As witnesses attest, it was Rasputin’s uncanny ability to calm the boy during episodes of life-threatening bleeding that made his mother believe in the “holy man’s” healing powers, and to follow his advice on everything else as well.

Rasputin’s notoriety in Russia and around the world inspired some contemporaries to invent meetings with him in order to spice up their own life stories. Jack Johnson succumbed to this temptation, according to a memoirist who also went on to claim that Frederick introduced Johnson to Rasputin—and at a court ball in Petrograd, no less. This could never have happened, as documentary evidence proves. But Frederick did know well several people who had to deal with Rasputin’s scandalous behavior in Moscow, when he came from Petrograd to close a tawdry business deal. On the night of March 26, 1915, Rasputin and his entourage went to Yar, which was still owned by Frederick’s old boss and mentor Aleksey Sudakov. The “holy man’s” escapades were legion, but on this occasion he managed to outdo himself. He was already drunk when his group occupied a private room. They ordered dinner, more drink, summoned a choir, and launched into a noisy revel. As always, Rasputin was the center of attention: he ordered the choir to sing his favorite songs; made the chorus girls do “cynical dances,” as the police report subsequently put it; performed Russian folk dances himself; and dragged some of the women onto his lap. Not forgetting his role as a “holy man,” he also scribbled notes urging them to “love disinterestedly” (meaning that they should yield to him because their love would be sanctified). When Sudakov heard what was going on he fell into a panic and tried to persuade other patrons that it was not actually Rasputin carousing upstairs but an imposter passing himself off as the notorious “friend” of the imperial family. Rasputin got wind of this and was so incensed that he started to prove his identity in the most unbridled ways possible—hinting obscenely about his relations with the empress, bragging that she had personally sewn the caftan he was wearing, and, finally, dropping his trousers and exposing himself to the young women.

Outrage at Rasputin’s behavior and supposed influence played into the hands of his many enemies, and early in 1916 three prominent men, including the tsar’s first cousin, murdered him in Petrograd. In their own blundering and bloody way, the three had tried to save their country from one of the malignancies at its heart, although they had misconceived the scope and nature of the task. Corruption had already spread too deeply to be excised by the killing of any single man. But in contrast to the country’s ruling circles, the three had at least looked inward, which was the right direction.

During the last months of its life, the Russian Empire was being threatened from two directions simultaneously. The tsar, his ministers, and his top military commanders focused almost entirely on the external danger posed by the Central Powers and were committed above all else to a “victorious conclusion” of the war. As a result, they largely neglected the grave internal threat to the empire’s entire social and political order—the disaffection of large swaths of the population, including many troops at the front, the workers, and the peasants. The conditions were ripe for revolutionary groups to exploit the situation and to foment open rebellion.

In the end, the imperial regime’s blind pursuit of victory proved suicidal. Six months before the empire collapsed, the Russian army managed to gather itself up for an immense new effort and won its greatest victory of the war against Austria-Hungary, known as the “Brusilov Offensive.” In fact, some historians have characterized this as the single greatest military triumph of the Entente against the Central Powers and one of the deadliest battles in world history. But it was a classic Pyrrhic victory. The Russian army suffered such staggering casualties and desertions that it began to disintegrate. More than anything else, General Brusilov’s great success underscored the waste of men, wealth, and vast national potential that was Russia’s tragic fate during the Great War.

Back in Moscow, Frederick did not see the coming cataclysm. Even though every month it became more difficult to carry on as before because of shortages of food items, alcohol, electricity, fuel, and people, the variety theaters and restaurants were packed and profits kept pouring in. The only adjustments that Frederick made during these troubled times were driven, ironically, by his personal success. To free himself from the daily chore of attending to his properties, he transformed most of his active business interests into passive investments by leasing his theaters to other entrepreneurs. Concurrently, in a move without precedent in Moscow’s theater world, he generously rewarded some of his senior employees—the stage manager, the accountant, the head chef, and several maîtres d’hôtel—by transferring day-to-day control of the Aquarium garden’s multifaceted operation to them. However, he remained so optimistic about the future that all the leases he signed were for several years and the rents he demanded and received were high.

In fact, Frederick made his biggest investment in Moscow—and thus tied his fate to Russia’s more strongly than ever—in the last days of the Russian Empire. He had been scouting properties in Moscow for some time before he finally found one that suited him in terms of location, quality, size, and income. On February 16, 1917, he signed documents that made him the owner of a block of six adjoining buildings, with thirty-eight rental units of varying sizes, on one of the main spokes of the Moscow street wheel, at 2 Karetny Ryad Street. This location is less than a mile from the Kremlin, and, in an ironic twist, was (and still is) across the street from the Hermitage Garden, Aquarium’s only rival. He had paid 425,000 rubles, which would be about $7 million today.

In making the purchase, Frederick must have been amused by the unlikely coincidence that one of the former owners—a man with two resonant titles: Prince Mikhail Mikhaylovich Cantacuzene, Count Speransky—had a prominent American connection. In 1899, he had married Julia Dent Grant, the granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union armies during the Civil War and eighteenth president of the United States. Julia had in fact been born in the White House during her grandfather’s presidency, and after her marriage she lived in Russia with her husband, who was a close aide to the tsar and eventually rose to the rank of general during the war. Who in Hopson Bayou could ever have imagined that a black native son would be involved in a property transaction in Moscow with a family like this?

With this purchase, Frederick completed the process of investing the money that he had made during the war. His focus on real estate reflected not only his desire to put roots even more deeply into his adopted country. His purchase at this moment in Russian history also shows a character trait that he shared with his parents: a conviction that he could prevail.