The Black Russian Page 9
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 s
ubterranean 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 a
ttached 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.