The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  In his passport application, Frederick listed his occupation as “waiter” and indicated that he was planning to return to the United States within one year. For this passport—in contrast to his Paris application—he gave his home address as Chicago. His disregard for accuracy suggests that whatever he said was simply a way to forestall suspicions that he might have expatriated himself. The only difference in Frederick’s physical description is that he now had a “black moustache” instead of being clean-shaven; he would eventually let it grow to an impressive width. Nothing in the application suggested that Frederick was going to Russia with intentions different from those that had led him to crisscross Europe; in fact, he noted that after visiting Russia he planned to return to France.

  Armed with his new passport, Frederick was able to get his required second visa from the Russian consulate in Budapest. However, a visit like this required a brief interview that would have made any black American’s head spin. Unlike most of their counterparts in the United States diplomatic service, the Russian staff would not have cared that Frederick had black skin. If anything, his appearance might have awakened their curiosity because people of African descent were rare in Russia. But their lack of concern over race would have been replaced by a different bias that Frederick had not seen manifested elsewhere in Europe in quite as virulent a form—anti-Semitism. Official Russian government regulations required a consular officer to ascertain if an applicant for a visa was Jewish or not. The purpose of this regulation was to restrict the entry of Jews into Russia and to limit their freedom of movement if they were admitted.

  In Frederick’s case, the matter would have been settled easily. But it is hard to believe that he would not have been struck by the question implying that Jews were, in a sense, the “Negroes” of Russia. He could not have been ignorant of anti-Semitism in Europe during the years he had been there, especially in France, where the notorious “Dreyfus affair”—the prosecution of a Jewish officer in the French army on trumped-up charges—raged from 1894 to 1899. But there is a difference between an outburst of hatred that received some popular support and contravened the laws of the land—as was the situation in France—and a system of official Russian laws and widespread public sentiment that recalled the Jim Crow South.

  The comparison can be taken only so far. The Jewish population of Russia had never been enslaved. This is something that Russians had reserved for their own Christian peasants, who were liberated only in 1861, just two years before American blacks were emancipated. Also, the Russians liberated their serfs peacefully, by government decree, and without the horrific bloodshed of the American Civil War. Nevertheless, by applying for a Russian visa, Frederick was for the first time seeking to enter a country where his sense of belonging would be very different from what he had experienced in Europe thus far. In contrast to the other countries where he had been accepted more or less like anyone else, in Russia he would explicitly not be a member of a despised and oppressed minority. A black American would have felt this distinction with greater poignancy than most whites of any nationality.

  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 obscu
rantist 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.