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.
Your Excellency, I have the honor to humbly address a request to You:
To most loyally petition His Imperial Majesty the All-Russian Sovereign Emperor about accepting me and my family into Russian citizenship. I have been living in Moscow for 17 years and have become so accustomed to everything Russian and grown to love Russia and Her Monarch so much that I would carry with great pride the exalted title of Russian subject.
I am married to a Russian and my children study in Russian schools.
I attach a permit issued by the Office of the Moscow Governor General and my national American passport.
Moscow, 1914, August 2.
Frederik Brus Tomas
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 fr
om 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 ce
ntury—“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.
The Black Russian Page 14
