The Black Russian (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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