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.