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 welclass="underline" 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 obscurantist 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.
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.