On the night of February 8, 1904 (N.S., that is, by the New Style calendar), the imperial Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific fleet lying at anchor in the outer harbor of Port Arthur in China, “thus accomplishing the original Pearl Harbor,” as an American historian put it. The two countries’ imperialistic ambitions in Manchuria had come into conflict, and the Japanese naval attack that launched the Russo-Japanese War proved to be only the first of the military disasters that the giant Russia would suffer at the hands of little Japan during the next year and a half. The Japanese besieged and eventually captured Port Arthur itself, then defeated the Russian army in Manchuria. Finally, between May 27 and 29, 1905, in the Battle of Tsushima Strait, the Japanese annihilated the antiquated Russian fleet, which had sailed for over half a year and had traveled nearly twenty thousand miles from the Baltic to the coast of Japan. The president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, brokered a peace conference between the belligerents in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905—none too soon for Russia. The country had already been experiencing revolutionary turmoil for months. The war that began six thousand miles to the east of St. Petersburg had initiated upheavals that shook the Russian Empire from top to bottom, leaving cracks that would help to bring it crashing down a dozen years later.
As an erstwhile American citizen, Frederick was in a strange position because of the war and the events that followed. Some decades earlier, during and after the American Civil War, Russian-American relations had been amicable; the United States was grateful for Russia’s support of the Union. There were also mutually profitable political and commercial relations between the two countries, including Russia’s momentous sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. However, as the twentieth century approached, American public opinion began to turn against Russia for two dominant reasons—abhorrence of the tyrannical absolute monarchy and revulsion against Russia’s treatment of Jews. Indeed, during the Russo-Japanese War, the United States sympathized with Japan, and New York bankers made large loans to Japan in the hope that this would help to defeat Russia.
Frederick was thus making a life for himself in a country that was increasingly being vilified in the land of his birth. Another ironic twist was that not only were Jim Crow laws continuing unabated in the United States, but a newer animus had appeared against the Chinese, whose entry into the country and ability to acquire citizenship were blocked by explicitly racist federal laws. The Russians thus considered the Americans hypocritical, and vice versa. When President Roosevelt’s administration transmitted a petition to the Russian government protesting against widespread anti-Jewish pogroms, the Russian ambassador to Washington complained that it was “unbecoming for Americans to criticize” Russia when blacks were being lynched and Chinese beaten up on the streets of the United States.
The disastrous war with Japan could hardly have come at a worse time for the Russian Empire. As the twentieth century opened, waves of turmoil had begun to spread across the country. Workers struck against onerous conditions in factories; students demonstrated for civil rights; peasants in the countryside tried to seize land from the nobles. Committees of citizens sprang up demanding broad-ranging reforms in political life, the economy, and education. The Socialist Revolutionary Party resurrected its “Combat Organization,” which carried out a series of spectacular assassinations—two ministers of the interior in 1902 and 1904, and then, in February 1905, Grand Duke Sergey, former governor-general of Moscow and visitor to Aquarium (where Frederick may well have met him), who was literally blown to bits inside the Kremlin.
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.