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.”
A maître d’hôtel’s skills would be exercised routinely in any good restaurant that attracted a well-heeled clientele, but at Yar there were times when such skills were challenged and pushed to the limit. One reason was Moscow’s cultural norms, especially among some of the rich and successful members of its merchant class, who valued the ability to demonstrate bravado or unbridled passion in a way that would make people notice and remember their Russian “broad nature.” The other was the reputation Yar acquired as a favorite destination for especially extravagant sprees. The result was some truly memorable escapades. An American writer, Roy Norton, visited Yar around 1911, when Frederick was still working there. Although Norton had already spent some time in Europe studying the behavior of “spendthrifts” in various countries, he quickly concluded that Russians were by far the most extravagant, and that Yar was the place in Moscow where one could see them at their best. Norton was especially impressed by one such reveler who decided that it would be fun to play football in the dining room with hothouse pineapples, which were selling in Moscow that winter for around 44 rubles, or $22, each: around $1,000 in today’s money. He ordered a whole cartload and proceeded to kick them all around, smashing china, overturning tables, and spilling imported champagne. His bill from the proprietor, who approached him with a smile, was supposedly 30,000 rubles, or around $750,000 in today’s money. Frederick told Norton that there are “probably an average of fifty bills a month, paid for one evening’s entertainment, that will average seven thousand five hundred rubles each.”
Within a decade of Frederick’s arrival in Russia, his life was looking very bright. He had a lucrative position at a famous restaurant and his family was about to grow once again: Hedwig was expecting their third child. Irma was born on February 24, 1909, and baptized at home on March 31 by a pastor from the Saints Peter and Paul Church. Frederick’s happiness over Irma’s arrival was poisoned, however, by the debilitating effect that her birth apparently had on Hedwig’s health. As the Thomas family’s oral history suggests, Frederick’s subsequent distance from Irma was due to his seeing her as somehow responsible for the loss of his wife, whom he cherished deeply. Irma’s tragic fate and the way she suppressed any recollections of her family past when she grew up also imply that a chasm had developed between her and her father—a situation that darkened her entire childhood and that she was never able to overcome.
There is no direct evidence regarding the nature of Hedwig’s illness after Irma’s birth, although there was much that could have happened to her. Despite improvements in hygiene and the growing use of birthing hospitals in early-twentieth-century Moscow, childbirth was still beset with potential dangers for both the baby and the mother, with puerperal fever leading the way and a troop of other ghastly complications following. Hedwig died of pneumonia, with the additional complication of blood poisoning, on January 17, 1910, at the age of thirty-four, and was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery of Foreign Confessions in Moscow, also known as the “German Cemetery.”
Olga was almost eight when her mother died and thus just old enough to understand some of what this meant. But Mikhail was only three and Irma not yet one, so for them their mother’s death was a confusing and distressing event that they could not fathom; also, they would not remember her. Hedwig’s death was Frederick’s first close personal loss since his father’s murder in Memphis. He would continue without Hedwig, of course, but the uncomplicated harmony of the family life he had built with her is something he would never know in quite the same way again.
Frederick’s most urgent task after Hedwig’s death was to find a way to care for his children. His income at Yar was more than sufficient for him to hire the domestic help he needed, and the obvious solution was to find an experienced nanny. His choice fell on Valentina Leontina Anna Hoffman, and it would prove to be a fateful one. “Valli,” as she was often called, was twenty-eight years old and came from Riga, the capital of Latvia, a small province on the Baltic Sea that had been part of the Russian Empire since the eighteenth century. Her surname and the fact that she knew German as well as English—in addition to Russian, of course—suggest that she belonged to the Baltic region’s dominant German population and was educated. Judging by surviving photographs, she was a plain and rather large woman; and given subsequent developments, her appearance played a role in how Frederick treated her.
While working at Yar, Frederick had also begun to prepare for the next major step in his life, one that must have been in the back of his mind for years. The tips he received at work continued to be generous and he was accumulating a sizable sum in savings; in fact, he now had more money than ever before in his life. The time was right to decide what to do next—continue like Natruskin until retirement, which was the safe route, or take a calculated risk like Sudakov and invest in a business of his own. Frederick decided to follow Sudakov’s—and his father’s—example and to bet on his own skills and energy.
The business risks that Frederick faced could not be separated from the bigger ones threatening the entire country, although the energy with which he pursued his personal ambitions suggests that he thought Russia would somehow get through it all. The Revolution of 1905 showed the fragility of the Russian Empire’s social and political system, and what happened then could happen again. Although terrorism had declined from 1908 to 1910 in comparison with previous years, over 700 government bureaucrats and 3,000 civilians were murdered during this period (these deaths included the shocking assassination of the powerful prime minister Peter Stolypin in 1911). Strikes by workers demanding political and economic reforms dropped in 1910 to their lowest level in several years, with only some 50,000 workers participating in 2,000 mostly small job actions. But this relative lull was hardly a sign that the country’s underlying problems had been fixed, despite an economic boom that began around 1910. Strikes increased the following year and would grow to crisis proportions by 1914 as the government continued to suppress workers with blind, stupid brutality. An especially notorious incident occurred in 1912, when troops fired on thousands of peacefully demonstrating gold miners in Siberia, killing 147. The Duma demanded a full investigation, but little came of it. By this point in the country’s history, nothing could dispel the impression that the imperial government was dangerously, even catastrophically, adrift.