However, despite repeated efforts, Johnson was unable to leave the United States until the summer of 1913, so Frederick was forced to postpone all his grand plans. Johnson then toured several other European cities for close to a year before finally arriving in Russia in mid-July 1914. When he did meet Frederick, they hit it off right away: “Thomas and myself became close friends and we made our headquarters in his park,” Johnson recalled. The two black men had similar origins and had triumphed in two very different white worlds. They shared another similarity as well. As Johnson illustrated vividly in his memoirs, both were fond of tall tales that enhanced their present or embroidered their past and that underscored the extent to which both were showmen.
As the war approached, our host [Frederick] became engrossed in Russian war preparations, for he was a factor of some importance in Russian political and commercial circles. He was a confidential agent of Czar Nicholas, and I was greatly surprised to learn that he was taking part in military councils and other phases of the war preparations. High military officers made their headquarters at hotels and restaurants in his park [Aquarium] and it was while I, members of my party, and several army officers were dining together in one of these restaurants that we learned that war had become a reality. As we sat at the table some of my military friends were summoned to the telephone, told that war had been declared, and instructed immediately to join their units for hurried mobilization.
This is mostly fiction with a sprinkling of fact, and it is difficult to disentangle Johnson’s inventions from Frederick’s. There is no doubt that army officers liked spending time in Aquarium, drinking champagne, and ogling the chorus girls, and that some would also have enjoyed meeting and dining with the black American champion. There is also no doubt that Frederick had acquaintances among influential Russian businessmen and, possibly, politicians. But although Frederick may have been known and liked by such men because he was a genial and broad-minded host, he was certainly not a confidential agent of the tsar or a player in the Russian political arena (also, there were no hotels in Aquarium, just living quarters for some of the staff).
Johnson’s career might have developed quite differently if Frederick’s plans for him in Russia had been realized. Johnson had run a successful saloon in Chicago, the Café de Champion, before he was run out of town. Nothing prevented him from doing the same in Moscow, perhaps with Frederick as a partner, and without any of the problems that continued to dog him when he was touring Western Europe, or that resurfaced after he returned to the United States. It is regrettable that he and Frederick were unable to spend more time together, but by the end of July 1914 the world around them was about to go mad.
When war was declared on August 1, 1914, Johnson realized that if he stayed in Moscow, he would be cut off from the rest of Europe by the fighting that was about to break out along Russia’s long border with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Frederick helped him to leave in a hurry, although Johnson had to abandon much of his luggage on the way. But he did not forget Frederick and managed to keep track of his friend from a distance, through the maelstrom of Russia’s collapse in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Frederick’s hairbreadth escape to Constantinople in 1919.
5: Becoming Russian
For fifteen years, Frederick had lived in a kind of charmed circle in Russia that allowed his talents to develop largely unaffected by strikes; assassinations; executions; the revolutionary turmoil that convulsed the country in the aftermath of the war with Japan; or the arrests, pogroms, and repression that followed. Even when the forces of history took on flesh and blood in Moscow’s streets, Frederick could stand on the threshold of his music-and laughter-filled world, his arms open in welcome to the crowds seeking respite inside. Money was all one needed to enter Aquarium and Maxim, and no matter what was going on outside there were always people who had enough. It is a paradox that the politically unstable and depressing period in Russia after the war with Japan was also marked by rapid improvements in industry, agriculture, and the economy in general. More people were making more money than at any other time in Russian history. Before the summer of 1914, there was no reason for Frederick to think that this would ever change.
On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a small Balkan state that was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a teenage Serbian member of the Black Hand terrorist organization assassinated the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, believed that he had struck a blow against Austrian domination of the South Slavic peoples. In fact, his pistol shots set off a new kind of war that would engulf Europe as well as parts of Asia and Africa; draw in the United States; and destroy the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish Ottoman, and Russian empires. Millions of lives would be lost and irrevocably changed in a dozen countries, including Frederick’s in distant Moscow.
In 1914 the major European powers were entangled in two alliances that pitted the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary and Germany—against the Triple Entente: France, Great Britain, and Russia. On July 28, one month after the archduke’s assassination, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia, claiming that the Serbian response to a harsh ultimatum had been unsatisfactory. Russia automatically backed Serbia for a reason that was largely sentimental —a belief that the two countries shared the same “blood and faith.” Germany then declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3. On August 4, after Germany invaded Belgium while attacking France, Britain declared war on Germany. On August 23, Japan entered the war on the side of the Entente, and on October 29, the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia. Italy joined the Entente in 1915, as did the United States in 1917. The world had never before seen a war that was as vast, destructive, and unnecessary.
Within two weeks of the war’s beginning Frederick made the fateful decision to step out of his charmed circle. The way he chose to do this not only was remarkable in itself but may have been unprecedented in the experience of black Americans in Russia: he asked to become a subject of the tsar. Frederick did so in response to several threats that rose around him when the war began and that he could not have avoided by continuing to maintain his purely paper-based American citizenship. In the short term, his dramatic action would succeed and he would prosper for several more years. But he could not have foreseen that his decision would rebound upon him later, when he was most vulnerable and the threats against him were far more serious.