On August 2/15, 1914, Frederick composed a petition to the minister of internal affairs in St. Petersburg requesting citizenship for himself and his family. (The imperial capital would soon be renamed Petrograd because the original name, which was actually derived from the Dutch, sounded too “Germanic” to Russian ears newly sensitized by war.) This petition was first vetted by the governor-general of Moscow, Major General Adrianov, and then forwarded by him to the minister on December 19, 1914. Adrianov would certainly have heard of Frederick’s role in Moscow’s nightlife, and probably knew him personally. He sent the petition off with the necessary supporting documents and a cover note in which he referred to the petitioner as “Fridrikh Brus (Fyodor Fyodorovich) Tomas,” a “negro citizen of the North American United States,” and added, “There is no opposition on my part toward the satisfaction of Tomas’ petition.” (Probably for reasons of cultural inertia, Adrianov had automatically converted “Frederick” into its Germanic form, “Friedrich,” which was more familiar to him.)
Frederick’s petition is such an unusual document that it deserves to be quoted in full. In the heading, he refers to himself in a way that underscores his hybrid identity—“Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas (Frederick Bruce Thomas), citizen of the United States of America.” He then signs the document with his American name transliterated into the Russian alphabet. An English translation cannot do full justice to all the bowing and scraping in the original.
Your Excellency, I have the honor to humbly address a request to You:
To most loyally petition His Imperial Majesty the All-Russian Sovereign Emperor about accepting me and my family into Russian citizenship. I have been living in Moscow for 17 years and have become so accustomed to everything Russian and grown to love Russia and Her Monarch so much that I would carry with great pride the exalted title of Russian subject.
I am married to a Russian and my children study in Russian schools.
I attach a permit issued by the Office of the Moscow Governor General and my national American passport.
Moscow, 1914, August 2.
One clear way of measuring how far Frederick had traveled in his life is to juxtapose his avowal of love for Russia and its tsar with his birth on a farm amid the roadless forests, swamps, and cotton fields of Hopson Bayou, Coahoma County, Mississippi.
Frederick’s reference to having lived in Moscow for “17 years” is off by two, and is typical of other inaccuracies and inventions in the documents that accompanied his petition to the minister of the interior. The heart of the petition is a form on which he had to provide answers to a series of questions that were then certified by the superintendent of police in the district where he lived. Here Frederick told the truth when necessary, exaggerated where possible, and burnished his past when he could get away with doing so. An example is his claim that he spoke and read Russian well, which was only a half-truth; although he could communicate readily in Russian, he made many grammatical mistakes. To enhance his education, he replied that he had completed studies at “an agricultural school” in Chicago. Presumably, this sounded better than saying he had worked as an errand boy, a waiter, or a valet.
The notoriously inefficient Russian bureaucracy revolved around the all-powerful tsar and moved sluggishly at the best of times; it slowed even more after the war began and numerous problems accumulated on the front lines and in the rear. It took until May 2, 1915, for the minister of the interior to send all the new petitions for citizenship (there were only 112) to the Imperial Council of Ministers. After the council approved them on May 14, they were presented to the tsar at his summer palace in Tsarskoe Selo outside Petrograd. The following day, Nicholas II wrote on the document—in blue pencil—“Agreed.” Frederick had officially become Russian on May 15/28, 1915. His race had been mentioned several times in the paperwork but it never became an issue.
Despite Frederick’s seeming candor, his application was a calculated and well-timed move with a hidden agenda. On June 24/July 7, 1914, about five weeks before he filed his petition and four days before Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo, Frederick had gone to the American consulate in Moscow to renew passports for himself and his “official” family—Valli and the three children by Hedwig—because the ones he received in 1912 had recently expired. Frederick of course signed the renewal application, as he had always done before, despite its statement that he was only “sojourning” in Moscow “temporarily” and that he intended to return to the United States “in two years.” In other words, when international affairs in Europe seemed relatively normal, Frederick saw no reason to change his nationality. It was not until a month later, after war had been declared and its consequences for him became apparent, that he suddenly discovered his “love” for Russia and the tsar (although there is every reason to believe that by 1914 he had indeed gotten very “accustomed to everything Russian”). If there had been no war, Frederick would have continued to live and work in the special space that he had found for himself between the real Moscow and his “virtual” American citizenship.
Frederick made other evasions as well, and one was especially daring. At the same time that he sought the protection of Russian citizenship for one set of reasons, he tried to conceal what he was doing for another. The maneuvering this necessitated between his purely personal interests and his prominent role as a Moscow entrepreneur could not have been easy. His duplicity would remain hidden to this day from everyone except, presumably, Elvira; possibly Olga; and the author of this book. The Thomas family’s oral history does not allude to the matter, and this implies that even his oldest son, Mikhail (who later modified the spelling of the surname to “Thomass”), did not know about it.
Frederick concealed from the American authorities that he had decided to become a Russian citizen. The Moscow governor-general’s office and the Russian Imperial Ministry of the Interior did not inform the Americans either. As a result, neither the American consulate general in Moscow nor the embassy in Petrograd nor the State Department in Washington, D.C., ever found out that Frederick Bruce Thomas had officially expatriated himself. This would have two remarkable consequences. Four years later, in Odessa, during what were some of the most perilous days of his life, he would be able to save himself and his family by concealing that he had formally surrendered his American citizenship. And in 1931, three years after his death, his two youngest sons, who were born in Russia, would be recognized as Americans on the strength of their father’s (nonexistent) American citizenship and only because the State Department did not know that he had given it up in Moscow.
Another extraordinary move on Frederick’s part is that he concealed his Russian citizenship from his wife Valli. On July 27, 1916, well over a year after Frederick and his three oldest children had been accepted into the Russian fold, Valli applied to renew her American passport, which had been issued in July 1914. Her application was approved and she was informed that she had been “duly entered on the Consular register, and that her national passport has been forwarded to the Department of State at Washington to be substituted by a fresh one.” Valli could not and would not have done this if she had known that Frederick had expatriated himself because, as she realized, her American citizenship was entirely dependent on his. The attestation that Valli received from the consulate in 1916 also corroborates that the American authorities did not know Frederick was a Russian citizen. Valli’s application underscores as well that Frederick had effectively abandoned Irma, who is listed on the form as Valli’s “daughter” (in future years, Irma would refuse even to talk about her father).