Why would Frederick have bothered to apply for Russian citizenship? Against his will and despite his best efforts to resist such things, he had been swept up by a new, European stream of history and had to defend himself from its consequences as best he could. When Austria-Hungary began to menace Serbia in July 1914, Russia responded with an explosive mixture of patriotism and belligerence. In Moscow on the nights of July 14/27 and 15/28, for example, demonstrations broke out in several central locations, with thousands of people repeatedly singing the Russian imperial anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” demanding that it be played over and over again by orchestras and bands summoned out of restaurants; shouting “Long live Russia and Serbia”; and angrily denouncing Austria-Hungary and Germany. When on the first night large crowds started heading toward the consulates of both countries with the intention of demonstrating their defiance more forcefully, mounted police intervened to prevent it. Within a year, however, hatred of the Central Powers grew to such an extent that when anti-German riots broke out in Moscow, the police did nothing to stop them and German nationals began to be rounded up and expelled from the city.
For as long as he had lived in Moscow, Frederick had numerous and close family connections to Germans and Germany. His ties were hardly an exception, however. Baltic Germans were numerous in European Russia and played a major role in all aspects of the empire’s life, especially the civil service and the military. Economic, cultural, and political ties among Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary had also been long-lived and extensive. In 1913, almost half of all foreign goods imported into Russia were German and 30 percent of Russian exports went to Germany. Perhaps the most visible embodiment of Russian ties to Germany was Alexandra—the tsaritsa, or empress—who, like a number of her predecessors, was born a German princess. All such associations became poisonous after August 1, as did the tsaritsa herself: her loyalty to Russia would become deeply suspect during the war. Frederick’s decision to take Russian citizenship would thus go a long way toward defusing possible accusations of Germanophilia (and he would start claiming Elvira was Swedish).
Simultaneously with filing his petition for citizenship, Frederick began to take part in extravagant public expressions of Russian patriotism. At the end of August 1914 (N.S.), news reached Moscow of a major battle taking shape in East Prussia between massed Russian and German forces. Named “Tannenberg” by the Germans, it ended several days later with the utter destruction of two Russian armies and the suicide of one of the disgraced commanders. Frederick and Tsarev responded to the unfolding events by organizing a benefit evening at Aquarium on August 16/29, with all the proceeds from the garden’s entry fees and sales of theater tickets going to the wounded, thousands of whom were starting to pour into Moscow and other cities in the Russian heartland. Publicity from evenings like this earned Frederick a lot of goodwill.
Nightlife in Moscow went on, although nothing about it could remain quite the same against the background of the Great War, which kept unfolding with grim relentlessness. On the Russian front, the fighting took on a character very different from how it was being conducted in the West. After an initial, rapid, wheeling advance through Belgium into France in August and early September of 1914, the Germans were stopped just thirty-five miles outside Paris. It was the fatal Russian incursion into East Prussia, ending in the Battle of Tannenberg, that had helped save the French capital. Thereafter, for much of the rest of the war, the western front congealed into brutal trench warfare with relatively little movement but hecatombs of deaths along a curved line that ran from the English Channel to Switzerland. In the east, the war was more wide-ranging and mobile, and even more bloody. After Tannenberg, in early September 1914, Russian armies four hundred miles to the south attacked the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, seized an important fortress, laid siege to another, and captured over a hundred thousand prisoners. For much of the war, this province would be the site of massive retreats and advances by both sides, with horrific losses every time the scythe of war changed the direction of its swing.
However, not all evidence of the war’s carnage came from dispatches about events hundreds of miles away. As the mobilization of Russia’s enormous army grew—it would eventually reach 15 million men—actors and other theater workers in Aquarium, Maxim, and other venues began to be called up. Men in military uniforms appeared everywhere in Moscow—on the streets, in theaters, and on streetcars. Refugees escaping the battles on the empire’s western frontier started to arrive as well; masses of the wounded filled hospitals and clinics; trainloads of Austrian prisoners of war passed through to points farther east.
But the biggest change for those in businesses like Frederick’s was prohibition. Although never announced as the official law of the land, as it was in the United States in 1920, Russia’s “dry law” began as a series of restrictions on sales of alcoholic beverages during mobilization leading up to the war and ended with the tsar’s “wish” that the sale of alcoholic beverages be stopped throughout the empire for the war’s duration. The actual regulation of sales was left to the discretion of local governments, although all of them rapidly signed on. Moscow was the first to restrict sales by restaurants in accordance with their classification; then came Petrograd, and finally the rest of the country.
At first, the effects appeared to be dramatic. Some Russian and foreign observers concluded that the country’s population had genuinely embraced sobriety. The army’s mobilization seemed to take half the expected time because the recruits were not drunk when they showed up, as they had been during the war with Japan. “Drunkenness vanished in Russia,” proclaimed the New York Tribune; “there never has been anything like it in the history of the world,” reported an excited Englishman living in Moscow; “one of the greatest reforms in the history of the world,” exclaimed another. The Russian Duma, or parliament, received an official request from the United States Senate for information about the practice of prohibition, and an American delegation traveled all the way to the provincial city of Samara to investigate matters there.
But—as Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev is reported to have proclaimed as far back as the tenth century—“Russia’s joy is to drink,” and the old habits quickly reasserted themselves. The highly unpopular ban quickly dissolved in an ocean of evasion, corruption, and bootlegging, just as it would in the United States a few years later. With his decade and a half of experience in Moscow’s restaurants, cafés, and bars, Frederick would not have been surprised.
Russians began to take steps to avoid the restrictions even before they were fully in place. In mid-November 1914, for example, an American in Petrograd saw thousands of men, women, and even children lining up outside liquor shops as early as 4 a.m. during a driving snowstorm because that was the last day when they could buy wine and beer before prohibition took effect. In Moscow after prohibition, residents had only one legal method of obtaining any alcoholic beverage, whether it was vodka or wine—with a doctor’s prescription, in a limited amount, and one time only. However, what was supposed to be a controlled trickle soon became a flood as the “medicinal” spigot was wrenched open by bribes; illegal stills and moonshine production began to proliferate as well.