Trying to be witty, Serpoletti first throws some silly camouflage over Frederick’s name and business, and then provides an encoded summary of Frederick’s biography, which he obviously knows well. This “citizen,” as Serpoletti pointedly calls him, who was “despised” in his native “Egyptian Colonies” (these are allusions to Frederick’s application, his African blood, the status of blacks in the United States, and the nation’s origin as English colonies), came to Russia from Paris as a lackey; “got fat” on Russian bread; benefited from Russians’ good nature; made a lot of money; and became a captain in a restaurant, a maître d’hôtel, and finally the owner of an entertainment garden. Serpoletti’s main point is that despite such humble origins and “undeserved” success—which Serpoletti bitterly envied—Frederick “puts on airs because of his position” and assumes a “negro-dully-arrogant” (“negrityanski-tuponadmenno”) attitude toward Russian artists, whom, moreover, he calls “pigs.” Then comes Serpoletti’s final, vicious thrust—an accusation that was as dangerous to make in Russia during World War I as was calling someone a “communist” in the United States in the 1950s: Frederick is “great pals with foreigners in general and with Germans in particular.” Despite all this scaffolding, the reason for Serpoletti’s animus is clear: Frederick supposedly preferred to hire foreign performers for Aquarium and Maxim rather than native Russians (including Serpoletti and his protégés).
Frederick successfully countered this accusation by continuing to demonstrate his Russianness at every opportunity, to the extent of assuming a leading role in a grand patriotic demonstration that began in Moscow on May 19, 1915, just a few days after his application for citizenship had been approved. This was a momentous time in the Russian conduct of the war. A German advance in Galicia inflicted huge Russian casualties, and a retreat that had been orderly at first degenerated into a “mad bacchanalia” all along the front, with troops fleeing their positions and hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees also streaming east. The combined German and Austro-Hungarian advance lasted five months. By October 1915, the Russian armies not only had lost everything they had won but had been pushed back one hundred miles and forced out of what had been Russian Poland since the end of the eighteenth century.
In Moscow toward the end of May, however, the full extent of the developing catastrophe was still not clear and, in an atmosphere of buoyant patriotism, the Moscow Red Cross planned a three-day event that was named “Tobacco for the Soldier.” May 19 began with several thousand actors and other performers from variety theaters across the city gathering in Aquarium’s garden, which Frederick and Tsarev had made available as a staging area. Participants formed into a long parade and left the grounds at 4 p.m., heading down Tverskaya Street toward the Kremlin. Leading the procession were actors from Aquarium riding in decorated wagons and dressed in the national costumes of the countries of the Entente. Then came numerous other groups, vehicles, and floats. Participants numbered in the thousands and attracted huge crowds.
As the lead elements of the parade began to enter Red Square, an outdoor prayer service led by a bishop assisted by a multitude of priests began at Lobnoye Mesto—a raised, circular stone platform traditionally used for imperial proclamations. The icon of the Iberian Mother of God—long venerated by Muscovites as “wonder-working”—was brought from its nearby chapel to the platform, as were other icons and religious banners from St. Basil’s Cathedral a few dozen yards away. Wounded soldiers from Moscow’s hospitals gathered around, accompanied by their nurses. The remainder of the vast square between the soaring redbrick walls of the Kremlin and the ornate facade of the Upper Trading Arcades filled with tens of thousands of people—the men’s heads bared; women on tiptoes straining to see, some holding their children up—while the bishop, priests, and deacons intoned prayers for the army’s valiant warriors, for the emperor and his “august family,” for all faithful Russian Orthodox Christians during this time of dreadful travail. A reverent hush spread over the crowd. The gold brocade raiments of the churchmen gleamed in the afternoon sun as wisps of sweet incense wafted from their swinging censers and the hymns of the deep-voiced male choir rose, fell, and rose again. At the end of the service, the enormous crowd broke into singing “God Save the Tsar” and repeated it over and over again. The actors from Aquarium who had led the parade stayed together as a group by the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, two seventeenth-century Russian national heroes in the war to liberate Moscow from the Poles.
After the service, the parade returned to the Aquarium garden, with the troupe of its actors again leading the way. That evening and during the next two days, special performances to benefit the soldiers took place in theaters all over the city; hundreds of volunteers also took up collections on the streets, in stores, and in restaurants. Frederick and Tsarev themselves worked the crowds in Aquarium with collection cups in hand and were singled out for special praise several times in newspaper and magazine reports.
A native son of Russia could not have done more to demonstrate his loyalty. Frederick’s actions were seen by hundreds if not thousands of Muscovites and were known to many more, including the city’s leading citizens. He had also inscribed himself convincingly in the tradition of philanthropy for which Moscow merchants and businessmen were famous throughout Russia. Whatever vengeful designs Serpoletti might have had against the black former American could not pierce the armor of goodwill that Frederick created around himself.
Frederick demonstrated his Russianness with uncannily accurate timing; a week later Muscovites revealed the inevitable other face of patriotic fervor—hatred of the enemy and paranoia regarding outsiders. For many, the calamitous retreat of Russian forces in Galicia seemed inexplicable without sabotage or treason on the home front. Anti-German and then broadly antiforeign riots erupted in the city in late May. Hundreds of stores were sacked and entire streets were set ablaze. One horrified Englishman recalled seeing grand pianos being pushed out of the fourth-floor windows of Zimmermann’s famous music store on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow’s toniest shopping street, and crashing to the sidewalk with a doleful ringing sound as pages of sheet music swirled in the air like flocks of white birds. Some of the mobs swarmed partway up Tverskaya Street, which led to Aquarium. The financial and social costs of the riots were huge: damage was estimated at what would be about $1 billion today. There was also a heavy political cost: the mostly lower-class rioters had gotten a taste of taking the law into their own hands and using street violence to show their frustration with the government’s conduct of the war. Few observers realized it at the time, but Moscow’s “anti-German” pogrom was a harbinger of far worse things to come.
By the first anniversary of the war, Frederick and his adopted homeland were starting to move in different directions. Russia had lost a million men killed or wounded and another million captured; all evidence showed that the country had been woefully unprepared for a war of this length and magnitude. Blundering through historical events that he could not understand, much less control, Nicholas II in September 1915 dismissed the army’s commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, who was not only a professional soldier but his uncle. The tsar assumed command of all the Russian forces himself, even though he had no military experience. Elsewhere, the British attempt to support and resupply Russia by forcing the Turkish Straits and opening a passage to the Black Sea ended in disaster. In one of the many ironies of the time, a hero of the Turkish defense at Gallipoli was Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later to become the savior of his country and arbiter of Frederick’s fate.