Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The next thing was to take a look at Vladimir, for its cathedral, as Ivan and his churchmen insisted, was still to be the model for the Moscow site. To his surprise, on arriving outside the older cathedral, Fioravanti found himself examining a fine – and substantial – building. ‘It must have been the work of our masters,’ he muttered, ever-loyal to his native roots. Despite the contempt implied by that remark, however, he went on to make an extended tour that summer (partly to secure the falcons he had promised to a patron back at home), visiting Novgorod and the remote White Sea monasteries and taking in a landscape that few European travellers had seen since the days of the Vikings. When he returned to Moscow, armed with those falcons and some ermines for himself, he was better informed about the local architecture and ready to start making bricks. But his tour had not entirely changed his view of Russian craftsmanship. He spent his first winter in Moscow setting up his own brickworks, where trainees could be taught to follow his exacting rules. As they discovered, he wanted thousands of flattish, heavy bricks of uniform hardness and uniform size. Even by modern standards, they look huge.

  The brick factory at Kalitnikovo was a triumph, and it heralded a series of technical innovations that confirmed the Italian’s reputation as a magician. First, he wanted foundations that could have swallowed a full-grown elephant. The men kept digging till they were fourteen feet deep, and then they packed the trenches with oak stakes. While some laboured with the new bricks, others were taught to make a marvellous mortar, far thicker than the formula that they had used before; the Italian issued them with metal spades to work it with, another innovation. His walls were to be built of pale cream stone, but this was cut and laid without the usual rubble-filling. The building seemed finer and lighter-looking as a result, and the magic bricks were so strong and precise that the arches and cupolas appeared to float above it. The architect showed his builders how to brace the structure with metal rods, rather than chunks of oak, and as the walls grew higher he installed a pulley-system for raising the heavy trays of materials.56 His insistence on measurement was remarked on by everyone. In what was sorcery indeed, the locals observed that ‘everything is done by the ruler and compass’. The delicacy of it all, the lightness, seemed miraculous. The finished building was so perfect that it seemed to have been cut out of a single block.

  Though the internal decoration would take much longer to complete, Fioravanti’s Dormition Cathedral was formally consecrated by Metropolitan Geronty on 12 August 1479. The Italian had fulfilled his commission in a little less than five years, but he had not quite kept to his original brief, for the church was neither an exact replica of Filipp’s nor of its sacred prototype in Vladimir. It had the same five domes, but they appeared weightless, the same sequence of bays and piers, but executed with unprecedented regularity and precision. Meanwhile, instead of being square, Fioravanti’s building was elongated, and where most Russian cathedrals would have included a choir gallery, this one remained uncluttered, light. The interior space was probably the largest that the Muscovites had ever seen. The effect was definitely Russian, but it had a distinctly European twist.57 For years to come, the fact that Moscow’s most sacred cathedral had been built by a fellow-countryman continued to make Italian visitors to the city feel proud.58

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  The plan was now to rebuild the whole Kremlin in impressive style. By the time of Fioravanti’s death in 1486, Ivan had the resources to hire the finest specialists, and – thanks to his new links with Europe – the necessary local knowledge. A fresh detachment of Italians duly appeared in Moscow, including cannon-founders, silver-smiths and apprentices from Rome and Venice. The most important member of the group was another builder, Pietro Antonio Solari, a Milanese who was expected to continue the late Fioravanti’s work.59 Experienced and confident, this man soon started to describe himself as the grand prince’s chief architect, but (though distinguished) he was not the only Italian in town. Two others, whom the Russians knew as Marco and Onton Fryazin (Fryazin was not an Italian surname but the generic name that Russians gave to Europeans – ‘Franks’), were already at work when he arrived in 1490, their task to raise a new system of walls and towers round Ivan’s fortress-court.60 In 1493, another Italian, the Lombard Alevisio de Carcano, was hired by Ivan’s hard-working agents, and in 1504 the Crimean khan, Mengli-Girey, sent his fellow-prince a gift in the shape of the master-builder who had just completed a commission for his own palace at Bakhchisarai. The gift was a Venetian, Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana, and even he was not the last Italian on Ivan’s site.61

  With German cannon-founders (they had proved to be the best), Persian smiths, assorted master-builders from Italy and a physician from Venice who called himself Leon the Jew, the Kremlin must have been a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual cauldron. Despite the presence of so many foreigners, however, a few natives of Russia were still working on royal building plans. Their influence was particularly visible around the irregular square that was now dominated by Fioravanti’s cathedral. A team from Pskov replaced Yona’s little Church of the Deposition of the Robe in 1485. Their next commission was the palace Cathedral of the Annunciation. Despite the loss of priceless frescoes, the dilapidated fourteenth-century original was demolished, and for the next five years a modest new brick structure slowly rose on its foundations. But soon the Russians’ building was upstaged. Facing their work across the sacred square, the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael had long served as the burial place of Moscow’s princes, and Ivan III commissioned a replacement in expectation of his own approaching death. The prince never saw the result (he died in 1505, three years before it was finished), but the final building, by Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana, was spectacular. When it was new, its red brick and white stone facing must have looked almost garish, and some of the imported details – especially the Venetian scallop-shells under the domes – were shocking in the Moscow light. It might be Russia’s royal mausoleum, but this was certainly no patriotic replica. It was beautiful, however, and gracious, and any honest visitor could see it as a synthesis of the cultures that had converged in Ivan III’s Kremlin: Moscow, Vladimir and Pskov on the one hand; Milan, Venice and Constantinople on the other.

  The busy quarter at the Kremlin’s heart contained a lot of smaller buildings of all kinds, and these contributed to the eclectic, sometimes confusing, geography of Ivan’s court. There were monks’ cells behind the metropolitan’s stone palace, steps and walkways to avoid the sea of mud, and a brick-built treasury in the square itself, another of Ivan III’s innovations, whose warren of underground chambers connected to the Annunciation Cathedral’s limestone crypt.62 But one final masonry building was needed to complete the central religious ensemble. Ivan Kalita had commissioned a bell tower for his own cathedral complex, and generations later it still stood beside the little Church of Ivan Lestvichnik, or St John of the Ladder, ‘Under the Bell’. In the early 1500s Kalita’s tower was demolished to make way for the now iconic bell tower that came to be known as Ivan the Great (after the church rather than any prince). The upper tiers of this, and the famous cupola, were added later, but even in its original form the new structure, completed in 1508 by an Italian whose only surviving name is Bon Fryazin, was theatrical.63 It was also extraordinarily robust. Like Fioravanti, Bon Fryazin liked to dig foundations deep, and the walls of his tower, which rose nearly two hundred feet above the Kremlin’s central square, were so thick and solid that when Napoleon’s sappers mined them in October 1812 they managed to achieve no more than a slight list.64

  Ivan III’s palaces turned out to be more fragile. By shifting the entire Saviour Monastery to new premises beyond the Kremlin walls, the prince’s men cleared an extensive site close to the existing royal quarters. Ivan himself moved out in 1492, leaving his master-builder, Solari, free to work. The Milanese created a group of elegant structures in brick and stone, probably a series of distinct blocks arranged around central reception-rooms and antechambers. No-one can say what they looked like for
certain, however, for the complex was destroyed by a fire almost at once. The next version, also of Italian design, was on a grander scale, again incorporating separate buildings. The foundations of some are still there, but the rest disappeared in a succession of fires and radical changes of fashion. The one survivor is the beautiful Faceted Palace, finished in 1491.

  This building, by Solari and Marco Fryazin, was planned as a reception hall. Inside, it consists of a single arched room of roughly seventy feet by seventy-seven, its roof supported by a central pier. This design was as Russian in essence, if not in every detail, as Ivan might have wished; Vasily Ermolin had recently finished something of the same kind for the monks of the wealthy Trinity-St Sergius Monastery forty miles outside Moscow.65 But Solari’s building was also an Italian palace in classic renaissance taste. The exterior walls are still decorated with the diamond-shaped blocks (rustications) that give it the almost jewelled appearance that was all the rage in fifteenth-century Venice. This kind of decoration was soon to seem as Russian as the new passion for brick.66 The local genius was one of adaptation, rapid learning followed by new variations on a theme. Even the Italians’ own term, palazzo, was promptly adopted by their hosts (as palata), to mean any high-end stone-built mansion for the rich.67

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  More Russian yet, at least for every later generation, were the brick walls and towers that were built to surround it all. Even now, these remain the ultimate symbol of the Muscovite age. In Ivan’s day, when the outcome of an entire continental war could be determined by a single siege, the specifications were demanding. The Kremlin’s old defensive towers had been designed for archers and for townsmen armed with cauldrons and stones; the new ones would have to accommodate massed rows of cannon and the men to service them. It was also important to create an early-warning system, to the point of building underground listening-posts that would amplify the sounds of any sapper who might try to tunnel in. Sieges could drag on for years, and a supply of drinking water would be needed to support a population of thousands. There would also have to be somewhere to store large quantities of grain and salt. Finally, if an attack should ever breach the walls, the city’s treasure – and the prince’s own considerable reserve – had to be kept hidden and secure. Ivan’s new team of architects was instructed to develop the old cathedral crypts, and as they worked they created a network of chambers and tunnels whose extent still remains unknown.68

  The work began in 1485 along the Moscow riverbank. Onton and Marco Fryazin began by clearing the old walls and digging deep into the mud to establish the foundations for a brick fortification, starting with a massive tower in the centre of the embankment. Their design included a hidden passage down to the river for raising water into the Kremlin in time of siege, and for that reason the tower and the entrance gates beneath it were called ‘Tainitskie’: ‘secret’. Like all the other Kremlin towers of Ivan’s time, this one was a solid-looking block with interior stairways and tiered parapets, purposeful and elegant rather than fanciful. The decorative tent-shaped roofs on today’s Kremlin (the things that look like follies, several of which support red stars) were added later (and at different times); for now, this was a structure that meant business. Above the wooden huddle of the city, it would have been visible for miles.

  The side above the Moscow riverbank, the side that faced invaders from the south, was considered to be the most vulnerable part of the Kremlin, and work continued rapidly here once the old walls had been knocked down. As soon as the central entrance gate was completed, the architects turned to the two end-points, and by 1489 two further towers were finished: the Beklemishev, at the Kremlin’s south-eastern tip (named for the nearby estate of Nikita and Semen Beklemishev), and the Sviblova (now usually called the Vodovzvodnaya, after the hydraulic systems that were eventually installed), in the south-western corner. These were both round (to give the defenders the widest possible line of sight), and each was large enough to house the coveted new cannon. In all, seven towers were constructed to defend the Kremlin’s south bank, each conceived as an independent fortress but standing close enough for the defenders to maintain a clear view of each other as they delivered a storm of impassable cross-fire into their enemies’ path.

  This was the point that had been reached when Pietro Antonio Solari arrived from Milan in 1490, bringing the style and technology of the Sforza princes to Ivan’s fortress. Under his direction, two impressive gate-towers, one to the south-west (the Borovitskaya) and one beside a little church dedicated to the Christian emperor Constantine and Elena (Helena) his mother, were completed in 1490. The following year, the Kremlin’s most important sets of towers and entrance gates, the Frolov (or Saviour) and Nikolsky, were built to face the trading quarter on the edge of what is now Red Square. In constructing these, Solari had to move the bas-relief of St George, and though it was briefly replaced on his gatehouse it was soon upstaged by a new clock, whose hands were visible across the city and whose marvellous mechanical system may even have played music.69 But Solari had no time to pause and listen. His Moscow must have reeked of baking clay and fresh-cut logs. Tens of thousands of bricks were needed for the next phase of the job, which was to complete the main line of walls. The river would have vanished under a permanent film of builders’ dust as these began to snake around the south and east sides of the hill, seldom less than fourteen feet thick and in places more than fifty feet high.70 Milan had come to Moscow, so the entire perimeter was topped by seven-foot-high swallow-tail battlements in the best contemporary style. On their inner side, however, the elegance gave way to firing platforms and a walkway that was always wide enough to accommodate several ranks of archers at a time.

  Solari, who was also working simultaneously on the Faceted Palace, now turned his attention to the steep bank leading down to the Neglinnaya river. He began with a round tower, the Sobakin (later Corner Arsenal) Tower, commanding the north-western point of the Kremlin’s triangular defences. Its foundations included another reservoir, this time fed by a seemingly inexhaustible underground spring. There may have been a set of strongrooms, too, each sealed behind an iron door for which the smiths designed a lock so massive and so intricate that none could open it without the subtle key. Beyond, the legend goes, the rooms themselves were lined with giant storage-chests, again secured with fiendish locks.71 This tale dates from the 1720s, when the vaults were rediscovered during building-work for a new arsenal, and though the details are impossible to verify, much later excavation did find a deep chamber, flooded after centuries of neglect.72 The Neglinnaya was always the sort of river that pools and oozes rather than flows; in Ivan’s time its chills did for the unfortunate master-mason as well as his secret rooms. Solari died in 1493, leaving the last section of the Kremlin’s defences to be completed by his successors.

  There was a lot of landscaping involved. So much timber was consumed in the building-work – as fuel, as scaffolding, as props – that by 1500 the Moscow forest had all but disappeared.73 Using only hand tools, a vast crowd of workers dug and hacked at the Kremlin soil, carting and tipping the sullen heaps until the land itself had been reshaped. If the fortress still looks natural today, as if moulded to fit its site, it is because the hill beneath was rearranged when these great walls were built. Ivan III also altered the setting around it. The fire of 1493 had alerted everyone to the potential threat to brand new walls, so Ivan ordered that a 780-foot-wide fire-break should be cleared around his fort. Red Square began life in this way (at this stage it was called the pozhar, or fire), but clearance could be controversial. On the Neglinnaya side, Ivan’s project involved razing large numbers of wooden residential buildings and at least one church. The people were, as always, pushed aside, but Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod, a former archimandrite (the equivalent of a senior abbot) of the Chudov Monastery, condemned the prince for sacrilege when the church disappeared, for dogs and cattle had begun to wander on what should have been consecrated ground.74 The space stayed clear, however, for another hundred y
ears.75

  Ivan continued with his plans. In 1500, the Kremlin acquired its first internal road, which cut its way through the jumble of boyar palaces and wooden chapels from the Saviour and Nikolsky gates to the brand new Cathedral Square.76 At the same time, Alevisio de Carcano set about transforming the entire hill from a promontory into an island. Ivan did not live to see this work done, but his successor, Vasily III (ruled 1505–33), encouraged efforts to complete and develop his father’s plans. Further reservoirs were built beside the Kremlin walls, and in 1508, Alevisio created a brick-lined moat to join the Moskva and Neglinnaya rivers along the edge of the recently cleared territory below the Saviour Tower. The work involved was prodigious even by the standards that Ivan had set; the moat was over forty feet deep and a hundred and thirty feet wide, protected by low walls and spanned by drawbridges beside the two main gates.77 Its width was intended to rule out the possibility that besiegers might set up camp under the walls. It also prevented an army of determined foes from tunnelling underneath and streaming into the Kremlin like a plague of moles.78 No-one ever did. When the moat, which lapped straight down the edge of what is now Red Square, was filled with water, the Kremlin was cut off from the land around, and for a few decades at least it was impregnable.

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  Ivan III was the first Russian sovereign to be described as ‘the Great’, and in his lifetime he was also known in Russia, justifiably, as groznyi, or terrible, the epithet that later seemed far better-suited to his grandson, Ivan IV. Under the influence of Sofiya, his Italian-educated wife, the Grand Prince of Muscovy began to call himself a tsar, or emperor, and he adopted a very European-looking double-headed eagle as an emblem for the Muscovite throne.79 His renaissance palaces were meant to impress outsiders as much as his own people with the extent of his power and culture. Beyond the Slav world, however, people still knew very little of Moscow. The Italians of course had some notion of Russia’s wealth (even before Ivan’s marriage to Sofiya, Milan’s ruler, Francesco Sforza, had made an effort to inform himself about the realm of the distant ‘White Emperor’), but further north, Emperor Frederick III assumed that Moscow’s prince was merely a vassal of the Lithuanian king.80