Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  In 1487, a German visitor, Nikolaus Poppel, visited the Kremlin and seems to have been amazed by its wealth and splendour. On his return, Poppel’s excited report was so convincing that Frederick decided to woo the barbarian, and in 1489 the German adventurer was sent back to Moscow to arrange a match between Ivan’s daughter and the margrave of Baden. One sweetener, which Poppel may have added on his own account, was the offer of a crown for Ivan from Frederick himself, for only the Holy Roman Emperor, Poppel explained, had powers to confer kingship. Ivan’s reply was magisterial. ‘By God’s grace,’ he told the unfortunate visitor, ‘we have been sovereigns in our own land since the beginning … Our appointment comes from God, as did that of our ancestors … We do not desire to be appointed by any one.’ As for the marriage, only Frederick’s own son would do. Yury Trakhaniot, now in the role of Ivan’s envoy, conveyed the message to the emperor in person. There was no chance, he affirmed, that a sovereign as great as Ivan would give his daughter in marriage to some mean ‘Makraby’.81

  His wealth made visitors think twice, but Ivan did not rule a secure or peaceful land. All those impressive fortress walls were built to hold real enemies at bay. The need for defence did not end at the Moscow river. Ironically, Novgorod was actually the first place Ivan fortified (beginning a year before Moscow, in 1484), though the point here was probably to make sure that his governors could escape from angry crowds of local citizens if the need arose. After Ivan III’s death, relations with the Crimean khanate deteriorated, and the new prince, Vasily III, presided over fresh defensive work. Italian expertise was brought to bear again, and a string of strategic towns along the southern frontier began to sprout new fortresses in a range of Lombard designs. These included Tula, Kolomna, Nizhnyi-Novgorod and Zaraysk, each of which still treasures fragments of its old brick walls and battlements.82 The citadels were soon needed, for the frontier suffered repeated raids, and even if they remained safe in their new forts, the defenders were powerless to stop the devastation of surrounding lands. When a combined army of horsemen from the khanates of Crimea and Kazan reached Moscow in 1521, the city was attacked and burned. The Kremlin itself remained unscathed, but the large business quarter to the east was not so fortunate. One set of walls, the court agreed, was not enough to keep the city’s treasure safe.

  A team led by another Italian, Pietro Annibale, began to dig the first earthworks for a second line of walls and towers in 1535.83 At first, the structure was staked out in wood, although it was protected by a cruel ditch and also by the Moscow and Neglinnaya rivers. By 1538, however, the engineers had replaced the wooden palisade with two miles of brick wall, pierced in seven places by gates and defended by thirteen new towers. The design was an advance on that of the Kremlin to the extent that the new fortification was as thick as it was high, a refinement intended to defeat a new generation of artillery. The local nickname for the site derived from the wooden bundles of stakes (kity) that the builders used in the initial phase, however, and the new enclosure was soon called Kitai-gorod. Enclosing Moscow’s old commercial district (posad), its fortifications ran in an elongated loop north and eastwards from the Kremlin’s Corner Arsenal Tower and back south to the Moscow river near the Beklemishev Tower. The Kremlin remained separate, looming behind its own brick walls and Alevisio’s moat, to say nothing of the wide space that had been cleared since the great fire of 1493. But from a distance the two parts of the city-centre could easily be mistaken for one fortress.84 Some called the Kremlin the ‘old’ city to distinguish it from the new one.

  The centre of Moscow was now a maze of walls, forbidding as a mythic dragon’s lair. Its court was so protective of the new security that the entire set of fortifications was treated as a state secret (notwithstanding the fact that almost all had been designed by foreigners), and later visitors sometimes reported that they were blindfolded, crowded about with guards, or forced to travel in closed carriages as they entered the Kremlin itself, especially if renovations were in hand. 85 Kitaigorod was more accessible, and it became the city’s main commercial hub, not least because Ivan III had banned foreign merchants from the Kremlin, but even this walled district had the feeling of a citadel. Its military character was emphasized by the presence of prisons, torture-chambers and a massive arsenal.86 As any merchant counting silver in the shadow of Kitai-gorod’s new walls could see, Moscow’s rulers viewed the entire city as a fortified stronghold. In building it, they had imported the best engineering advice that money could buy. It was ironic, then, that the technological revolution that had driven fifteenth-century Italian fort-design should have continued without them once the building-work was done.

  From artillery to muskets and drilled, disciplined, full-time infantry, Europe’s armies and the thinking that went into them rapidly surpassed the level that had been the benchmark for Fioravanti and Solari in the 1480s and 1490s. Even siegecraft changed, and within decades of its completion, the Kremlin looked old-fashioned when compared to the more sophisticated star-shaped forts for which some European cities had begun to bankrupt themselves. Since Moscow chose to rely on imported inventions, rather than nurturing home-grown masters of the new science, it remained permanently one step behind. The problem was not confined to the battlefield, either, and extended to technologies such as printing as well as a whole range of arts. Only geographical accident – a matter of distance and cold – preserved the illusion of Moscow’s impregnability. For as long as its main enemies were steppe Tatars, the balance was even at least. From the middle of the sixteenth century, however, a new kind of unease began to cloud the Russian court. Somehow, it seemed, the European heretics had stolen a march. Centuries later, experts in Russia and elsewhere would start to call the problem backwardness.87

  Aloof even compared with walled Kitai-gorod, meanwhile, the Kremlin stood above the confusion of real life, cut off from its messy hubbub; defended, certainly, but also locked in. It was a metaphor for a good deal of Russia’s subsequent history, and several of the country’s later revolutions amounted to a struggle to escape. But none entirely overcame the barrier. ‘A wall’, writes Ryszard Kapuscinski (who had no time at all for Russian patriots), ‘is simultaneously a shield and a trap, a veil and a cage.’ Solid defensive walls, he continues, ‘produce a mental attitude that sees a wall running through everything, imagines the world as being divided into an evil and inferior part, on the outside, and a good and superior part, on the inside.’88

  3

  The Golden Palace

  Ambrogio Contarini, an envoy from Catholic Venice, passed through Ivan III’s Moscow in the 1470s. His notes record a memorable scene:

  By the end of October the [Moscow] river is frozen over, and shops and bazaars for the sale of all sorts of things are erected on it, scarcely anything being sold in the town. They do this, as the river … is less cold than anywhere else. On this frozen river may be seen, daily, numbers of cows and pigs, great quantities of corn, wood, hay, and every other necessity, nor does the supply fail during the whole winter. At the end of November, all those who have cows or pigs, kill and bring them, from time to time, to the city market. They are frozen whole, and it is curious to see so many skinned cows standing upright on their feet … The meat that you eat has sometimes been killed three months or more. Fish, fowls, and all other provisions are treated in the same way. Horses run on this river when it is frozen, and a good deal of amusement takes place.1

  Nearly a century later, in 1558, an Englishman called Anthony Jenkinson observed the same ‘great market’ on the frozen river, but he was also witness to an even stranger spectacle. It took place at Epiphany, and it involved the entire court, ‘all most richly apparelled with gold, pearles, pretious stones, & costly furres’. The day’s events had begun with a religious service in the Dormition Cathedral, but after that the company made its stately way towards a pre-cut hole in the frozen surface of the Moscow river. There, the metropolitan took his seat on a throne in the place of honour, but the sovereign remained standing,
as did the rest of the assembled court. The apparent reversal in the hierarchy of church and state was unexpected, but so was the ceremony that followed, for once the leader of the Russian church had blessed the river underneath the ice, handfuls of water were scooped up and ‘cast’ over the sovereign and his noblemen. ‘That done,’ Jenkinson went on,

  the people with great thronging filled pots of the said water … and divers children were throwen in, and sicke people, and plucked out quickly again, and divers Tartars christened: all of which the Emperour beheld. Also there were brought the Emperours best horses, to drink at the said hallowed water. All this being ended, he returned to his pallace again.2

  These separate episodes involved a similar stretch of river, but in other respects the contrast between them could scarcely have been greater. The first was part of red-blooded commercial life, a market whose abundance would astonish foreigners for centuries.3 It was a festival in its own right, and that could make proceedings riotous. The church preached a staid, sober and self-denying life, but Russian popular culture was a colourful affair involving lewdness and cross-dressing, buffoonery, and large quantities of alcoholic drink. At Christmas and Epiphany, the celebrations bordered on debauchery, for it was widely feared that evil spirits stalked the land and had to be appeased or exorcized with swearing and satanic games. But the annual appearance on the ice of the entire court, a ritual that was probably adopted in Moscow in the early sixteenth century, was neither spontaneous nor wild. Even today, no-one has really managed to explain it all.4 The most convincing account views the scene as a tableau, a living icon stepping from its frame. The sovereign plays the role of Christ and the metropolitan that of John the Baptist. The chilly Moscow river is a Jordan, and behind it, looming in the winter light, the Kremlin has become the Holy City, a Jerusalem.

  If this interpretation of the ritual is correct, the participants themselves must have had a peculiar relationship with time, and especially with history. From the solemn blessing of the waters at Epiphany to the daily reverence for holy images, the court’s religious practices speak of a world where centuries could be compressed, where saints still walked, and long-dead princes could exert an influence that few of the living would ever match. As for the future, that was overshadowed by the vivid expectation of the end of days. The Orthodox calendar had placed the date of the world’s end in its own year 7000, which coincided with Catholic Europe’s 1492.5 Even when that fateful date had come and gone, icons showing the apocalypse were prominent in every recently completed cathedral, including all three of the famous Kremlin ones. A Protestant like Jenkinson might not have grasped these details, but for the wealthy few who gathered on the winter ice, the threat of everlasting fire was as familiar as the pearls on the trim of their own fur gloves.

  Theological niceties mattered most to priests, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was they who largely shaped the theory and the outward form of Russian kingship, the principles by which the Kremlin’s inner world was run. They made abundant use of Christian metaphor, encouraging their flock with promises of glory for the faithful on the Day of Judgement. But ecclesiastics at the Kremlin court also harnessed the potential of history. Their prince, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV, ruled 1533–84), turned out to be an apt and even a creative pupil. What started as court theatre, a series of experiments with sovereign power, was to end in the blood and gristle of his torture-chambers. It was appropriate, indeed, that Ivan had such an affinity with icons. Christ-like at first, the evidence suggests that in his later life he came to see himself in an apocalyptic role that would have challenged any iconographer, even the most inventive.

  * * *

  Two generations previously, in the 1440s, it had taken a civil war to make sure that Ivan III would inherit his father’s throne. To extinguish any further claims by his uncles and cousins, he promptly ordered the arrests of several of his male relatives. It was a strategy that guaranteed the crown for his sons, and Ivan fathered quite a few of these, not least because he married twice. The short-lived wife of his youth, Mariya of Tver, produced the undisputed heir, who was also given the name Ivan, and before the lad reached thirteen years of age, Ivan III had named him as his successor. Disaster struck in 1489, however, when the younger man fell ill with gout. His father went to every length to find a cure, and deliverance seemed to have come at last when the Venetian doctor, Leon the Jew, arrived in the Kremlin in 1490, but the regime that the physician ordered resulted in the younger Ivan’s slow and painful death. Leon was duly beheaded, but the grand prince was still left with a dilemma.6 His remaining sons were children of his second wife, Sofiya. The eldest of these, Vasily, was an obvious heir, but the picture was complicated by the fact that the late prince Ivan had fathered a son of his own, Dmitry Ivanovich, who had been born in 1483. Ivan III showed a special fondness for this grandchild and also for the infant’s mother, Elena Stepanovna of Moldavia, a distant kinswoman whose family was crucial to Moscow’s delicate diplomatic network in Europe.7

  Whatever the court might have said in other times, Ivan III considered that he had a real choice about the succession. For some generations, as their surviving wills attest, the Muscovite rulers’ idea of power had been synonymous with ownership. They viewed the city as a vast estate; each dying prince bequeathed the throne in much the same way as he also left his jewels and his honey-farms. While he considered which potential heir to favour, Ivan III treated the candidates more or less even-handedly, but in 1497, when Vasily was eighteen years old and Dmitry just thirteen, the ageing prince announced his choice of the latter, his grandson, as heir. The rival camp immediately launched a rebellion, including a plot to assassinate Dmitry himself, but no-one could gainsay Ivan III. Six of the conspirators were executed and both Sofiya and her son were disgraced.8 All hope for Vasily seemed lost, and to underline the point, Ivan took the unprecedented step of crowning his grandson as co-regent.

  The ceremony, which was staged in February 1498, was the first of its kind to be held in Russia, and it took place, like every coronation after it, in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. There was no precedent in Moscow’s past, so Ivan’s priests consulted various Byzantine texts before deciding on the wording of the prayers and the order of the ceremonial. Thrones were made ready on a raised dais, and the entire court prepared to attend in full costume.9 The gold robes that the nobles had to wear were so expensive that most of them borrowed their outfits from the Treasury for the day, but the spectacle left a memory that later churchmen would never forget. Within four years, however, the old grand prince had changed his mind about the heir himself. In April 1502, Dmitry and his mother Elena were arrested, and soon after Vasily was proclaimed the ‘Autocrat of all Russia’. Conveniently enough, and probably not accidentally, Dmitry died in prison just a few years later.10 On Ivan’s death in 1505, it was Vasily who succeeded him.

  Vasily III was never crowned, but that, if anything, was a mark of his evident legitimacy. There was no need for theatricality. Although he was successful in the role of leader and grand prince, however, fatherhood eluded him. His first wife, Solomoniya Saburova, failed to produce a male heir, and in 1523 the prince sought a divorce. It was a move that split the court, and some church leaders disapproved of it on moral grounds. But Vasily eventually secured his wish, and Solomoniya (now accused of witchcraft) was packed off to a remote convent. Barely two months later, in January 1526, Vasily and his second bride, the fifteen-year-old Elena Glinskaya, were married. On this occasion, the need to silence court intrigue prompted the prince to opt for a dramatic ceremony.11

  The wedding of 1526, then, like the coronation of February 1498, was invented to convey a decisive message at an uncertain moment, and also like the coronation it created an enduring precedent.12 The central sacrament was celebrated in the Dormition Cathedral, and candles from it were then used to illuminate the couple – and their troupe of attendants – in the coming nights. Every detail of the pageant was invested with significance, from the choice
of bedchamber icons (depicting motherhood) to the scattering of earth (to call mortality to mind), and the lavish use of ancient fertility symbols such as honey and grain. In August 1530 a first son, Ivan Vasilevich, was born. That night, according to legend, an unseasonal wind of such ferocity swept through Moscow that the bells of the Kremlin’s Saviour Cathedral began to toll of their own accord.13

  * * *

  The succession seemed secure at last, especially after the prompt birth of a second boy, Yury. Vasily presented the crown prince, Ivan, with a tiny helmet at about this time, a symbol of both majesty and future leadership.14 An object of this kind was not a toy, but Ivan had no chance to play in any case. He was still barely a toddler in the winter of 1533 when his father became gravely ill. Vasily had been out on one of his beloved hunting expeditions when he was stricken with a noxious sore and raging fever. The doctors despaired, and Vasily returned to the snow-bound Kremlin on an invalid’s litter. As he lay dying, he told a hastily summoned council that he intended to leave his title and estates to his eldest son. He also drew up a new will, the aim of which, in part, was to establish a regency under the leadership of trusted aides. His last wish, like that of generations of his forefathers, was to become a monk, taking the holy name Varlaam. Over the protests of his weeping wife and of his brother, Andrei, the prince’s head was tonsured by the metropolitan himself, and at midnight, after watching his two surviving adult brothers kiss the cross in fealty to the three-year-old Ivan, Vasily died.15