Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The system left many noblewomen unmarried and prospectless. The tsar’s own daughters, as well as his sisters and maiden aunts, were certainly too important for any ordinary marriage-market. No clan could be allowed to monopolize them. Some opted for the convent and a relatively comfortable religious life (there were several places where such women lived in discreet luxury), but many grew old in the Kremlin’s own women’s quarters. There, behind the pierced and gilded screens, they were meant to spend their time in prayer and fancy needlework. Some mixed a toxic range of white face-creams, and others seem to have experimented with poetry and letters.75 Whatever their diversions, however, their spinsterhood was one convenient control on the production of possible pretenders to the throne.76 Another was the devotion with which successive Muscovite rulers exiled their married male relatives to the provinces, ostensibly to give them valuable tasks and lands but more practically to keep their wretched sons out of the Kremlin.

  At the centre of the entire costume dance, enthroned in his new palace, sat the tsar himself. His boyars and advisors clearly had important roles in the evolving government; some even managed complex prikazy. But the monarchy depended on its sovereign. This truth was clear to every visitor, and by the time of Richard Chancellor’s visit it was an article of faith at court. The tsar of the 1550s was like the sun amid the circling planets. His Kremlin had been redesigned to paint him as the heir to an imperial line. But sovereignty had not been viewed like this for very long, and the message required a good deal of reinforcement. For courtiers, the pictures in the Golden Palace were one kind of text. Since few could read, the images were visible parables, filling the role that propaganda was to play in a much later age.77 And Metropolitan Makary did not confine his efforts on the tsar’s behalf to art. Between 1547 and 1549, he and his bishops also more than doubled the roll-call of Moscow’s saints. Their selection was guided mainly by religious considerations, but the addition of princes like Alexander Nevsky and Mikhail of Tver showed clearly that the heavens loved a pious and God-chosen prince, especially if he happened to rule the lands of Rus.78

  For those who could read – or who listened while their priests intoned to them – the other medium for conveying the new philosophy involved a series of written texts. Makary’s most significant legacy may well have been the collection, editing and re-inscribing of the old Russian chronicles, the records of the past that had been kept and copied by armies of monks across the Russian lands for centuries. It was the Kremlin’s first systematic attempt to rewrite history, and it was a dazzling success, placing Moscow at the summit of a progression from Kievan Rus to heaven-blessed empire. Through this project, Makary also encouraged a new bias against Islam, and notably against the Mongols and their successors, the Tatars. This was a tricky stance to take, for there were Tatar princes in the tsar’s service, and the tradition of intermarriage on the steppes was so deep-rooted that few nobles could lay claim to purely Christian blood. But what Makary wanted was a new crusade – or the Orthodox equivalent of one. As Moscow learned to celebrate the Russian lands and Russian princely deeds, the leaders of its church were busily transforming the Tatars of Kazan and the Crimean steppe from cousins, neighbours and potential allies into the fatherless tribes of Hagar.

  * * *

  Makary gave his blessing to Ivan’s first military plans. What might have been a routine Muscovite land-grab ended up being celebrated as a holy war. In 1550, the tsar created a new military force, the streltsy, a fledgling standing army composed of trained musketeers (who served for life). With their help, and some well-placed casks of gunpowder, his troops were able to besiege and capture the Tatar fortress of Kazan in 1552. When Ivan rode home after that triumph, Makary himself stood at the city’s boundary to greet him. The tsar dismounted in the middle of a sea of banners and walked into his Kremlin as if it were indeed Jerusalem and he an image of Christ. Four years later, the Muscovites took Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, giving the Kremlin control of the Volga’s entire length and raising a Christian (and Orthodox) standard over huge areas of territory that had hitherto lived under the rule of Islamic princes. In celebration, a prominent new icon, the Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar, was painted for the Dormition Cathedral. Though angels circle round a saintly procession, the icon may also have represented Ivan and his victorious army, their deeds reflected in a template that had been designed for heaven.79 Orthodox Russia had found a mission in expansion and empire. To add to the celebratory mood, Ivan’s first heir, a son, was born in 1553, and though he died in infancy, a second son, Ivan, looked set to grow up a survivor.

  In the spring of 1553, Ivan unveiled the plans for a monument to his triumph at Kazan. The building, originally dedicated to the Trinity, started life as a brick church on the banks of the moat beneath the Kremlin walls. After the fall of Astrakhan, however, the prime site seemed to call for something more ambitious, and soon the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat was born.80 It was conceived as a series of individual churches gathered round a central tower, but that description hardly captures the exuberance of St Basil’s. Its architecture was another text about Ivan’s God-given destiny. Much of it recalled the specific dates of his recent victories (the Festival of the Intercession, for instance, coincided with the start of the final assault on Kazan).81 Among the other chapels, one was dedicated to St Varlaam, whose name Ivan’s father, Vasily III, had taken when he became a monk on the eve of his death.82 The exception, the wild card, was the smallest chapel, which Muscovites themselves began to associate with a holy man called Basil the Blessed. Basil, who had died in 1552, was a Holy Fool, famous for walking Moscow’s icy streets barefoot and often naked underneath his dirt. But he was loved and revered as a truth-teller, a fool in Christ.83 When it was finished, Ivan’s fantastic cathedral was the tallest building in the city, but it was the spirit of the Holy Fool, the shaman, half in darkness, half in light, that came, eventually, to monopolize it all.

  In Ivan’s time, however, a different chapel in the same building seems to have played the really colourful role. This one was dedicated to Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. The name was a reference, not even thinly veiled, to Ivan’s own return to Moscow from Kazan, but it was also the cue for another of the court rituals that seemed designed to mystify outsiders.

  ‘On Palme Sunday,’ Anthony Jenkinson recalled, ‘they have a very solemne procession … First, they have a tree of good bignesse which is made fast upon two sleds, as though it were growing there, and it is hanged with apples, raisins, figs and dates, and with many other fruits abundantly.’ The sight of brightly coloured food, in the lean days of early spring, may well have been miraculous in its own right, but the procession that came next was even more remarkable. ‘First,’ Jenkinson continued, ‘there is a horse covered with white linnen cloth down to the ground, his eares being made long with the same cloth like to an asses eares. Upon this horse the Metropolitan sitteth sidelong like a woman.’ Leading the horse, in the middle of the huge procession, was the tsar himself, on foot, a palm frond in the hand that did not hold the reins. Tsar and metropolitan were preceded by a wooden cross, and youths spread cloth on the ground to make way for the ritual ‘asse’. Here was another living icon, and the route, from the Kremlin to the Chapel of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, emphasized Moscow’s status as the earthly image of God’s chosen city.

  The tsar’s role in the tableau remains a puzzle. Some experts take the scene at face value, and argue that it shows Ivan deferring to his spiritual leader in an act of ritual submission.84 Like some views of the dominant role of the boyars, this one runs counter to the popular image of the Russian ruler as an autocrat, and so it fascinates historians of Ivan’s court. The mystery is never likely to be solved, but what is clear is that submission – in this world, at least – was never Ivan’s strongest suit. By 1558, when Jenkinson observed him, the tsar was already earning a name for cruelty, and in later years his deference to metropolitans did not prevent him from having one of Makary’s s
uccessors murdered. An alternative explanation for the ritual sees the scene as another assertion of Ivan’s Christ-like role, and this seems more convincing in terms of iconography and even general context.85 Like the ceremony on the ice each January, the Palm Sunday parade quickly became a favourite with Muscovites. In that respect, it was also a useful tool in the church’s continuing battle against paganism and natural magic. As he approached middle age, that struggle made such a deep impression on Ivan himself that he seemed almost to embody it.

  * * *

  The tsar’s long reign had been inaugurated with church bells, but by the 1560s there were rumours, fostered by his enemies, that Ivan’s court was promiscuous, drunk and bawdy, his palace filled with louts and jesters, its candles burning late into the night as the shadows of minstrels and drunks capered and loomed. The persistent fable that there were two Ivans, a benevolent, reforming youth and an ailing, vindictive old man, is unconvincing, but there is evidence that the tsar’s mental health, always fragile, began to collapse as he aged, and he certainly suffered from a painful, and occasionally excruciating, spinal deformity.86 He was also beset by growing fears about the succession, for though he now had two male heirs, Ivan and Fedor, the boys were young, and in 1560 their mother, Tsaritsa Anastasia, had died. As he considered his children’s futures, gruesome memories of his own childhood made Ivan suspicious of the clans who continued to figure so centrally at court. His faith in these was further tested by their resistance to his plan for an extended war against Moscow’s neighbours on the Baltic coast.87 Ivan became more and more volatile, and by the time of Makary’s death in 1563, his conduct bore little evidence of the respectful piety that his mentor had marked out for him.

  The most portentous change came in December 1564. The feast of St Nicholas fell on 6 December, and Ivan intended to celebrate it with his family in the fortress city of Kolomna, seventy miles south-east of Moscow. Such journeys, often involving a large part of the court, were common everywhere in Europe at the time; an annual round of pilgrimages and even hunting expeditions gave sovereigns an opportunity to assert their rule over the provinces directly, and afforded far-flung subjects a much-valued chance to glimpse a splendid prince with their own eyes. This time, however, Ivan packed to leave the Kremlin as if escaping from a threatened siege. He gathered up a huge weight of gold and jewels, and he also requisitioned icons, crosses, gold and sacred treasures from churches and monasteries beyond the Kremlin walls.88 The line of sledges stretched over the snow like a small army on campaign, and like an army it eventually made camp. Ivan led the royal progress from Kolomna to the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery, and finally established himself some miles deeper still into the hills to the north-east, at his late father’s fortified country estate of Alexandrovskaya sloboda. Again, such pilgrimages were not rare – the death of his beloved Anastasia was probably hastened by the incessant travelling on which Ivan insisted – but this time the tsar’s journey was unscheduled. More puzzling still was Ivan’s curt summons to a picked list of boyars, demanding that they leave Moscow and join him at the palace in the fields.

  The land of Russia had been orphaned. No prayers and no appeals to the memory of Moscow’s holy saints looked likely to bring Ivan back. And a court without a prince, as Muscovites were cruelly aware, was rudderless. In January 1565, nobles and church leaders struggled with the prospect of chaos. What they learned, through a series of terrifying embassies between the tsar’s fortress and the metropolitan’s residence in the Kremlin, was that Ivan was threatening to abdicate. The idea was unthinkable – it was a blasphemy, a betrayal, it would have made the country ungovernable – so Moscow’s lords, chaired by the new metropolitan (Afanasy) and backed by a chorus of citizens, begged Ivan to resume his crown at any price.89 The message given to the snow-bound palace was that his people would endow their tsar with any kind of power, pass any law, confess to every treachery. No-one dared call Ivan’s apparent bluff, for he was neither mad nor dying. In effect, he was testing loyalties and making sure of personal support, but it was the strangest, and most chilling, atmosphere in which to shape his new programme for sovereignty.

  As he considered his courtiers’ entreaties, Ivan himself may not have known what terms he would eventually demand.90 His immediate condition was that he should be permitted to dispose of certain enemies without further interference from the church, the bureaucrats or the boyars. The first victims, beheaded in the shadow of the Kremlin walls, were senior members of the ancient Shuisky clan.91 Though he showed no pity for the condemned, Ivan paid for expiatory prayers to be said after the event; as tsar, he always saw his actions as service to God.92 One of the more vivid explanations for his violence, indeed, sees it as a way of putting his own kingship to the test before the courts of heaven, casting Ivan more in the role of Lucifer than of Christ.93

  But Ivan’s plans were not limited to assassination. More far-reaching was his scheme to split his empire and create a separate kingdom within it where no plot or whisper (and certainly no pressure from a council of boyars) could challenge his personal writ. According to this programme, part of the Muscovite realm would continue more or less as it had done before, with a government in the Kremlin that involved the principal boyars and with prikazy to manage most routine administration. This territory, whose ruler in the first instance was to be a boyar called Ivan Mstislavsky, would soon be known as the zemshchina, from the Russian word for land. The other part, however, which included almost all the wealthiest towns, was the portion that Ivan intended to rule, alone and without interference, from his effective capital at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. In practice, Ivan never quit the Kremlin for all time, just as his threats to abdicate were never really implemented, but the uncertainty he generated was oppressive. Muscovites began to whisper a new term, oprichnina, the word (derived from the Russian for separate, apart) that Ivan had chosen to describe the unfortunate estates that he proposed to control for himself. In time, the same term would also become a byword for the terror that his tyranny unleashed.

  To run the new oprichnina, Ivan shipped wagon-loads of clerks and trusted officials from Moscow to his out-of-town stronghold; his next requirement was an army to enforce his orders and make sure of his lands. The corps he recruited, the extortionists and bullies who became infamous as the oprichniki, was swathed in black, a nightmare vision of apocalypse. The symbols on their bridles were a dog’s head and a broom, for their mission was to savage the tsar’s enemies and drive them from the realm. Initially about a thousand in number, their ranks grew in the next five years and ultimately comprised about six thousand mounted men, drawn from all classes and united by a common greed.94

  The appearance of these horsemen in a district almost always spelled misery. Not only adult males – the clansmen Ivan might justly have feared, the councillors who had queried a policy or chafed under a tax – but entire families including children were tortured and killed. Villages were burned and the houses of former boyars left to the wind and snow. Some of this property was supposed to go to the oprichniki, and many profited significantly from their work, but at the time the land seemed merely ruined.95 Heinrich von Staden, the German who had visited the prikazy and described the conditions of the clerks, was also a hired mercenary with the oprichniki, and he left a chilling account of their impact. ‘The villages were burned with their churches, and everything that was in them, icons and church ornaments,’ he wrote. ‘Women and girls were stripped naked and forced in that state to catch chickens in the fields.’96

  As Ivan and his minions came and went, Moscow’s sacred fort witnessed more than its share of executions. In 1568, the tsar’s spies reported a new plot to remove him from power. The chief conspirator, Prince Ivan Petrovich Cheliadnin-Fedorov, was summoned to the Kremlin and stabbed in the heart by Ivan himself. His body was dragged several times around the fortress walls before being dumped in the main commercial square.97 Cheliadnin-Fedorov’s estates fell to the oprichniki. ‘He did not spare them,’ a contempora
ry source related, explaining how Ivan’s men killed over a hundred of the prince’s noble servitors. No-one was pardoned, not even ‘their wives, nor their little children sucking at their mothers’ breasts; and they say that he even ordered that not a single animal be left alive.’98 But the tsar’s wrath was not assuaged, and the land around Moscow’s fortress continued to be stained with blood. The dead – impaled, beheaded, quartered or strangled – were left in piles under the Kremlin walls, and bodies choked the fetid ditch along the Neglinnaya river.99

  The following year, the oprichnina claimed its most illustrious victim when Ivan’s thirty-six-year-old cousin, Vladimir of Staritsa, was forced to swallow poison at the hands of the infamous oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov, at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. His children were murdered beside him. The pretext was a rumour (improbable) that Vladimir was plotting to seize the crown, but there did not have to be a reason for specific killings at this time. The terror had a logic of its own. No-one could feel safe, not even leaders of the church. In 1568, the new metropolitan, Filipp II, who had dared to speak against the tsar’s cruelty, was seized by Ivan’s men during a public service, forcibly unfrocked, and bundled off to a monastery in Tver. Months later, still protesting against unnecessary bloodshed, he was smothered there by Skuratov.100 Ivan himself remained tormentedly devout despite this outrage, and he frequently ordered his torturers to suspend their activities, wherever he was, while he engaged in extended prostrations and prayers. ‘Dying for the tsar,’ the historian Sergei Bogatyrev explains, ‘was represented as being akin to dying for Christ … [Ivan] subjected his counsellors to disgrace and execution in the belief that he would thereby purify himself and his subjects on the eve of judgement day.’101