Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  To read the map beside the written history, moreover, is to turn it from a snapshot into commentary. One thing it shows is that the Kremlin had been changing at breathtaking pace in the years – not even twenty – since Tsar Ivan’s death. There has been plenty of rebuilding and repair since the last fire, but all the same there are now fewer mansions for boyars. The names of the Belskys, Mstislavskys, Sitskys and Sheremetevs are mentioned in the key that Blaeu provides, and their walled palaces seem like small kremlins of their own, but the Patrikeyevs and Khovrins have disappeared along with half a dozen others. Instead, one name is mentioned several times: there are at least three mansions for the Godunovs. This is not a casual mistake, for the leader of this clan, the great lord Boris Godunov, has clearly added buildings everywhere. He has extended the tsar’s palace, for instance, and he has made the bell tower of Ivan the Great into a serious landmark, adding new tiers and a cupola. Another angular structure, obviously brick, is marked ‘prikazy’, and this time the design looks set to last. Meanwhile, there has been a significant change to the stone building, behind the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, that was last known as the metropolitan’s residence. The international status of the Russian church must have improved, for this is now the palace of a patriarch.

  The faithful map shows all of this, but despite all that it is misleading in a way that even Blaeu himself might not have grasped. The Dutchman’s buildings cast compact, untroubled shadows, and yet the decades after Ivan the Terrible’s death were among the most turbulent in the Kremlin’s existence. Kremlenagrad is incomplete without that darkness, but to begin to look for it you need to know some history, and Blaeu was probably as hazy about Russia’s as any other north-west European. As a map-maker, he would have been distracted, too, by all the new worlds of his day, for his was the golden age of European exploration. The coasts of continents as diverse as America and East Asia were gradually taking shape on paper with Dutch water-marks. These were fantastic places; exotic and terrifying. But the most eccentric sailors’ tales of foreign lands could not have been more wildly wrong than the idea that the Kremlin of Kremlenagrad was orderly, immaculate, tranquil.

  * * *

  When Ivan the Terrible died, in March 1584, the boyars once again held Moscow’s future in their hands. Even now, it is not easy to like the members of this jealous, arrogant elite. The French mercenary Jacques Margeret, who later headed the tsar’s foreign troops, was never enthusiastic. The nobles he met were as soft as grubs. ‘They go on horseback in the summer and in winter on sleighs,’ he wrote, ‘so that they get no exercise. This makes them stout and obese.’4 A Dutch grain merchant, Isaac Massa, whose own well-fleshed features can still be studied in two portraits by Frans Hals, was no more flattering about them. ‘The magnates’, he decided in his memoir of Russia,

  lead a fairly unhappy life in this country. Obliged to be at court continually and remain standing for days on end before the emperor, they scarcely have one day of rest in three or four. The more they are raised in honour, the wearier they are out of anxiety and fear, and yet nevertheless they are constantly seeking to mount higher.5

  In the boyars’ defence, there was no obvious alternative. The Kremlin was not an arena that these families could simply leave at will. The ancient clans were bound to serve, and that meant they were trapped for life. Though ordinary people loathed them and believed they blocked free access to the tsar (who was essentially conceived as good), boyars (good and bad) had been governing beside the sovereign for ten generations. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the question that had to be settled was whether one of them might finally ascend the throne in his own right.

  The system was still based mainly on families, so it was notable that the man whose name featured so centrally on Joan Blaeu’s map, Boris Godunov, came of a doubtful pedigree. Most other boyar families in the Kremlin had been there in some guise for centuries, and many were related or allied in complex ways. The Romanov clan, for instance, which traced its noble service back to the days of Ivan Kalita’s eldest son, had junior branches whose members, by the 1580s, were almost equally eminent, including the Cherkasskys, the Sheremetevs and the Shestunovs. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, in the lifetime of boyar Nikita Romanovich Yurev-Zakharin, one of the Romanovs’ most distinguished leaders, this clan did not disdain to build dynastic links with the Godunovs.6 But other members of the old elite were more uneasy with the newcomers. The Godunovs appeared to be a vulgar brood. As the latest generation of them grew and flourished in the 1580s, the youngsters’ talent and their quick success galled many who believed that every Kremlin prize was theirs by right of blood and history.

  Boris himself grew up at the oprichnina court. It was not the most promising environment for a moral education, and to make matters worse, the wife that the young man’s father chose for him seems to have been a latter-day Lady Macbeth. Mariya Godunova was the daughter of Ivan’s most infamous enforcer, Malyuta Skuratov, and it was through that connection that young Boris and his sister, Irina, made much of their early progress in national politics.7 They also made some powerful enemies, some of whom survived to shape the way their tale was told after their deaths. That is why, in subsequent accounts, there always seem to be at least two Boris Godunovs: a good one, enlightened and generous, and a murderer, the tragic anti-hero who later featured in Mussorgsky’s opera.8 What no-one ever questions, however, is that Boris was very rich. If anyone in the sixteenth-century Kremlin was the equivalent of a twenty-first-century oligarch, it was the clever, restless Godunov.

  At thirty-three, Boris lacked natural grace. While some old clans could run to handsome, agile sons, the young boyar, at least according to Isaac Massa, ‘was a man short in stature, fairly corpulent, with a somewhat round face’.9 His wits were his fortune. He was the sort of man who quickly earns the loyalty of his officials: calculating, imaginative, and blessed with a memory for detail.10 Few Russian rulers harboured larger plans for Moscow’s spiritual primacy, and these, combined with his ambitions for the Godunov dynasty itself, gave young Boris a sense of mission.11 Like several dictators of a much more recent age, he may also have reaped an unintended advantage from the disdain of blue-blooded rivals, although he shared their love of old-world style.12

  The Godunovs’ collective fortunes took a particularly promising turn in the last years of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, when Irina Godunova married Fedor, the ageing tyrant’s second son. The marriage, however, was far from conventional. Many accounts claim that Fedor was mentally handicapped, as simple and as helpless as a child. Whether this was true or not, the dying tsar thought it prudent to name a four-man regency council to protect the youth. Again, the Godunovs did well, for in addition to the princes Ivan Mstislavsky and Ivan Shuisky, its members were Nikita Romanovich Yurev-Zakharin and his ally, Boris Godunov.13 The first test for these regents came while Ivan’s body was still warm. One of the late tsar’s former henchmen, Bogdan Belsky, took advantage of the general confusion to attempt a coup. The atmosphere was very tense – as it was bound to be while the succession was unclear – but then a rumour spread through Moscow that the oprichnina was coming back.14 Even in a depressed and depopulated city, the prospect of more bloodshed and injustice was enough to provoke violence. Grasping for any weapon that came to hand – a pike, a club, perhaps a sword – the braver citizens made their way straight to the Kremlin to demand the truth, but as they mounted the bridge to cross the moat they found the huge gates barred. The regents’ first full night of power ended in looting and at least twenty recorded deaths as the mob flowed back through the nearby rows of market stalls and past the arsenal.15

  Behind those massive bolted gates, meanwhile, the council met continuously through the night. Belsky was sentenced to exile, but that still left the courtiers with the problem of a suspicious, volatile mob. Child-like or not, Crown Prince Fedor was now the key. As Ivan’s heir (and people were already nostalgic for Ivan the Terrible, their late ‘true tsar’), hi
s presence offered an illusion of normality. The regents organized his coronation with an almost ugly haste. To an accompaniment of cheerful bells and showers of clinking silver coins, Fedor Ivanovich was proclaimed tsar on 31 May 1584. Significantly, Boris Godunov was the man who carried the new sovereign’s sceptre, a service for which he was rewarded with the title of master of the royal horse, konyushii, the most prestigious of boyars.16

  The last Daniilovich prince of Moscow, Tsar Fedor lived a pious, even contemplative life. He and Irina liked to pray, and no-one has ever managed to accuse them of any real malice. Secure in his own golden world, the tsar may not even have realized that his advisors were circling like vultures over an imminent kill. Outside his lavish fortress, however, the 1580s were proving to be unusually harsh and disturbing. Moscow itself was full of ghosts, its surviving population tormented by famine, fire and epidemic disease.17 The ‘little ice age’ was just beginning, and crops were failing everywhere in Europe, but the hunger in the Russian lands followed years of terror and plague, and unrest made the climate problem infinitely worse. For one thing, thousands had left their homes during Ivan’s reign, taking refuge in the borderlands to escape taxation or forced labour. Others, crushed by impossible debt, had sold themselves into slavery. Beyond the cities, peasants were still on the road, fleeing in their tens of thousands from the scourges of crop blight, debt and labour service. Most were making for the southern steppe and the Volga. According to one estimate, the acreage of land under cultivation in the north-eastern forest belt, including Vladimir, Suzdal and the Moscow region itself, dropped by 90 per cent in the decade after 1564.18 Novgorod and its hinterland were virtually empty. The sun could have shone through the night for all the good it would have done to fields of weeds. However little there was left to steal, meanwhile, there were so many strangers everywhere that yet another bane of life was banditry.

  Almost every class of citizen faced hardship. Ever since the days of Ivan III, the state of Moscow had expanded by conquering and suborning its neighbours, and the social costs of that approach were now becoming clear. Both local settlement and national defence, for instance, depended on the provincial gentry, the pomeshchiki, the men who had accepted smallish grants of land, often in the newly annexed territories and borderlands, in exchange for a continuing duty of military service. They were the sixteenth-century equivalent of patriotic settlers, but circumstances kept them from developing their farms.19 The continuous wars of Ivan the Terrible’s reign had demanded their participation almost without respite. In their absence, bonded labourers were supposed to cultivate the land and provide their masters with an income, but if the harvest failed the problems soon began to multiply. Estates turned into millstones as runaway peasants headed southwards to the rolling grasslands that most people now referred to as ‘the Field’. Shouldering their former master’s pike or axe, many of these fugitives joined the cossacks, the bands of outlaw horsemen who roamed the steppe like guerrilla gangs. But the state made no concession, in terms of service obligations, to the gentry militia-men, some of whom were now unable to cover the cost of their own food, let alone weapons or a horse. The peace-keepers were growing ever more demoralized, in other words, at just the time when outlaw bands were threatening security at home.

  The militia was no more help when it came to facing foreign threats. Indeed, their poverty was a guarantee that the Muscovite state would not keep pace with European military innovations. The corps of streltsy, the hereditary musketeers, were modern soldiers of a kind, but they formed only part of the army, and the firearms they used were still so unreliable, and at the same time so forbiddingly expensive, that the members of the gentry militia who fought beside them usually preferred to arm themselves with bows and arrows.20 The foreign armies on Russia’s frontiers were much better equipped, and most nursed more or less expansive plans. To the north, the Swedes harboured territorial ambitions in the Baltic, while Poland-Lithuania, to the west, eyed border towns across the rivers of Ukraine. The southern frontier was so exposed that even Moscow was not safe; in June 1591 a Tatar army led by Kazy-Girey reached the city’s outskirts.21 Other strategic centres, including Tula and Ryazan, were still more vulnerable, and slave-raids remained the curse of the Russian south for decades.

  Whatever dangers the land seemed to face, however, the boyars never ceased to vie for power. While Fedor lived, the Godunovs and Romanovs behaved like life-long friends, but the princes Shuisky and Mstislavsky each believed the tsar’s infirmity to be their cue to take control of Moscow’s throne.22 In 1585, it was Mstislavsky who made the first bid. When his plot failed, the Kremlin’s governing council ordered the defeated boyar to become a monk, and ruled that his son, Fedor, could never marry.23 This was a cruel punishment indeed; the idea was to make sure that the senior branch of the ancient Mstislavsky clan, whose royal service had begun in fourteenth-century Lithuania, would never produce another heir, let alone a new pretender.

  Less than a year later, Prince Ivan Shuisky, a descendant of the sainted Alexander Nevsky, chose to prepare a coup of his own.24 As usual, the plot began with malevolent rumours, and in the spring of 1586 there was a fresh panic in Russia’s capital. Shuisky let the people think that Boris Godunov was preparing to usurp Tsar Fedor’s crown. At this, the Kremlin tensed for civil war, and even the monks of the Chudov Monastery began to stock supplies of arms. Facing arrest and murder at Shuisky’s hands, Godunov himself became so alarmed that he made secret approaches to England, which was already getting a reputation as the destination of choice for Russian potentates in crisis (the first would-be asylum-seeker in this line having been Ivan the Terrible). The boyar’s escape-plan was not needed, but his rivals, aided by the metropolitan, Dionysii, certainly came within an ace of driving him from power.25

  It may have been Tsar Fedor who ultimately saved him. On the pretext that Irina Godunova had not managed to produce an heir, the Shuiskys planned to engineer a royal divorce. Their anti-Godunov alliance grew stronger when they persuaded Fedor Mstislavsky that it could be his sister whom the tsar married next (a nice piece of poetic justice in view of the recent ban on his own right to a wife). The downfall of the Godunovs looked certain until the young tsar himself showed an unsuspected power of decision. To everyone’s surprise, he refused to part with his wife, who was, in most respects, his best playmate as well as nurse. As the conspiracy collapsed, Boris and his Kremlin aide, the d’yak Andrei Shchelkalov, called in their debts, removing Dionysii from the metropolitan’s seat, exiling several other leading priests, and starting an investigation at court. Six of the main conspirators were beheaded, and others, cast from the Kremlin and stripped of their estates, were exiled to the provinces.26 The ailing Nikita Romanovich Yurev-Zakharin had died in April 1586. Of the four regents that Ivan the Terrible had originally appointed, only Godunov could now wield power.

  * * *

  Boris Godunov was not so foolish as to count himself secure. In a court riddled with intrigue, his regent’s role was never guaranteed, while the country was beset with problems that resisted all reform. His government passed a series of measures to help the gentry by tying the peasants to their masters’ land.27 It also raised taxes and found labour for much-needed public works. Andrei Shchelkalov, described by Massa as ‘a man of finesse, audacity and duplicity not to be credited’, could squeeze money from anyone, even the Kremlin monks.28 But no good works and no veiled threats could neutralize the opposition that his master faced. The church was full of discontent, for the priest that Boris had installed as metropolitan, his loyal henchman Yov, was widely viewed as an outsider, a man whose background had been tainted by a long association with the Godunovs. The boyar’s next move, therefore, was a masterstroke.

  In 1588, two years after the Shuisky crisis, the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah, travelled to Moscow to petition for financial aid. Such missions had become a tedious necessity for Orthodox leaders from the Middle East, who were struggling to raise revenue under Turkish rule. Jeremiah
’s first audience with Godunov and the d’yak Shchelkalov took place in July. Further conversations would be inescapable, but his plan was to return home before the first serious autumn rain. In the event, however, the patriarch and his suite were subjected to luxury house-arrest for nearly ten more months. Pretexts were found for each delay, and no-one mentioned force majeure, but as the weeks passed it became clear that Tsar Fedor’s government (for which read Boris and Shchelkalov) would not release the visitors, still less afford their church financial aid, until certain conditions had been met. Months were wasted in the boredom of official politesse. Even if the foreigners managed to venture out, their path was always lined with Kremlin guards. If the Russians’ purpose was to isolate their visitors from reality, the tactic worked. At one point, as if mesmerized by the Kremlin’s splendour, Jeremiah started to play with the idea of moving his own patriarchal seat to Moscow in a bid to escape the Turkish yoke.

  This was not Godunov’s plan. The regent used a range of methods to make his points clear (Shchelkalov threatened to drown a member of the Greek delegation in the Moscow river29), and in time Jeremiah acceded to his wishes. In 1589, with the agreement of the ancient churches of the east, the leader of Russian Orthodoxy was formally elevated to the rank of Patriarch. Yov was enthroned in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral, and glory shone on smooth-faced Fedor for a second time. If Moscow had ever pretended to be a third Rome, the proof – and the responsibility – was evident now.30 The creation of the patriarchate also added to the traffic in and out of Moscow’s fortress; the Kremlin’s opportunity to become a world-class centre of spirituality and culture had finally dawned.

  The triumph did a lot to bolster Godunov’s position, but the other testimony to his skills was more immediately visible. The regent was a large-scale commissioner of building-works. His main programme began in 1586. For nearly two decades to come, Godunov’s architects employed a small army of builders, in the process providing work for thousands of hungry citizens at a time of economic stress. The projects sometimes took place far from Moscow, transforming landscapes in the provinces with brick and stone. But Godunov was also constantly aware of the Kremlin. Just before his death, indeed, his last construction scheme was meant to fix its place for ever as the capital of universal Orthodoxy.