He would, of course, build a new capital as well. The most protracted military campaign of Peter’s life opened with an alliance against Sweden in 1700. The tsar’s Grand Embassy had visited Riga on its European tour, and Peter now claimed that the Swedes had slighted him. There were also rumours, probably fabricated, that the Swedes themselves were preparing to attack Russia’s northern trading cities, including Novgorod, Pskov and Archangel.40 In reality, Peter and his allies, Christian V of Denmark and Augustus II of Poland and Saxony, may well have decided to take advantage of the inexperience of Sweden’s new ruler, the eighteen-year-old Charles XII. But the calculation backfired. The austere Swede proved an even more determined warrior than Peter, and in November 1700 the Russians, who had fielded four times as many troops as Charles, sustained a punishing defeat at Narva on the Baltic coast. More than 10,000 Russian lives were lost, 150 Russian cannon captured, and Peter (shamefully) was forced to flee.41 Russia’s military iron age began with a catastrophe.
The victories that followed probably owed more to Charles’ low opinion of Peter than to any Russian prowess in the field. From 1701, the main part of the Swedish army was occupied in wars with Poland and Saxony. Confronted with a smaller force, the Russians won a series of battles, capturing the fortress of Nöteborg on Lake Ladoga in October 1702. The following spring, Russian troops took a Swedish settlement called Nyenkans further down the River Neva. After a boat-trip to assess the strategic possibilities of the low-lying delta, Peter chose an island downstream, which the Finns called Yannisaari, for his own defensive military fort. The site was dedicated by Russian priests on Peter’s name day in the summer of 1703. Poor as it seemed, remote and bleak, this was the future kernel of St Petersburg.42
Moscow paid an ugly price for these adventures. For years, there was a real danger that the Swedes might strike directly at the Russian capital. The renaissance Kremlin would have been an easy target for their European guns, so Peter ordered that the citadel should be refortified. In 1707, he brought his best siege-engineers to excavate and build eighteen massive bastions to Dutch designs.43 The work meant shifting mountains of soil and timber in the centre of Russia’s busiest city, displacing street vendors and merchants’ halls, and even ploughing up Aleksei Mikhailovich’s beloved apothecary garden. At first, the builders dragged their feet, constrained by lack of money, but in October 1707 Peter’s son, Aleksei Petrovich, suggested that each bastion be assigned to a specific boyar. The list that was eventually approved reads like a last roll call of historic Muscovy – the first two bastions were assigned to Peter and his son, but then came Golitsyn, Dolgoruky, Saltykov, Prozorovsky and all the great dynastic names.44 It was the most ambitious addition to the Kremlin’s fortifications since the time of Ivan III. Thirty thousand labourers were involved in the project, which was the largest of its time in Russia. When it was finished, a jumble of civil buildings and market stalls had been swept aside, and the Kremlin was trapped behind a double row of freshly turned ramparts.45 The change reflected recent European military science, but it cut through the medieval city-centre like a scar.
Peter’s armies ultimately won. In June 1709, a Swedish force under Charles XII’s leadership was defeated at Poltava in central Ukraine. The celebrations were compulsory, lavish, and loud. There were fireworks and cannon-rounds, fanfares, drummers and Russian pipes. The centre-piece, in January 1710, was a triumphal procession through Moscow. Peter entered his capital on horseback behind the Preobrazhensky regiment, his route adorned by seven wooden arches in the classical style with inscriptions praising Russia’s ‘Mars’, its ‘Hercules’, the emperor who conquered like a Roman god. The temporary structures cost small fortunes to design and build, but Russian nobles now vied jealously to pay for them. Aleksei Zubov produced the usual commemorative engravings – orderly, narrative, classical in design – and they show processions in the European style, devoid of long robes, fur hats, or hirsute boyars.46 Every detail was carefully recorded, from the sword in the hand of a carved gladiator on an arch to the tricorne hats that the real soldiers wore, but the Kremlin, landlocked relic of a different age, barely figured anywhere at all. Peter used the fortress merely as an extra prop. Its towers made a good support for garlands, and its gates looked grand when they were lit with thousands of his multi-coloured lamps.47
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Peter’s foreign policy ensured Russia’s place at the European table. Muscovy was all but forgotten as a new imperial Russia took the stage. From 1721, when Peter signed the Peace of Nystad with Sweden, the Russian empire, which already stretched from the Pacific to the Dnieper, came to embrace the Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga, parts of Karelia, and islands in the Baltic Sea. At the heart of it all, however, the Kremlin entered an age of eclipse. The turning point was probably 1711, when the bulk of government business shifted to St Petersburg. As Peter departed from Moscow, so did his wife, his family, and the usual troupe of guardsmen, flunkeys and informers. The citadel of the old state must have felt strangely empty.
The noblemen themselves were torn between the comforts and familiarity of Moscow and the chance of promotion at Peter’s Baltic court. In 1714, Peter resolved the matter for at least a thousand of them when he issued an order that forced them to relocate, with their households, to his new city on the Neva. According to a survey of 1701, there were forty-three significant households (dvory) inside the Kremlin walls at the start of Peter’s reign, five of which were headed by courtiers and the other thirty-eight by elite priests.48 Thirty years later, however, even that small total had been cut to ten. There had also been a reduction in the number of wealthy courtiers living at expensive addresses nearby.49 Everyone complained about the thieves and ruffians who seemed to have replaced them on Moscow’s exclusive and once-fashionable streets.50
Moscow remained the ‘first’ capital, but over time less and less of the sovereign’s business took place in the Kremlin itself. For years, Peter had held his meetings at Preobrazhenskoe; he issued numerous decrees from there. Only the great files of paper stayed in the Kremlin, stacking up in requisitioned rooms, many of which had never been designed as offices. To add to the problems of co-ordination, especially in war-time, Peter was constantly on the move. In 1711, in the interests of efficiency, the tsar created an entirely new body, the ten-man Senate, whose task it was to run the country on a daily basis whenever he was on campaign. For two years, this met in a building behind the Kremlin’s Annunciation Cathedral, but when the Senate moved north, all that was left (apart from a new, less glamorous, government for Moscow) was the paper. In years to come, reports would start alluding to activities by mice.51
As part of the same reform, the prikazy were replaced by ‘colleges’. Far from making government simpler, this second move led to a multiplication of offices, many of which remained in Moscow or retained an extensive set of sub-departments there. The noble politicians might have left, in other words, but those of lesser rank now moved into the fortress, installing servants, horses and wives. A number of palace buildings – notably those that had once served as bakeries and stores – were transformed into office-blocks and even unofficial tenements.52 With the administrators came the need for facilities, including a prison for offenders awaiting sentence and several sets of public stocks. A tavern sprouted up as well.53 The royal apartments themselves were untouched, but even that, in a city of cold and damp, amounted to a death sentence. By the end of Peter’s reign, large parts of the old Kremlin palace were uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, to pay for Peter’s war, a team of bureaucrats was charged with squeezing money from the two great Kremlin monasteries. In requisitioning a portion of monastic wealth, the emperor was only continuing policies his father and others had begun, but his style was unapologetic. In 1699, for instance, as part of a wider review, the Kremlin cathedrals and monasteries alike found their spending and tax privileges under scrutiny. Among the claims that were dismissed was one from the Annunciation Cathedral. It turned out that its staff had been su
bmitting an inflated candle order for years, supposedly to provide spares in case the usual ones miraculously self-ignited.54 Two years later, when the Patriarchal court was abolished in favour of a Monastery Chancellery, church income began to be collected centrally, and in 1706 the Kremlin’s religious foundations, like all others, lost the tax exemption that had allowed them independent control of land and serfs.55 In 1721, Peter finally abolished the patriarchate altogether, and the grand buildings that Nikon had built in the 1650s were reassigned. Church leaders now met as a committee, the Holy Synod. The atmosphere was muted, even drab, for bureaucrats will always lack the charisma of wonder-working saints. And Peter changed the rules for verifying miracles, which meant that almost nothing qualified for years.56 Moscow still had its metropolitan, a man to lead cathedral prayers and the processions at great feasts, but the patriarch’s seat in the Dormition Cathedral remained empty.57
With that, the meaning of the citadel itself began to change. To some, it was a landmark and a talisman, a jewel; but by the early eighteenth century it was also possible to view it in a very different light. Eternal Moscow was a myth; Peter’s reforms had proved that people could be forced to live in rapidly moving secular time. The past, meanwhile, had finally turned into history. It was a new diversion for the emperor and his close friends. Peter initiated a series of measures to catalogue, preserve and explore what he referred to as ‘curiosities’.58 He began, in 1701, by ordering his palace workshop staff to create an inventory of the Kremlin’s treasures, possibly with a view to raising cash. At a time when the wealthiest man in Russia, Sofiya’s co-plotter Vasily Golitsyn, had just forfeited estates worth 71,000 rubles, the value of Peter’s treasury was estimated at approximately 250,000 rubles.59 A century after the Time of Troubles, when so much had been lost or looted, this was a satisfying tally. And the list itself may well have piqued the emperor’s interest. In Europe, he had visited palaces where treasures were prized, and not as holy objects, nor as cash deposits in the safe, but as pieces of art. In 1718, Peter had parts of the Kremlin treasury displayed, commissioning glass cases for the choicest items.60 Gold cups, pearl robes and jewelled swords, recently part of ceremonial life, were now available for his guests to admire like the relics of a vanished civilization.
Peter also ordered his empire’s churches, cathedrals and monasteries to submit their most interesting parchments and papers to the Senate for scrutiny and possible copying.61 Historically, it had been the Russian church that kept the records of the past. The Holy Synod still resisted the idea that anyone might be allowed to work through the material and write a book (its condemnation used words such as ‘pointless’ and ‘deceitful’), but Peter’s new collection formed the basis of a valuable archive for the historians of later times. A reform of the alphabet in 1708, aimed at creating a rational script for government, made many older documents seem more exotic still. And then there was a treasure-hunt, also inspired by the idea of half-forgotten manuscripts. For years, there had been rumours of valuables and a priceless library, a collection saved from lost Byzantium and brought to Moscow by Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother, Sofiya Palaeologa. Long buried somewhere under the Kremlin, its fabled riches now began to beckon the impious Kremlin residents of this very different age. The first search was initiated by Fedor Romodanovsky, who used the excavations for Peter’s arsenal as an opportunity to hunt for hidden vaults (he later claimed to have discovered two complete underground palaces, but the story has never been corroborated). In 1724, a d’yak called Osipov began a second dig around the Tainitsky gates, which was continued, with the blessing of the Senate, a decade later. A lot of tired servants moved a lot of soil, but nothing was found.62 The rumours and the dream, however, would prove more durable, over the centuries, than any cache of old vellum.
The Kremlin was becoming a visitor attraction. Peter even introduced an entrance charge. Worldly though he was, the Habsburg envoy Johann Korb was impressed after his tour of the relics and icons.63 But signs of neglect were everywhere, from gardens ‘going to ruin on account of human sloth’, as he observed, to royal apartments falling victim to burst guttering and moss.64 By mid-century, the Kremlin was decaying into Russia’s Fontainebleau, the poor relation to St Petersburg’s Versailles. Indeed, a Russian nobleman who visited the old French palaces at Fontainebleau in 1756 (travel abroad was almost commonplace by then), wrote that he felt ‘as if I were in Moscow in the Kremlin palace. There is no symmetry of any kind; it’s mostly chambers and entrance-ways. In a word, every single prince seems to have built something somewhere by whatever architectural rules happened to prevail.’65
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Inconvenient though it was, the Kremlin was never totally abandoned. The citadel had two main symbolic uses in the new imperial Russia. In the first place, it was still a valued symbol of apparent continuity. In the decades to come, there was no better place to crown a tsar, especially when the candidate was mad, female, illegitimate, or a suspected regicide. And the Kremlin also mattered because it was the heart of Moscow; no-one ever held Russia without that capital’s support. In 1718, when Peter disinherited his eldest son, Aleksei, he chose to hold a trumped-up treason hearing in the Kremlin’s banqueting hall; it was a way of facing down the simmering opposition of a city that had not grown used to bowing to St Petersburg (and still, perhaps, believed in royal primogeniture). On 3 February 1718, the court listened in silence as a tearful Aleksei renounced his claim to the throne. The new heir, Peter’s infant son Peter Petrovich, was proclaimed in the Dormition Cathedral immediately afterwards. Beneath the Kremlin walls, meanwhile, the fact of Peter’s absolute personal rule was emphasized to every Muscovite bystander by the elite guards who patrolled day and night in groups of five or ten.66
The choice of Moscow for the first of the new era’s coronations was also politically inspired. Aleksei died in St Petersburg in June 1718, quite possibly at his own father’s hands and certainly after weeks of the torture that his father had supervised. But the tsar-elect, Peter’s adored Peter Petrovich, did not survive beyond his infancy. In his last years, Peter the Great was left without an obvious heir. Whatever happened, he would have to make a choice, and his people would have somehow to be induced (even after his death) to accept it. The court ideologue of the time, Feofan Prokopovich, produced the necessary legal reform (it stated that each tsar henceforth should have the right to name his own successor), but legitimacy needed more than the mere letter of the law. By 1722, Peter had decided to trust his empire to his second wife, Catherine. This woman, born Marta Skavronska, came from provincial Lithuania and had started life as a laundress. Her origins, however, were only one of many possible objections to the idea that she might reign as Russia’s empress. No woman (with dubious exceptions such as Elena Glinskaya and Peter’s half-sister Sofiya) had ever ruled the Russian lands. And Peter wanted to crown her himself. There was no patriarch to preside, no dead tsar to replace, and no cluster of golden-robed boyars to kiss the cross. Legitimacy was the central problem, so Peter wisely gravitated to the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral for the ceremony. Every new sovereign after him would do the same.
The script, the symbols and the velvet uniforms were all Petrine creations. The preparations for Catherine’s great day were as thorough as Makary’s plans for Ivan the Terrible, and the atmosphere was probably as tense. The ceremony was planned as a ‘coronation’ (koronatsiia), a European term that Peter chose in favour of the traditional Russian venchanie. Having set their faces against one tradition, however, the members of the coronation commission were careful to combine the most impressive European borrowings with concessions to Russian taste. While reading all they could about the customs of ancient Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, Peter’s advisors also studied old Byzantium, for this at least was one place where women had ruled as empresses.67 They observed that regalia were central, and while they could make use of an existing sceptre and orb, they decided to commission a new crown, since the traditional Russian jewelled cap lacked the
desired elegance. A jeweller called Samson Larionov, whose trade was ‘to make things with diamonds for her imperial highness’, was approached in deepest secrecy. His commission was to produce a crown that would appear, when finished, ‘as if old, and not newly-made’.68
The Kremlin buildings also needed work, and the preparations began in 1722. Staff were drafted to the Kremlin workshops, which had seen little business for a decade. They began with the refurbishment of the Faceted Palace. In the years between his accession and departure for St Petersburg, Peter had allowed this space to be used for theatrical performances. As a result, the remnants of the old frescoes had suffered irreparable damage, and now there was neither the time nor means to restore them. Instead, as court engravings show, the venerable walls were covered with cloth and the carved detailing given an entirely new look with red and gold paint.69 The banqueting hall received the same kind of well-meant attention. As the painters whitewashed and made good, other craftsmen worked to build the thrones, walkways and galleries that would be needed for the sovereigns and their guests. The schedule was tight, and no allowance was made for refurbishing the Terem Palace, which gaped on to Cathedral Square like a sightless guest. Someone estimated that it would cost 50,000 rubles merely to repair its window-frames.70
On 5 May 1724, Moscow was woken by the sound of trumpets. For forty-eight hours, the heralds announced the coronation to a city and its numerous expensive visitors. The Kremlin bells might ring as they had always done, but this was a new kind of pageant, and Peter intended to shake the old stones to the ground. On 7 May, Peter and Catherine entered the cathedral in a spirit very different from that of Peter’s own coronation three decades before. Instead of streltsy, there were members of the newly formed Guards regiments; instead of robed boyars, a line of courtiers in European dress. The crowd, indeed, included many foreigners, not least the families of Peter’s married daughters. As to the principals, Catherine herself wore an embroidered purple robe with gold trim, imported from Paris, and Peter a kaftan and breeches in sky-blue silk, embroidered in silver, topped off with a matching hat with a magnificent white feather. Led as it was by uniformed marshals and Peter’s closest aides, the procession gleamed in rainbow hues, a far cry from the golden monochrome of Peter’s youth.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 24
