Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The architect needed to be certain of the play of light and colour everywhere, so artists worked beside his draughtsmen from the first. Their task was to create a set of elfin versions of the future wall and ceiling panels for the interiors, perfect in every detail. Catherine put her foot down when she heard that ‘finished paintings’ were being created, at her expense, for a mere maquette, but by this time the sum of 60,000 rubles had already been poured into Bazhenov’s miniatures.98 The models were so lifelike that they became tourist attractions in their own right. They also constituted a kind of advanced architecture school: the brilliant Matvei Kazakov, Bazhenov’s deputy, used them to train young draughtsmen as they worked on them. The plans provided a beautiful focus for reformers’ dreams. Catherine herself decreed that Bazhenov’s model-house should be open for viewing by the public, ‘except for the baser sort’.99

  The plague that hit Moscow in 1771, however, respected neither class nor education. It was deadly even by eighteenth-century standards, and by the time it had run its course, about a quarter of Moscow’s population (or just under 57,000 people) had perished.100 At the height of the infection, in August–September 1771, as many as nine hundred people were dying in the city every day, and the survivors trembled in panic. A riot broke out when a rumour started that plague spots had appeared on the icon of the Virgin that was kept in a public chapel not far from the Kremlin. Crowds began to gather – and to spread the plague – beside one of the city’s principal gates. Moscow’s archbishop, Amvrosii, ordered the contentious icon to be secured inside the Chudov Monastery till the epidemic was over, but this act, a violation of the people’s right to see, worship, and even touch their Virgin’s painted face, provoked a fatal uprising. ‘Moscow is a crowd,’ wrote Catherine to Voltaire, ‘and not a city.’101 A mob stormed the Kremlin and broke into the monastery, later hunting down and murdering Amvrosii himself.102 Through it all, Bazhenov stood guard in the model-house, keeping watch over his latest prototype as the rioters surged by outside. His pupils whispered that he was ready to defend it unto death.103

  His work on the project did not resume until the start of 1772. In sombre but determined mood, Bazhenov tested samples of the pale Myachkovo stone, he built a brickworks, and his men made progress in shoring up the historic buildings (notably the three great cathedrals and the bell tower of Ivan the Great) that every Russian always wished to save. He must have paused and worried when he learned that the first cracks had appeared in the Archangel Cathedral walls. It was at this point that the bulk of the demolition-work along the riverbank was carried out, giving a fine view of the old building, but disturbing the groundwater and the underlying rock. Despite all that, on 9 August 1772, the first foundation stone was laid. A giant square was cleared for the ceremony, in each corner of which stood Doric columns respectively dedicated to Europe, Asia, Africa and America. One of these bore an inscription in alexandrines comparing the Kremlin with the finest buildings of classical Greece and Rome. As the first trench was dug (appropriately nearest to ‘Europe’), a participant recorded that ‘joy was written on every face, combined with the wish to see the happy completion of the building’.104

  But Catherine was losing heart. The empress was absent from both Bazhenov’s dedication-galas, and notably from the one in June 1773 when the architect himself laid the ceremonial bricks, with their emblems of Catherine and her son, Paul, that were to form the basis of the palace’s principal wings. The grandeur of this occasion already belied a troubling lack of funds. Bazhenov’s critics were also beginning to draw their sovereign’s attention to the likelihood of further damage to the Archangel Cathedral. The architect travelled to St Petersburg, perhaps to plead for cash, but the strain proved overwhelming and he became so ill that work was halted for several months. Nature, as the sceptics had predicted, was proving stronger than the human will. A change in fashion also doomed the great palace. As Europe’s fascination with the ruined and the exotic grew stronger, Catherine’s tastes were changing. She liked a bit of gothic now, she wanted to explore chinoiserie.

  Bazhenov never built his palace. His principal legacy in central Moscow is a stunning private residence, the Pashkov House, which stands on a hill opposite the Kremlin (and is now part of the Lenin Library). Instead of transforming the Kremlin, the Muscovite genius was assigned to projects at Tsaritsyno, a site outside the city that Catherine imagined as a sort of grand country retreat. He planned a range of gothic park-buildings for that, but they were never completed. As for the Kremlin, Bazhenov’s most enduring contribution was his fantastically detailed model. In a later age, this was displayed in the Kremlin museums, but it was an inconvenient object to exhibit, needing an entire hall to itself. In the Soviet era, it turned up in the Don Monastery, a nationalized space which at least had a large enough room (the former cathedral) in which to display it. But when the monks returned in 1991, the model disappeared again for twenty years. It was only in the summer of 2012 that parts of it finally emerged into the daylight of Moscow’s Shchusev Museum of Architecture. The museum has no single gallery with the space to display it all, but something of its severe glory can at last be glimpsed, albeit as a series of broken sections in two separate rooms.

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  It was not Bazhenov who ultimately solved the problem of the Kremlin’s new ‘attendance space’ but his pupil and colleague, Matvei Kazakov. The son of a sailor, this man – who had never travelled beyond Russia (and had not even seen St Petersburg) – originally trained in the Ukhtomsky architecture school. His early work included some buildings in Tver and also conservation in the Kremlin itself. More recently, he had worked with Bazhenov on the unbuilt palace, and it was often he who supervised the real work, from stone-cutting to the preparation of foundations. A draughtsman of unusual talent, Kazakov also drew numerous Kremlin scenes, including the restoration of the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest, which he directed, and also every stage in the unfolding saga of Bazhenov’s plan.105 When Moscow’s new archbishop, Platon, was looking for an architect for his official residence, the site for which, next to the Chudov Monastery, had been approved by Catherine herself, Kazakov was an obvious choice. This so-called ‘Chudov Palace’ was completed in 1776, and though its occupants complained about the noise that nearby cannon made on public holidays, it soon became the most comfortable address in the entire fortress.106

  In 1776, Kazakov won an even more glittering prize: the commission (which Bazhenov had not managed to fulfil) for the new attendance-place. The building is still among the most beautiful on the Kremlin hill. Now known as the Senate, it is a triangular structure of neo-classical design, topped with an elegant dome that is just visible above Red Square. When it was opened, its magnificent audience-hall, eighty-nine feet high and eighty-one feet wide, won universal praise, as did the gracious scale of its internal courts and handsome upper rooms. Kazakov’s Senate was to be a model for neo-classical buildings across the Russian empire, and the architect went on to beautify his native Moscow with a new home for the university (1782–93), a grand building for assemblies of nobility (1793–1801), and numerous private houses of palatial proportions.107

  There was some question, nonetheless, about the Russianness of the new style. The eighteenth century in Russia has been described as an era of ‘imitation and apprenticeship’.108 If the state of Muscovy was like a tree, then Peter’s goal was to create a brand new graft, keeping the virile rootstock but exchanging the visible top-growth for something more productive and possibly more appealing. The new plant blossomed under Catherine, but it was still an experimental hybrid. The question of Russian identity was complicated, and in the coming age of the nation-state, the autocracy’s very success, and its imperial expansion in particular, made the issue still more complex. By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796, her court conversed and wrote in French. The empire that she governed from St Petersburg was no longer wholly Russian, either, and included large parts of Poland, the former khanate of the Crimea and parts of t
he Caucasus, as well as territories in Siberia that stretched as far as the Pacific coast. Only the state itself united these; there was no single culture for the entire space. Russia faced a dilemma. No longer content to be an apprentice to Europe (especially as France dissolved into revolution after 1789), it would attempt to revert to its roots, reviving a half-forgotten language and an eclectic range of visual styles in pursuit of prized uniqueness. But Peter’s hybrid had evolved too far. Whatever traditions might still persist among the peasants closest to the soil, the scions of Russia’s cosmopolitan elite, the courtiers and guardians of the Kremlin, could not abandon all the new things they had learned. The only route back to old Muscovy was in romantic dreams.

  7

  Firebird

  A courtier whose business took him to Moscow at the beginning of the nineteenth century would probably have welcomed the journey. For one thing, it meant escaping from St Petersburg, where everything cost twice or three times the accustomed price and life revolved around display. And then there was the visceral, the almost atavistic draw of the older city. As the English engineer John Perry observed, ‘Mosco is the native place which the Russes are fond of … they have here all their comforts.’1 The time-worn capital was Russian to the core. Despite a string of energetic schemes in Catherine’s time, no planner had managed to tame it. Its courtyards were a jumble of the rustic and the new, there was a reassuring barnyard smell, and even major thoroughfares were blocked at frequent points by relics of defensive wall and the polluted coils of rivers.2

  For all its brand-new mansions with their colonnades, the place continued to strike visitors as medieval. After a century of legislation calling for stone and brick, three-quarters of its buildings were still built of wood, including the new theatre.3 A recent run of pipes now brought fresh water from a village twenty miles away, but at sunset, and even close beside the Kremlin, there were always women with baskets of laundry and carters with their thirsty horses crowding on the sloping riverbanks. In the ramshackle trading rows, pie-sellers jostled between stalls laden with everything from cloth and paper to knives and sweet long yellow melons. It was a place where a man could wear his second-best boots, the comfortable ones, and where he could afford to waste an hour in the bookshops on Nikolskaya street or reading the newspaper, Vedomosti.4

  In 1810 Moscow was the largest and probably also the wealthiest city in the Russian empire. Its population, calculated in 1811, was just over 270,000, but the numbers fluctuated sharply by season. Although it was the second capital, it was mainly a winter city, a place where provincial nobles spent the colder months, complete with their retinues of servants and the tradespeople who surfaced in their wake. And it was also an increasingly cultured place, boasting Russia’s first university and three academies, that wooden theatre, fourteen printing presses, and, for the nobility and wealthy merchants, separate and exclusive clubs.5 The rich might be wealthier than ever, but they no longer enjoyed their old monopoly on civilized discourse. An entirely new class, the intelligentsia, had made its entrance in recent decades, and though their influence remained quite small, the pallid, intense, ink-bespattered types now made up almost 4 per cent of the city’s population.6 The largest social group, meanwhile, included servants, traders and petty craftspeople, all of them serfs whose obligations included annual payments or indentured labour in their lord’s service. A single nobleman might run his Moscow household with several hundred staff of this kind, ranging from cooks and nursemaids and the lad who swept the carriage yard to the members of his serf-choir and even his serf-artist. None of these people was free to leave, or even, in most cases, to marry without permission. Their slavery was something that a few of the more thoughtful of their masters were beginning to find uncomfortable.7

  In all seasons, males outnumbered women in Moscow, sometimes by more than two to one. The reason for that was the growing practice, among serfs, of earning the cash to pay their obligations by leaving their villages to seek work elsewhere, usually in the quietest months of the agricultural year. At the turn of every season, there were thousands on the roads, walking between Moscow and the provinces, their efforts justified by the small sums they earned by selling shoes or mending roofs or even seeking work in factories. As well as hosting trade on a grand scale, Moscow was becoming a centre of paper-milling and textile production. By 1812, there were more than four hundred factories in the old capital, and to Catherine the Great’s disgust, some had been established in the city’s ancient centre.8 There were also military barracks, parade-grounds, and, to cater for the famous Russian soul, innumerable monasteries.

  At the top of this uneven social pile, the world seemed to belong to Moscow’s tiny elite of noblemen.9 More at ease than in the past, free to enjoy the best that Europe could offer of art, of fashion and of luxury, the members of this gilded class devoted much of their lives to elegance. They gambled and they drank champagne, but the Europe that they knew so well had also taught them to converse for fun. As they gathered in the fashionable new salons, their talk was of culture, language, Russia’s future, and, increasingly, its past. If they ventured into prose, a longing for history (and, in some cases, an obsession with death) imbued the writing with a Romantic quality that recalled the great Germans – Schiller, Herder, Goethe – that so many had begun to read.10 But even if they wrote in Russian, as opposed to the politer French, most were looking for echoes of Italy, or for a gothic shiver of delight, when they began to praise landscape. Poetic writings by the likes of Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) and Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855) were among the finest, but all the same they tended to evoke a predictable range of European, as opposed to Russian, scenery, and they did it using Greek and Latin verse-forms.11

  The sentiments these poets were supposed to feel on viewing Moscow would also have been standard fare for other Europeans of the time. Lyrical odes came easily to the era’s sensitive travellers, and most shared an enthusiasm for mournful groves, shepherdesses and the ruins around Athens, Rome and the Bay of Naples.12 Indeed, it was precisely to find an echo of those antique sites that Russian visitors wandered the Kremlin in the last years of the eighteenth century.13 True, there was always bustle somewhere on this particular hill. The Kremlin’s monasteries hummed with holy business, the cathedrals could draw massive crowds, and the more sinister corners harboured vagabonds and cut-purses. ‘The worst den of thieves in Moscow’ was one contemporary’s view of the old place.14 But a literary soul could always find a quiet space, and if he liked the feel of ruins he might step into a palace yard. The pressures of the city really could give way to silence there. The terema were almost derelict; of the older buildings, the Faceted Palace alone continued to play host to court events. Aleksei Mikhailovich’s Poteshnyi Palace, also in very poor repair, was patched up for the newly created Kremlin commandant in 1806, but though it accommodated several noble families from time to time, it was never exactly teeming.15

  The eye could rest contentedly on the building that Rastrelli had designed for Elizabeth in the 1740s (though it was now considered cramped), while the service quarters behind it, which housed army officers and senior Kremlin staff, could easily be ignored (as could the heaps of rubble in the grounds nearby16). In all, the place was definitely romantic, if not quite up to Italian standards, and its ruins held a touch of pathos and more than a pinch of oriental spice.

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, as a young bride, Catherine the Great had lamented the Kremlin’s various discomforts in her letters. When her son, the emperor Paul, was crowned in 1797, large numbers of the royal party preferred to reside outside the citadel for the same reasons.17 But romance, the lure of gothic sensation, was already drawing others to the ancient site. When she arrived in Moscow for the new tsar’s coronation, Princess Golovina complained, as most did, about the lack of dressing-rooms and boudoir-space, but she allowed herself to be enchanted by the overall impression of the citadel. ‘You would have to have the talents of an historian to describe in mer
e words all the awe that the Kremlin instils,’ she wrote in her diary that spring.

  You would need the pen of a poet to extol the impressions that this ancient and wonderful place plunges you into, this cathedral, this palace, the gothic style of which with its terraces, railings and vaults gives it an air of fantasy and which in its height stands lord above the whole of Moscow.18

  The princess had no real desire – and no obvious means – of exploring the Kremlin’s past with any precision. Her response was based on a fantasy, and it combined a well-bred classical sensibility with an inchoate (but conservative) nationalism and a good (safe) helping of the macabre. For her, as for so many others at the court, the Kremlin had become a prop for a new brand of theatre. In the wake of the French Revolution, Catherine’s heir rejected anything that smacked of liberal cosmopolitanism. Instead, Emperor Paul made a point, on his accession, of reaffirming his connection to the spirit of old Muscovy. When the time came for his coronation, he chose to enter the ancient Russian capital on Palm Sunday, creating echoes of festivities from centuries before. ‘The procession’, Golovina wrote, ‘was colossal.’19 The ceremony itself, with its overtones of rebirth and divine nomination, took place on Easter Day.20

  As a literal re-enactment of the past, however, the pageantry was inconsistent. Paul rode into the Kremlin to be crowned (whereas tsars of old had walked); he lined the squares with modern guns; and soon he was exploring plans to rebuild the entire site. The architect he chose was Kazakov, and the brief included a new palace, a riding school and hanging gardens.21 If this tsar had lived, a round of demolitions would almost certainly have followed, and some of the cleared space would have been used as a parade-ground for his beloved Prussian-style troops. As it was, however, even his plan to remove Peter the Great’s now derelict earth bastions, approved in 1799, was postponed and then forgotten.22