Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Paul was never a popular ruler. Personally, he seemed to combine the worst qualities of a spiritual mystic with the sadism of a sergeant-major, while his Francophobia (which was at least as much about his mother as about Robespierre) was jarring to a court raised on the philosophes. Catherine had encouraged the fashions and tastes of Paris, recoiling only at the prospect of an uncouth mob; Paul, however, was part of a reactionary group that rejected the entire culture of the regicide French.23 His subjects were forbidden to use any word – such as ‘fatherland’, ‘citizen’ or ‘club’ – that he suspected of revolutionary overtones. Under his increasingly repressive regime, guest lists for balls and soirées required prior approval, and even music was subject to censorship. A great lover of uniforms and boots, Paul also imposed his own views on the nation’s clothes. Round (as opposed to three-cornered) hats were banned on political grounds, and fashionable tail-coats were magnets for his gendarmes, many of whom carried shears so that they could chop off the dandyish flaps of cloth on the spot.24

  There was an obvious precedent here – Paul was a great admirer of Peter the Great – but where Peter’s reforms had transformed an empire, Tsar Paul’s merely looked spiteful. His enemies gained confidence each time he made them watch him strutting with the troops. If the conspirators delayed, it was only because they could not act without the consent of the presumptive heir, Alexander Pavlovich, the tyrant’s eldest son; but by March 1801 even that young man had stopped objecting to the idea of a merciful arrest. The final act, however, was neither humane nor particularly just. The textbooks usually describe it as a ‘scuffle’, thereby evading reference to bloodshed, let alone premeditation. In reality, a group of courtiers burst into the emperor’s bedchamber at night on the pretext of arresting him. When Paul tried to hide behind a curtain, one of them grabbed a heavy snuffbox and aimed it at his head. The rest then fell upon the injured man and beat him to death, though none would ever admit to having struck the fatal blow.25 The murder was never investigated. It ought to have ranked among the most popular crimes in Russian history (an interesting shortlist to compile), but instead it became another cursed regicide, and for decades to come the site of the killing, in St Petersburg, was shunned by princes and passers-by alike.26

  The new emperor, Alexander I (ruled 1801–25), had been Catherine’s favourite grandson. Sensitive, intelligent, but famously weak-willed, the twenty-five-year-old may well have regretted his own, albeit passive, part in his father’s murder. At best, it was an inauspicious start to the new reign, but contemporaries chose to overlook the tragic portents as they prepared to welcome their new ruler. ‘You shine like a divine angel / With goodness and beauty’, the historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote in an ode on Alexander’s accession to the throne.27 ‘What a beauty, and in addition what a soul!’ declared another noble fan; another likened him to Apollo.28 Though Alexander himself insisted that his coronation should be a modest and businesslike affair, so many flocked to Moscow for the occasion that the city’s population temporarily doubled.29 In the imaginations of his people, if not in practice, the new emperor promised a fulfilment of the hopes raised by Catherine the Great, a golden age of reason and justice. There was talk of the emancipation of the serfs, of law-codes and prosperity. For months, enormous crowds would gather just to see the young man’s face.

  * * *

  The cloud on the horizon was a European of humbler birth: the upstart Corsican, Napoleon. This brilliant strategist had made himself master of most of western Europe. He had overturned the last revolutionary regime in France, crowned himself emperor, and now behaved as if he were the equal (or superior) of any autocrat in the known world. His success, and the relatively enlightened use that he was deemed to be making of it, had earned him respect, and in some quarters adulation. He seemed to be a hero for the time, a man who could talk to a foot soldier as easily as he could snub a prince of royal blood. By 1806 he had defeated almost every army in Europe (including Russia’s), dictated a new continental order, and presided over the dissolution of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire. The Francophiles within the Russian liberal elite were mesmerized, though they could not always approve. In Moscow, however, which had always preferred the cultures of Germany and even England to the Gallomania of St Petersburg, the French advance seemed like a call to patriotic arms.30

  A new topic began to circulate at the Thursday soirées in Moscow’s salons. The talk was now of nationhood. American independence had opened a debate about citizens and their right to rule, while the French Revolution and the new French emperor had brought the same issues to the heart of Europe. As the world blazed, Russian patriots divided. Some were inspired by the Napoleonic vision of orderly new governance, but many counterposed the vigour of the Russian state to the decadence that had doomed so much of Europe to the Corsican’s control.31 It was admittedly a problem that Russia’s courtiers still corresponded, flirted and worried in French; there was no real Russian literature, no native high culture. But Russia was a mighty state, and patriots began to extol its specific virtues. They decided that autocracy itself was the measure of their land’s historic greatness. The strong state, Russian-style, might even turn out to represent Russian culture’s highest achievement, though the nation’s Orthodox faith ran it a close second. Sergei Glinka, elder brother of the composer, was one of the earliest advocates of this sort of line in Moscow, but its most famous exponent, and certainly the most prolific, was the historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826). His Notes on Ancient and Modern Russia appeared in 1811, taking an anti-European line and praising the Romanov dynasty even before Napoleon had crossed into Russia.32

  The state that Karamzin envisioned was firmly rooted in the past, and history became a tool for exploring its virtues. The historian’s greatest work, his multi-volume History of the Russian State, took decades to complete, but beyond the walls of his study, interest in the Russian past, almost always from a nationalist point of view, was gaining a wide popularity by 1812. An elite that had forgotten how to read pre-Petrine script began the painful task of understanding it. A century after Peter the Great’s alphabet reform, the documents he might have read with ease perplexed his successors and then fascinated them. Old papers were collected, stacked in wooden cupboards, pored over. The Society for the Study of Russian History and Antiquities was founded at Moscow University in 1804, and noble amateurs began to edit and publish medieval chronicles at the same time.33 Before the people’s very eyes, a history that had been lost – its records burned, buried, or rendered indecipherable – was gradually, and thrillingly, rediscovered. It would be years before the bones of Russia’s real past were finally unearthed, but research had certainly become respectable.

  Old buildings, too, began to draw the antiquarians in their pince-nez: Russia’s architectural heritage was better studied in the first decades of Alexander’s reign than it had ever been. But ruins were not always destined for faithful preservation. The Romantic approach was not about conserving history but rather about feeling it. This was a generation that clung to its best-loved symbols and landmarks, wrote odes to ivy-covered stones, and discarded the inconvenient, the unsightly and the frankly hazardous. If real things were not sensational enough, the romantics were also prepared to alter them. It was at this time, the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the gaudy exterior of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square was briefly painted white ‘for authenticity’.34 The idea of a public record, greater than each private person’s interest or taste, had yet to grip Muscovite minds. In 1806, when many of the Kremlin’s medieval treasures were moved to new quarters, its commandant felt obliged to issue a specific order forbidding his staff from selling off the small (and thus conveniently portable) items of the hoard.35

  In the midst of all this, Alexander’s coronation provoked the usual rash of anxieties about the dilapidated state of the Kremlin, and the first decade of the new reign saw demolition in the fortress on an ambitious, even reckless, scale. In charge was Petr Stepanovich Va
luev (1743–1814), a former protégé of Tsar Paul’s whose priorities may be guessed from his choice of adjectives to describe the structures within the royal compound: ‘ruined’, ‘dangerous’, ‘dirty’ and ‘disorderly’.36 The Kremlin walls themselves, of course, were now such powerful symbols of Russia’s antiquity that they were repaired, stabilized and cleaned in readiness for the coronation, but other buildings, including the Sretensky Cathedral (built by Ivan the Terrible) and a crumbling tower above the entrance to the terema, were demolished without scruple (the fabric of the tower, along with that of Boris Godunov’s Kremlin palace, was later sold). Beyond them, just below the Kremlin walls, two of the oldest palace smithies were knocked down as an eyesore.37 The Vodovzvodnaya Tower, on a corner near the riverbank, was demolished and rebuilt in 1806, while Empress Elizabeth’s palace was extended with an upper storey and a colonnade. The total cost of repair work within the citadel amounted to 110,000 rubles between 1801 and 1809.38

  Improvements in the spirit of order and harmony were generally welcomed by the better sort. Whenever a ruin was lost, new public spaces could appear, and sometimes these were popular. In 1808, Valuev’s men demolished a stretch of seventeenth-century city wall, long crumbling and for years a refuge for criminals and fly-by-nights. Though any change drew anxious gasps, the public was won over to the loss of this landmark when the plans for Moscow’s first ever pleasure-ground were unveiled in its place. The park, complete with fountains, was a space where Muscovites could take the evening air, no doubt flaunting the new outfits that they had imported from France. ‘Few people were worried about what was happening in Europe,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘Everyone was busy with the great event of the day – the opening of the new Presnya ponds pleasure-ground.’39 The first of Moscow’s tree-lined boulevards, Tverskoi, was also completed at this time, making the city-centre even more inviting on a summer’s night. By 1811, on the eve of Russia’s patriotic war, the leisured class of Moscow must have felt uniquely privileged. One thing the planners had forgotten, oddly, was to institute a system of fire insurance.

  * * *

  What put an end to this dreamlike interlude was a visit by the tsar himself in July 1812. The military situation had worsened dramatically. Relations between Alexander I and Napoleon had grown tenser and then snapped between 1809 and the summer of 1812. No-one could really have said what the French emperor hoped to gain by invading Russia, and it would have been as difficult to state exactly what was in the Russians’ minds as they failed to make peace with him, but a series of alleged insults, inflated slights, economic strains and territorial anxieties gradually led the two courts to the brink of confrontation. In view of the slaughter to come, the diplomatic failure was not so much a sleepwalk as a danse macabre. In the winter of 1811–12, the French began to assemble the largest army that the world had ever seen, a multi-national force drawn from the whole breadth of Napoleonic Europe and for ever famous as the Grande Armée.40 The host crossed on to Russian soil on 24 June 1812: Midsummer’s Day, a fine season for Russia’s wars. Four days later, Napoleon himself rode into Vilna.

  The invasion came as a shock to Alexander, and for some days it was feared that he might try to lead the military response. Happily, he was persuaded instead to focus on mobilizing the nation’s spirit. His visit to Moscow in July was calculated to shake the city from its torpor and also, in view of the French emperor’s talent for rousing common people to revolt, to quell emergent pro-Napoleonic sympathies. In both respects, it was a success. Huge crowds pressed round the handsome sovereign wherever he went; the Kremlin itself was packed to the limits. In ballrooms and along the tree-lined boulevards, the pursuit of elegance gave way to a new fashion: patriotism. ‘The dandies stopped showing off,’ a satirically minded Alexander Pushkin later wrote. ‘Mr so-and-so emptied his snuffbox of French snuff; another burnt a dozen French booklets; yet another gave up Chateau Lafitte and took to eating cabbage soup. They all vowed never to speak French again.’41 Many offered funds, serf-soldiers, and even their own services to the national cause. Purple silk tents were erected in the city’s squares, and young men queued in jaunty lines to sign up for the tsar’s army. At the same time, however, and despite the talk of Moscow’s glory, others were making their plans to flee. It looked as if Napoleon might head their way instead of to St Petersburg.

  The news would soon confirm that fear. The Grande Armée seemed to advance unchecked, and soon it had reached the walls of Smolensk. The French were determined to take the fortress city as they headed east; it was to be a forward base, a centre for supplies. In August 1812, Napoleon expected the old place to fall at once, perhaps even to welcome an army that promised brotherhood and liberty to enslaved people everywhere. What followed, however, was worse than simple resistance. The massive walls above the Dnieper repelled the initial light attack. Then, perhaps because of random sparks (or possibly, unthinkably, through arson) a fire broke out which, as one witness later wrote, ‘rose in whirling and destructive grandeur … and consumed Smolensk amidst ominous and awful crashes’.42 Napoleon was gratified, comparing the sight of the burning city to ‘the eruption of Vesuvius’.43 But his aides saw their future supply base going up in flames, and with it the best hope that Russia’s people might have welcomed Napoleon’s version of liberty.

  As the fires cooled, the French officers made a brief tour. Many of Smolensk’s prosperous residents had fled before the enemy arrived, but hundreds had been trapped inside Boris Godunov’s Russian bricks. The sights were sickening even to the most war-hardened of veterans. ‘Like thousands of others,’ a German soldier in the French army recalled, ‘I was marching along when, between two burned-out houses, I saw a small orchard whose fruit had been carbonised, underneath the trees of which were five or six men who had been literally grilled.’44 In Moscow, news of the fire spread like a plague. Accounts of pitiless flames and searing heat needed no elaboration in a city with Moscow’s history. That very day, the price of hiring a horse in the old capital increased four-fold, and by nightfall the roads leading out of it were choked with carriages and carts.45 Most people headed south and east, towards Rostov, even Kazan. In the Volga town of Nizhnyi-Novgorod, the rents on summer homes tripled overnight.46

  Moscow’s defence depended on two men. Military operations were entrusted to Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, a veteran of Russia’s Turkish wars and more recently of a failed campaign against Napoleon in Austria. A former governor of St Petersburg and Kiev, Kutuzov understood the strategic and psychological importance of Moscow, but his priority was the survival and ultimate victory of Russia as a whole. Meanwhile, the civil government of Moscow depended on the wealthy and conservative Count Fedor Rostopchin. Complacent in the early months of 1812, this man now dedicated himself to the patriotic cause, insisting even after the disaster at Smolensk that he would never hand the keys of Moscow to the French. That promise was eventually honoured, though few at this point could have imagined how exactly the count meant to fulfil it. For the present, he continued to prepare for Moscow’s defence. Though almost everyone with the means to do so was making plans to flee, the remaining inhabitants, described as the poor or ‘dark people’, were issued with arms. The Kremlin cannon, once again, were cleaned and trained towards the streets.47 The governor’s patriotic stand earned him a hand-written letter of thanks from his emperor on 6 September. Like so much else in Russia at the time, it was written in immaculate French.48

  * * *

  The harvest season of 1812 was glorious; the fruit – apples and plums – conspicuously good.49 Away from the fighting, it was easy to ignore the danger that now threatened tens of thousands of young soldiers’ lives. In Moscow, rumours of all kinds were circulating; the temptation to hope, to cling on till the last, kept a few stalwarts in the city even now. Kutuzov himself was sanguine, repeatedly promising to hold the capital at any cost. On 7 September 1812 he took his troops into the bloodiest one-day battle that Europe had ever seen. The duel for Moscow, at Borodino, near Mozhaisk, w
as sheer butchery. The fighting was vicious, with near-continuous artillery fire, in a restricted space, from dawn to dark. The total Russian losses have been estimated at 45,000, French at 28,000, but the figures give no sense of the carnage or the waste.

  Napoleon inspected the field, as was his habit, after the guns had stilled. ‘Every thing concurred to increase the horrors of it,’ one of his aides, Comte Philippe-Paul de Ségur, was later to recall. ‘A lowering sky, a cold rain, a violent wind, habitations in ashes, a plain absolutely torn up and covered with fragments and ruins … soldiers roaming every part among the bodies of the slain and emptying the knapsacks of their dead comrades to procure sustenance for themselves.’ Many took shelter under heaps of dead, and one Russian was said to have survived for several days inside the ravaged carcass of a horse, gnawing on the exposed flesh. The following spring, when the Russians finally cleared the field, they would bury a total of 35,478 horses, but there were even more human corpses.50 In late October 1812, when the French army was retreating, the troops would start suspecting they had stumbled on the former battlefield when they noticed dark flocks of wheeling crows against the white background of snow. In the path of the soldiers’ weary steps, the smooth landscape soon started blistering with numberless half-buried grisly shapes.51

  On the night of the battle, Moscow kept vigil by holding a religious procession in the Kremlin and around Red Square. The faithful crowded into the Dormition Cathedral for prayers; others volunteered to tend the 22,000 wounded – the shells and massive bullets left appalling injuries – who had already arrived in the city’s hospitals and temporary wards.52 In truth, however, Moscow was now almost defenceless. Rostopchin still averred that it would stand, but even as he spoke, the order had been given to pack and evacuate the city’s historic treasures. Jewels, icons and gold from the Kremlin were carted south and east to the Volga and Vladimir; other items, including parts of the Chudov Monastery archive, were interred underneath the Kremlin walls.53 But there was very little time. On 13 September, as some of his aides were preparing to engage with the French again, Kutuzov announced his decision to abandon the old capital. ‘Moscow is not the whole of Russia,’ he explained. ‘To save Russia we need an army; to save the army we must give up the idea of defending Moscow.’ That evening, Rostopchin, spluttering with rage, was obliged to order a more general retreat, including that of the Kremlin garrison. They marched out to the strains of a military band, reportedly because ‘according to the code of Peter the Great, a garrison abandons a fortress to the sound of music’.54 All too soon, however, the drumming and the marching boots gave way to silence.