Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  As the last soldiers strode away, it was Rostopchin’s turn to quit Moscow. Among his final acts was an order to withdraw the fire-brigade and sink the city’s fleet of fire-boats. He also had the prison-gates unlocked, and the upshot was a night of looting, the scale of which remains unknowable. The liberation of what witnesses described as Moscow’s ‘dirty, disgusting mob’, however, and the arrival of additional opportunist looters from the surrounding countryside, would help Rostopchin’s planned reception for the French. He left a notice hinting about what he had in mind, addressed to the invaders, on the gate of his own estate at Voronovo, to the south-west of Moscow:

  For eight years I have improved this land, and I have lived happily here in the bosom of my family. To the number of one thousand seven hundred and twenty the dwellers on my estate are leaving it at your approach, while, for my part, I am setting fire to my mansion rather than let it be sullied by your presence. Frenchmen! In Moscow I have abandoned to you my two residences, with furniture worth half a million rubles. Here you will find only ashes.55

  For the soldiers in the Grande Armée, however, those residences still seemed good enough. Many officers were so confident about the pleasures ahead that they had packed their bags with evening dress.56 Their first sight of the Russian capital promised not to disappoint. The comte de Ségur remembered the scene until he died. Before us, he wrote,

  was an immense and singular assemblage of some two hundred and ninety-five churches and fifteen hundred splendid habitations … They were grouped around a lofty, triangular palace … and a vast bazaar, a city of merchants, exhibiting the opulence of the four quarters of the world. These buildings, shops as well as palaces, were all covered with polished and coloured plates of iron … A single sunbeam made this superb city glitter with a thousand varied colours; and the enchanted traveller halted in ecstasy at the sight … Over this immense and imposing theatre we conceived ourselves moving in splendid procession amidst the acclamations of surrounding nations.57

  Here at last was a cause in which exhausted soldiers could believe, a reward equal to the price in blood and effort and months on the road. Napoleon, no stranger to the capture of great cities, paused to await the usual delegation. It was only after a long interval, when no-one turned up with the city’s keys, with bread and salt, that the depth of Moscow’s silence started to impinge. The stillness held, uncannily quiet, and not until the French approached the Kremlin itself, the gates of which were bolted, was it broken by ‘the most savage yells’ from within. The fortress had not quite been abandoned – five hundred or so soldiers had stayed inside when the main convoy left – and these had been joined by a crowd of disorderly civilians, men and women, all of them in ‘a state of beastly intoxication’. Their curses (‘horrid imprecations’) now rained down upon the French. Moscow had fallen without a shot, but it took cannon-fire to open the Kremlin gates, and even then one of the defenders flew at a member of Napoleon’s advance guard, fighting even with his teeth as Frenchmen piled in to disarm him.58 The conqueror’s grand entrance, through the Borovitsky gates, was thus delayed, but his satisfaction at taking the Russian citadel remained undimmed. ‘Napoleon’s earlier hopes,’ Ségur observed, ‘revived at the sight of the palace, at once of Gothic and of modern architecture, of the Romanovs and the Rurics.’ The throne was still in place, he found, and even the Kremlin’s innumerable clocks were ticking.59 ‘The city is as big as Paris,’ the emperor wrote to his wife. It seemed ‘provided with everything’.60

  That very night, however, the picture changed. While Napoleon rested in the Kremlin, surrounded by the flower of his army, his sentries on the high brick walls noticed a new glow in the Moscow dark. There had been several small fires since the French arrived, and each had been blamed on the carelessness of troops. This time, by almost all accounts, the blaze was being set deliberately, a co-ordinated campaign of arson that made the best use of an equinoctial wind. ‘All the narrators had remarked men of atrocious look and tattered garments,’ Ségur later wrote, ‘roaming around amid the flames, and thus completing a horrid image of the infernal world.’ A fiery ball settled on the palace of Prince Trubetskoi, burning it down. At this signal, the Bourse was torched; witnesses reported seeing Russians dressed as policemen stirring the flames with tarred lances. The French hacked at the most obstinate of these arsonists with sabres, but gruesome chopping could not cut the torch from every fist.61 In the space of an hour or less, the blaze turned to a steady roar, punctuated by explosions and the clatter of collapsing masonry and metal roofs. The French emperor and his aides were in acutest peril, for there were still explosives in the Kremlin arsenal, and they themselves had recently brought a battery of artillery into the fortress, stationing it, for safety, under the palace windows. For a whole night and through the next morning, the future of Napoleon’s campaign, and his very life, depended on the vagaries of airborne sparks.62

  For some hours, the emperor stayed in his palace suite, pacing the wooden floors and watching through each window as he passed. The longed-for treasure shrivelled up before his eyes; he cursed the Russians for their barbarism. Despite entreaties from his aides, however, he refused to make an early move. By the night of 15 September, as one of his officers recalled, the firestorm was so bright outside that it was possible to read by its light without the need for oil lamps. But the next day was the worst of all. Even Napoleon could not hold out when the Kremlin arsenal finally caught fire. A decision was taken to withdraw, to make for the Petrovsky Palace on the Petersburg road. By this time, however, the citadel, as Ségur wrote, was ‘besieged by an ocean of fire’.

  None of the Kremlin’s principal gates was usable, but the occupying troops eventually came upon a postern gate in the rocks on the side above the river. It was one of the Kremlin’s secret routes, a legacy of centuries of improvised repair and alteration, but as they closed it behind them, the imperial party discovered that they were scarcely any better off. The city they had gained was a burning wasteland; featureless. ‘A single narrow street, crooked, in every part on fire, presented itself to our notice,’ Ségur continued,

  but it seemed rather an avenue to hell before us than a way to escape from it. We were walking on a soil of fire, under a sky of fire, and between walls of fire. A penetrating heat was … almost destroying our eyes, which yet it was necessary to keep open … A devouring air, sparkling ashes, detached flakes, made our respiration short, dry and gasping, and already suffocated with smoke.63

  The French elite escaped that day, helped by a local man who knew the routes, but thousands of others remained trapped, condemned to the most cruel death. Ségur’s account must be balanced with those of Russian witnesses, which tell of French troops running riot: looting, brutalizing, taking their revenge. They treated every Russian as a suspected arsonist. Some were held as prisoners of war; others were cut down on the spot.64 For the survivors, huddling in the reddish dark, the only refuge from the heat and falling debris proved to be the cemeteries. After six days of fire, the worst Moscow had ever seen, strings of pitiful figures, as insubstantial as ghosts, emerged into the wreckage of their city. Even when the smoke had cleared, the ruins stank of rot and soot and death; the stench was nauseating several miles away.65 There was scarcely a green leaf anywhere, hardly a tree to punctuate the horizon. A bitter economics ruled. Anyone could snatch a fine snuffbox or set of silver spoons, but food of any kind was almost unobtainable. In the fields beyond Moscow, groups of French troops built their campfires out of mahogany furniture and gilded window-frames. When it was time to eat, however, their only hope was rotten horseflesh.66

  In the midst of desolation, the Kremlin still stood more or less intact, a symbol to Russians, a landmark for the homeless, and a magnet, more immediately, for the returning French. Napoleon moved back to the citadel on 18 September. His mood had soured, and two days later, his bulletin announced that ‘Moscow, one of the most beautiful and wealthy cities of the world, exists no more.’67 Despite that loss, however,
the Corsican persisted with a doomed attempt to build some kind of life among the ruins. Though almost none of the local population supported it, a Moscow government was decreed, with orders to collect the corpses and maintain the peace. Theatrical performances were commissioned, and concerts, featuring an Italian soloist with piano accompaniment, were held in the Kremlin palace to help pass the nights.68 The decision to indulge in makeshift luxury, bizarre enough at any time, turned out to be one of the most disastrous of Napoleon’s entire career. As the milder days of autumn faded, so did the last options for the French. Napoleon could surely not have hoped to feed and lodge his army in this city through the winter. There was almost no fodder for the vast stable of horses, either. A retreat was inevitable, and the sooner it began, as Napoleon himself later conceded, the better his army’s chances would have been. For now, however, the general sulked, spending long hours over his food and settling his stout frame along a damask-covered chaise, novel in hand, throughout the heavy interval of afternoon.69

  Back in what was left of the real Moscow, the French had started to exact their price. In addition to the furs and trinkets and the cashmere shawls that they had looted, Napoleon’s men were encouraged to pack up or desecrate anything that might seem precious to the hateful Russians. The systematic desecration of the Kremlin followed. Stories abound of horses stabled in its churches, of gold and silver melted down (an on-site forge was constructed for the purpose), and of violating fingers probing the coffins of the ancient saints. The ‘beasts’ were even said to have cut the head off the revered corpse of Tsarevich Dmitry.70 Napoleon set his heart on the gold cross that glinted on the top of the Ivan bell tower, and he ordered it to be brought down, packaged up, and carted off to decorate the Paris Invalides. When it reached the ground (in several pieces), this particular treasure turned out to be no more than gilded wood. Still, by ripping out assorted icon-mounts, lamps and palace fittings, the French managed to melt down a total of 325 poods (11,700 lbs) of silver and 18 poods (648 lbs) of gold. These figures, which are cited in every Russian source, were established with the help of a set of scales that the French set up in the Dormition Cathedral. One of the columns was said to have carried a scribbled record of the tally for decades afterwards.71

  As the occupation dragged on, even Napoleon grew impatient, drilling and inspecting his troops more frequently by the day. Kutuzov’s Russians, too, had regrouped; in the second week of October, an advance-guard of French soldiers heading west was trapped and slaughtered. When the first snow fell on 13 October, Napoleon finally gave the order to prepare for retreat. Encumbered by lines of laden carts and sagging bags of treasure, the Grande Armée was ready to go home. But the French emperor had yet to satisfy his hunger for revenge. As his retinue filed out of the gates on 19 October, he left instructions that the Kremlin should be mined. Obediently, his sappers, led by Marshal Mortier, laid barrels of explosive under the Faceted Palace, the arsenal, the larger defensive towers and the bell tower of Ivan the Great. According to Ségur, at least 183,000 kilos of explosive were stacked up in the subterranean palace vaults.72 Two days later, at 1.30 in the morning, a mighty explosion shook the earth; windows shattered for miles around, and several onlookers, hurrying to the scene, were injured by the flying glass and rubble from successive blasts. A party of looters who had entered the Kremlin as the last French left were hurled into the air; as Ségur has it, ‘mutilated limbs, mixed with the fragments of the building, and with broken [weapons], fell far and wide in a frightful shower’.73

  Napoleon heard the explosions from a bivouac twenty-five miles away. He issued a proclamation at once, echoing the language he had used after the Moscow fire. ‘The Kremlin, ancient citadel, coeval with the rise of the [Russian] monarchy, this palace of the Czars, has ceased to exist.’74 It was a bold and angry statement, but it was not true. The arsenal was indeed a ruin; the Faceted Palace had burned. One of the outer towers had collapsed to its foundations, the Nikolsky gates and several other towers had been wrecked, and the iconic bell tower of Ivan the Great had suffered extensive damage, including the loss of the adjoining Filaret Tower. But the mines had only wounded, not destroyed the fort.

  The damage to Moscow as a whole was far greater. In the weeks after the French retreat, Muscovites cleared 11,959 human corpses and the bodies of 12,576 horses. Here and there, sinister piles of blackened flesh had blocked entire streets.75 Though parts of the city had escaped the fire with little damage, most of the central districts had been razed. On Tverskaya street, only twelve houses had survived, and only two still stood above the ruins of Kitai-gorod.76 ‘The whole of the left bank of the city was exactly like a big black field,’ a witness later wrote. ‘Many churches were standing, but round them lay the burned-out wrecks of houses: here and there a stove might stand, here a sheet of metal roofing; sometimes the house had survived and the outbuildings were gone, elsewhere only an outbuilding survived.’77 In all, roughly 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city had been ruined.

  Returning refugees, the beau monde of the old Moscow, were often the most bitter when the truth struck home. As an uncle of the writer Ivan Turgenev put it: ‘The thirst for revenge is a source of glory and the future guarantor of our greatness. No-one wants peace.’78 Moscow’s fiery crucible certainly burnished the rhetoric of nationalism, but as ever the longer-term material effect depended on a person’s status. The price that ordinary Muscovites had paid – the poor who lacked the means to regroup and rebuild – was incalculable. Large numbers – ten thousand or more – of Moscow’s wealthy merchants also faced ruin; their stocks as well as their grand homes were lost, and many eked out livings in the common trading-stalls for the rest of their days.79 But the real elite, the Stroganovs and Trubetskois, the top tier of the court, absorbed its losses from the safety of alternative estates. Though they attended the sumptuous commemorative ceremonies in the Dormition Cathedral in decades to come, and though they flocked to admire any newly painted portrait of the war heroes, the great magnates escaped with little lasting damage to their livelihoods, and in time many built new mansions even grander than the ones they had lost. The rift with the French would soon close. Contention still lingers about the causes of the Moscow fire, but Ségur could claim to have his version from the horse’s mouth. Rostopchin moved to France in 1815 and he met and talked to Ségur there. In time, they even became kin, for Rostopchin’s daughter married Ségur’s nephew.80

  * * *

  The process of rebuilding Moscow began in an atmosphere of shock. With Russian troops still in the field (and Frenchmen still on Russian soil), there were no easy triumphs for the citizens at first. The Kremlin was hastily locked; that winter it would serve, among other things, as a depot for any valuables that honest people found and handed in.81 But it was also a semi-wreck, and far from totally secure. The patriotic heroism that was supposed to have been kindled by Moscow’s flames was not universally shared. Even the police resorted to looting. Mere survival came first for almost everyone. As peasants from surrounding regions converged on the city to pick the ruins clean, there was also a good deal of cynicism and simple greed.

  But their suffering had strengthened many people’s Christian beliefs. There was a sense, expressed by Sergei Glinka among others, that Russia, in its Christ-like guise, had sacrificed itself (and certainly Moscow) to save a sinful Europe from destruction.82 For many, too, the saints were still performing miracles on Moscow’s soil. ‘And the thing that I would not believe if I had not seen it with my own eyes,’ a Russian investigator wrote to Rostopchin after the French sappers’ parting explosion,

  was that despite the terrifying quake, which broke the windows in almost all the houses in Moscow and could be heard 40 versts [26 miles] away, the miracle-working images of the Saviour at the Saviour Gates and of Nicholas the Wonder-Worker on the Nikolsky gates not only escaped any damage, but the lamps that hung in front of them and still do hang, and even the glass that covers the images themselves, did not get broken.83


  By a further miracle, the bodies of the saints themselves had also more or less escaped unscathed. Moscow’s metropolitan assured his flock (revealing a bizarre sense of priorities on someone’s part) that the mortal remains of Tsarevich Dmitry had been carted out of the Kremlin before the enemy forces arrived (this honour he would later share, in different times, with Lenin). Whichever corpse’s head the French troops had cut off, it was not the one that Russians ascribed to their dynastic saint.84

  The sacred mysteries at the heart of Moscow’s fortress, at least, had survived. Exactly what role they played in the lives of starving, frightened survivors during that homeless winter is unclear. The ragged did not leave memoirs. But when Russians of a different class began to tell the story of the fire, the key to Moscow’s resurrection seemed to be the city’s soul. ‘In the month of October,’ Tolstoy would write forty years later, ‘without a government, without church services or sacred icons, without its wealth and its houses, Moscow was still the Moscow it had been in August. Everything was shattered except something intangible yet mighty and indestructible.’85 That ‘mighty’ thing, perhaps, was the very folk-belief, the visceral affection for familiar saints and local shrines, that planners and enlightened courtiers had been dismissing for so long. A few years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy’s would be the generation that rediscovered it.