Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  In the first months after the fire, however, the main priority was rebuilding. In May 1813, Alexander I convened a special commission to begin work on the city’s reconstruction. The first plans were ready that autumn. Large-scale work started in 1814, but it would be some time yet before the main squares and boulevards stopped looking like a giant building-site, and longer still before the city’s population had recovered to its pre-war high.86 The tsar himself did not visit for three more years. By that time, though there were construction projects everywhere, the immediate evidence of death and looting had been swept away.87

  Moscow must have felt unusually spacious for a while. Clutter and rubble gave way at last to new, elegant squares. Three generations of architects were finally vindicated as Red Square acquired its current shape and the Kremlin ceased to be an island surrounded by moats. Peter’s earth bastions were demolished, and the Neglinnaya river was piped underground to make way for twenty-two acres of new gardens, the Alexander Gardens, at the foot of the Kremlin walls.88 These were designed with overtones of Italy, complete with landscaping, fountains and grottoes. ‘Moscow is becoming beautiful,’ the city’s postmaster wrote to his brother in 1820. ‘They are making a park round the Kremlin walls that will be no worse than the Presnya ponds.’89 The improvements were so radical that some outsiders found them disconcerting. In 1839, a Frenchman, the marquis de Custine, on a visit from Paris, could scarcely hide his amazement. ‘What would Ivan III have thought,’ he asked, ‘could he have beheld at the foot of the sacred fortress, his old Muscovites, shaved, curled, in frock coats, white pantaloons, and yellow gloves, eating ices…?’90

  The commission for Moscow’s reconstruction functioned until 1842. As it closed its books for the last time, its members could congratulate themselves. The fire had proved to be an opportunity. The planners had swept away much of the city’s medieval jumble, at least in the centre. The village feel had been replaced, the dream of neo-classical order realized. Strict regulation made sure that most new building followed a prescribed pattern, giving the city an unaccustomed harmony, while the sprawl was tamed by grouping houses on to smaller, more regular plots. The city’s isolation from St Petersburg had also been reduced, for the capitals were now linked by a public stage-coach service, the horse-drawn diligence, meaning that anyone could make the journey in two or three days. It would not be long before that time was reduced even further: in 1851, a new railway line, one of Russia’s first, was opened between the cities, again promoting commerce and sparking a local building-boom.91 Among Moscow’s other new amenities were extra street lights (fuelled by oil), better drains, new fountains, and a fire service staffed by more than 1,500 men and 450 horses.92

  The Kremlin itself was reserved for the attention of a special commission whose brief was not rationalization but authentic reconstruction. The point was to preserve and cherish the monument that had come, as no other, to define Moscow and even Russia. While the city round it modernized along the now-familiar neo-classical lines, in other words, the Kremlin’s meaning shifted subtly; as a national emblem it had to reinvent itself in national guise. Its morale-boosting value was so widely recognized that a lavish budget for restoration was approved despite the other claims on imperial funds. By the end of 1813 the architects had spent 294,500 rubles (a prince’s fortune) on the restoration of the cathedrals alone.93 In their search for authenticity, some experts, including the Italian-born Dementy Zhilardi, consulted the drawings and ground plans that the pioneering architect Ukhtomsky had created half a century before. Even where there had been extensive damage, builders were encouraged to preserve foundations and original courses of stone, and where new building was inescapable, as was the case with several of the fortress towers, they were supposed to copy anything that had survived. The silhouettes, as they rose against the bare skyline, meant more than they had ever done to local people on the streets below.

  But the more observant might have noticed something odd about the shapes of the new spires. The architects of post-war Moscow, like Russian intellectuals more generally, were eager to repair the nation’s most historic monument in an appropriately Russian manner. What that meant in practice, to a generation that considered it a compliment to improve on legacies from the past, was that the builders who restored the Kremlin adopted a Romantic, even gothic, style. Osip Bove, a student of Kazakov, gave the Nikolskaya Tower a new (and unprecedented) decorative spire; St Petersburg’s Karl Rossi designed a confection in stucco, domes and yet more pseudo-gothic detail for the Ascension Convent. The finished church, dedicated to St Catherine, was so ornate (and so prominent, lining the main route into the Kremlin from Red Square) that even at the time it was considered incongruous. The same criticism was levelled at some of the proposed replacements for Filaret’s ruined building, adjoining Ivan the Great, but the most extravagant plans here, complete with gothic towers and classical friezes, were rejected in favour of a simpler and more sober building by Zhilardi based on drawings from the 1750s.94

  Among the most controversial ruins was the Cathedral of Nikola Gostunsky, which dated from 1506 and housed an icon of Nikola, the people’s best-loved saint. This building stood on open ground beyond the Ivan bell tower. Prominent and fragile, it had suffered badly during the French occupation, and in 1816, on the eve of Alexander I’s long-awaited visit, the planners viewed it as an eyesore rather than as a national treasure. Some members of the Kremlin commission advocated reconstructing it, perhaps as yet another exercise in the pseudo-gothic style, but others saw the site’s potential for large military parades, and it was this group that eventually prevailed. The old cathedral was demolished by a group of soldiers under orders from the city architects in August 1817.

  But knocking down a church of such great age, a symbol of the very spirit Muscovites had suffered to protect, was not straightforward. As Valuev had discovered ten years before, the Kremlin’s buildings had become everyone’s business, and after 1812 there was a sense that Moscow’s surviving monuments might belong, in part, to its people. The metropolitan, Avgustin, had the solution. A century later, it was to become the tactic of choice when Stalin’s young communists had a church to destroy. ‘I agree [to the demolition],’ the metropolitan wrote,

  but only on condition that you undertake the work at night and that by morning they have not just demolished it but the site is completely cleared and everything removed so that there should be no indication left that a cathedral was ever there. I know Moscow: if you start knocking something down in the usual way you will not be able to stifle the rumours. You have to take them by surprise and then they all keep quiet.95

  It was a shrewd, if not exactly democratic, view. Avgustin found, just as the Bolsheviks later would, that a building really could disappear from memory.

  The Kremlin as a whole seemed quite complete without the old landmark. To judge by the surviving paintings, the citadel emerged from the age of repair with real elegance, though artists tended to paint out the rubbish-heaps and scaffolding. Most images from this era show the fortress rising white and gold above the city, although at one point the brickwork was actually painted a shocking blood-red.96 This was definitely a landscape that belonged to the rich and educated, to noblemen and ladies of the better sort. It is through the artists’ eyes that we glimpse the well-dressed crowds: the gentlemen with their top hats and shiny canes, the ladies in their bonnets, gloves and crinolines. They could be leading citizens of any European state, and there is little sense of Russia (let alone romantic Muscovy) about their world. What sets them apart is not their nation’s history but their present-day wealth. Horse-drawn carriages race past the convent gates while uniformed Kremlin guardsmen stand to attention, swords at their sides. The sense of exclusivity is emphasized by the long stretches of iron railing and the sentry-boxes with their bright diagonal stripes. A watercolour from the 1820s by Osip Bove shows the restored expanse of wall along Red Square, and also (a personal triumph, for he had fought to introduce them) the freshly
planted lime-trees round the old ramparts.97 The fortress had become a place where the elite could promenade. They soon flocked there, sporting their lapdogs and their parasols.

  The Russian nation clearly needed something else, not just this theme-park for the leisured rich. The memories of 1812 were everyone’s. By all accounts, Alexander himself disliked the story of Moscow’s great crisis, preferring to think about his more victorious moments (and especially his entry into Paris, at the head of his troops, in 1814).98 But tens of thousands of victims, and Moscow’s own ashes, were not easily forgotten. In a brief interlude of messianic passion, the emperor allowed himself to be inspired by visions of the Russian people and its mystic sacrifice.99 In 1813, his court announced a competition for a permanent memorial to the epic of 1812. Significantly, there was no plan to build it in the Kremlin itself; Alexander refused to contemplate such an upheaval. Instead, a site – and an idea – had to be found in Moscow, and to Moscow it would then belong.

  Buildings, portrait galleries, fountains, statues and parks were all sketched and discussed, but eventually it was agreed that the central landmark should be a cathedral, a holy building dedicated to Christ the Saviour. The first round of the competition came and went. Preliminary drawings, which ranged from a version of St Peter’s basilica to Giacomo Quarenghi’s take on the Pantheon in Rome, were soon dismissed.100 As universalist ideas like these were aired in St Petersburg, however, Moscow’s thinking took a nationalist turn. In 1818, a statue to the victors of 1612, Minin and Pozharsky, was installed on Red Square. It had been designed for Kuzma Minin’s city, Nizhnyi-Novgorod, but in Moscow it came to stand for a nation that was Orthodox, conservative, and proud.101 Tellingly, the helmet that the bronze Pozharsky cradled in the crook of his left arm was deliberately based on an original (mistakenly) thought to have belonged to Alexander Nevsky.102

  In the next few years, the victory over Napoleon would inspire numerous buildings across Russia, including St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral (which housed the banners captured from French troops and also the keys to many of the cities that the invaders had occupied). But the scheme for Moscow’s own shrine continued to stall. The architects, it seemed, were torn between the old ‘classical’ world and Moscow’s new, ultra-Russian, nationalism. In 1817, however, Alexander finally approved a plan to build the cathedral in the universal European (as opposed to an identifiably Russian) manner. The winning entry, by the architect Alexander Vitberg, was scheduled to tower above Moscow from a site on the Sparrow Hills. Vitberg himself described its style as ‘Egyptian-Byzantine-Gothic’, and though the idea is hard to visualize, his sketchbooks show just what he meant.103 The building – which would have been vast – included obelisks and columns and a huge Byzantine dome. Its spirit was international, and it was meant to be inclusive rather than purely Slavonic. But tensions built around the project from the first. Though cash was found, and 11,275 unfortunate serf-labourers were assembled for the long task of constructing it, Vitberg’s vision was never realized. Alexander I died in 1825. His heir and brother, Nicholas, was never one for universal brotherhood.

  * * *

  The marquis de Custine visited Russia in 1839. Something of a social outcast in France, where his homosexuality had brought censure and considerable personal pain, he was looking for a subject for his real passion: writing. The empire in the east was no longer a provincial outpost; in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, most people knew it as an arbiter of European politics. At the same time, its huge size and its untapped power were fascinating. As Ottoman Turkey continued to decline, Russia looked set to take its place, straddling the frontier between Europe and Asia, holding the line between the world of modern comforts and the seething, tempting, maelstrom of the Orient beyond. Like many Europeans of his time, and certainly the French, Custine was hoping to find some first-hand oriental barbarism for his book, and like many other visitors to Russia with that mission, he ended up perplexed.

  There were the usual inconveniences. Every traveller to Russia seems fated to describe vast spaces, an extreme climate, and the extraordinary drinking-capacities of the Russian male. In some ways, these, and even the attentions of an ever-watchful state police, were just the things Custine was looking for. He also found much to admire in the new emperor, Nicholas I. This tsar was handsome, if severe; he bore himself as a true despot should, frowning from the strain of responsibility; and though he wore a corset, which Custine deplored, from the neck up he looked noble and even ‘rather German than Slavonic’.104 The singularity of the emperor’s power, his absolute but lonely eminence, was mesmerizing. ‘If I lived in Petersburg,’ Custine remarked, ‘I should become a courtier, not from any love of place or power, nor from any puerile vanity, but from the desire of discovering some road that might reach the heart of a man who differs from all others.’105

  When it came to authentic local colour, however, the foreigner found the court in St Petersburg to be Janus-faced. It had taken a real effort on the part of Peter the Great, of the reformers in the age of Elizabeth and Catherine, but by 1839, when Custine visited the country, Russia was almost as European as it is today. Its businessmen made money out of European trade, its libraries were stocked with European books, and its young nobles travelled just as any other wealthy Europeans might. Even those who stayed at home continued to take whatever they saw fit from Europe, from fashion to technology and even (with explosive results) political ideas. Against this background, Nicholas encouraged Russian nationalism, but his variant on the theme was specific. In 1833, his conservative advisor, Sergei Uvarov, defined Russian nationhood in terms of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’. ‘The trick,’ as the musicologist Richard Taruskin has commented, ‘was to associate love of country not with love of its inhabitants but with love of the dynastic state.’106

  Custine accepted the autocratic politics as part of his tourist package (it is a deal that foreign visitors have gone on striking ever since), but what he really revelled in was the official promotion of Russianness. Though it was never more than costly palace make-believe, court life had certainly acquired a nationalist veneer. Flying in the face of decades of sophistication, Nicholas introduced a ‘national’ dress-code for certain court functions. Mistaking this innovation for something timeless, Custine described the elaborate head-dress that elite women had lately been obliged to wear: ‘it is very ancient,’ he wrote, ‘and gives an air of nobleness and originality to handsome persons’. At the wedding of a royal princess, he was also delighted to observe ‘the Russian, that is to say, the Persian, costume of the men’. These people, ‘in their long robes and brightly-coloured girdles … created the illusion of an immense Turkey carpet’.107 What troubled the visiting Frenchman was not the exotic and alien, but rather the Europeanness of the court: the extent to which, in Catherine the Great’s shadow, the ‘enrolled and drilled Tatars’ aspired to a civilized life. ‘I do not reproach the Russians for being what they are,’ he explained, ‘what I blame in them is, their pretending to be what we are.’

  It was a sentiment that some of Russia’s own elite were coming to endorse. In an age when every educated citizen was discussing the country’s future, a range of thinkers saw salvation in the traditional, the Slavonic, and the Orthodox. Moscow was such people’s true spiritual home, and by Custine’s time, the city had become a Mecca for conservative historians and philosophers. Among these were the antiquarian Ivan Snegirev, who also worked as a literary censor (one of his projects was to check the Bible for sedition), the artists and restorers Fedor Solntsev and Alexander Veltman, and patrons of theirs from the Golitsyn and Stroganov clans.108 These people’s lives revolved around historical research, religious ritual, and loyal service to their emperor. It was to find their kind of Russia that Custine set off for Moscow.

  He was not disappointed on his arrival in the old city. ‘The first view of the capital of the Slavonians,’ he wrote,

  rising brightly in the cold solitudes of the Christian East, produces an impressi
on that cannot easily be forgotten … The whole plain is covered with a silver guize. Three or four hundred churches … present to the eye an immense semi-circle, so that when approaching the city, towards sunset on a stormy evening, it would be easy to imagine you saw a rainbow of fire.

  Even greater thrills awaited in the city’s heart:

  The citadel of Moscow is not merely a palace. It is the bulwark of Russia, the revered asylum in which sleep the tutelary saints of the country, it is also the prison of spectres … In this prodigious creation strength takes the place of beauty, caprice of elegance: it is like the dream of a tyrant, fearful but full of power; it has something about it that disowns the age … an architecture that has no connection with the wants of modern civilisation: a heritage of the fabulous ages, a gaol, a palace, a sanctuary, a bulwark against the nation’s foes, a bastille against the nation, a prop of tyrants, a prison of peoples.109

  The problem, at least from the romantic point of view, was that Nicholas had plans to bring things up to date. The autocrat had always felt at ease in Moscow. In 1818, while Alexander was still emperor, he had taken over the old Chudov Palace, the building that Kazakov had created for Archbishop Platon in 1776, and rather than moving out of it on his accession, he had extended and adapted it several times. For all his efforts, however, the building, which was now known as the ‘Nicholas Palace’, was feeling, as he put it, ‘inconveniently small’. A new residence was required, especially since he planned to spend more time in the historic city. ‘We will show you the new works that we are making in the Kremlin,’ Nicholas promised Custine. ‘My object is to render the architecture of these old edifices better-adapted to the uses now made of them.’110 The Frenchman was horrified. ‘This is a profanation,’ he wrote. ‘Were I the Emperor, I would rather raise my palace in the air, than disturb one stone of the old ramparts of the Kremlin.’111