Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The new tsar’s Muscovite romance continued. In 1906, the tenth anniversary of his coronation, Nicholas’ famous jeweller, Carl Fabergé, created one of the most celebrated of his renowned Easter eggs, based on the Kremlin and its Dormition Cathedral.10 The charming trinket was the tsar’s gift to his consort that year, but it was far from the sum of their nostalgic pleasures. In February 1903, for instance, the couple had presided over an unforgettable Muscovite costume ball at which the guests had all appeared in authentic-looking seventeenth-century robes. As Nicholas noted in his diary, ‘the hall looked very pretty filled with ancient Russian people’, while one witness described the scene as ‘a living dream’.11 Though Russia teetered on the brink of civil unrest, a series of historic gala jubilees followed throughout the reign, the most spectacular of which was the tercentenary of the Romanov accession in 1913.12 After a royal progress through the land, this culminated in extended celebrations in the Kremlin.13 Moscow’s loyal historians were ready with a special exhibition to accompany the banquets and the balls, a full-scale celebration of Muscovy that featured 147 rare pre-Petrine icons as well as fabrics, silver and a display of original documents. Many of the items had been loaned from private collections in the city. For the elite, even the bourgeoisie, the celebration of the golden past had turned into a patriotic act.14

  In general, the past seemed to appeal the most to those who feared prospective change. The nineteenth century is often associated with the stress and transition that produced such radicals as Alexander Herzen(1812–70), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), and Georgy Plekhanov (1856–1918), respectively the founders of Russian socialism, anarchism and the Russian Marxist movement. By the 1900s, Russia could boast several different brands of revolutionary party, numerous would-be political assassins, and a fledgling trade-union movement. At the time, few of Moscow’s more prosperous types – its notaries and professors, its businessmen with their new money and hand-rolled cigars – spared much thought for the greasy youths and home-made bombs. Almost none had heard of communism, and most thought of revolution as a horror once inflicted on the French. There were many – including several historians – who regarded the impulse to commit acts of terror as a kind of psychological illness.15 But the injustice and inflexibility of tsarist rule unquestionably drove enlightened Russian citizens to near-despair, and hardship was a real spur to clandestine, illegal, labour organization.

  On Moscow’s streets, however, and in the basement rooms where people lived without cigars, the talk was seldom about revolution, let alone Karl Marx. The city’s population boomed, increasing by 65 per cent in the decade after 1861 and comfortably exceeding a million by 1902.16 The newcomers who hung around the taverns, markets and pavement stalls might have been poor, but most could still afford cheap souvenirs.17 Old photographs – the Russians loved them – show turn-of-the-century crowds against a city lined with shops and signage, and folklore and history are suddenly everywhere. Some of the posters and advertisements bore images derived from fairy-tales (the water-spirit, rusalka, was popular), and some showed landmarks like St Basil’s and the Sukharevka Tower, but the Kremlin was a recurrent, an inescapable, motif. It featured in picture-postcards, magazine-covers, and on the lids of decorative chocolate-boxes. It also turned up on thousands – millions – of icons. By the 1890s, the workshops in Palekh and Mstiora were turning these out like bars of soap; the craftsmen in a single village (Kholmy) could produce as many as two million in a year, and they soon began using the Kremlin’s image as a shorthand for holy Russia.18 As time went on, the fortress also started to feature on mass-produced scarves and postage stamps, on printed calendars and the covers of souvenir theatre programmes.19 Russian style had, in effect, become a brand, and the Kremlin was its instantly recognizable trademark.

  * * *

  That style, however, was a nineteenth-century invention. It drew on early works of art, the products of an age as yet unsullied by the neo-classical revolution, it drew on Russia’s scattered churches, peasant costumes, and icons from a range of different schools, but the nineteenth century’s achievement was to interpret and synthesize these diverse, eclectic, and not always truly Russian objects into an entirely novel artistic idiom. Distinguished by a weakness for the onion dome and kokoshnik (the decorative Russian corbel arch), the fashion was far from austere. Magpie-like, its exponents collected everything from peasant woodcarvings to drinking-cups, and that was where the treasures of the Kremlin played their role. Largely untouched, and often prey to mice and rot, the relics of pre-Petrine Muscovy that the fortress contained had been little more than lumber for a century; at best they made a collection of random curiosities. The process of their rediscovery took decades. But in the end, a neglected assortment of icons and decorative weaponry, a trove of awkward, heavy ceremonial regalia, and the motifs in a set of semi-ruined buildings emerged as the inspiration for a nation’s cultural revival. Elaborate and faintly exotic, its colours, shapes and lettering have gone on symbolizing Russia, to itself and others, ever since.

  The objects in the Armoury Chamber had swum into official view on several occasions since the days of Peter the Great. As early as 1755, a palace official called Argamakov had argued for the creation of a permanent exhibition space. But it was only in 1801, when Alexander I, on the eve of his coronation, began to take an interest that the condition of the Kremlin collection attracted any serious concern.20 It turned out that there were thousands of objects, almost jumble, in the Kremlin’s various strongrooms. Icons were more or less familiar, but the original purpose of some of the rest remained a puzzle. An eye-catching golden ewer, the metal twining round a large exotic shell, was one such mystery, but even the more familiar objects could be difficult to identify precisely.21 The collection included elaborate religious vestments, not least some pearl-encrusted mitres from the seventeenth century, but then there were the jewelled tankards and court plate, drinking-vessels adorned with niello work, quantities of swords and bows, saddles, harness and decorated horse-armour. None of this had been examined for decades. Some things were literally falling to pieces.

  As soon as the collection had been noticed by St Petersburg, questions started to be raised. One thorny issue was the cost of curatorial staff. Their numbers, the accountants saw, seemed to have mushroomed even as the collection continued to decay. The supervisor of all Kremlin works, tidy-minded Petr Valuev, promptly reorganized both staff and treasure, though he thought that all ‘useless’ objects should be sold.22 It fell to others to see the real value in the old robes and the tarnished swords. One hopeful theory, proposed by no less a person than the president of St Petersburg’s Academy of Arts, Aleksei Olenin (1763–1843), was that a true study of such objects would reveal the classical (i.e. European) origins of medieval Russian culture, establishing a long-lost link to Europe’s common ancestors in Greece and Rome.23 It was a tempting idea at the time, and in 1806 the tsar commanded that the remaining objects in the Armoury and associated workshops should be put in order pending more investigation.24

  Olenin worked in the collection from 1807, joining a small group of other experts and enthusiasts, and the first catalogue, prepared by A. F. Malinovsky, was published that same year. The task of establishing the authenticity of anything was complicated by the eagerness of wealthy patriots who proffered items from their own strongrooms, and even by a few donations from public-spirited peasants, who came to Moscow bringing objects they had turned up in their masters’ fields.25 In 1810 the architect I. V. Egotov completed a special building, in the finest neo-classical style, to house it all. Valuev assumed the role of curator, a task he fulfilled with his usual energy.26 But the collection’s troubles continued. First came the panic and last-minute packing as Napoleon advanced; the treasures that came back from Nizhnyi-Novgorod in 1814 had been so roughly handled that some of the most delicate items, including fabrics and porcelain, had been damaged beyond repair.27 To compound the losses, a good number of smaller items, including collections of rare manus
cripts (and also including Karamzin’s own archive), had disappeared when Moscow burned.

  The destruction was catastrophic – by 1814 the palace collection must have felt like the salvage from some great shipwreck – but Napoleon’s invasion of the homeland inspired a new respect for the legacy of old Russia. People might not know quite what an object was, let alone how best to place it in context, but a new sense that Russia had its own art, in style and spirit different from that of Europe, was detectable at court and among some intellectuals. The accession of Nicholas I in 1825 was not untroubled, sparking a failed revolt by disaffected members of the Russian intelligentsia, but that, too, gave an impetus to patriots. The emperor harnessed their enthusiasm in his political programme, encouraging Russian-centred art and style at court as eagerly as he bore down upon dissent. The precise story of this Russianness, however, was a problem that forced Nicholas to take advice, especially from his court antiquarians. It was confusing enough to have to deal with unintelligible script, for Old Russian was almost Greek to Nicholas’ generation. But there were also tough questions to be answered about provenance; unless there was crystal-clear documentation, it was almost impossible to determine the date of anything.

  Nicholas was not a scholar, and his interest was always pragmatic. Faced with this collection of treasures, whose use and origin were often unknown, his priority remained the promotion of official nationality, and to that end he needed someone who could interpret the past. Olenin knew exactly whom to recommend. In the 1830s, he encouraged his emperor to hire the award-winning artist Fedor Solntsev (1801–92) to explore and record the Kremlin collection.28 In later life, Solntsev would recollect that his commission had been to document Russia’s ‘ancient customs, dress, weaponry, church and imperial accoutrements, everyday objects, and archaeological and ethnographic information’ from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries.29 His execution of that mammoth project (if not his actual name) would soon be famous, and it still shapes most people’s idea of ‘real’ Russian style.

  Solntsev’s work was not confined to copying; the tsar additionally commissioned him to create a series of Russian motifs to decorate a new ‘Kremlin’ porcelain dinner service comprising five hundred settings. The work took sixteen years to complete (the final pieces were fired in 1847), but the service was spectacular, and would be used whenever the court wanted a Russian nationalist theme, most notably at the Romanov tercentenary in 1913.30 A second service, this time for Nicholas’ son, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, was fired later in the 1840s. For both commissions Solntsev drew on his explorations in the Kremlin, and though some of the objects that he copied had been made by foreign masters in the tsar’s employ (or, at least, by Russians working under instruction from Germans, Scots and Persians), the porcelain became a landmark of national art. A whole series of Kremlin plates, for instance, followed seventeenth-century designs, while the distinctive shape of the so-called ‘Alexander Nevsky’ helmet (which had, ironically enough, been made at a nostalgic moment in the reign of the first Romanov tsar) was recycled to inspire the lid of Grand Duke Konstantin’s new coffee-pot.31

  In 1834, a very busy Solntsev was also charged with the renovation of a suite of rooms associated with Mikhail Romanov in the old part of the Kremlin palace.32 The terema became – and still remain – a showcase for his new, imagined, version of the past. The colours on the walls and tiles were deep and rich, the patterns intricate, organic, as if inspired by the meadow-flowers in a Russian fairy-tale. Some of the design was authentic (Solntsev retrieved and copied anything that had survived), but much was improvised, and some relied on flights of creative imagination. The furniture, for instance, included Solntsev’s copies of pieces rescued from Kolomenskoe, but the heavily draped beds – never a feature of the real terema – had no historical connection to the chambers where they were to stand. The colour-scheme, favouring deep red and green, was also chosen to evoke the romantic feel that Solntsev wanted.33

  In all, the restoration, which also involved architects like Ton and F. F. Rikhter, was almost as creative as a brand-new design. By indulging a fantasy, the artist and his allies were making a sort of fake (in this regard, Solntsev has been likened to Britain’s Augustus Pugin and France’s Eugène Viollet-le-Duc).34 But that fake was immensely influential, and it remains, for most, the closest they will ever get to a sense of the Muscovite past. Another outcome was the rediscovery – in many ways, the reinvention – of the Kremlin as a work of art. This coincided with a wider acceptance of native landscape, for by the 1850s even Russia’s aristocracy had begun to accept that the silver birches that grew everywhere on their estates could be as scenic as any cypress-grove in Italy.35

  The Kremlin became a treasure-house for the resurgent culture. Russians were used to looking at classical and fine European art, but now they could take pride in every home-grown masterpiece. When the final book in Solntsev’s most extensive collection of watercolours, the six-volume Antiquities of the Russian State, appeared in 1853, it marked a watershed in art appreciation and in taste, and most of the objects it showed were treasures from the Kremlin Armoury. Here was the famous fur-trimmed Cap of Monomakh, but here, too, were the details of embroidered fabrics, the handles of swords, lamp-holders, coach-work, decorative saddlery. The colours were brilliant and clear, featuring red, gold, emerald and ultramarine. In Solntsev’s hands, each venerable piece had acquired a perfection so dazzling that it banished any lingering thought of cultural inferiority, let alone mildew.36

  In reality, however, moth and fungus were making fresh inroads into the collection even as Solntsev worked. The culprit was the 1810 museum building itself. Egotov, fearing fires, had deliberately built it without stoves, and by the 1830s the pervasive damp looked set to destroy whatever the mice and Napoleon had overlooked. Such ravages were intolerable in the age of Russian nationalism, so Nicholas I approved a project for an entirely new museum. The site that was identified, beside the Borovitsky gates, allowed Konstantin Ton to build it as an annex to the Grand Palace.37 The new building shared the same style, the same solidity, and (like the palace) it occupied a site of unique archaeological significance. That site, sadly, was surveyed and excavated in haste, and if there had once been an ancient road or hermit’s cave underneath it, Moscow was never to find out. Nor would local antiquarians get the chance to explore the ruins of Godunov’s palace, the last major building to have stood there.38 Another disappointment came in 1851, when the staff in Ton’s new Armoury Chamber museum discovered that no provision had been made in it for conservation work. They were already feeling underpaid, but now the only space where they could clean, repair or study their objects was in a basement of the adjoining Grand Palace.39

  If anything, when the museum was finished, the Kremlin felt more like the exclusive property of the Russian tsars than it had ever done. Experts who worked there often arrived to find the building locked without notice.40 As for the public, entrance was limited, mainly, to Muscovites and special, pre-vetted, guests. A fairly liberal system was introduced under Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II (ruled 1855–81), but from the 1880s the palace imposed firmer controls. Entry-tickets could be obtained only from the police administration, and the procedure would have made today’s restrictions appear light. In 1914, potential visitors had either to provide proof that they lived in Moscow or, if they were not locals, to apply in writing (to a separate office in a different building) two weeks in advance of any planned visit.41 The museum’s opening hours – 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. three days a week between September and May – limited visits even more. Despite all this, the Palace and Armoury together received an annual average of about a quarter of a million visitors in the last years of tsarism.42

  For foreigners, the rules were different, and showed how closely Russia’s newly created nationalism was connected to the official Orthodox Church. When a selection of the Armoury’s treasures was earmarked for display at the Paris Exposition of 1867, the Russian authorities refused to allow t
he items to travel, pleading that sacred objects should not be treated as exhibits for the vulgar gaze.43 The Paris public had to be content with a set of drawings. It had been fine to sell some pieces of the same trove sixty years before, and it was not unusual to find an item mouldering in basement rooms, but foreigners, even curators and specialists, could not examine anything unless they made the effort to present themselves to the Moscow police.

  For those who managed to procure their ticket, however, the Armoury offered glimpses of another world. It was a Romanov family collection, the private property of a royal dynasty, and that lent it an eclectic and unbalanced air. Indeed, it was not even quite complete, for in 1858 Alexander II ordered that some of the objects, selected silver plate and furniture, should be removed to furnish a museum-project of his own, the restored house of the Romanov boyars on nearby Varvarka street.44 Some other gaps were suspiciously like unsolved crimes: small gems, pocket-sized ones, were rarer than the massive, famous jewels that could never have been sold. Weapons and transport featured prominently (a whole room was devoted to ceremonial coaches), but there was little trace of any routine palace life, especially that of royal women. A room was set aside for Bazhenov’s extravagant model Kremlin, an object that was fast becoming the white elephant that it still remains, and beside it stood the older model of the palace at Kolomenskoe, a relic of Muscovy that now seemed closer to the nation’s heart. The most glamorous attractions were the celebrated gems, including the royal regalia. Two rooms held these – there was a special case just for the Cap of Monomakh – and visitors could also view the coronation robes. To these were added diplomatic gifts, including unique inlaid thrones from Isfahan, one made for Boris Godunov, the other for Alexei Mikhailovich, a carriage given by England’s King James I, and the finest collection of Tudor English silver in the world.45