Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

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  Despite the new level of interest, the Kremlin was hardly a public institution and certainly not a museum. Its fate depended on decisions made at court, in St Petersburg, and on whatever budget the administration there could spare.46 Fortunately, three out of Russia’s five nineteenth-century emperors harboured a real fondness for Moscow, and even the reforming Alexander II, who was born in the Kremlin’s Nicholas Palace in 1818, referred to the city (which he did not like) as ‘my native land’.47 The years of ivy-covered neglect were coming to an end. ‘As Moscow is the heart of Russia,’ a guidebook of 1856 solemnly explained, ‘so the Kremlin is not only the heart and soul of our white-stone Moscow, but also the seed from which our Russian Tsarism has grown.’48 The piety was genuine, but it was fast becoming an anachronism. Europe was changing, and even white-stone Moscow would not stand aloof. Eighteen fifty-six was the year when Henry Bessemer’s new steel process promised to revolutionize manufacturing across the world. The tale of humanity itself was being rewritten. Just outside Düsseldorf, near Erkrath, some workers had just found parts of a skull that later formed the standard for Neanderthals. Three years later, in 1859, Charles Darwin was to publish his shattering book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

  However hard conservatives might try, there was no way to hold back an advance of progress on this scale. In the age of steam, a political system that was based on coercion and political repression, even one that was oiled by regular doses of Holy Russian sentiment, could only overheat and stall. The more thoughtful members of Russia’s political class had grasped this by the reign of Alexander I, and in 1855 the death of his obstructive successor, Nicholas I, opened the way to limited change. The greatest single measure of reform (whose fiftieth anniversary, in 1911, was one jubilee that the Romanovs chose to ignore) came six years later, in 1861. When he succeeded his father, Alexander II had made it clear that he intended to abolish the institution of serfdom. It was a reasonable, almost irresistible, decision, long-discussed. It was taken at a time when slavery was being challenged across the civilized world. Predictably, too, conservatives were appalled. In Russia’s case it looked as if their cause had been betrayed by the sovereign himself. ‘Woe to Russia,’ wrote one Moscow-based historian, ‘if it knocks this pillar away of its own accord and breaks the centuries-old bonds of reciprocal benefit.’49 If Karamzin had lived, he would have written much the same. ‘Serfs can be liberated,’ he had once quipped, ‘as soon as it is possible for wolves to be fully fed while sheep remain uninjured.’50

  In fact, the emancipation manifesto was limited, complex and cautious, a far cry from the principled stand of anti-slavery campaigners in the English-speaking world. But the end of serfdom constituted an epic break with the past, and it was followed by a programme of important further change. In the next few years, Alexander II signed laws providing for limited local government, extended education provision and far-reaching legal reform, including jury trials. He might have gone yet further if the political mood had not been soured (to put it mildly) by an attempt on his life in the spring of 1866. Already depressed by the death of his eldest son, the heir-apparent Nikolai Aleksandrovich, the previous year, a shocked Alexander II now began to rely almost exclusively on a conservative clique of advisors.51 The next fifteen years were punctuated by explosions, shots and the ring of hammers on hangmen’s scaffolds. But this repressive war on terror proved futile, and in March 1881, despite the efforts of his spies, the emperor, now in his early sixties, was blown to pieces by a bomb laid for his carriage as it travelled through St Petersburg. It took him several hours to die, and the scene (especially the blood) haunted the shocked imaginations of his loyal subjects everywhere. The royal family itself could scarcely bear to speak of it.

  Alexander II’s heir, Alexander III, never forgot that he owed his throne to his father’s agony. He was an uncompromising reactionary, and his reign was to be one long tale of arrests, forced emigration and penal exile, censorship, hypocrisy, and the pervasive use of informers. But it began with a coronation. The event was delayed until the spring of 1883, and the interval allowed the palace craftsmen to adapt the setting to new tastes. Since Peter the Great’s reign, the Faceted Palace (which had at times done service as a theatre) had been whitewashed inside, lined with fabric and hung with classical medallions.52 In preparation for his coronation feast, Alexander commissioned a group of icon-masters from Palekh to restore the interiors ‘to the old appearance that they had in ancient times’. The team, led by the Belousov brothers, toiled for months, working largely from Ushakov’s seventeenth-century drawings, and though the results lacked subtlety (they remind me of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s pastiche medievalism), the lines of old-time princes and boyars certainly evoked the saintly era of dynastic rule.53 The diners who gathered inside on the coronation afternoon sat among richly painted walls. In the centre of the room, they could admire the tiers of shelves that groaned, as in the distant past, with antique gold and silver from the Kremlin hoard. Outside, there were no Latinate triumphal gates, and even the lavish commemorative album from the occasion had an elaborately Russian, not classical, graphic design.54

  The timing of the coronation coincided with the opening (at last) of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. As a monument to the redemptive power of the people’s sacrifice in 1812, Ton’s vast shrine might, in other circumstances, have seemed to challenge the Kremlin’s dominance of Moscow’s sky. It housed important relics from the war, and its walls bore a carved list of the names of the fallen. The building could accommodate 10,000 people, and its cupola, an unsung miracle of nineteenth-century engineering, was higher even than the landmark bell tower of Ivan the Great. The original plan for the cathedral’s gala opening was to have involved cannon, trumpets, and the premiere of T chaikovsky’s 1812 overture. But Alexander II’s assassination forced a delay, and even a rethinking of the symbolism. On 30 May 1883, as the new imperial family and the lines of ministers and priests processed from the Dormition Cathedral to Ton’s building and back, it was clear that, in this new age of reaction, the cathedral’s role would be to extend the dynasty’s imperious reach along the river, consuming Moscow’s public space in the service of autocracy.55 Years after his death, on 30 May 1912, a colossal statue of Alexander III was unveiled at the top of the cathedral steps. Nicholas II and his wife (in a delightful white toilette, complete with parasol) were there to watch, and so were all the priests and advisors, but as the monster loomed above the crowds, glaring at Moscow and the Kremlin from its massive throne, it looked as if the city had been conquered by a giant.56

  By then, however, the Kremlin had acquired a giant of its own to even out the competition. Today, the most famous monument to the assassination of Alexander II is in St Petersburg. Alexander III commissioned the shrine, now known as the Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood, in 1883, and it was built in an uncompromisingly nostalgic (for which read pastiche) neo-Russian style, complete with colourful mosaic panels and the standard-issue onion domes. But while St Petersburg endured years of disruption during the construction of that (and still endures the finished building), Moscow’s elite found its own way of commemorating the murdered tsar. S. N. Tretyakov, the brother of the art-collector, took the initial lead, and it was his idea that any monument should stand near the Kremlin palace where Alexander II had been born. The site of the old prikazy looked just right, and then a ground survey added an appropriate frisson by turning up hundreds of skeletons, suggesting hurried burial, perhaps during a Mongol raid.57 This bloody precedent was a good start, but though it sanctified the site it did not help much with the future monument’s design. Statues were not in keeping with the old Kremlin, and Alexander had never been a robes and candles man. In the end, it took three competitions and a lot of argument to settle on a winner, by which time the project – which those involved seemed to treat as a spiritual test – had taken on grotesque dimensions.58 It had also acquired a royal patron in the shape of A
lexander III’s own brother, the pious, prim and reactionary Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, who became governor-general of Moscow in the spring of 1891.

  The first stone for the Kremlin monument to Alexander II was laid, to the sound of bells and a full 133-gun salute, on 14 May 1893 (the buried skulls, meanwhile, were borne off quietly to Moscow University). Five and a half years and just under two million rubles later, in August 1898, the finished structure was opened by the new tsar, Nicholas II. Towering above the Moscow river, especially when illuminated at night, its centrepiece was a bronze statue of the murdered emperor roughly four times natural size. Leading up to that was an open-air gallery lined with 152 columns, a pointless space that Muscovites were quick to dub ‘the bowling-alley’. Pink granite from Finland completed the ensemble, which even the most sheepish members of Moscow’s intelligentsia were known to hate. Inside, meanwhile, the theme was romantically historical. A team of artists had created a mosaic cycle within the colonnade to lead visitors through nine hundred years of supposedly continuous Russian history. The starring roles were played by thirty-three officially approved rulers from Vladimir to Nicholas I and finally – glancing outside – by Alexander II himself.59 The main inscription on the façade ran: ‘To Alexander II with the love of the people.’60

  Strangely, once they had lived with it for a few months, large numbers of ordinary Muscovites seem genuinely to have made the Alexander monument part of their lives. It was secular and accessible, and the view from the top was great. The paved space underneath the colonnades became a favourite for ladies seeking to enjoy the sights and also for the gentlemen who idled round to wait for them. Thousands of humbler mortals treated the mosaics as a useful introduction to their nation’s history, or at least as a place to take their visitors when the weather was wet. One of Moscow’s nimbler textile factories cashed in, and began marketing a woven headscarf that featured the monument (in red, on a cream ground) surrounded by a tasteful greenish border composed of the royal portraits rendered as a series of medallions.61

  This comfortable version of the past grew ever more alluring as the pace of economic change increased. As Moscow’s population boomed, and new smokestacks and loud machines intruded on its calm, the attractions of nostalgia grew ever more powerful. So did the threat to the people’s sense of Russianness from endless tempting foreign goods and brash ideas. The Kremlin itself was not safe. In 1893, a citizen called Kozhevnikov drew attention to the citadel’s poor state compared with the Upper Trading Rows (now known commonly as GUM), the glass and iron palace that now challenged it across Red Square. With so much building going on, so much regeneration, the Kremlin urgently cried out for help; its renovation, Kozhevnikov wrote in an essay published in the journal Russian Archive, amounted to ‘the sacred duty of sons before their fathers’. ‘To become what they should be,’ he continued, ‘the Kremlin walls should not be whitewashed, nor painted, but they should be artistically decorated with hand-painted illustrations … all around and from top to bottom … showing scenes from the drama of Russia’s history.’ The themes proposed were patriotic: Russia’s heroic stand at the crossroads of the continents, its history of holy struggle and its war against infidels, Asians, and (wrote Kozhevnikov) the ‘armies of fanatical Islam’.62 The idea seems outlandish now, but at the time there would have been a stampede if an artist had been called upon to do the job. The pack might well have been led by two brothers, Victor and Apollinary Vasnetsov (1848–1926 and 1856–1933 respectively), whose work in these years included paintings, ceramics, carved wood and even architectural designs that gave the nation just the Muscovy it seemed to want.63

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  Real Kremlin life was no romance, but nor was it in keeping with the new commercial frenzy out on Moscow’s streets. The pace of life had slowed in the fortress since the building of St Petersburg. By 1909, the Chudov Monastery, which at its height had been home to three hundred monks and their servants, housed only seventy-two men, of whom twenty-three were non-religious palace staff.64 The Ascension women’s monastery had declined in the same way; by 1917 its complement had dwindled to just fifty-one.65 Both institutions had been forced to find new ways of generating revenue since their heydays, the men by selling candles, holy books and consecrated bread, the women by weaving palm crosses and making artificial flowers for sale.66 Meanwhile, though ceremonies for the tsars were still magnificent (and the Synod choir, which sang in the Dormition Cathedral, remained a wonder of Moscow’s cultural life), the daily services in many Kremlin churches were perfunctory. ‘The service was crude,’ one visitor recalled after attending vespers in 1911, ‘the deacons and the singers had the most disagreeable bass voices, the church was empty and dark, and the whole thing had a most disagreeable effect on me.’67

  Outside the confines of the church, on land where weeds and even full-sized trees had lately grown, a dull parade-ground order now ruled almost everywhere. Though visitors, if decently attired, were permitted to stroll about the hill by day, Cathedral Square itself was enclosed by railings and guarded by a row of sentry-boxes. All gateways and main thoroughfares were locked at night. The guards belonged to the permanent palace staff, all of whom were carefully screened for deviant political views. The other residents included policemen and grenadiers, but the Kremlin’s full-time population also numbered several doctors and architects, a midwife, and at least seven accountants. An army of servants (known, to their own well-documented discomfort, as ‘lackeys’68) completed the population. Many lived on the site itself – there were about two hundred such official residents in 1905 – but conditions were modest (few occupied more than one small room) and the atmosphere could be more or less subtly oppressive. Even occasional overnight visitors were watched and sometimes subject to arrest.69

  The staff themselves led languid, even boring, working lives. In 1862, Sofiya Behrs, the daughter of a resident palace doctor, held her wedding in a Kremlin church. The groom was Lev Tolstoy, who later used the scene (complete with his embarrassing last-minute search for a clean shirt) when he described Kitty and Levin’s marriage ceremony in his novel Anna Karenina. Like the fictional Kitty, the real Sofiya had spent the entire day in tears, but she managed to control herself in the presence of ‘a great many strangers, palace employees mostly’ who gathered round to watch. As Tolstoy put it, ‘Those who had arrived too late to get into the middle of the throng pressed round the windows, pushing and disputing and trying to peer in between the bars.’70 There was normally so little for such people to do that when the imperial family needed to accommodate large numbers of important guests (as they might on almost any state occasion), the Kremlin’s less important residents – whole families – were obliged to vacate their rooms, sometimes for months at a time.71 ‘Kremlin life is oppressive,’ Tolstoy’s new wife reflected on a return visit to her parents’ apartment. ‘It evokes the oppressive, lazy, aimless life I led here as a girl.’72

  The circumstances were not conducive to determined effort. It must have felt quite strange to quit the city for the Kremlin’s tranquil squares, nod at the sentry, and to step inside the Armoury archive. The building was magnificent, a blaze of gold; the ill-lit desks, by contrast, narrow, cluttered and austerely functional. And yet the nineteenth century’s nationalist historians could not keep away from the fortress, for besides its gems and lavish gold, the Armoury’s other major treasure was its store of documents. The majority of these papers had started life in Muscovite prikazy, and had been shifted, like unwanted baggage, from shelf to store to strongroom as the Kremlin landscape changed. The collections included account-books and treaties, details of fire legislation, and the names of every foreign worker in the Kremlin’s hire. The paperwork was incomplete – parts of the archive had burned and other documents had disappeared in the many government reorganizations of Romanov times – but this was raw material for real professional research. While lackeys next door in the palace rubbed a languid thumb across the silver spoons, a new team of historians began to w
rite.

  They did not get to work in special light or pull on clean white gloves. They were not like the specialists who use archives today, and they tended to share a particular outlook and cast of mind. The older generation was represented by Ivan Snegirev (1792–1868), historian, ethnographer, official censor and arch-conservative. A professor in Moscow by the 1830s, his output included historical accounts of famous monuments, among them several of the Kremlin churches, and news of his efforts soon reached as far as London’s British Museum. Snegirev took great delight in decoding the documents that wealthy patrons could not read (‘they say the writing of the seventeenth century looks like shorthand,’ he wrote in 184173), and used that skill to open doors into the lost world of pre-Petrine tsars.

  As his diaries show, however, Snegirev’s was a spiritual, not merely scientific quest. He was a regular attender at both the Chudov Monastery and the Dormition Cathedral, and his love of dusty papers was part of his deep religious faith. He read and wrote, in other words, in search of the imagined city, saint-filled and still untouched by Europe, that had produced the art and religion he loved. Beyond the church, his circle included many of Russia’s conservative patriots as well as the cream of artistic Moscow. He spent evenings in the company of the writers Sergei Glinka and Ivan Turgenev, he dogged Fedor Solntsev round the Kremlin, and he lectured Konstantin Ton about the building he was planning to erect. The writer Alexander Veltman (1800–70), later curator of the Armoury Museum, became a friend, as did the noblemen – mainly Golitsyns – who sponsored Snegirev by buying ancient manuscripts for him to decipher. His wife, however, was no admirer of his monkish tastes, and in return he found her wild and vulgar, even slightly mad. On a day-to-day basis, he took refuge in libraries. ‘I got on with my own affairs,’ the historian wrote in January 1843, ‘which my wife greatly obstructed.’74