Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  As well as cultivating the elite, Snegirev used his influence to encourage talent and attract new minds to his projects. Among his protégés was a penniless young man from Tver called Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908). In 1837, when the latter was forced to abandon his studies for lack of funds, Snegirev took him on to work with documents in the newly accessible Kremlin archives. In compensation for his meagre pay, the youth was given rooms in the Cavalry Building behind the Kremlin palace, and he took the opportunity to immerse himself in the lives of dead Muscovite tsars. He would give his best years to that subject, though he also led successful archaeological expeditions to the Crimean steppe.75 Snegirev approved Zabelin’s first publication, an article based on Kremlin papers, in 1842. Exactly twenty years later the younger man completed his first masterpiece, a study of the seventeenth-century Kremlin called The Home Life of the Muscovite Tsars.

  Snegirev and his protégé lived in a world apart from liberal reforms and revolutionary politics. For Snegirev, patriotism was a holy duty almost indistinguishable from religious service. In 1855, for instance, on the day after the death of Nicholas I, while the bells rang and the cannon boomed above the shocked, clamouring crowd, Snegirev joined a select group of Moscow’s elite in the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery to hear the imperial succession manifesto. The sombre mood there was far more to his taste than a noisy crush among the mob. ‘It is remarkable,’ he noted, ‘that Nicholas I died on the very same day and hour (Friday at noon) that Christ suffered for us when He was on the cross.’76 It did not matter that the late tsar was a prig, nor that he had demolished large parts of a building Snegirev revered. A loyal subject was supposed to view the dead ruler with religious awe.

  Zabelin’s patriotism was much less spiritual in tone. He was no lover of Nicholas I, and wrote accusingly about the damage that the emperor had caused with his ugly Kremlin palace and the botched repairs. As the son of poor parents, he greeted the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 with tears of joy, although he then stopped short of any further liberal demands.77 Like Snegirev, however, he certainly believed that Russia was a nation with a destiny. His pet hates were the student radicals, the future gravediggers of tsarism. He also condemned the substantial band of émigrés who wrote critically about Russia from the comfort of western European cities. Citing a Russian proverb, he observed that ‘you must not carry arguments out of the hut’. But the concepts that had done the most to pollute national life, in his view, had originated among the tsar’s Polish Catholic subjects, a large minority in the empire with strong connections to Europe. ‘Freedom, independence, self-reliance, self-government,’ he wrote disparagingly in 1861, ‘this is the miasma of our ideas at the moment, like an epidemic.’78

  Chauvinism like this was the hidden poison in neo-Russian thought. A search for cultural purity could easily go wrong, a love for all things Russian degrade into resentment of the foreign and the unfamiliar. The canker of anti-Semitism had established itself all over nineteenth-century Europe, but in Russia the wildest spores were deliberately cultivated. Indeed, the Russian version was so unapologetic that in 1891 Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, felt able to demand that Moscow should be cleared of Jews as a precondition for his acceptance of the post of governor-general in the city. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, the city authorities were willing to comply, and in 1891–2 two-thirds of Moscow’s Jewish population were driven from their homes by local police. More than 15,000 people were forced to survive on the roads, dependent on the fragile mercy of provincial life.79 It was a strange way to attempt to win the people’s loyalty and love, but a caste of Muscovite chauvinists approved. Zabelin was more imaginative (compared with the grand duke this was not saying much), but in 1905, when his beloved Moscow dissolved into violent revolution, the old man blamed the ‘eternal Jew [vechnyi zhid] with his intrigues’, and notably ‘the Jewish [zhidovskie] newspapers’. In private, Nicholas II had decided that ‘nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews’,80 and Zabelin (independently) agreed. ‘We have had the Pechenegs,’ he noted in his diary, ‘the Polovtsians, the Tatars, the Poles, a score of different Europeans under the leadership of the enlightenment French. Now we have the revolutionary invasion of the Jews … presenting the Russian people as the most worthless of the worthless.’81

  This was taking nostalgia into the realms of deep despair: fomenting hatreds, abusing history and building false, murderous, pride. But at this time its very intolerance actually added to the appeal of Russian style, at least in conservative circles. The nationalist movement is difficult to like, but in the nineteenth century’s final decades it seemed no more abhorrent, to most people, than Russia’s own version of England’s Arts and Crafts movement. By 1900, the taste for so-called ‘Russian revival’, for the shapes and forms of Muscovite high art and recovered folklore, was influencing everything from painting and architecture to journalism, literature and textile-design. As the chairman of the Moscow Society of Architects complained in 1910, ‘material from the past’ exerted such a hold on the national imagination that it was all but impossible to say ‘a new original word’.82

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  The first Imperial Russian Archaeological Society was founded in 1846, by the grace of the emperor, Nicholas I, in St Petersburg. Moscow followed suit in 1864, but the interests of the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society would turn out to be distinctive.83 A well-earned reputation for documentary research turned the society into one of the most influential voices for architectural conservation in the empire, though its ultimate campaign, a project to repair the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral, remained at best controversial and at worst destructive.84 In 1918, under a different regime, the members of Moscow’s post-revolutionary artistic elite condemned its treatment of the frescoes as vandalism – the restorers should have done no more than scrape back later paint to uncover the earliest layers – but the damage might have been much worse. Church leaders had wanted to redecorate the Kremlin’s most famous interior with Byzantine mosaics: repainted frescoes were far less incongruous. Members of the society also won an argument about the socle, the base on which Fioravanti had designed the building in the fifteenth century, and by the outbreak of the First World War, a team of engineers had managed to lower the whole of Cathedral Square, returning the landmark to its original proportions.85

  The path that led the society to such achievements was far from smooth, however. Zabelin, a noted archaeologist in his own right, attended the Archaeological Society’s first major congress in 1869, surely a key moment in the city’s relationship with its own past. It was, for him, a cruel disappointment. Like many such meetings before and since, this one felt – as he put it – like some kind of livestock exhibition, a tedious parade of narrow, self-regarding personal displays. ‘It is boring even to record it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘No-one has a clue about the discipline.’ With pardonable rancour, too, he noted that the great historian Mikhail Pogodin (1800–75) had not mentioned his own Home Life of the Muscovite Tsars.86 But pompous men with gold watch-chains (Solntsev was there) were not the sum of the society’s problems. From sentimental archaizing to the caprice of the tsar, its projects always had to overcome the most frustrating obstacles, and none faced more of these than its first and greatest scheme of all: the construction of a public museum beside the Kremlin.

  When Alexander II let it be known that he wished to found such a museum, what he imagined was a series of displays that would tell Russia’s history through the lens of war. The Archaeological Society convened a committee under the chairmanship of Prince Aleksei Uvarov in 1869, and soon its members were thinking hard about objects and their value to a fact-hungry public. The narrative of progress, romance, and Russian uniqueness was never questioned, but the museum soon moved away from Alexander’s puerile focus on the military. The committee preferred to widen its remit to include the whole of Russian history, and Moscow’s story above all. The proposed building, which was to be opened in honour of Tsarevich Alexander Alek
sandrovich (the future Alexander III), soon became known simply as the Moscow Historical Museum.87

  The society’s progress was painfully slow. One source of delay was the Polytechnical Exhibition of 1872, a brilliantly successful event held in the public spaces round the Kremlin to mark the bicentenary of Peter the Great. Attractive stands in lavish temporary pavilions invited Muscovites to explore the finest achievements of science (including history), and the exhibits, which included recently discovered documents and ancient seals from inside the fortress, were the talk of the city.88 The public appetite had certainly been whetted, and the historians were eager to seize the initiative. As the marquees and the coloured lamps came down, members of the Archaeological Society were pleased to learn that some of the most interesting items from the exhibition had been earmarked for permanent display in their museum, and also that their new building had been assigned a whole block at the north end of Red Square. This was a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, which gave the advocates of fashionable Russian style an extra reason to base the museum’s design on it. Conveniently forgotten was the fact that many of the most iconic features of that fortress had been shaped by the ideas of foreigners.

  The competition among architects was fierce. Among those who submitted designs were Fedor Shekhtel (later famous for his interpretations of Russian moderne, a kind of Art Nouveau) and Nikolai Shokhin, one of the architects of the eye-catching new Polytechnical Museum. The winner, however, with a design called ‘Fatherland’, was Vladimir Shervud (Sherwood), a Russian of British descent. His eclectic plan was purely and quintessentially Russian, at least as people of the time chose to interpret that, and the Kremlin clearly served as inspiration. Arched windows and a tented roof, elaborate gables, twining curves and gothic porches: Shervud’s design had everything except coherence. Zabelin (to his credit) remained unconvinced. At an early meeting of the management group, he noted that the style amounted to an assemblage of disparate and mismatched parts, observing mischievously that the facet-detail of some of the stonework was based on old Italian designs. ‘They don’t exist in Italy,’ a bigot from the nationalist camp snapped back, ‘and since Aristotele [Fioravanti] built in the Russian style, the [facets] must be Russian.’89

  More arguments awaited when it came to fitting out the exhibition halls: this, after all, was a rare chance to make a definitive intellectual statement at public expense. Experts of widely differing views threw tantrums over questions like the place of Europe, the relevance of common people, the place to be accorded to military affairs, and (of course) the rules for admission. But in the end, the museum was largely shaped by Zabelin’s sensibility, especially after he became its executive director on Uvarov’s death in 1884.90 The rooms were beautiful, painted in bright colours, an inviting place for a stroll whatever you wanted to see. Muscovites flocked to the galleries in droves, and as they toured the spacious halls they were introduced to a thrilling, and an unsuspected, world. Dinosaur bones, they learned, had been found in their own forests. Urn burials had taken place in lost kurgans not far from the Tver road. Traces of pagan sacrifice, meanwhile (and, more prosaically, old coins), had been extracted from under their very streets.91

  This sort of thing was much more fun than any list of stuffy tsars. Although the Archaeological Society spent relatively little of its effort on fieldwork, Zabelin had always insisted that archaeology and history were ‘the right and left hands of the same scientific organism’.92 The notion gave the Kremlin a peculiar allure. In normal times, the palace administration did not permit excavation of any kind on the hallowed hill. For the most part, digs could only accompany scheduled building-work, which limited the scientific possibilities.93 But no-one could deny that there were treasures to find. In the 1830s, when Ton had begun to prepare the site of the old palace buildings for his great monolith, the experts had gathered like so many crows. Among their first discoveries, in 1837, was a complete and intact vanished church. In the fourteenth century, Dmitry Donskoi’s pious wife, Evdokiya, had built it in the name of the Raising of Lazarus, a name that imbued its rediscovery with a certain pathos. When the forgotten building was unearthed among the palace foundations, Muscovites began to ask what else might have gone missing there.94

  The answer was that there were relics from pre-Mongol times, to say nothing of later items of enormous importance. Among the most impressive of these, also turned up by Ton’s palace building-works, were a series of horizontally laid oak beams of massive size. According to Zabelin, these must have dated from Ivan Kalita’s reign, and were the remains of the oak wall he had built around the stronghold in the winter of 1339.95 Their placement, and the evidence of deep earth-workings along a line from the Borovitsky to the Saviour gates, allowed historians to picture the size and shape of the original fortress, which turned out to have been more modest than they had assumed. Smaller objects offered clues to the lives of the citadel’s first occupants. There was silver jewellery from pre-Mongol Rus, a selection of coins, and even an empty vault, the purpose of which, since its contents had long since decomposed, must once have been to store grain for an early population of settlers.96 In 1847, the demolition of the Church of St John the Forerunner, by the Borovitsky gates, yielded yet more silver coins and a pair of earrings. When the newly founded Archaeological Society turned its attention to those, excited specialists began to claim that the Kremlin must have been occupied in the ninth century, and even that it may have been the site of pagan rituals.97

  By far the most dramatic episode, however, began in 1891, when a professor from Strasbourg named Eduard Tremer turned up in Moscow, ostensibly on the trail of a rare book. His tale gripped the city, for Tremer claimed that he was looking for a volume that had entered Russia in 1479, in the train of Sofiya Palaeologa.98 As the heir of Byzantium, he explained, she had brought with her a collection that included books in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, codexes, rare manuscripts and classics long-since lost. There were alleged to be at least eight hundred items, a figure that had been corroborated in the sixteenth century by courtiers like Andrei Kurbsky and Maxim Grek. Sofiya’s unlettered husband, Ivan III, had found no use for the books, and his son, Vasily, had been too busy hunting to sit down and read. Ivan the Terrible, however, was said to have admired them for their beauty and, potentially, as texts. The collection formed the core of his fabled library, an inheritance so valuable that he refused to part with it. In the 1550s, he invited a German called Vetterman to translate the antique scripts into Russian. The sage duly appeared in Moscow and was introduced to the great collection, but he proved unwilling to submit to Ivan’s rules. Refusing to work in the secret darkness of a vault, he offered instead to purchase the hoard. Ivan fell into one of his rages, dismissed him (a light punishment for the time), and had the entire library, which was stored in two massive stone chests, consigned to a chamber under his fortress and locked behind a set of iron doors.99

  Tremer directed his audience to an article in the pages of an obscure journal that had been published in 1834. Its author, one von Dabelov, was a professor from the Baltic city of Dorpat. In the course of his research in Riga, Narva and Reval, Dabelov wrote, he had found several old notebooks, some parts of which bore writing that looked like Ivan the Terrible’s. Deciphering the rest, he concluded that the notes were fragments of a lost list that Vetterman had prepared during his brief stay in the Kremlin in the 1550s. The catalogue included at least eight volumes of classic history, including one of Cicero’s; there were also autograph manuscripts by Tacitus, Sallust and Livy, a copy of Justinian’s Codex, and parts of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Greek texts supposedly included lost works by Aristophanes and Polybius, and there were many other items from the court library of Constantinople.100

  Von Dabelov had vanished into Dorpat’s mist, but Tremer, turning up when Moscow’s ear was tuned to history, became a celebrity. He told the public that he had found documents in Leiden that looked like parts of a fourteenth-century copy of an older manuscript. He had come to Mo
scow in search of the rest, for he believed that the larger part of it was probably in Moscow and must have arrived with Sofiya. The text he was after was a lost section of the Iliad, rumours about which, as he understood, persisted among archivists in the Kremlin.101

  The idea of a library of priceless works caused a sensation. Emotive pieces appeared in the Moscow press, and disputes of a more pedantic kind were to fill the learned journals for years to come.102 Sergei Aleksandrovich, the reactionary governor-general of Moscow (and by now Zabelin’s boss as Director of the Historical Museum), at once formed a commission to explore the evidence and advise on the necessary excavations. This was chaired by Prince Shcherbatov and included a sceptical Zabelin, both also representing the Historical Museum. Under its supervision, workers dug under the Kremlin’s most historic towers, exposing subterranean defensive works but finding no trace of the sealed doors. They made a new effort to uncover the passageways that might once, in medieval times, have linked strategic palace buildings, paying special attention to the Archangel Cathedral, since some assumed the books to have been buried close to Ivan’s grave. The work was not entirely fruitless: it uncovered several lost buildings, including the foundations of the fifteenth-century Treasury.103 What the explorers never found, of course, was Ivan’s library.