Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

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  The establishment of the Historical Museum was an epic labour in itself, but the industrious Zabelin also continued to publish. His last major work, The History of the City of Moscow, appeared in instalments between 1902 and 1905. The book was written under the supervision of the Moscow City government, the wealthy and august Duma, and its purpose was to foster civic pride.104 But though the city was officially his theme, Zabelin chose instead to write a history of the Kremlin in the guise of a walking tour. The citadel had been his first love, and now he brought together a lifetime of anecdotes, the fruit of decades of original research. His book contains accounts of court life, government, and even prisons. It combines a knowledge of architecture with a sense of drama and spiritual destiny. Detailed and scholarly, it is also a hymn to the Kremlin of martyrs and Russian heroes, and that explains why, in the early twenty-first century, the new age of historical chauvinism, the book has been reprinted several times.105 But Zabelin’s was not the ultimate account of the tsarist Kremlin. That laurel belongs to the work (now also reissued) of Sergei Bartenev (1863–1930).

  Bartenev was the son of a prominent Moscow historian, Petr Bartenev, the founding editor of the journal Russian Archive. From such beginnings, naturally, the younger man rejected history in favour of music and composition. But the Kremlin exerted a special pull on him, and eventually he joined its staff as a curator. In 1912, he published his best-known book, an elegant history of the Grand Kremlin Palace, printed in both Russian and (for twice the price) French. The volume covered the history of the site, including a survey of the original stone palace of Ivan III, before taking its readers on a stunning tour of the current palace, its churches and its ceremonial halls. There were numerous black-and-white photographs, some of which now constitute the last pre-revolutionary record of buildings, such as the Saviour in the Forest, that were later destined for extinction. The book did not discuss the recent restoration-work (interiors were shown as if they were perfectly preserved versions of their original selves), but it certainly encouraged Russian hearts to swell.

  Bartenev’s most ambitious scheme, however, was a projected three-volume history of the entire Kremlin: The Moscow Kremlin in Old Times and Now.106 Though only the first two volumes ever appeared, this work was as compendious as any encyclopaedia. Its readers, if they had a desk of sufficient size, could find in it the exact dimensions of every battlement and tower. They could discover how the walls were built and roofed, what kinds of foundation were dug, and often who exactly paid for what. If they preferred to read chronologically, they could follow the stories of the Moscow tsars, and they could picture all of this with the help of five hundred years of maps and drawings, Russian and foreign. Bartenev cited experts like Karamzin and Kliuchevsky, but he also incorporated lengthy excerpts from original documents. The book was almost unreadable, and it could only have been written by someone who lived in the Kremlin and had been more or less seduced by it. In fact, Bartenev worked with the official blessing of the Kremlin’s chief administrator, Prince Odoevsky-Maslov, and the two were neighbours in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building.107 The Moscow Kremlin reflected the academic spirit of its time but also the nineteenth-century’s main fantasies about the Kremlin as a place, including a meticulous, almost religious, deference.

  Bartenev’s Moscow Kremlin was written in the florid language of Russia’s nineteenth-century court, but anyone can still enjoy his most original idea. It is a map, a plan of the Kremlin on which are superimposed the outlines of every known structure, whether lost or extant. Four colours – red, yellow, blue and green – provide a chronological guide, existing buildings featuring in red and vanished medieval buildings (the oldest) in green. The map is very large, over three feet square, but the detail is so fine that it takes a magnifying glass and patience to discern the names and dates of individual monuments. With these, you can make out the courts of fifteenth-century boyars, the ghosts of churches, the rectangular outlines of the old prikazy and the folds of Peter the Great’s bastions (the latter yellow, since they dated from the neo-classical age). The complex shapes of long-demolished palace buildings also feature, coloured blue, beneath the red lines of Ton’s much more recent structure. It is a fascinating, utterly absorbing document, and it is still in use. On my first day as a researcher in the Kremlin library, the staff brought me a mounted copy, larger than a table-top, and left it by my desk for reference.

  Like most historical sources, however, this beautiful object has to be read critically. Bartenev’s map does not show the Kremlin as he knew it, or even as it grew and altered through history, but as he wanted to imagine it. The historical developments, even the loss of churches or the disruption caused by Peter the Great’s earthworks, all point to a noble outcome, a beautiful present. In reality, there would have been uncertainties, not tidy lines, at almost every point. More seriously, the map offers no trace of the pervasive clutter of encroaching modern life. One thing that it carefully overlooks, for instance, is the coal-burning electricity generating station that had recently been completed in the Kremlin grounds. Built to power the illuminations at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896, it remained a semi-secret, almost shameful, addition to the palace complex, not least because the city as a whole had four more years to wait for its first power-station.108 Indeed, most streets remained in the gas age (or that of candles and oil) until the 1920s. The Kremlin’s new facility caused so much confusion that it took years for palace officials to decide upon the uniforms that its technical staff were to wear. It was a question they were still discussing when the monarchy collapsed in February 1917.109

  Another subject that Bartenev’s map does not discuss is architectural style (as an existing building, Ton’s new palace is shown in the same triumphant red as the ancient Dormition Cathedral), and it passes no political comment. So it takes a reader with some knowledge of the space to understand the meaning of a small red outline, marked with the symbol that the author used to indicate a consecrated site, in the middle of Senate Square. It was, in fact, another monument, a substantial metal cross in the Russian revival style, designed by Victor Vasnetsov to mark the site of a murder that had horrified conservatives and loyal Russian patriots. In 1910, the date of Bartenev’s map, the monument was only two years old, and its story would have been fresh in the minds of every Kremlin resident.

  The drama began in January 1905, when Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, whose reactionary views had made him a prime target for terrorists, had moved into the Kremlin’s Small Nicholas Palace (so-called to distinguish it from the Grand Palace that Nicholas I had later built) for his own protection and that of his family and staff. The grand duke’s fortunes had taken a dive since the accession of his nephew, Nicholas II. Devoted husband though he was, and thoughtful master to his own immediate retainers, his inflexibility as an administrator was rapidly becoming an embarrassment at court. On 1 January 1905 he resigned as governor-general of Moscow, but the threats to his life continued.

  Grand Duke Sergei was about to become the first royal victim of the coming revolutionary storm. The Russian nationalist project had not succeeded in including everyone. The mass of Russia’s poor was not convinced; historic art did nothing for the workers in their airless dark or peasants struggling with debt. Such people might enjoy a festival, they might turn out to cheer their tsar, but the grinding hardship of their lives attracted them to any revolutionary spark. Among the most alienated were the students, disgusted by the empire’s repressiveness, its chauvinism, and its complacent assumption that the poor deserved – even enjoyed – their fate. In 1904, a war with Japan revealed the full extent of Russia’s weakness. Again, it was the poor who bore the brunt, enduring food shortages and extended working hours as well as providing the bulk of the foot soldiers who would have to die. The imperial elite consistently underestimated the public mood, ascribing any protest to the work of isolated malcontents. In January 1905, a peaceful crowd of protesters in St Petersburg was hacked to piece
s by the tsar’s cossacks. This atrocity, universally known as Bloody Sunday, became the rallying cry for a nationwide revolt. The pressure of the public’s rage was one of the reasons why, back in Moscow, Sergei Aleksandrovich, daily expecting an attack, had started to forbid his adjutants to share his carriage, fearing for their lives.

  The assassin, Ivan Kalyaev, was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a group whose aim was to destroy the current system in the name of the peasants. He had made several visits to the Kremlin – his face was a familiar one – but when he walked through the gates on 17 February 1905 the newspapers that he habitually carried concealed a bomb. No-one looked too closely that cold afternoon. The grand duke’s carriage-wheels crunched over snow, his coachman whipping the horses towards the Nikolsky gates. As the carriage rounded the Senate building, Kalyaev threw his bomb, killing the victim instantly by blasting him to bits. The grand duke’s widow, Elizaveta Fedorovna, who had heard the explosion, rushed out of the palace where the pair had been eating lunch a short time before and threw herself into the bloodstained snow, gathering up the pieces of her husband’s corpse. A schoolboy later remembered how he and his friends found more scraps of flesh during a sledging expedition the next day. Some of the grand duke’s fingers, still wearing their heavy rings, were blown on to the Senate roof.110 It is the sort of detail that could never feature on Bartenev’s map.

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  The revolution of 1905 hit Moscow with punitive force. Neither the imperial authorities nor the Duma was prepared for the strength of public outrage. The bourgeoisie itself was divided, some joining the calls for reform while others condemned any proletarian demand as insurrection. Zabelin, by now an old man, wrote a dismal list of words in his diary, the lexicon of a changing world. ‘Revolution,’ he began. ‘Bureau – resolutions – petitions – delegates – cadres. Qualifications. Functions. To function. To get qualified. Provocateur.’ Later that season he thought that

  everyone has stopped asking; instead they importunately DEMAND that their lives must improve, that the working day should be reduced and wages raised, and they demand this AT ONCE. They also demand the introduction of a democratic republic AT ONCE. Russia [Rus’] has become a madhouse … it’s like an epidemic of plague or cholera.111

  But this, of course, was no passing affliction. In January 1905, a third of Moscow’s workforce went on strike in protest at the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg. By spring, the public mood had hardened even further, and political parties on the left, including democrats and socialists, had gained considerable ground. The most extreme conservatives responded by arming themselves, and Russia saw a series of clashes between the protesters and vigilante groups such as the Black Hundreds, a nationalist and anti-Semitic band of thugs. In Moscow, these were rallied by Moskovskie vedomosti, the newspaper of choice for people like Zabelin. The pogroms that disfigured other Russian towns were only averted in Moscow because it had already lost most of its Jews. In vain did the prime minister, Count Witte, warn the tsar agains ‘finding an energetic soldier to crush the rebellion by sheer force’.112 All Nicholas could think of was repression; the coming months destroyed his dream of a mystical union with the people. In the face of blatant state brutality, the workers, and even Duma members, responded with further strikes, and by October the entire city was at a standstill. Only the army and police seemed to share the emperor’s view that the best answer was to use the troops. Nicholas II confessed as much in a letter to his mother, whining that ‘I had nobody to rely on except honest [police chief] Trepov’.

  Witte did at least persuade the tsar to grant a constitution, and the declaration, in October 1905, brought the crowds out yet again, this time in celebration. But the ‘abscess’, in Nicholas’ phrase, had not been ‘lanced’.113 Extreme-right brutishness provoked the next outburst. On 18 October, the day after the reading of the constitution manifesto, right-wing vigilantes killed a leading Moscow socialist, Nikolai Bauman, sparking renewed conflict. That winter, as the city teetered on the brink of anarchy, there were yet more mass strikes, and barricades went up in the workers’ districts.114 The year ended with pitched battles on Moscow’s streets. Trepov and the cossacks had imposed order by late December, but the regime had lost moral authority. In the years to come, protest was silenced by arrest and the enthusiastic use of hanging, but in the workers’ districts there would be no toasts to the Kremlin.

  From this point, it would be easy to look ahead for signs of the catastrophe to come. The revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky later called 1905 a ‘dress rehearsal’, but the streets of workers’ red flags that autumn did not lead in a straight line to Bolshevism’s own Jerusalem. Even in the nine years that were left before the First World War, there was time and space for the likes of Bartenev to make their maps, nostalgic and romantic, and for publishers to print (and sell) Vasnetsov’s paintings of the medieval Russian world.115

  But the hour has come to take leave of nostalgic dreams. As the curtain begins to fall for ever on the tsars’ Kremlin, there is barely time to linger on the last ever coronation, which took place in 1896. The crowning of Nicholas II was an event that focused on the mystery of sovereignty, the sacred bond that joined the tsar and people.116 Its precedents reached back to a fantasy of Byzantium, ‘the ideal Christian state’, and through that to a world that shone with a much brighter light than humdrum Europe and its tedious middle class.117 The lucky guests who received the coronation albums where these sentiments appeared could remind themselves in advance about the continuities with coronations of the past. The books, in finest reinvented Russian style, were full of splendid pictures, including several of the previous two coronations, and the text included a vivid thousand-year history of the ceremony (not entirely inaccurate) to instil the required sense of awe. Each item of regalia was carefully described, each gesture analysed. The very weight of the volumes, and the luxurious paper inside, might well have been enough to make recipients catch their breath.

  The press – the world’s press – joined the commentary, listing past tsars and noting the precedents for every detail of the pageantry to come. In Russia, a number of cheap histories were also printed to satisfy public demand. One such, Tokmakov’s Historical Description of Every Coronation of the Russian Tsars, Emperors and Empresses, reads like a literal record, despite the fact that almost every detail from before Peter the Great was still conjectural. There was even a portrait of Riurik, with dates, though no-one could be sure he had existed, let alone what he looked like (uncontroversially enough, the artist showed him dark-eyed, with moustache and beard).118 The other fixation was with continuity, lingering on the stories of dynastic tombs and the thrones of the Romanovs. As for the Dormition Cathedral, whose domes still leaked pending the Archaeological Society’s great repair, the coronation album described it as ‘modest in size but great in its historical significance and in its ordinances, the most precious heart of Russia, and of its first capital, Moscow’.119

  Public excitement gathered pace, but Nicholas himself had little appetite for the coming display. As he wrote to his mother in the spring of 1896, the preparations were full of reminders of his father’s coronation and, thus, inevitably, of his recent illness and death. ‘Darling Mama,’ he confided on 27 April,

  I believe we should regard all these difficult ceremonies in Moscow as a great ordeal sent by God, for at every step we shall have to repeat all we went through in the happy days thirteen years ago! One thought alone consoles me: that in the course of life we shall not have to go through the rite again.120

  It was one of his few prescient comments, but it did not help much when the day arrived. The new emperor found the lengthy ceremonies tiring. The robes that had been sewn by armies of industrious nuns were heavy, and he worried, too, about his proud wife in her cumbrous gown. His compensation, as always, was the ‘sea of heads’, his people massed to show their love for him. Thousands crushed into the restricted precincts of Cathedral Square: invited dignitaries, uniformed gu
ards, and representatives from every corner of the empire. As the Kremlin’s famous bells rang out, Nicholas could have imagined himself at the centre of a timeless pageant, holy and suffused with light, as if a medieval painting – though not the kind with bloodstained swords and torture-scenes – had sprung miraculously to life.

  But the bright tableau was soon marred by the news of mass deaths at the people’s coronation party on Khodynka field. The day had not been meant to go this way. The idea had been to put on a traditional coronation feast, the ritual gift Muscovite tsars had always offered to their subjects. As London’s Times had noted (in its smuggest tone): ‘No less than five thousand poor people will be housed and fed during the stay of the Czar and the Czarina in Moscow, and on the day of the coronation there will be a grand dinner given, at which ten thousand poor people will be present.’121 But the feast laid on for Muscovites, the open-air coronation feast, had gone very wrong. At dawn, stampedes of revellers had surged towards the booths where food and coronation mementoes had been set out, and before the appalled gaze of the world’s journalists, the crowd had become a mass of bodies; wounded, trampled and dying. Some later blamed the panic on a rumour that there would not be enough food, and many later drew attention to the treacherous, uneven ground. As people fell, there was no hope of saving them. ‘Probably some 2,000 persons perished on the spot,’ wrote the London-based Graphic, ‘while many of the 1,200 in hospital are not expected to survive.’ Many of the corpses were ‘so disfigured and stripped of clothing that identification was almost impossible’.122

  While Moscow’s cemeteries filled with dead, however, the Kremlin glittered like a Christmas tree. It was traditional for lamps to burn at coronations (the illuminations were one thing that even Alexander III had not skimped on), but these dazzled the crowds, bathing the halls in artificial light for the benefit of invited guests and conscripting even passers-by to the festivity. The empress Alexandra had thrown the first switch, lighting the bell tower of Ivan the Great and then the Kremlin’s other main historic sites. ‘Like diamonds, rubies and emeralds among a mass of other precious stones,’ wrote one admiring chronicler, ‘Ivan the Great and the Kremlin towers stood out above the illuminated capital and its sea of lights.’123 The Russian national colours – red, blue and white – picked up the fabulous outlines against a background of low springtime clouds. The evenings that May were damp, the public mood sombre and pained, but through it all the fortress blazed above the huddled roofs like a child’s fantasy castle, a dream home for the prince and princess in a fairy-tale.