Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Even more annoying, at least to any other self-appointed guardian of Russian culture, was the next addition to the staff in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building. Malinovsky’s deputy was to be a second-rate artist called Evgeny Oranovsky (‘a complete fool, and probably malicious as well’59), and his task was to log and conserve Moscow’s treasures, including everything that Red guards brought to him.60 The point was to prevent destruction, export and black-market trade, and to that end no painting and no trinket was supposed to evade him. If citizens wished to keep objects of historic or artistic value in their homes, and even if the curators of established museums wished to retain their collections, they were now meant to apply for documents from Oranovsky’s hand. Unregistered valuables would all be liable to confiscation. Registration was invited at the Kremlin itself, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only, 12.30 to 2 p.m.61

  ‘Every day a new decree,’ a Muscovite scrawled on one of the city’s houses, ‘but still there is no bread.’ The decrees certainly abounded. At the same time, however, even officials seemed confused about the status of nationalized property, including anything that Moscow’s richest citizens might have left behind when they prepared to flee the country. In the confusion, mountains of jumbled objects cluttered Oranovsky’s little office every morning.62 Among the looted (‘conserved’) items on his list by early January 1918, many of them stacked in crates in the Kremlin’s Armoury Chamber, were European paintings, antiquities, and 30,000 books from the library of Aleksei Uvarov, the late founder of the Moscow Archaeological Society.63 In March the officer in charge of the Kremlin arsenal wrote to complain that so many things – including instruments from a local church orchestra and a batch of radio-telegraph equipment – had been brought there in error that there was no space left for his men to work.64

  Oranovsky’s style of operating can be judged from his memoir. Searching the Grand Kremlin Palace in his first weeks, he and his men discovered a cache of valuables that the Provisional Government had moved to Moscow for safekeeping earlier in 1917. There was porcelain and there was gold, but there were also cases of fine wine, which, being Bolsheviks of the hard school, the men regarded as a form of temptation rather than treasure (or art) in liquid form. Oranovsky ordered the entire supply to be poured into the palace drains. As he wrote, not without pride, ‘The drunken aroma of those wines infused the palace for many a month.’65

  And there were further bright spots in the dutiful hack artist’s life. The Armoury Museum’s curator, Trutovsky, was a consistent ally, and a Kremlin priest, Archimandrite Arsenii, facilitated some co-operation by the church. In February 1918, the aristocratic owner of the Kuskovo estate, a palace in stunningly landscaped grounds on the edge of Moscow, applied in person for his help in saving a collection of rare porcelain.66 More frequently, however, Oranovsky worked in an atmosphere of suppressed rage. Beyond the Kremlin, wealthy people knew him as the man who checked the contents of their private safes, helping himself (or the new state) to anything that could be classed as art before Lenin’s secret police seized the rest. Moscow’s remaining artistic elite – still reckoning itself to be the only possible custodians of art and books – detested him, and poked fun at his boorish manners and his fondness for dining off the palace china.67 No-one really wanted him to take their things. In the circumstances, there was something heroic in his zeal throughout that hungry winter, the long hours that he worked in those unheated rooms, his passion for ‘conserving’ treasures that the Bolsheviks might otherwise have sold for cash. He fought against the dealers and insulting crowds and even the police. Among the pieces that his men snatched from the latter in 1918 were two handguns set with diamonds, the property of the celebrated army commander General Brusilov.68

  No-one felt like a hero on the bleaker days of that first winter, however. The monks and nuns, the archivists, the painters and the palace staff made tea, lit tiny stoves, and shivered in the undiscriminating cold. Though Moscow’s artists were still dreaming of their avant-garde acropolis, it took a strong faith, whether religious or political, to believe in a bright future for the Kremlin in the early months of 1918. The interiors were dim, even menacing, though loyal servants of the old regime attempted to protect the sacred rooms with locks. Churchmen made plans to bury their treasures, and rumours that they had already started taking some along a secret tunnel underneath the walls abounded. But it was the disorder that was most apparent. There were no corpses outside the palace windows now, but the rubble had not been cleared, and nor had the refuse that was piling up in the snow, attracting hooded crows and rats. Whenever there was a slight thaw, the gateways slithered into mud, and a lake collected in the square, reflecting the bell tower of Ivan the Great in frothing sludge. As one of Lenin’s aides later remarked, shamelessly shifting the blame, ‘Napoleon left the Kremlin in 1812 in no more littered, ruined and dirty a state than the gentlemen Junkers did [in 1917].’69

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  It was a winter when the Kremlin’s future could have taken many turns. There was still a lingering chance that it might have become a museum-park; it was fast turning into a fortified bank for the nation’s valuables in any case. But though its masters talked about repair, little was done, and the Kremlin could just as well have succumbed to another fire or crumbled into semi-ruin.70 It was not until four months after Lenin’s coup that its fate was settled. By then, a civil war was pressing on the Bolshevik elite. They needed a secure stronghold, and they also needed a more centrally located capital city from which to extend their territorial control. Moscow offered both, and it also had something more, for the place was lively with historic resonance, an asset that had rescued several fragile regimes of the past. Petrograd had served its turn as the cradle of proletarian revolution; Moscow was the mother of the Russian people’s lands.71 Privately, Lenin disliked the place, but there was little real choice.72 In February 1918, the Bolshevik government secretly agreed to move its capital back there.73

  The relocation involved several hundred souls, including the entire membership of newly formed organs of government like the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, together with the most essential of the many staff who worked with them. At the centre of it all was Lenin himself, a figure now so precious that he was protected like the queen bee in a hive. The logistical anguish of moving an entire war-time government was as nothing compared with the anxiety for Lenin’s life. In the end, the relocation plan was kept secret, disinformation (including a denial that the government would ever move) was dropped into any listening ear, and even government personnel (including Lenin) were not told in advance exactly how and when they were to travel.74 To further distract would-be assassins, Lenin’s colleague, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, arranged for the members of the Central Executive Committee – politicians, soldiers and sailors – to make a decoy journey in railway-carriages requisitioned from the tsar’s own stock.75 The epic move, involving two entire trains, took place on a Sunday, 10 March, with much official bustling and cross-checking before the passengers could settle into the deep leather and the monogrammed moquette.

  Travelling with his wife and sister in a less conspicuous train behind the other two, Lenin arrived in Moscow the following night. It is likely that he had always hoped to make the Kremlin his base in the city, and the Cheka, the agents of security and (later) terror, had duly placed it in a state of siege.76 From March 1918, access to the fortress was restricted to persons in possession of a pass, the coveted propusk, and these were issued only by the Kremlin commandant.77 A former sailor, Pavel Malkov, was given this job, working closely with the secret police in a role whose powers paralleled (and soon exceeded) those of Malinovsky in his art empire. Living conditions in the Kremlin remained squalid, however, and Lenin and his entourage arrived before the telephones and new guard-posts had been set up. Like many other top officials, the leader of the first proletarian revolution in the world spent a first night at the five-star National Hotel. His neighbours included other Bolsh
evik luminaries, and more had been accommodated in the nearby Hotel Metropole (splendid but shell-damaged) and in the rather less grand Hotel Lyuks.78

  In the years to come, as government swelled and more and more officials, time-pressed and self-important, moved to the Bolshevik capital, former hotels and even former mansions would be used as top-grade government billets. Their china and linen, marked and crested, were distributed to ambitious provincials, many of whom had arrived in the capital with little more than a change of clothes.79 Accommodation soon became so scarce that people were grateful for a shared room, while an apartment was a real luxury. But every politician, however comfortable they found the erstwhile quarters of the bourgeoisie, eventually aspired to live inside the Kremlin. It towered over everything. When the great gates shut, as they were soon to do on all but those entrusted with the new elite’s official pass, the city almost disappeared from view; the Kremlin’s elevation minimized its ant-like striving and its small despairs. You were either in or you were definitely out.

  Lenin asked to move in after just one night. His aides had planned to give him an apartment and offices in the Senate, but the suite would still take some weeks to prepare, and he was so impatient that a temporary set of two rooms had to be cleared in the Cavalry Building.80 This was a bad omen for Oranovsky and his staff. Their work (which also brought them into conflict with the well-connected art dealers who were raising cash for Lenin’s cause) was already under scrutiny, and now their space seemed set to disappear. But Lenin did not remain in his two cramped rooms for long. Later that year, as planned, the leader moved into more generous and permanent lodgings on the third floor of the Senate, a suite where he could have a library and where he and his wife, Nadezhda, kept a much-loved cat.81 Among the modern touches were an Erickson lift and an indoor toilet (Ideal Standard) in a heated room.82 But Lenin also craved the fresh night air, and in 1920 his Kremlin apartment was extended with the addition of a makeshift study on the roof, concealed within the folds of the great building. Here he liked to rest each evening, lulled by the stillness of a city paralysed by civil war. Eighty years later, the curator of Lenin’s Kremlin apartment museum was nostalgic for that rooftop space. It was a relic of the first heroic days, before a time came when the leaders could build anything they chose.83

  Government, of course, was the priority, and that meant meetingrooms and offices. The Senate had always housed assemblies – that was its purpose – so it was a natural location for the new revolutionary cabinet. The Council of People’s Commissars met in a long room, its members choosing leather chairs around a baize-covered table. At one end was an old-fashioned Russian stove, and it was here that the smokers had to sit so that their habit did not trouble the famously clean-living Bolshevik leader.84 Larger assemblies, the Congresses and Conferences of the Bolshevik Party that were held in more or less alternate years, were sometimes fitted into the Grand Kremlin Palace. Since these could last for several days, a canteen had to be provided, and someone chose to use the fifteenth-century Faceted Palace for that. Soldiers in their grubby jackets jostled party officials, always talking and always in a hurry. By 1922, despite the discreet efforts of the palace staff, there was soot on the historic walls and spots of grease on the carpets and parquet. Steam had lifted antique plaster from the walls and cigarette-smoke had thickened the air. Nearby, a group of several palace rooms, including a church, was being used to dry residents’ laundry. The windows were left open summer and winter, and, as an inspector later wrote, the snow and wind were making sure to finish any damage that had not already been accomplished by the occupants.85

  The frantic pressure on Kremlin space left little time for sentiment. Government workers needed lavatories and typing pools, secret police needed cellars, everyone needed cleaners and maintenance-staff, and then there were the soldiers, the garrison, together with their bulky and explosive weapon-stores. The land outside was wracked by poverty and civil war, but members of the new elite employed maids, some added cooks, and Lenin himself had a loyal chauffeur, Stefan Gil. The old palace staff, meanwhile, had also managed to cling on, and some were even starting to teach their new masters how to use the china and the knives and forks.86 By the middle of 1918, the Kremlin teemed with housekeepers and drivers, resident bodyguards, and nannies for the children of not one, but many new-style ruling families. That summer, there were 1,100 people living in the Kremlin, 450 of whom had moved in since the revolution.87 Additional personnel and servants increased these numbers to 2,100 by the end of 1920. The old Kremlin, with its official complement of just two hundred staff, had never witnessed such an influx. The assorted inhabitants were crammed into 325 apartments, not all of which were really fit to live in.88

  Leon Trotsky, whose role in these early months was almost as important as Lenin’s, took to the new environment with ease:

  With its medieval walls and its countless gilded cupolas, the Kremlin seemed an utter paradox as the fortress for the revolutionary dictatorship … Until March 1918 I had never been inside [it], nor did I know Moscow in general, with the exception of one solitary building, the Butyrsky transfer-prison, in the tower of which I had spent six months during the cold winter of 1898 to 1899.89

  Now he was living in a world of gilded mirrors and Karelian birch: ‘The aroma of the idle life of the master class emanated from every chair.’ An ornamental clock, decorated with the figures of Cupid and Psyche, stuck in his memory. Soon after he moved in, its chimes had broken into one of his snatched business conversations with Lenin. ‘We looked at each other’, Trotsky wrote, ‘as if we had both caught ourselves thinking the same thing; we were being overheard by the past, lurking over there in the corner. Surrounded by it on all sides as we were, we treated it without respect, but without hostility either, rather with a touch of irony.’90

  A different mood afflicted those who had to fight to win a room. From the accommodation point of view, there were only three viable buildings: the Senate, the Cavalry Building, and part of the Grand Palace. Many of the rest, including the Small Nicholas Palace, were too badly damaged for any use (though Lenin tried to overrule the experts several times91), while detachments of Latvian guards now occupied the barracks. Trotsky’s sister Olga and her husband, Lev Kamenev, moved into the Cavalry Building (they were so grand that they disdained to pay their rent), and so, for a while, did Stalin, who briefly shared a lodging with his future henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. Others, including the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, were given rooms on the ‘Frauleins’ corridor’ of the Grand Palace. It was an extension that lacked proper sanitation and seemed to be permanently cold.92

  Both Malkov and his comrade Malinovsky joined the hunt for space.93 While the architect explored the palaces, Malkov’s attention was directed at the church. As he recalled, the Kremlin’s religious residents, ‘all flapping in their black … lived by their own rules and took no notice of ours’. Worse, ‘I had to provide these people, most of them enemy brothers, with permanent and single passes to the Kremlin: how do you protect the Kremlin from hostile elements that way!’94 It was common knowledge that valuables were disappearing under the priests’ flapping cloth. On one occasion, Malkov claimed to have exposed the church’s ‘fortress’ in the city, stuffed with smuggled treasure from the Kremlin. Partisan though he was, the tale was true. An archive document from April 1918 confirms that Malkov’s police indeed ‘repossessed’ a cache of items from the Chudov’s inventory, among which were thirteen crosses, four golden icons, seven diamond-encrusted mitres, a gold star, and a golden box containing holy relics. Believers had also removed five chalices, two gospels, lamps, mitres and other valuables from the Ascension Convent.95

  The Bolsheviks condemned the whole tribe of churchmen as spies. In July 1918, Malkov was mandated to expel most of the Chudov’s monks, though a separate enquiry continued in the women’s case.96 By late July, about a third of the Kremlin’s monastic residents had gone, but the core of men and women that remained included the most stubbornly pious
of all.97 These people argued – and truly believed – that their duty was to pray beside the ancient shrines. They also promised that they worked in other ways, physical ones, baking communion bread and scrubbing their cells. The nuns’ days were numbered, however, when an official called Kuznetsov reported to his masters in the late summer. Only thirty-six women were left in the Kremlin convent, he noted, and most of those were old, too decrepit to carry out the advertised monastic chores. At least nineteen of them were over fifty, an age at which, as he put it, ‘a woman is considered unfit for work’.98 On that undignified note, a religious tradition that had flourished on the Kremlin hill for six hundred years was brought to an end.

  Malkov could now use some parts of the old convent as rooms. But the pressure on space continued to increase remorselessly, and the cramped conditions left the Kremlin seething with rivalry. The situation came to a head when Trotsky’s wife, Natalya Ivanovna, took over the plum job that Malinovsky had been doing running Moscow’s art. The new governing lady was taken with the idea that the palace could be turned into a museum. In 1920, that belief led to a bitter argument with Stalin. At issue were rooms in the wing that led from the Grand Kremlin Palace to the Armoury Chamber. The rooms themselves were covetable: elegantly furnished and flooded with light. Lunacharsky was already in residence, and one or two nearby suites had been occupied by other fortunate comrades, but Natalya Ivanovna was not pleased to learn that the boorish Georgian commissar wanted to join them. As she explained in her letters to Lenin, the annex opened straight into the treasure-house of the Armoury Chamber. It ought to be part of a great museum, it should be sealed off, and anyway it was inconvenient and ‘hellishly cold’, for there was neither heating nor modern plumbing.