Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  These cruel gestures helped to crush the practice of one kind of faith, but Lenin’s party had yet to establish anything substantial to put in its place. That priority largely explains Lenin’s impatience about monuments. Although his campaign for ‘monumental propaganda’ had been launched in April 1918, by late May there were still no Marxes on the plinths round Moscow. Lunacharsky and Malinovsky both faced his ‘surprise and indignation’ at that point, and soon the leader was demanding that the slackers should be named and imprisoned. By mid-July, every sculptor of any note was busy carving his designated personage. Marx, Engels and Auguste Blanqui were at the top of the list, but Brutus and Robespierre, as well as Chopin, Voltaire, Beethoven and Lord Byron were also represented. As ever, finding female subjects to balance the inevitable regiments of men was tricky for the committee in charge. On a list that ran to sixty-two names, only one (the revolutionary populist Sofiya Perovskaya) was a woman. That may be why the ever-helpful Oranovsky got the job of sculpting the late actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who had played the role of Nina in the first run of Chekhov’s Seagull.127 With her nomination, the female contingent was doubled, but everything from lack of paint to sheer incompetence still threatened the scheme. In September 1918, a bust of the eighteenth-century social critic Alexander Radishchev (sculpted by Leonid Shervud, the son of the Muscovite architect) simply disappeared before it could be unveiled. Lenin heard the report on that with ‘deep revulsion of spirit’.128

  To be sure, there were some triumphs to record. In the spring of 1918, the sculptor S. T. Konenkov (‘Russia’s Rodin’) had accepted the task of designing the Kremlin bas-relief Lenin so craved. Ostensibly, its purpose was to honour 1917’s fallen, but the more profound objective was to upstage the Christian icons before which the faithful (and even the not so faithful) still paused and bowed and silently crossed themselves. In November 1918, Konenkov’s answer, an angel named ‘Genius’, was unveiled. The work was made of forty-nine separate brightly glazed pieces, but its style owed more to folklore than to cubism. The background was a rising sun, and the figure held a red flag in one of its giant hands and green palm fronds in the other.129 The architects and sculptors of the avant-garde were on notice; their task was not to express spiritual truths or individual creativity but to educate the Russian masses. The avant-garde magazine Lef might proclaim that the time had come to move beyond the conservative art that had always ‘required’ a ‘passive mentality, soft as wax’.130 But Lenin’s motives were less pure, and the ultimate results were not utopian.

  The final skirmish in this battle for the nation’s soul was the darkest of all. As the fighting in the civil war subsided, a famine as merciless as any Old Testament plague swept over Russia. The suffering was at least as great as any witnessed in the recent war, moving donors as diverse as the United States government and the pope to extend generous material aid.131 In Russia, the Orthodox Church, though stricken itself, offered to raise money and to help distribute food. Its leader, Patriarch Tikhon, went as far as to make a list of valuables that parish churches might offer to sell as part of the appeal for funds.132 Ignoring this, Lenin demanded that all church assets be seized. Their cash value was scarcely the point. ‘It is now and only now,’ he explained in a secret directive, ‘when there is cannibalism in the famine regions and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) carry through the confiscation of church valuables with the most rabid and merciless energy.’133 The civil war was almost won, and this last effort, from Lenin’s point of view, would guarantee a victory.

  The decision to liquidate church assets was taken in the Kremlin at the end of December 1921. Directed by an impatient Trotsky, the Central Executive Committee laid careful plans to avoid resistance, to the point of stipulating that the requisitioned treasures should be moved about on passenger trains, not goods wagons. The public response fully justified such precautions. Even in Moscow, where the preparatory agitation and propaganda had been thorough to the point of saturation, the requisitions sparked heart-rending protests. It was not clear to anyone why treasured objects should be snatched away, especially as there was still no bread. ‘The starving need food, not gold,’ the workers in one factory resolved, and some dared to suggest that the famine was the fault of the ‘bourgeois’ in the Kremlin. If Lenin and his crew resigned, they whispered, we might get a government that could feed us all.134 This kind of talk put Bolshevik nerves on edge: it was the breath of civil war, the poison of White guards and priests. Izvestiya urged workers and peasants to ‘burn out’ the priestly counter-revolution ‘with a hot iron’.135

  In the late spring of 1922, Moscow let its gunmen loose. Armed gangs arrived to seize and package gospels, icon-mounts and chalices; churches were searched, opened coffins left gaping. Believers wept as lead and silver coffin-lids were carried off, sometimes from local churches and sometimes from the great cathedrals of Russia’s walled cities. In Petrograd, a particularly eager team prised open coffins in the Peter-Paul Cathedral. They ripped a string of pearls from the long-dead neck of Catherine the Great, but when they opened Peter’s coffin and were confronted by the formidable and surprisingly lifelike body inside they stepped back, abandoning the mission in terror.136 It was a rare victory for the old regime. Elsewhere, the Reds were ready with machine-gun fire. Busy though he should have been, Lenin demanded to be informed ‘on a daily basis’ about the number of priests who had been shot.137

  The Kremlin churches were not exempt from general attack. Indeed, the accusation that the ‘high-ups’ were living like tsars helped seal their fate. The Moscow public watched as icon-lamps and canopies were torn from the Kremlin walls. Grabar’s written complaint about the consequent exposure of late-fifteenth-century paintings, so fragile that they could not be expected to survive in the open air, never received an answer.138 In Aleksei Mikhailovich’s favourite palace church, the Saviour behind the Golden Grille, a silver iconostasis that held works by Ushakov and his contemporaries was dismantled for melting down. Silver doors and decorated reliquaries in the Chudov Monastery were also forfeit. But despite all the destruction, the total haul from the Kremlin, in bullion, was less than had been taken by Napoleon.139 And at a time when the depressed world market was already flooded by Russian loot of every kind, half a ton of gold was never likely to secure the revolution anyway.

  The whole campaign against religious art ran counter to the Soviets’ economic interests. A better-informed government might have taken the time to assess the value of artistic treasures, of relics, unique icons and even minor works of sacred art. Attempts to do this often foundered on the zeal of local requisition teams, who just grabbed everything, regardless of instructions about fine objects, waving the loaded crates off to the foundries without a second look.140 Among the few officials who could influence the process, a weary but tight-lipped Grabar attempted to step in and save some of his nation’s precious heritage. He even pleaded with the state’s broker to pause for a while, to wait while he and his colleagues taught Europe how to understand (and pay for) Russia’s great religious art.141 But Bolshevik bull-headedness prevailed; this was the liquidation of the church, the death of God, not just an exercise in fund-raising. The great icon collections of the world – including those in Sweden and the United States – date from this season of fire-sales. Some treasures, including many of the embroidered vestments in Washington’s Hillwood Collection, were bought in the Moscow equivalent of charity shops.

  The experts could insist only that the very finest and most famous objects be assessed in the Armoury Chamber. In all, over 10,000 individual pieces of church art were unpacked in the museum in the nine months of the campaign. But it was impossible to track and save it all. Grabar spent sleepless nights defending items that might otherwise have disappeared, chasing each new consignment and almost physically snatching some things from the smelting flames.142 It was exhausting and depressing work, but like everyone else in the artistic community, he was t
rapped, for the Bolsheviks were the only patron left in town. Conservators could either work with them or they could take a bullet with the priests.

  While one religion suffered these repeated blows, another – or at least a system of belief – enjoyed the most overt state patronage. Bolshevism was neither unworldly nor ethereal, however, and its holiest symbol, after 1924, was Lenin’s tomb. ‘One day,’ Lenin’s comrade Leonid Krasin declared, ‘this spot will hold a greater significance for mankind than Mecca or Jerusalem.’143 On Lenin’s death, his grieving colleagues chose a burial-site for him beside the people’s graves of 1917, and to mark it, the committee hired Aleksei Shchusev, an architect whose inspirations (like Vitberg’s back in 1813) included the Egyptian pyramids.144 Shchusev’s designs (several mausoleums were built, first in wood and then in marble) proved dignified, if stark, and the tomb itself was so sacred that it entirely upstaged the existing martyrs’ graves, which were transformed into a row of faceless geometric blocks. It also superseded Konenkov’s multi-coloured bas-relief, which now looked positively light-minded by contrast with the shrine.

  From this time on, the Kremlin would again belong exclusively to the elite. There was no further spontaneity around its walls. The revolution had been fought for many things, but in the end the victory went to a rag-tag group of fixers, thugs and managers. In the ruthless and utilitarian atmosphere of the coming age, the avant-garde did not appeal, and its plans for the Kremlin were shelved along with many of its other more utopian hopes. The process took a few more years, for dreams die more slowly than human beings, but by the end of Soviet Russia’s first decade, the short, hot Indian summer of the acropolis Kremlin had finally drawn to a close.

  10

  Red Fortress

  Guarded and sealed, the Kremlin of the 1920s must have seemed like a remote and anti-human place. Beneath those formidable walls, however, Moscow was still lively with the revolution’s energy and hope. The early 1920s were a heyday for utopians, and the times were also reasonably kind, for a while, to the thousands of Muscovites who engaged in small-scale trade. While the artists and dreamers sketched their plans for futuristic, high-rise lives, the tradesmen (who were far more numerous) got on with buying, selling, and scraping a living from stalls and pavements in the real world. Alongside both, a tight-lipped piety could still be found behind church doors, and any walk in the city, however short, involved at least one encounter with Orthodox religious faith. The German socialist Walter Benjamin was swept up and delighted by the chaos of it all. The Moscow of 1927, he wrote, was a place where life went on ‘as if it were not twenty-five degrees below zero but high Neapolitan summer’. The only things that made him nervous were the countless shrines. Moscow’s cupolas and golden domes reminded Benjamin of an ‘an architectural secret police’. The inner rooms below, he feared, were probably ‘fit to plan a pogrom in’.1

  Moscow remained a composite of old and new, but for a time the frankly makeshift seemed to have the upper hand. It was one of the many problems that frustrated the revolution’s more enthusiastic supporters as they began to craft the world’s first ever workers’ state. Far from enjoying leisure, health and universal brotherhood, the Soviet paradise seemed constantly beset by demons. In Moscow, the most troubling of these were housing, health and jobs. The mass exodus of the civil war years was soon forgotten as the city’s population began to spiral upwards. In addition to the bureaucrats, secret police and Party men, tens of thousands of migrants arrived in the capital each summer, all hoping for seasonal work and all needing a bed. Unemployment rose four-fold between 1921 and 1927; in early 1929, it peaked at nearly one in three. Working or not, everyone needed transport, doctors and food, and urban services were soon under critical strain. ‘What kind of socialism is it,’ a speaker asked at a meeting for factory workers in the spring of 1926, ‘when the workers get forty rubles for their physical efforts and the people in power get three hundred rubles for showing us the path to socialism? It’s turned out to be just like the past, when priests showed everyone the way to heaven.’2

  The project to transform Moscow was clearly urgent. The challenge was also a stimulating one, however, and it attracted some of Europe’s most ambitious men. In the 1920s and 1930s, a list of stars including Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier proposed new buildings for the socialist capital and also large design concepts of a more general kind. The local Soviet architects were also buzzing with ideas. Freed from the old constraints and tastes, innovators like El Lissitsky and Konstantin Melnikov began to plan glass skyscrapers and whole suburbs on stilts. There was even a 1920s version of the garden city, zoned to provide space for industry and workers’ homes.3 Money was tight, and only a fraction of these schemes was ever completed, but the inter-war decades of the twentieth century were probably the only time in the history of Russia when its architects managed to lead the world rather than running after it.4

  At first, too, the revolution brought some pickings for the conservationists. As Igor Grabar had perceived, the state’s determined seizure of the assets of the very rich was like an open invitation to explore their properties. Even the church could not exclude the expert teams. The only real requirement was a permit on the necessary form. Since he could almost print these for himself, Grabar found time in a packed official schedule to supervise the wholesale stripping of old plaster. What he was looking for was genuine Russian art, by which he meant the medieval stuff, and to find it he was ready to destroy almost anything that was not at least a hundred and fifty years old. Others also grasped this rare chance to explore. From 1923 to 1928, for instance, a team led by the architect Petr Baranovsky worked to unveil the long-lost mansion of the seventeenth-century magnate Vasily Golitsyn.5 They found it by chipping stucco from a squarish city-centre block, uncovering the old windows, and knocking down an ugly service extension. Apart from its obvious historical importance, the resulting structure was a rarity in a city that had lost so much of its heritage, and almost everyone was delighted.6 Even the secret police joined in, although for them the most important thing was to make sure that they had complete control of any secret passage that Golitsyn and Grand Duchess Sofiya might have built between the mansion’s cellars and the Kremlin.7

  The transformation of the city, then, was not steered by some sinister cabal. At first, the whole thing even lacked a rational design. As some old structures were being resurrected, others were about to be torn down. The demolition started in 1922 with a nineteenth-century chapel dedicated to Alexander Nevsky, which someone in the futurist camp complained was blocking traffic in a city-centre street. The church was powerless to answer back, and Grabar, in his role as the city’s artistic consultant, did not protest, because the building was an ugly one. The chapel was quickly razed, a decision that opened the gates to a flood of similar plans.8 Grabar soon seemed almost elated. It was not just that he disliked virtually everything that had been constructed since the days of Konstantin Ton. He was also happy to approve the demolition of a treasured older building if he could salvage the materials for a more attractive or high-profile scheme.9 The iconoclasm of the 1920s was, for him, a straight case of win-win: a conciliatory attitude to the new regime helped keep him in his enviable job, while he could look forward to frequent bonuses in the form of recycled bricks for renovation projects of his own.10

  By 1927, however, the pressure to accept whatever change the new regime required had started to make some other people in the conservation camp highly uncomfortable. That year, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent the demolition of the last of Moscow’s grand baroque triumphal arches, the so-called Red Gates. Some then joined a collective body, Staraya Moskva (Old Moscow), to protect the best-loved landmarks that remained. Petr Sytin, the author of several important histories of Moscow, was particularly fond of Peter the Great’s Sukharevka Tower, which he imagined as the focus of yet another new museum. Petr Baranovsky, who had led the work on Golitsyn’s mansion, devoted a good deal of precious time to the Kaz
an Cathedral, a much-altered seventeenth-century building on Red Square, restoring it with every care for the original design. Other architects worked just as scrupulously on the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery, whose main churches (now free of monks) were landmarks of Old Russian style. Like St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin walls themselves, these were the people’s basic heritage, and Moscow seemed impossible without them. But a turning-point was looming, and the catalyst was probably the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1927. Soon after that, the restoration workshops in Leningrad (the erstwhile Petrograd) were closed, leaving the old imperial capital to rot. Elsewhere, and even in Moscow, the pressure to ‘cleanse’ (that is, remove) religious buildings and imperial sites increased. And a worrying rumour had begun to spread to the effect that Lunacharsky, the conservation-minded Education Commissar, was about to fall.11

  When Stalin announced his plans for drastic economic change, the advocates of cultural warfare were enthralled. The blueprint for the country’s transformation was a Five-Year Plan for industry and agriculture, launched in 1928. This envisaged an entirely new Soviet economy, a dream (or nightmare) of huge factories and power-plant, of tractors moving in formation over golden miles of wheat. Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of millions of private farms, followed by the state-led requisitioning of grain. The implications for anything old or faltering were obvious. An ideology that could justify the deaths of millions of peasants in the name of the future could hardly let its progress founder at the sight of ancient walls. The sound of dynamite reverberated through Moscow. It was a second revolution, the so-called ‘great break’ with the past, and five years later, victory was declared. The final plan for Moscow’s reconstruction (‘an attack upon the old’) was not approved until 1935, but by then the landscape had completely changed. ‘Old, feudal, noble, merchant and bourgeois Moscow grew and developed slowly,’ announced the journal Class Struggle in 1934. ‘But the victory of the proletariat has opened new pages of world-historical importance here … in the name of Stalin a new stage in the construction of the socialist capital has begun.’12