Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Among the losses was the Sukharevka Tower, which was demolished on the now-familiar pretext of improving traffic flows. In 1934, Baranovsky’s lovingly restored Kazan Cathedral was commandeered as a canteen for the men who were digging metro tunnels, and two years later it was destroyed completely, ostensibly to ease the path of vast Red Square parades.13 Even Golitsyn’s rediscovered palace was blown up, this time to make space for a monumental bank. At one point, at a planning meeting where models of city-centre buildings were being placed on a paper map, Stalin lifted the miniature St Basil’s from Red Square, briefly considering how things would look if it were gone.14 The church was spared, but Moscow lost hundreds of other historic buildings, as well as many of the winding central streets and leafy courtyards that had fed its village soul. At best, some civic monuments were mounted on rollers and relocated when the time came to widen a boulevard; the governor-general’s house on Tverskaya, originally built by Kazakov, was moved this way in 1937, as was the former English Club.15 But the result was an intimidating emptiness, as devoid of comfort and character as it was of shady trees. Stalin wanted space for all the tanks and marching troops; his heirs still live with the windswept results.

  With or without the tanks, however, most religious monuments were doomed. In the outright war that economic transformation required from 1929, loyal citizens had to prove themselves actively anti-religious. ‘Dynamite’, one such class warrior announced, ‘has become a real ally in our uncompromising battle against Orthodoxy.’16 In six months during 1929 alone, four hundred religious buildings in Moscow were closed, including the last working church in the Novodevichy Monastery.17 In July 1929, one of Moscow’s most revered shrines, the Chapel of the Iberian Virgin, was demolished to ease large-scale access to Red Square. It was high time, the planners must have argued. This chapel blocked the free passage of crowds. But in secret, Moscow’s new rulers were also worried by its spell, which was so strong, even this late in the new age, that marching communists, red flags and all, were sometimes seen to cross themselves as they passed by.

  Strong passions could be harnessed on all sides. Christians felt besieged and trampled, but the Bolshevik elite, taking decisions for their own half-secret purposes, tapped into a movement that was as genuine and deeply felt, in the cities at least, as that of the Orthodox believers in the other camp. In 1929, an ‘anti-Christmas’ demonstration in Moscow’s principal city-centre park attracted 100,000 participants. ‘Anti-Christmas’ and ‘anti-Easter’ marches in the next two years were similarly popular.18 Having endured decades of repression and even violence at the hands of the inquisitors of the old regime, the anti-clerical working class was euphoric. The atheists in its ranks might have been confused about some issues – they never quite got used to the finality of godless death – but they knew that they had finished with the priests and rote-learned prayers. Their cycling festivals, open-air picnics and banner-waving parades were certainly sponsored by the government, but the force of this revolution came from real Russian souls.19

  It was not long before attention turned to the most grandiloquent religious building in Moscow, Konstantin Ton’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Even after 1917, the building was a focus for the fragmentary religious life that still endured. The famous choirs still sang there when they could, and until 1929 the faithful continued to queue at its great doors for evergreen branches and Christmas blessings. Unlike the Kremlin that it faced, however, this building was not really capable of reinvention, for no-one could believe for long that the cavernous interior, marble and all, would make a splendid workers’ club. In 1931, when the planners were looking for a site for their showpiece Palace of Soviets, the decision was taken to have it demolished. By this stage, the city’s countless Orthodox believers had learned to be cautious. Very few dared to protest. The ageing artist Apollinary Vasnetsov tried to defend Ton’s domineering structure (and the art inside), but his argument was based on heritage, not faith. ‘It is easy’, he wrote, ‘to demolish, but when a cultural and artistic monument has been destroyed without trace it will be too late to be sorry.’20

  The Party newspaper, Izvestiya, refused to print Vasnetsov’s letter. This was the clearest signal that the demolition had been approved (if not instigated) at the highest level. The massive structure, seven decades in the planning, was gone within the next few weeks. As the secret policemen kept their usual officious watch, teams of workers stripped the cupolas of their gold leaf and copper sheets. Others strained to lower several heavy bells, and others yet removed the carvings and interior tiles. When all was ready and the site secure, the shell was blown up in a single night, leaving a ruin that took months to clear. The spoils were loaded on to fleets of horse-drawn carts (the Soviet dream of universal mechanization had yet to be realized) while an eager coterie of artists and designers collected like rapacious storks, some hoping to recycle the bell-metal for projects of their own, others to crate up and export the bronze doors and the carved statues. Despite the 1930s Great Depression, there were always cash buyers somewhere in the world.21

  The cathedral’s disappearance changed the Moscow skyline completely. But as doubters had already started to mutter, the Bolsheviks were better at removing the city’s landmarks than agreeing about replacements. Fantastic plans, the more impossible the better, were always being laid. One was to build a soaring Commissariat for Heavy Industry on the site of the old trading rows (the GUM building); Ivan Leonidov’s sketches for that showed that he meant to upstage the Kremlin itself.22 Then came the Palace of Congresses, another future tallest building in the world, on the site of Ton’s lost cathedral. There was the giant bank for which Golitsyn’s mansion had been razed, and there were always plans for monumental factories. In every case, however, it was much easier to draw designs than to make a mad idea come true. The city, in reality, was not so much a clean slate as a rubble-pile, and the heaps of broken stone grew higher still in 1934, when the walls and gatehouse towers of Kitai-gorod were finally destroyed.23 ‘A person who thought he knew Moscow would soon find that he did not know this Moscow,’ quipped humourists Il’f and Petrov.24 The city never quite made sense again, and even now there are strange gaps and ugly, oddly routed streets, leaving a visitor to wonder, in footsore despair, exactly what could have been in the planners’ minds.

  The answer – or one answer – was that they were trying to create a modern city of concentric circles, the focal point of which would be the Kremlin, still its medieval self.25 But here the planners’ dreams gave way to the designs of a more powerful elite, for what happened in or near the fortress was never open for public debate. If Moscow’s citizens had been in charge, after all, the Kremlin might have turned into a vast museum, a park, or even the base for future missions to space. It might also have been reclaimed by some kind of religious faith, and even by militant atheists. For all its visionary glory, however, this was not a revolution that remained the people’s own. The Kremlin, like state power, was a resource that ultimately belonged to the very few. There had to be some editing, for the Kremlin was as much a text as any book, but in the end the new elite, Stalin’s own clique, taught the old walls to speak Bolshevik Russian. In their hands, the Kremlin became Red Russia’s fortress, the silhouette with five bright-lit electric stars that was, and probably remains, the world’s shorthand for Soviet power.

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  Because of its importance as the nation’s citadel, the Kremlin’s architectural fate unfolded according to a set of unique rules. The Bolsheviks (at first it was Madame Trotskaya in person) began by dividing its buildings into four categories, depending on their historic or artistic value. In 1925, that initial scheme was modified to introduce the notion of utility, which freed up a good deal of space for the new government to use. The colonnade around the former monument to Alexander II (Category 3) was knocked down within weeks, and the site where Moscow’s young had strolled and flirted on their pre-war summer afternoons was turned into a gasoline depot.26 But under Trotskaya’s
original scheme, the oldest churches and the two monasteries had been ring-fenced on the grounds of their historical significance (Category 1), so few expected that the first significant Kremlin building to disappear entirely should have been the little Church of Konstantin and Elena in the citadel’s south-eastern corner.27 This was demolished on the Executive Commission’s orders in 1928, ostensibly to enlarge the surrounding garden and make space for a new sports ground.

  A year later, when there was still a lot of rubble and no sign of that sports ground, the director of the Lenin Library, a Bolshevik of long standing called Vladimir Nevsky, dared to protest about the loss of heritage, but his was an isolated voice.28 Less voluble was a petition by the Kremlin’s own recently appointed architectural director, D. P. Sukhov, who was already worried for his job.29 He and his comrades won a minor victory in the spring of 1928, when plans to demolish the gothic-style Church of St Catherine in the Ascension Monastery were set aside, along with a scheme to melt down most of the Kremlin bells.30 But the respite was a brief one. Just one year later, in April 1929, the news leaked out that both the Kremlin monasteries (Category 1) were doomed. No less an organ than the Party’s supreme council, the Politburo, dismissed a last-minute protest, by Lunacharsky, as ‘anti-communist in spirit and completely indecent in tone’.31 As if on cue, that July the Education Commissar was relieved of his duties. The site of the two monasteries was earmarked for a military training school.

  The loss this time would be serious indeed. The Chudov Monastery, founded by Metropolitan (and saint) Aleksii in the days of Mongol rule, was one of Russia’s most important sites. Its oldest buildings were significant monuments; some of its icons (and the iconostasis in the monastery cathedral) were rare works of art, as were the frescoes and the carvings on the walls, and the grounds contained historic tombs, including that of Aleksii himself. In recent years, the crypt had also been used to accommodate the remains of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, though that was not, perhaps, the best card the conservators could play. More plausibly, defenders of the buildings could at least request that they be given time to draw and photograph interiors that very few had ever seen. The country’s leading conservation experts pleaded for the time to explore and to catalogue the precious space. Lenin, surely, had acknowledged what the buildings meant, for he had once approved a programme of repairs to rectify the shell damage of 1917. As architect Sukhov and his ally, the conservator-historian N. N. Pomerantsev, wrote to Mikhail Kalinin in 1929, it was also ironic, if not tragic, that ‘valuable monuments to our culture which survived material hardship in the early years of the revolution’ should disappear in what were meant to be enlightened times.32

  The Ascension Monastery, the women’s convent, was just as important. For centuries, this great religious house had been the burial-place of Russia’s royal women. The first such lady to be buried there had been Dmitry Donskoi’s widow, Evdokiya, the monastery’s founder, and others included Ivan the Terrible’s much-loved first wife, his scheming mother Elena Glinskaya, and the grand old princess Sofiya Palaeologa. Because the royal coffins lay in massive stone sarcophagi, the trove was important from an archaeological point of view alone, for it included grave-goods, as well as carvings, fabrics, and the science to be scraped from centuries of dust. In the summer of 1929, members of the Kremlin’s restoration workshop (a body, sponsored by the Education Commissariat, that was itself heading for oblivion) raised the necessary cash, stocked up on graph paper, and prepared to survey the entire compound.33 Most of the gold and silver from the convent had been seized in 1922, but the iconostasis in the main cathedral still remained to be surveyed. In July, experts dismantled it for safekeeping. Meanwhile, the placing and condition of the royal coffins were quickly recorded before each was lifted for last-minute storage in one of the Archangel Cathedral’s crypts.34

  The situation, at the very least, was awkward socially. Each morning, groups of men assembled by the monastery walls, perhaps holding a match to light each other’s cigarettes, perhaps sharing a topical joke. The photographs survive, and they show gaunt-faced figures in dusty boots, taking their short breaks in casual shirtsleeves. All were experts, and all had Kremlin passes and police clearance, but some had come to measure and sketch the monuments and others to make sure that the dynamite to blast them was correctly laid. The trust between the two may well have been a fragile thing. One morning, when their conservation and surveying work was far from finished, the art historians arrived for work to find that overnight the other gang had reduced their subjects, the old walls, to rubble.

  There was no possible redress for this. Instead of wasting time on protest, the experts turned their attention to the frescoes in the Chudov Monastery’s sixteenth-century Cathedral of the Miracle of Archangel Michael, which was still standing. The head of Kremlin conservation had been warned that there were only weeks left to record all these, and in early December he asked a fellow-specialist, A. I. Anisimov, to chisel out and store some of the better examples. By now, the temperature outside had dropped. The old buildings were not heated, so conservation workers must have cursed as they hauled their gloves on and off, blowing on clumsy, painful fingers. All the same, on 17 December 1929 Anisimov still believed he had two more weeks – a short time for so delicate a task – when he, too, arrived to find that his site had been dynamited before dawn. For the rest of the winter, he went on picking through the rubble, determined to rescue any viable fragments while there was still time. Parts of this hoard are now preserved like gems in the Kremlin’s own museum.35 Vladimir Nevsky, of the Lenin Library, wrote to deplore the loss of two ‘establishments of importance to the architecture of Russia in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … which contained the work of Russian masters of the fifteenth century, amazing frescoes and ancient pieces of unimaginable perfection.’36 Both he and the unfortunate Anisimov were soon to end their days in one of Stalin’s camps.

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  No one really believed the story that the Central Executive Committee needed the Kremlin’s monastery site for a military training school. Even in a modernizing age, few Moscow architects would touch the commission to build it, though finally the work was taken on by I. I. Rerberg, a man now better known for designing one of Moscow’s railway terminals.37 The resulting complex was impractical, and it was also hard to see what kind of military training could take place next to the Politburo’s meeting room.38 The school was soon closed and its building converted for use as offices, a canteen and, some years later, as a Kremlin theatre. The fact that Stalin and his aides were content to put up with all the noise and dust, meanwhile, suggests that what they really could not tolerate was the sight of monastery walls, even abandoned ones, for there were always other places for a school. But as they hoped, all trace of the religious houses disappeared. In 2007, a former Kremlin resident even assured me that no such buildings had ever existed. As he repeated, shrugging at my ignorance, ‘there never was a monastery in the Kremlin’.39 The Bolsheviks, clearly, had succeeded with him.

  It was far easier to make a case for some remodelling of Ton’s Grand Kremlin Palace. The goal this time was to provide a better conference centre. Of course, the Palace of Soviets, on the site of the lost Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was supposed to be about to offer this, but that skyscraper was still in its planning stages (and would ultimately never get beyond them). Meanwhile, the Communist Party needed a hall large enough to seat several thousand delegates, together with facilities like lavatories and dining-rooms, and while the Bolshoi Theatre was a stop-gap, the Grand Palace in the Kremlin was a far more promising site. A team led by an architect called I. A. Ivanov-Shits began work there in 1932, and the brief was to complete the entire job in eighteen months, in time for the Communist Party’s Seventeenth Congress.40 The burly men with barrows and ungainly piles of tools moved in again, each one requiring prior clearance – on a daily basis – from security. Rudolf Peterson, who had replaced Pavel Malkov as Kremlin commandant, later remembe
red the exercise as a logistical nightmare.41

  Few onlookers could really mourn the palace halls named for the Orders of St Andrew and St Alexander. Like so much else of recent date, the Grand Palace was opulent rather than tasteful. The gold leaf and the fake marble were quickly stripped, and the two massive rooms knocked into one. The resulting titanic space, to be known as the Sverdlov Hall after one of Lenin’s deceased aides, was then panelled in wood (Stalin’s favourite) and fitted with raked lines of seats without much protest from conservators. More ominous, however, was the threat to nearby sites, including some of the oldest on the Kremlin hill. The fifteenth-century Faceted Palace had served as a canteen for several years, but architects now eyed the nearby Red Stair, the last survivor (albeit a copy) of the canopied lines of steps that had once linked the first-floor royal terrace to Cathedral Square. In 1934 this relic was demolished to make way for a more comfortable dining-room and toilets. Meanwhile, there was the problem of the oldest building in Moscow, the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest. In 1932, this much-loved house of prayer was being used to display an exhibition of communist funeral wreaths, notably those of Lenin and Sverdlov.42 In the 1990s, the daughter of Aleksei Rykov, who had once lived nearby, told a researcher that her father believed the church’s fate was sealed because it darkened the windows of the flat that Stalin’s henchman, Lazar Kaganovich, inherited at the time of Rykov’s fall in 1932.43 Such trivial reasons, worthy of an emperor like Nicholas I, may well have played a part, but just as likely is the fact that Stalin’s court could hardly bear to leave a church alone. This one may well have been unique, a witness to the nation’s deepest past, but that weighed little in Soviet plans. The building was too close to the palace for comfort, and in an age of brilliant electric light, it smelled of candlewax, tsarism and mice.