Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Everything was suspect. Sergo Mikoyan remembered his father receiving a crate of wine from the Caucasus, every bottle of which had to be removed for testing. The leaders’ children could not bring packets of sweets from town into their flats. No visitor could bring a parcel and no bag was left unchecked.117 But not even Stalin could stay in the Kremlin all the time. The greatest danger threatened when the leaders had to travel. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, remembered how the great man would order his driver to take a different route every night as he drove to and from the Kremlin. He used his own street plan of Moscow, and neither driver nor bodyguard was told the route in advance.118 In 1949, a short-sighted woman who was careless enough to use a pair of opera-glasses to check the time by a city-centre clock accidentally caught sight of Stalin’s car as it sped up to the Borovitsky gates. She was arrested and spent six years in a labour camp.119 A Muscovite who used to live on Mokhovaya street, opposite the Kremlin, told me that his father’s camera and film were seized the morning after he made the mistake of testing them by taking a single picture from the back of a room whose windows faced the Kremlin walls.120

  And there were other secrets underground. Stalin’s agents were fascinated by tunnels and hidden rooms. In 1923, during the restoration of Golitsyn’s palace, the secret police combined work on their own projects with a fresh attempt to find Ivan the Terrible’s lost library, searching the lower end of Okhotnyi Ryad for underground chambers and iron doors.121 Thereafter, any city-centre work brought them down from their grisly roosts, torches and measuring-tapes in hand.122 Always fascinated by the great leaders of Russia’s past, Stalin himself took an interest, and in 1933, under Peterson’s security regime, a civilian enthusiast called Stelletskii received a permit to dig inside the Kremlin. At the interview where they agreed the deal, Peterson told the explorer that his own men (all secret police) had not located any chambers during work to build the military school (he meant, of course, under the sites of the two monasteries that they had just destroyed). Obediently, Stelletskii dug on the opposite side of the fortress, carting large quantities of earth from underneath the Arsenal Tower throughout the early months of 1934.123 His dig received some expert help from the architect Shchusev, who had found an old tunnel of his own (soon open to the elite through a private entrance near the Senate Tower) during excavations for the Lenin mausoleum.124 There was a flicker of hope that something really new might soon be learned about the Kremlin’s past, but the operation shut down for some major Party meetings in the late autumn of 1934, and then came Sergei Kirov’s death.

  The public would learn little more about the networks underground. The stories of a secret world under their city, however, continue to fascinate Muscovites even now. The Kremlin catacombs, they believe, are extensive enough to accommodate a large part of the nation’s gold reserves, as well as a vast communications system.125 Stalin certainly added a bomb-shelter, his bunker, which had at least two exits and very strong walls. In 1994, during the restoration of the Senate, builders found a further hidden tunnel, whose location would have allowed someone (the evidence points to the post-war secret-police chief, Lavrenty Beria) to eavesdrop on Stalin himself.126 There are always stories about a secret metro, too. From the time of its completion, it was widely observed that the public line that started on the edge of the Alexander Gardens and ran out through the Kiev train station was unusual because it did not cross the whole city as later lines were all to do. Muscovites immediately reasoned that there had to be a hidden extension, a parallel line leading under the Kremlin. If it followed the main public route from there, like all the service tunnels that were known to exist, it could easily have reached Stalin’s dacha. The most persistent story now suggests that the order to complete the connection came in the aftermath of the war, when Stalin was afraid of an atomic strike.127 The only route really known to exist, however, is served by an antiquated underground tram, and connects the Senate building with nearby Old Square, though it may run out further under Moscow at some point.128

  Whatever the extent of that specific line (‘it is hardly a transport artery’ insists a former Kremlin aide129), there is no doubt that Stalin’s fort still sits on a maze of underground systems, far larger than the ‘Pindar’ network that was built for Winston Churchill under London’s Downing Street. The Kremlin’s director of archaeological research, Tatiana Panova, would not show me her complicated maps of groundwater and geology as we leafed through an unpublished study of the site. ‘It’s secret,’ she insisted, flicking through to safer stuff, ‘secret, secret. You can’t look.’ Strain as I might (for all the good it would have done to anyone), I saw nothing but coloured lines, most of which were probably out of date several geological eras ago. In 2010, I asked Mikhail Gorbachev’s friend and interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, to help me out, at least about the mythical metro. ‘Of course it exists,’ he replied at once, ebulliently waving his hands. But then he lowered his voice.

  Everyone knows it exists. But if you were to find someone who had actually seen it, if you were to find someone who really knew, they would never give you any details. They would never say anything. They could not tell you that it is still part of the Kremlin’s secret communications network, could they?

  Before we changed the subject he grew serious. ‘If you really need to know about this, I’m sure your own intelligence services can give you the facts.’

  * * *

  The chill that citizens had felt as they passed Stalin’s Kremlin in the worst years of mass arrests and secret executions (1937–8), did not ease while the old dictator lived. By 1939, however, there was a new atmosphere in Soviet politics and with it, another change of meaning for the Kremlin. Where recently it had appeared to stand for universal brotherhood, at least to judge by the red stars, the old fort was now reinvented (yet again) as Russia’s bastion. The tone of Soviet discourse shifted rightwards as Europe circled towards war, and patriotism began to take the place of proletarian unity. A famous painting of 1938 by Alexander Gerasimov, now in the Tretyakov Gallery, shows Stalin and his defence chief, Kliment Voroshilov, pacing the Kremlin’s grey terraces, clearly preparing to save Moscow. At the time, no-one knew exactly whom they were about to fight, but everything pointed towards a great defensive war. In May 1941, only a month before the German invasion, Stalin himself addressed a military gathering in the Kremlin hall, effectively making himself into a war-leader but incidentally linking the old fortress to his patriotic cause.130 Heroic themes from Russia’s past would soon be resurrected for the propaganda of war-time. Setting Karl Marx aside (reverently), people now learned over again how Russia had fought and defeated Napoleon and what a horseman from the days of Dmitry Donskoi might have worn for a helmet. The Soviet film industry produced a series of historical epics, too, including the blockbusters Alexander Nevsky (1938) and (co-starring the Kremlin itself) Ivan the Terrible (1944).

  The war that came, however, brought the state to near-collapse. For several months in the late summer and autumn of 1941, even the Kremlin was in real danger. Many of its illustrious occupants were evacuated (Lenin’s corpse took a holiday in Siberia), and so were most of the key ministries. The fate of a mysterious cache of radium, which had been lodged for safety in an underground strongroom in the fortress in May 1941, remains unclear, but the more conventional contents of the Armoury Museum were packed off to Sverdlovsk (formerly known as Ekaterinburg, and the city where the last Romanovs met their deaths) by the tiny band of staff who had hung on.131 At the same time, sappers working in strict secrecy laid mines under key buildings in the capital, and documents in its archive suggest that the Kremlin was included on their list.132

  Now dubbed ‘the brains of the country’, the architectural complex was watched over by special troops, some of them hidden in buildings around Red Square with orders to shoot anything that looked like an enemy.133 The Kremlin’s golden cupolas were masked in black, and fake buildings were created round it to confuse attackers from the air. Even so, the
fortress took several direct hits from German bombers.134 In October 1941, when officers of the Wehrmacht could already make out the city through field-glasses, Muscovites panicked, and it took the most brutal intervention by the secret police to stop a mass flight out of town. But Stalin himself remained. In November 1941, he held the customary gala meeting for the anniversary of the 1917 revolution in the underground hall of the Mayakovsky metro station, a sensible enough precaution when the city was at risk from bombs. The next day, however, he watched the annual military parade from an open-air platform on Lenin’s mausoleum, waving to the Soviet Union’s troops as they marched through Red Square and straight off to the front.

  It was a magnificent piece of theatre. Stalin still preferred to sleep in his heavily guarded dacha, and often worked there for parts of the day, but the Kremlin provided him with an impressive headquarters, and he was ready to exploit it. For the duration of the war, propaganda images showed the Soviet leader in his Kremlin office, receiving reports, checking maps, consulting the top generals. And records of the visits to that panelled study confirm the myth: the leader worked in it for parts of almost every day, usually seeing people from late afternoon until the early hours of the morning.135 In August 1942, Stalin received Churchill in the Kremlin (the British prime minister declined the offer of accommodation there). The delegation that arrived included several British officials and US diplomatic staff, but a note in the record observes that all but the most senior foreign-office men were made to wait outside the inner study in an anteroom.136 The mystique mattered, and preserved the illusion (not quite correct) that Stalin was running this war-effort on his own.

  As well as reminding the Soviet people just how hard their leader worked, the Kremlin also hosted gala celebrations for Russian triumphs. The two, indeed, were meant to seem inseparable. In August 1943, Moscow reverberated to the first of a series of 120-gun salutes, this one to mark the Soviet victory at Orel. The staging of successive celebrations was minutely choreographed, each time drawing attention to the primacy of the capital, the leader, and the Kremlin. One of the most ironic of these spectacles was the solemn repatriation, from Sverdlovsk, of the Armoury Museum’s treasure in February 1945. Crowns and icons that had once been awkward relics, preserved (in some cases) because they were too distinctive to sell to collectors, now returned to the fortress as the nation’s patrimony. A guard of honour from the Kremlin met their train, and the crates made their entrance to the palace up the regal marble stairs.137

  It was a glittering reminder of the glory of the Russian state, and in the years to come that state, and not its citizens, was to play the hero in Stalin’s version of history. The people, and the diverse, deeply held but half-forgotten beliefs of their past, faded into the shadows as state power and state-led ideology took centre stage. On 24 June 1945, the long-awaited Soviet victory parade rolled out in drenching rain. The crowds that gathered underneath the Kremlin walls were soaked, the rows of marching men looked cold; even the planned airforce fly-past had to be cancelled. Though Stalin assumed greatest credit for the victory itself, the most conspicuous role at the ceremony that day was played by the army’s hero, Marshal Georgii Zhukov. As commander-in-chief of the proceedings, he presided from the saddle of a prancing, skittish horse. He managed to stay in control of that, but to those who had learned their history before the revolution, it was a sign of fatal hubris that he chose to ride into Red Square through the citadel’s Saviour Gate. The route had been so sacred once that even tsars, in piety, had dismounted and walked. That night, Stalin’s grand reception speech to 2,500 military officers in the great hall of the Kremlin Palace was even heavier with depressing portents. The leader thanked the army for its efforts, to be sure, but he described the Soviet people as ‘little cogs’, mere components in a huge and unrelenting state machine.

  * * *

  If anything, the Kremlin’s isolation increased in the final years of Stalin’s life. ‘It was not so much an administrative complex,’ wrote a witness, ‘as a vast and oppressive wasteland. It was forbidden to walk in its territory.’138 The decade after the war was a bleak time for all Russians. Millions went homeless, millions slaved. There was no choice but to rebuild the factories and transport links that had been destroyed, but in their private hardship and long nights of grief, many found it difficult to remember that infrastructure and production were meant to come before the consolation of the individual. The question of lost heritage was even more awkward. Resources – labour and supplies – were so scarce that it was hard to justify the rebuilding of a palace or a stretch of wall when so many people still needed homes. But pride in the old symbols also mattered, and there was constant pressure to reconstruct the best-loved landmarks in places like Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod. The issue became critical in Moscow as early as 1944, when it was pointed out (with official prompting) that 1947 would mark the city’s eight-hundredth anniversary. A writer at the time called on his fellow-citizens to ‘listen more attentively to the voice of the past … We must bind ourselves to the roots of our nation.’139

  This kind of patriotic fervour soon became unwise. National history, having served its turn, was downplayed from the summer of 1944. In its place, loyal communists were supposed to rally round their ideology and leaders. Though the Party itself had instigated the talk of jubilees, its Moscow committee resolved that the celebration of the city’s founding should primarily be military. One of its members even ordained that Russians needed ‘more politics and less history’.140 That left the Kremlin’s role uncertain, for it was not immediately obvious what part the fortress was meant to play in the forthcoming pageantry. The answer was to treat it as a special case, the incarnation of the Soviet Russian state and spiritual home of the immortal Lenin. On that pretext, a restoration programme, costing millions, was approved in June 1945.141 The tension must have weighed on the architects whom Stalin summoned to his Senate office, often in the dead of night, to discuss the work inside the closed and largely empty site. His interest was scrupulous, for this was almost personal. At a time of continued ethnic tension and even outright nationalist revolt inside the Soviet empire, he meant the Kremlin’s Russianness to make a statement. The lines of perfect battlements that still exist today, and details in several of the churches (including the Church of the Deposition of the Robe) reflect the taste and interests of the Boss.142

  The team that led the renovation project included several familiar names. D. P. Sukhov, who had taken part in the conservation efforts of the 1920s, was one consultant, as was I. V. Rylsky, one-time head of the State Conservation workshops. Even an aged Grabar was there, dreaming of a project to restore a small part of the fortress to its original, fifteenth-century Italian, appearance.143 This caused a storm, and in the end a compromise – roughly corresponding to the mid-seventeenth century – was agreed. The bricks were a problem, however, for no-one made the heavy versions any more, and so, like Aristotele Fioravanti and like Boris Godunov, Stalin’s restorers commissioned a factory of their own. In the midst of post-war crisis, this special unit managed to turn out one and a half million heritage building-bricks in record time.144 Stonemasons also worked to quarry the white stone required to mend more than three hundred decorative caps on battlements and towers. To keep the construction going in the winter, someone thought of introducing outdoor stoves, which blasted the Kremlin’s walls with steam to keep them warm when the mercury dropped, whatever the workers themselves may have been feeling in the freezing air.145

  Outside the Kremlin, however, the historical elements of Moscow’s 1947 jubilee were diluted with large doses of Stalinist propaganda. A monumental new statue of the city’s legendary founder was fine because it echoed current views about Stalin himself, for instance, but real academic history could be dangerous. When Petr Sytin, the Moscow historian, produced a celebratory tome that included a scholarly reference to the probable Finnish origins of the name ‘Moscow’, a derivation that had once been mentioned by Zabelin, he found himself in
trouble. Only a traitor, it was ruled, could link the Russian capital with a defeated foe.146 Nostalgia, too, was deemed suspect, for this romantic sort of history could easily dissolve into a tale of princes and foreigners and even the church. Accordingly, all seven centuries of the pre-Soviet past were treated like a prelude to the real tale, and only events after 1917 were allowed to count as ‘genuine’ history. As the Moscow City Communist Party’s Comrade Popov put it, the Moscow of golden domes had to give way, even in its anniversary year, to the Moscow of red stars. The floodlights for the city’s jubilee lit up some ugly civic buildings, such as the new State Planning offices, but left all churches in the dark. It was proposed that children’s albums of the celebration should show Red Square without St Basil’s to avoid potential questions about religion.147 The children could be pacified with the newly available luxury, ice-cream, and everyone could marvel at the fireworks.

  The eight-hundredth anniversary souvenir guidebooks to the Kremlin, thin and cheaply printed in the hardship of post-war, were masterpieces of Soviet fraud. A collection of woodcuts by an artist called Matorin begins by citing Karamzin. ‘The Kremlin’, it announces, ‘is a place of great historical memories.’ But history is not the focus of the pages that follow, many of which show the smiling faces of workers in Soviet caps.148 Another souvenir, this one a collection of photographs, begins with Lenin and Stalin, the latter in his panelled study. There is a picture of the Lenin mausoleum that contrives to make Shchusev’s stark cube look like the inspiration for the (much earlier) Senate Tower behind it, and there are pictures of Communist Party meetings in the great hall. Among the few historical images, the terema feature because they were built ‘by Russian masters in 1637’ (no mention of poor John Taler), but the only other fragments of the past are military trophies. It is particularly striking that the entire book contains no image whatsoever of a Kremlin church.149