Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  A chastened Petr Sytin, lost for words in his own right, could only quote Stalin. ‘Moscow’, he wrote, ‘is the model for every capital in the world.’150 At the heart of it, the newly painted red fortress floated like a bizarre toy above the asphalt sea with which the latest batch of city planners had surrounded it. Or maybe it was more like an unfortunate live specimen, a rhinoceros or the last dodo, imported from a distant world as an exotic freak, but now condemned to stand in lonely silence in an alien, uncomprehending land.

  11

  Kremlinology

  The American writer John Steinbeck had to negotiate for weeks before he was allowed to take a tour of the Kremlin. The year was 1947, and Steinbeck was in Russia with the photographer Robert Capa. Though every move they made was watched, the pair travelled extensively, visiting the post-war ruins of Stalingrad as well as Soviet Georgia and the wheat-fields of Ukraine. The short walk from their hotel to the Kremlin, however, was much harder to organize, and for once Capa had to leave his camera behind. ‘We approached the long, heavily-guarded causeway,’ Steinbeck wrote. ‘There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permission scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate.’ It was like crossing from daylight into shadow; even their guide, a Russian hand-picked for the job, had never been inside the Kremlin in his life. The place felt barren, almost empty. ‘Just two hours in this royal palace so depressed us that we couldn’t shake it all day,’ Steinbeck remarked. ‘What must a lifetime in it have done!’ As they drowned the whole experience in whisky, the pair concluded that the Kremlin was ‘the most gloomy place in the world’.1

  The party did not go to the area where Stalin’s officials worked, and they seem not to have visited the cathedrals, either. Their tour began and ended with the palace and the old terema. It was a desultory history lesson, and there would barely have been time to shudder at Tsar Ivan’s ghost before the time came to leave. Like almost every visitor before and since, the two Americans made up for that by trying to convince themselves that they had seen authentic medieval sights, but their guide – if he had been a brave one – could probably have set them straight. The palace rooms and chapels that Steinbeck and Capa saw, after all, were not ‘strange, and ancient, and kept just as they were’.2 In the decades since 1917, they had been looted, gutted and then abandoned. The purge of 1935 had driven out the last of their old-fashioned staff, and many of their recent masters were dead. Even Stalin, for years the citadel’s presiding genius, was spending less and less time on the site. At night, this Kremlin’s darkness could seem almost tactile.3 Its very towers sometimes seemed to vanish into it, for there were almost no street lamps in Moscow’s central zone. On moonless nights, the five red stars, repaired and serviced since the war and now the brightest lights for miles, hung in the black like strange planets.

  The first signal of Stalin’s death, in that darkness, was probably a low-wattage electric light, the first of many that were snapped on when the telephones began to ring. The members of the tyrant’s inner circle were not at home – they had been watching at his dacha in the suburbs – but their families waited for news, and the phones would also have summoned the Kremlin commandant and the deputy who had to wake the clerks. While all these struggled to absorb what had just happened, the headlights of a black car swept up to the Saviour gates. Juddering over the cobblestones inside, they were extinguished in the courtyard of the Senate, Kremlin Corpus No. 1. The car’s main occupant was Lavrenty Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, and he had come straight from the leader’s deathbed to ransack an office and empty a safe.4 Inside it were the documents Stalin had used to lock and unlock other people’s hearts, including evidence of their personal foibles as well as damning reports about the state’s excessive violence. An adept in the arts of defamation and blackmail himself, the police chief wanted all of these to help secure his own claim to the vacant throne. As it turned out the bid would fail, and Beria’s comrades had him shot just months later. But the Kremlin continued to be a by-word for deception, presenting an austere face to the world that belied the conspiracies and turbulence within. Though parts of the fortress were opened to the public after Stalin’s death, no visitor would see beyond some bland museum-like façades. The very structures of leadership were so inscrutable that outsiders were tempted to bundle the whole government – policemen and politicians, ideologists, generals and all – into a single category: ‘The Kremlin’.

  * * *

  In the short term, Stalin’s empire was set for a new spring. His death, in March 1953, opened the way for many overdue reforms. In the Gulag (which Steinbeck did not see), tens of thousands of political prisoners were freed; elsewhere, Russia’s more fortunate citizens began to test their reflexes as if awakening from a long sleep. The Kremlin, too, emerged from its deep gloom, and the first New Year of the new age, in January 1954, was celebrated in a blaze of chandeliers and tiny decorative lights. At the centre of it all was a large spruce tree, festooned and sparkling in the over-heated cavern of St George’s Hall. There was music and spontaneous laughter, and the Kremlin squares saw their first snowball fight in a generation.5 Later that year, the first escorted tours were admitted, and in July 1955 the Kremlin grounds were finally opened to the public. From a security point of view, such latitude was possible only because Stalin’s ultimate heir, Nikita Khrushchev, had opted for a residence elsewhere, in equally exclusive premises on the Lenin Hills. The story persists that his wife, Nina Petrovna, refused point-blank to live in the dead tyrant’s Kremlin rooms. By 1955, the last remaining Kremlin VIPs, including the Mikoyans and Molotovs, had also moved out of the fort, allowing staff to tidy up, plant shrubs on the old tennis courts, and open windows that had rusted shut.6 But public access was the vital change. It was, some later said, ‘the first step towards the liberalisation of the Soviet regime’.7

  It was also a step closer to the Kremlin’s rebirth as a tourist attraction. There had been crowds of many kinds over the centuries, there had even been foreign armies of occupation, but never before had the Kremlin seen the slack-jawed milling of excursion parties in leisure clothes. The post-war Soviet Union was a land where holidays, in the form of regimented, rather joyless groups, were virtually prescribed (not least to foster healthy productivity), and the Kremlin became a fixture on the Moscow route. The first visitors were from the capital itself: factory-workers, office-staff, proud children boasting the red necktie of the Communist Party youth organization, the Pioneers. But soon the Kremlin was attracting citizens from Ukraine and the Baltic and (in exceptional cases) the far-off republics to the east. In 1955, new staff were hired and new facilities added to cope with the crowds, including underground cloakrooms, lockers, and two rows of gruesome public toilets at the foot of the Kutafia Tower. Above all that, in the forgiving light of a Moscow summer, the gardens round the walls were planted with flowers, creating a park where visitors could stroll.8 The red stars still lit up the night, but the real symbol of this generation’s Kremlin was the scarlet Soviet flag.

  It was also that flag that brought the foreigners; the brave, the scholarly, and the left-wing. Moscow was an exotic destination on the international circuit, but it was no longer sealed shut. In 1956, it hosted a major exhibition of Picasso’s work, accompanied by a season of French films.9 Russians made the acquaintance of Europe’s dove of peace, and foreign guests that of Soviet hotels. According to the eminent political scientist Frederick Barghoorn, who visited from Yale in the summer of 1956, about 3,000 Soviet tourist visas were issued to Americans that year. His own trip went smoothly enough (a few years later he was snatched in a bungled spy-exchange), and he noted that he ‘did not hear one word in praise of Stalin’.10 By 1957, when 30,000 foreigners arrived in Moscow for the sixth International Festival of Youth, the Kremlin had become a fully-fledged tourist destination, complete with welcoming multi-coloured flags (the red ones came back out when the foreigners had left), new asphalt paths, and gui
debooks for sale in a range of languages.11 Russians, meanwhile, poured through the gates at every season, and by the 1960s between four and five million visitors were trooping round the Kremlin every year.12 Their comments say a lot about the spirit of the time. ‘Thank you, thank you, and thank you again to our Party and government,’ a citizen gushed across the pages of the visitors’ book. ‘Thanks to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for preserving this monument to Russia’s past.’13

  * * *

  Nikita Khrushchev’s ten-year term as leader of the Soviet Union saw a marked retreat from Stalinism. His famous speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 attacked the late dictator directly.14 It was the first time that a Party leader had openly discussed Stalin’s tyranny, and the admission followed months of secret bargaining within the elite. Khrushchev himself knew that he had plenty to hide, as did the comrades who sat stony-faced in the best seats beside him.15 While Stalin lived, they had all agreed to measures that they now affected to deplore, and while most accepted that reform (and the regime’s very survival) depended on the repudiation of terror, the direct reference to historic crimes felt like a form of sacrilege, a blasphemy against the leader-cult that all had fervently professed. There was no question of forsaking communism itself, however. In place of Stalin’s cult, the clique agreed to introduce a reverence for Lenin, and ‘Leninist principles’ (whatever those might mean) became their ideological touchstone. The success of their new Soviet paradise depended on illusion. In its canteens, where pilfering by staff was so rife that there was no food but thin grey soup and glasses of tooth-stripping tea, the walls were lined with posters of plump fruit and freshly glazed white bread. The cosmonaut Gagarin was a hero in a country that could not make jeans to fit.

  But illusion was classic Kremlin territory. A site that had projected everything from theocratic power to steel-coated technological utopia in its eight centuries of life was bound to play a role in this new world. The question was exactly which image to choose. Khrushchev’s regime was no less hostile to the Orthodox Church than Stalin’s, and it was also multi-national, unable to rely exclusively on the Old Russian card. So it used the Kremlin, in the age of broadcast media, to bring a sense of dependability, even cosiness, to the rituals of Soviet life. The giant Christmas tree (or rather, New Year spruce) that went up each winter in St George’s Hall helped to do that, and generations of well-behaved Moscow children were invited to admire it at the annual Kremlin party. On New Year’s Eve, families across the ten time zones of the Soviet Union gathered round their radios (a television was a distant dream for most) as Moscow’s own midnight approached, waiting for the first mechanical rasp from the clock on the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower. It was another irony: the best this state could manage at midwinter was a festival for marking time.

  A void might well have opened where the dead Stalin had been, but propagandists were quick to burnish an alternative personality cult. ‘Every building and every stone in the Kremlin is a witness to the noble history of the Russian state,’ a guidebook of 1956 began. ‘But one of the Kremlin buildings is especially dear to our people and to all progressive people in the countries of the world. It does not speak so much about the past as about the present and about the years to come, the future of humanity as a whole.’16 The suspense was artificial, for every Soviet citizen would have known what was coming next. In 1955, the Lenin museum-apartment opened on the third floor of the Senate building, complete with the dead leader’s library of 18,000 volumes, his narrow bed, armchairs, and the kitchen pots that Krupskaya had never bothered to use.17 Here, visitors learned, ‘the great genius and leader of the world proletariat V. I. Lenin and his closest comrades organised the front during the civil war and planned the struggle against capitalist intervention’. Here, too, ‘was born the great plan for Soviet electrification’.18 There was even a picture of the father of the international proletarian revolution playing with a kitten.

  The next step came in 1961, when the Kremlin acquired a dedicated department for propaganda.19 This produced a flood of vapid platitudes, but at least people knew where they stood, which (unless they came with an official tour) was usually in a queue. Access to the Kremlin was packaged as a reward for good citizenship. For everyone else, getting into any of the best museums was fiendishly difficult.20 Their opening hours were short, visitor numbers restricted, and the guides had instructions to deliver a litany of facts about Russian craftsmanship (the workers’ contribution) rather than tempting visitors with morsels from the juicy tsarist world. ‘The Kremlin is an inexhaustible source of monumental propaganda of every kind,’ experts from the museums were eager to affirm. ‘It is exploited for study and allows the broad mass of the people to acquaint themselves with the treasures of art and history with the aim of creating fully-developed human beings, active fighters for the better future of mankind.’21

  On completing their Kremlin tour (main features of the hill, main landmarks, Cathedral Square, and, if you were lucky, Armoury and Diamonds), most excursions followed their guides through the exit gate down to the Alexander Gardens. The manuals for tour-leaders recommended that they visit Lenin’s mausoleum at this point, although the queues for that were formidably long at any time of year.22 To visit Lenin was to share in something greater than mere pride; it was a kind of sacrament. You did not slouch, you did not spit, and even you ground out that cigarette. Moscow’s schoolchildren learned this at an early age, for someone dreamed up the idea of bringing the pick of them here, to the very presence of the corpse, when they were sworn in as young Pioneers. As they accepted their red scarf and scroll, the lucky few would glow with pride, but grinning, in the presence of Ilyich himself, was definitely not allowed.23

  For all that, Khrushchev’s thaw was genuine, and no-one warmed to it with greater glee than educated Muscovites. In the 1950s, a narrow circle of these got their first opportunity in over twenty years to take professional stock of the Kremlin. Buildings that had been assigned to the secret police since 1935 were suddenly transferred to the Ministry of Culture. The Armoury Chamber museum also expanded for a time, absorbing Marshal Voroshilov’s recently vacated rooms in a wing of the Grand Palace.24 New research staff were hired, young men with history degrees, and by 1963 there was a curator for each room for the first time in half a century.25 They worked within an ideological frame, but they did not have to tell obvious lies. The guidebook, Kreml’ Moskvy, had chapters on the medieval and renaissance forts by several of Moscow’s most distinguished authorities, including the architectural historian V. F. Snegirev.26 Po Kremliu, a volume that was published for the Festival of Youth in 1957, is still regarded as a classic. The team of authors who created it included the architect-restorer A. I. Khamtsov, and the curator of Kremlin museums, A. A. Goncharova.27

  Stalin’s shadow was not exorcized entirely. Armoury staff encountered it in an unusual way, for in the later 1950s they developed plans to hold an exhibition of the gifts the leader had received during his quarter-century in power. The collection was assembled and catalogued, and the planning went so well that tickets for a private view were printed on two separate occasions, but each time someone found a reason to delay. Eventually the exhibition was dismantled and the rooms intended for it handed back to the commandant’s office, otherwise known as the ninth directorate of the KGB. By this time, as ever, the secret policemen needed extra space, but there would have been other rooms for them. In truth, while there was always scope for a museum of Muscovite tsars, and though it was vital to preserve the shrine to Lenin, no-one knew what gloss to put upon the Stalin mugs, the gilded armadilloes and the grotesque porcelain models of the Saviour Tower.28

  Still more eccentric, as a legacy, was the rebuilding of a long-dead face. At the end of his life, Stalin had ordered that Ivan the Terrible’s coffin should be opened and the bones and skull researched. The brick-built tomb gave up its secrets in April 1953, a month after Stalin’s own death, but it was only in 1965 that Russia’s famous ‘fa
ce-finder’, the forensic anthropologist M. M. Gerasimov, published his conclusions. By then, the coffins of both of Ivan’s older sons had also been opened, and all three skeletons had been subjected to Gerasimov’s professional attentions. As ever, his priority had been to reconstruct the faces. From Ivan’s skull he shaped a thickset man – at the end of his life, this tsar had been stout, even fat – and added a sharp forehead and petulant mouth. The image was convincing, and the model had a cruel, spoiled glare. But this was no dictator for the modern world. ‘The skeleton,’ Gerasimov recalled,

  was partially covered with the torn pieces of a monk’s garment. Over the head and masking the face were the remains of a monk’s cowl and a filet on which were embroidered texts of prayers. On the breast lay a monk’s apron top embroidered with the scene of the crucifixion on Golgotha.29

  This kind of detail could cause trouble in a Kremlin where religion was all but taboo. Ivan was still a Russian hero, but monks in any guise were unwelcome. The Kremlin cathedrals, too, remained in cultural limbo. They had not been used for religious services since 1918, and by the 1950s they were badly in need of renovation and frequently closed. Any sporadic repair-schemes were liable to be undermined (sometimes literally) by other government priorities. Later, conservation was typically commissioned to coincide with jubilees such as the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power in 1968 or the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. It was not a recipe for consistency. Hastily completed work generally left fresh, and urgent, problems in its wake.30 The Kremlin’s most important structures hovered at the edge of ideological acceptability, the very scaffolding around them keeping the tourists at bay. The best that religion seemed able to do (apart from looking nice on a postcard) was to foster a confused Soviet pride. ‘Notwithstanding their link to religious rituals,’ a conference of archaeologists conceded in 1970, the preservation of the Kremlin cathedrals ‘has facilitated the development of feelings of national self-consciousness and patriotism in the struggle against enemies of the fatherland, and has helped in the process of education in civic responsibility.’31