Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin
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In what became a tragedy for Russia, the leaders of its parliament turned out to be less interested in hope and freedom than in crude power-struggles of their own. In the spring of 1993, a faction finally attempted to impeach Yeltsin, aiming to take the Kremlin for itself. The attempt failed, but its main instigators continued to develop and exploit any promising-looking seams of popular discontent. On 1 May, the Communist spring festival, large crowds of opposition supporters gathered in the streets and squares near the Kremlin to demand better pensions, jobs and basic social provision. The police were unprepared, and there were violent confrontations, burning cars.9 Similar demonstrations were to be a feature of the cityscape for five more months, sometimes accompanied by army songs, sometimes by portraits of Stalin.10 Forlorn red flags and bitter crowds became the symbol of a thwarted, sour democracy.
The disappointment turned to crisis on 21 September 1993, when Yeltsin finally dissolved the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s parliament.11 The moment should have brought any supporters of democracy out to the streets, but most stayed quietly at home. Some later claimed to have been busy simply trying to survive. With good cause, too, they were appalled by the obstructive and self-interested politics of the White House. ‘We were very tired of political meetings and U-turns, bickering and scandals,’ a journalist later admitted. ‘All we wanted was to get on with life.’12 In stark contrast to 1991, when opposition to the August coup had rallied thousands of supporters of reform, the crowds who gathered to defend this incarnation of the White House included old-style communists, pensioners, and xenophobic Russian chauvinists.13 Yeltsin surrounded the whole lot with tanks, and this time lethal shells were fired. Even Russia’s official count of the White House siege speaks of 147 dead, but the casualty figures in other versions are much higher.14 ‘As I write, I can hear a familiar sort of sound through my windows, just like fireworks,’ wrote the liberal journalist Otto Latsis. ‘But it’s not fireworks. It’s the tank shells that are battering the White House. And this is not the Caucasus or the Pamirs; it’s the centre of Moscow.’15 Eight years later, when an attempt was made to call the president to account, critics confirmed that he had forbidden doctors to come to the assistance of the wounded White House defenders until his victory was sure. ‘When I make a strategic decision,’ Yeltsin later boasted, ‘I don’t punish myself with ridiculous worries over whether I might have done it differently or whether I could have found another way.’16
The intellectuals and journalists had feared a coup by anti-democratic communists, so Yeltsin’s violence did not provoke much criticism at the time. The United States ambassador, Thomas Pickering, was not alone in declaring the defeated White House faction to have been ‘fascist’.17 ‘I believe that President Yeltsin’s democratic credentials are strong,’ the reform-minded White House deputy Lev Ponomarev insisted. ‘He has proved his commitment to democratic institutions on many occasions.’18 But ‘democratic’ was an odd word to ascribe to a man who could happily state that ‘someone in the country should be chief’.19 Yeltsin’s governing idea was simply to remain in power.20 Another American diplomat, Thomas Graham, later drew a pessimistic lesson as he reflected on post-Soviet Moscow’s troubled record. As he put it in 1995, ‘In domestic politics, there are few committed democrats and no clans committed to democracy despite rhetoric to the contrary. Democratic procedures, including elections, are seen largely as weapons in the power-struggle.’21
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After the coup of 1993, the chance to base the new Russia on democratic multi-party politics was lost. Anarchy and revolt seemed like more potent dangers than any excess of government. Invoking history with masterly legerdemain, Yeltsin offered Russians what they were supposed to want: firm leadership from the Kremlin. Within weeks of the anti-parliamentary putsch, he had signed the new constitution, a document that the Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova has described as ‘not so much an agreement between society and the authorities, but a manifesto of the victorious side’.22 Its terms were unambiguous. The president was to be head of state, head of the Security Council, and the author of foreign and defence policy. He was to have the power to nominate the prime minister and the senior figures in a range of bodies including the Central Bank, the Procuracy, and the higher courts. In addition, he (or she) could also issue decrees with the force of law. These ukazy, whose very name echoed old tsarist times, gave Yeltsin a near-autocratic power. The only clouds on his horizon were the elections that were to be held every four years. An extra condition was that the president should serve for no more than two consecutive four-year terms, but a helpful sub-clause permitted former holders of the post to stand for re-election after someone else had kept the office warm for just one stint.23 The president’s official residence was the Kremlin.
Moscow’s red fortress was about to star, yet again, in the reinvention of the Russian state. On 6 October 1993, the guard of honour that had stood by Lenin’s mausoleum since the 1920s was removed, and the ceremonial activities associated with ‘Post No. 1’ were eventually relocated to the nearby Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A commission headed by the man in overall charge of Russian archives, Rudolf Pikhoia, then considered a range of emblems for the infant polity. The red stars on the Kremlin towers proved too expensive to move, but by the end of 1993 the Soviet hammer and sickle had been dropped from the Russian coat of arms in favour of the double-headed eagle.24 The president baulked only at proscribing communism itself. Though hundreds of statues and portraits were removed from town squares and office-blocks across the land, a piece of draft legislation ordering the removal of Lenin’s corpse from the mausoleum on Red Square was quietly dropped.25
Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s immediate problem was not so much a lack of personal legitimacy, since he had been both elected and acclaimed, but the total absence of any ruling charisma for his government. The new constitution explicitly banned state ideologies. The clause was meant to outmanoeuvre unrepentant communists, but it also pointed to an absence of political ideas. Even the new republic’s national anthem, Glinka’s nineteenth-century ‘Patriotic Song’, which now replaced the rousing and familiar Soviet hymn, had no official words. The system itself was anything but charismatic. Outside the court and Yeltsin’s presidential club, the institutions of government were weak and barely respected, less capable of raising taxes or controlling crime than any of their Soviet predecessors. A citizen who felt threatened was more likely to turn to private security companies or mafia groups than to the police. The Kremlin had its own life, privileged and rivalrous, but beyond it the one thing Russia did not have was an effective state.26
The solution, an old one, was to jazz up the idea of power by borrowing some glamour from the past. Amid the yearning for the country’s lost stability and pride, Yeltsin’s style began to change. In 1994, in a gesture of reconciliation that had been planned in the days of Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip made a state visit to his capital, the first by a British monarch since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.27 In Her Majesty’s honour, there was a full peal of the Kremlin bells, a sound Moscow had seldom heard in the previous seventy years. The president was attentive and courteous, his staff immaculate. It all went very smoothly, including the ticklish exchange of diplomatic gifts, though choosing these had been like torture for both sides. In a ceremony held in the famous indoor garden of the Grand Palace, the queen presented the Yeltsins – Boris and his wife, Naina – with a polished wooden box, each miniature compartment of which contained the seeds of a plant that grew in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. ‘Oh, Borya!’ the British interpreter heard Naina whispering to her husband. ‘Now we can have a Buckingham Palace of our own!’ ‘To our regret,’ Yeltsin would later confess, ‘many of the seeds did not take root.’28
The president shared Naina’s sentiment, however, and the one thing he could always cultivate was a nostalgia for the tsars. To the organizers’ delight, in July 1998 he even opted to attend the ceremonial re-interment, in St Petersburg, of the bodies o
f the murdered Nicholas II and his family. By then, the national fever of repentance had reached such a pitch that a rival ceremony had to be organized near Moscow, for some critics insisted that the first state funeral had not been splendid enough.29 The grandeur and the piety were all to Yeltsin’s taste. ‘How sad, really,’ he confided to his diary after the service in St Petersburg, ‘that we have lost the previous historical relics of the monarchy, that we have lost our sense of wholeness and continuity of our history. How desirable it would have been to have all of this restored in our country.’30
The public, meanwhile, was developing its own interpretation of that wholeness and historical continuity. Erstwhile Soviet citizens discovered a passion for titles and etiquette, and companies soon sprang up to design new coats of arms. But the longing for a strong, sound, morally acceptable collectivism, for Russia (or the Russian Federation) as it ought to be, found its most conspicuous outlet in the re-creation of old buildings, especially religious ones. The grass-roots passion for old monuments had been growing for decades by the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Its patron saint was the veteran architect Petr Baranovsky, whose survival into the 1980s gave him the status of godfather to the heritage movement. In 1969, he had created a school for architectural conservation in a set of Moscow buildings he had fought to save, the Krutitskoe Residence (podvor’e), a former monastery and bishop’s palace that had languished for years under the administration of the State Historical Museum.31 But after 1991 the resurrection of lost buildings turned into a craze. Each rescued or reconstructed monument seemed like a fresh step onwards from the Soviet past, a victory for true values; it helped that ancient churches served as pools of quiet in the crude bazaar that Moscow had become. From a politician’s point of view, the benefits were dazzling. The projects yielded millions in contracts. Nostalgia, meanwhile, could be made to substitute for politics, and even Yeltsin could be painted as a patron of the arts. Eventually, the Kremlin would become the centre of the most notorious restoration scheme of all, but the old fortress was not the first landmark on the investors’ list. The most prominent developments of the early 1990s were sham copies, facsimiles of the buildings that equally eager crowds had reduced to rubble only sixty years before.
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Free Russia’s first new reconstruction was the Kazan Cathedral on the edge of Red Square. This striking building had been demolished in 1936, but Baranovsky’s drawings from the 1920s had survived, and in 1991 a team led by one of his students, Oleg Zhurin, pledged to rebuild it from scratch. Baranovsky had not been able to survey the old building’s foundations, but Zhurin resolved to recreate a faithful image of the original stone structure. This had in turn replaced a wooden church, funded by Prince Pozharsky in 1625, that had been dedicated as a gesture of gratitude for Moscow’s deliverance from the seventeenth-century Time of Troubles. The historical resonance was explicit as Zhurin worked; he told journalists that he wanted his church to act as a symbol of Russian national peace-making after the troubles of more recent times.32 It was a post-Communist message, but Zhurin toiled like a Bolshevik, storming to complete the project in three years.
Zhurin’s new church was (and remains) eye-catching, and its success spurred others to rebuild the Iberian gates and chapel at the north-western entrance to Red Square. The mid-1990s also saw the transformation of an open space beyond the Kremlin’s Alexander Gardens. Manezh Square had been cleared by Stalin to make way for the massive demonstrations that burnished his rule, but the lesson of 1991–3 was that large crowds, in a state less able than Stalin’s to control them, could rapidly destroy the illusion of civil peace. The answer (conveniently from the point of view of the waiting investors) was to create clutter and diversion, a goal that Moscow’s mayor, Yury Luzhkov, achieved by commissioning a water-park with streams and fountains. Since new Russia lacked serious ideas – and even heroes – of its own, the mayor’s designer punctuated the space with lumpy statues of characters from Russian fairy-tales.33 A vast underground shopping mall beneath this Disneyesque landscape drew thousands of grateful shoppers and enhanced the opportunities for profit. In 1997, when Moscow celebrated the 850th anniversary of its foundation, the theme park just outside the Kremlin walls attracted larger crowds than almost any authentic building from the past. Even the advertising logo for the jubilee event showed a fairy-tale Kremlin silhouette in place of the genuine article.34
The most ambitious reconstruction, however, was that of Konstantin Ton’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Though its demolition had been a brutal blow, Moscow’s most conspicuous church had not been missed by everyone. The swimming-pool that Khrushchev commissioned on its site had proved to be extremely popular; roughly five million people used it every year, a figure that dwarfed the total number of churchgoers in Moscow, even in the early 1990s, by a factor of ten.35 Despite its utility, however, the pool was closed in 1993. There was no public consultation, but eventually the news broke that the site had been ear-marked for a monumental symbol of Russia’s post-Soviet resurgence. Where the Bolsheviks had planned to raise a tower, a statement of the values of October 1917, a new regime declared that it would build as grandly in the name of whatever the new Russia was supposed to be. Seizing on the ambiguity of that, local artists and architects drafted inventive proposals, some of which recall the innovative memorial projects under construction in Berlin at the same time. One was an empty metal structure, almost scaffold-like, which was designed to mimic the exact outline of the lost cathedral (and thus also to represent its massive scale) without imposing on the city or precluding a range of different commemorative or ritual forms inside it.36
What Moscow’s mayor had in mind, however, was a nostalgic (and profitable) homage to the nineteenth century. From 1994, the cathedral project focused on a single aim, which was to re-create – or at least to mimic – Ton’s building. ‘Our revolution,’ Luzhkov declared, ‘is only a slow return to the normal order of things.’37 Just to make sure, he also organized a public-relations campaign to sell his idea to the Russian electorate, many of whom remained sceptical, not least about the cost. Grass-roots enthusiasm was recruited, too, by personal appeals for building funds. In 1995 and 1996, travellers on the Moscow metro were besieged by pious-looking pensioners rattling collection-boxes bearing pictures of the lost cathedral. It was no accident that 1995 and 1996 were also election years (parliamentary and presidential). At a time when the Communist Party was gathering large numbers of votes, syrupy references to Russia’s rebirth and the memory of imperial Moscow, channelled through the cathedral project, served to boost the ratings of both Yeltsin and Luzhkov. The mayor was so proud of the scheme, indeed, that he made a gift of a commemorative cathedral plate to Michael Jackson when the singer visited his city in October 1996.38
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was rebuilt in a year. More accurately, the scaffolding came off the exterior in time for a grand opening ceremony during the jubilee of 1997. Thereafter, it would take more than two years to complete the work, which included the lavish interior decoration that was deemed indispensable for the future showcase of official state-sponsored Orthodoxy. To meet the self-imposed targets, Luzhkov’s architects used concrete, not traditional stone, and the other modifications they specified included lifts inside the pillars (which were hollow) to permit the public to speed upwards to a viewing-platform underneath the dome. The massive building was not quite a replica, in other words, but more like a vast, expensive fake, a promise made with fingers crossed, meretricious and glib. Unlike some other kinds of fake, it was not cheap, either, and though the costs have never been disclosed, estimates range from $250 to $500 million, a large (but unacknowledged) portion of which was taken out of the federal budget at a time when Russia’s provinces faced economic ruin.39 The rest came partly from the people’s small donations, but more notably from the wealthy group around Luzhkov. These worthies, the true beneficiaries of new Russia’s version of normality, are commemorated with memorial plaques around the dome.
The landmark indeed celebrates the spirit of its age: a gallery of oligarchs now clothes the space that Ton reserved, in his original cathedral, for the heroes of 1812.40
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The fake cathedral glinted on the riverbank, but the Kremlin remained the most charismatic landmark in the city. It also represented Russia in a way that Luzhkov’s controversial monster never really could. But the fortress had undergone a quiet change of status, the consequences of which remained unclear. In December 1990, in token of Soviet Russia’s new openness to the world, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square had been designated a World Heritage Site – one of several in what was then Soviet space – by UNESCO. The immediate benefits had been moral: inclusion meant international acknowledgement of the Kremlin’s status as ‘a masterpiece of human creative genius’.41 But the plaudits and the cash came at a price. In theory, international standards of conservation now applied, and UNESCO also specified that the Russian authorities should ‘observe the present configuration of the site, particularly the balance between the monuments and non-built areas’.42 That ruled out any further concrete palaces, but it also, at least officially, barred lucrative reconstruction.43 Finally, UNESCO took an interest (albeit remote) in issues of public access, which precluded any return to Stalin-era exclusivity. In 1992, the speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, revived the idea of turning the citadel into a museum-park. The proposal was dismissed as a political ruse to embarrass the incumbent Boris Yeltsin.44