Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  UNESCO would soon find that its well-meaning regulations carried little weight in Russia. In 1992, Yeltsin approved the first plans for a pastiche building in the Kremlin. The work involved the removal of a shabby block of toilets and catering facilities on the corner of Cathedral Square, so there were few real tears to shed. Once the service buildings had gone, a company called Mosproekt-2 began an expensive reconstruction of the nineteenth-century incarnation of the old Red Stair.45 In the Kremlin as in Russian politics, it was not golden Muscovy, and not the labyrinthine holiness of the Romanovs, but the confused and derivative style of nineteenth-century official nationalism that was to be the new benchmark. And the Red Stair was the first of many glitzy, profitable Kremlin jobs. Soon Yeltsin had also signed the outline plans for the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace, an undertaking that concluded with the resurrection of the nineteenth-century throne room.46 By the time of Moscow’s jubilee in 1997, the joke that people liked to tell was that Yeltsin and Luzhkov were competing to see whose golden cupolas, the Kremlin’s or Christ the Saviour’s, could be made to shine the brightest.

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  The man with ultimate responsibility for almost every Kremlin project at the time was a jovial character called Pavel Borodin. In 1999, the New York Times described him as ‘the Russian that people would most love to bribe’.47 Borodin’s titles varied, but he was best known as the Director of Presidential Affairs, a portfolio that included the upkeep and restoration of presidential real estate. In 1998, Borodin estimated the value of his empire at more than $600 billion, and it included federal dachas and apartments as well as government-owned hotels and ministerial buildings. But its crowning glory was the Moscow Kremlin. Borodin’s office released no accounts (‘these things are not the public’s business,’ a spokeswoman told The Economist in 199948), but its spending was in the tens of millions. After the Red Stair came the Senate, the real presidential base. Under Borodin’s supervision, the restoration of Yeltsin’s official residence was completed, in record time, in 1994–5. The cost remains undisclosed, but millions passed through one company, Mabetex Project Engineering, which had a controlling interest in the work.49 In terms of public benefit, the justification for such a huge outlay was shaky, for most of the Senate was off-limits to visitors and the restoration included the dismantling of its one public attraction, Lenin’s apartment-museum.50 The result, however, was spectacular, as Russian viewers could verify for themselves whenever their president appeared on television, gliding down a river of parquet or signing papers at a splendid desk.

  The style was calculated to impress the Russian oligarchs who tended to drop into Yeltsin’s court. As the president himself later wrote, when billionaires like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Vladimir Potanin arrived at the Kremlin, they had to realize ‘that they have come for an audience with the government and not a chat with some kind of uncle’.51 Once the Senate renovation was complete, Borodin turned his attention to the Grand Kremlin Palace. In 1997–8, at a time when Russia faced an economic crisis and a default on its international debts, teams of builders and craftsmen laboured to restore the gutted halls, or at least to create a version that might appear to be old. Their work received a boost when several retired Kremlin staff revealed that fragments of the original interiors, carried off in secret during the 1933 demolition, still existed.52 The treasured lumps resurfaced and were used to model replica palace rooms, albeit sometimes from cheaper materials. Finally, intricate gilt mouldings and tsarist insignia had to be copied and professionally installed. Such fine, delicate work required the skills of specialists, so craftsmen in Florence were hired for showpiece projects like the carving and the parquet floors, most of which were shipped in blocks to Moscow and assembled there.53 But not all foreign employees were prestigious. The basic labouring was done by workers on low pay, many of whom were brought to Moscow illegally from Central Asia and the states of the former Yugoslavia. In a land of visas and official work-permits, such ‘black’ labour was always vulnerable. In 1998, it was discovered that the men had gone unpaid for months at a time, while working conditions were so insanitary that scores had fallen ill and at least one had died.54

  Foreign labour was not, however, the main story when it came to Borodin. Yeltsin’s aide had an unusually sharp instinct for money. Among the anecdotes that were circulating in Moscow by 1999 was a tale from his days in Siberia. The story went that he had once refused to accept the gift of a Mercedes car, offered in gratitude by a German company whom he had sponsored for a lucrative state deal. ‘I can’t take bribes,’ he is said to have assured the Germans, ‘but of course you could always sell it to me.’ When the German delegates invited him to name a price, according to the tale, he did not hesitate. ‘Make it twenty kopeks,’ Borodin is said to have replied, ‘and I’ll have two.’55 Such brazenness usually raised laughs, not subpoenas, in Yeltsin’s Moscow, but by the end of the 1990s the political atmosphere had soured. The president’s second term was drawing to a close, and the constitution, to say nothing of his own ill health, barred him from standing for office again. The scandal that raged round Borodin in 1999 played to public disgust about the super-rich, but it was also part of the contest for Russia’s political succession, and (appropriately) its focus was the recent renovation of the Kremlin.

  The case against Borodin started to build in 1997, when the Swiss prosecutor-general and anti-mafia campaigner, Carla Del Ponte, announced an investigation into Russian money-laundering. In the spring of 1998, Russia’s chief prosecutor, Yury Skuratov, who had been approached by Del Ponte for assistance, began enquiries of his own, targeting alleged corruption by people close to the tycoon Boris Berezovsky and the Yeltsin family. Potential criminal charges arose from the allegation that Borodin and Yeltsin’s two daughters, Elena and Tatiana, had accepted kickbacks in the tens of millions of dollars in exchange for the award of Kremlin contracts. There were also questions to be answered by Mabetex and its Albanian-born director, Behgjet Pacolli. Del Ponte and Skuratov seemed to be making headway with their case when Yeltsin suddenly announced, in February 1999, that the chief prosecutor had been suspended, pending dismissal. In May, Russian television viewers discovered the reason – or at least the pretext – when they were given the chance to watch for themselves a grainy clip of film (aired at prime-time) that showed Skuratov disporting himself in a hotel bed in the company of two prostitutes.56 The prosecutor’s claim that he had been framed in order to block the corruption enquiry did little to help his cause.

  Though deputies in Russia’s Duma (the new parliament) continued to press for Yeltsin’s impeachment for a range of other crimes, Skuratov’s investigation had effectively been neutralized. In early August 1999, the Swiss money-laundering enquiry also hit an obstacle when Del Ponte was unexpectedly ‘promoted’ to the International Court in The Hague. The trail might have grown cold, but that same month, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera revealed details of credit-card slips that had been discovered in a raid on the Mabetex offices in Lugano. The company appeared to have been paying regular bills on behalf of several Kremlin luminaries, including the former head of Yeltsin’s personal security team, Alexander Korzhakov, as well as Yeltsin and his two daughters.57 Further investigations in Switzerland, assisted by an informant called Felipe Turover, cast suspicion upon other highly placed Russians, including Borodin.58

  The storm that threatened never broke, however. The details of the rescue still remain unclear, and Russian sources contest almost all of them, but the need for some kind of cover-up was obvious enough. The scandal did not quite determine the presidential succession (too many potential candidates were implicated, after all), but Yeltsin’s choice of Vladimir Putin certainly proved to be a happy one for those involved. It was under Putin that Skuratov was finally dismissed, the charges against the Yeltsin family forgotten, and, in April 2001, that Borodin was bailed from a Swiss prison for a sum, paid by the Russian government, of $2.85 million.59 ‘I am immeasurably grateful to Vladimir Vladimi
rovich Putin,’ the alleged felon declared on his return to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, ‘for his help, for his decency, for being a real man.’60

  Behgjet Pacolli, of Mabetex, successfully sued Skuratov for libel in 2000. He then moved on to greater things, and in February 2011 he was elected president of Kosovo, a post he held for just two months, though he continued to serve his beloved state in high office. His company also prospered, doing especially conspicuous work in the new capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, where its projects have included a magnificent new presidential palace for Yeltsin’s old friend, Nursultan Nazarbayev.61 As for Moscow, there is no sign of an end to the flood of development contracts. In 2007, UNESCO formally protested to the Russian government about the scale and intensity of new building around Red Square and the Kremlin. At the same meeting, it requested a report about the future management of the heritage site. The request was repeated in 2008 and 2009. In 2011, the committee was still waiting for formal replies. The Kremlin was not on the official agenda when UNESCO met in St Petersburg in 2012, but experts warned that the Russian government’s persistent infringement of the citadel’s historical integrity, including the construction of two entirely new buildings, could well result in its exclusion from the World Heritage List by the end of 2013.62

  Pavel Borodin, meanwhile, has flourished in defiance of most predictions. In March 2002, a Swiss court fined him $177,000, but he refused to recognize its jurisdiction. The money was taken from the bail that Russian taxpayers had paid a year before on his behalf.63 But the sum was trifling anyway, at least for someone in his world. In November 2006, the prosperous-looking former aide celebrated his sixtieth birthday at one of his lavish properties in the Moscow suburbs. Jennifer Lopez confounded the gossip-columnists by declining to appear, but the guests included the Speaker of the Federal Parliament, Sergei Mironov, the former defence minister, Pavel Grachev, and one-time presidential hopeful Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The cake, which was suitably vast, took the form of a cream-filled model of the Moscow Kremlin, and among the presents was a trinket-box shaped to look like the Grand Kremlin Palace.64

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  As Russia’s population struggled through the miseries of restructuring, debt and international default, its leaders seemed to have nothing but fairy-stories with which to distract it. The statues that appeared in almost every Moscow square, including a particularly grotesque monument to the Russian navy, stood witness to a series of confused, escapist and often wildly inappropriate judgements about a good deal more than public art. But the age of rudderless drift was soon to end. Six months before the end of his second term, on the eve of the millennium, 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation. The news was timed so that it felt like a seasonal present from a favourite grandfather. Any potentially disturbing impact was buffered by the fact that the broadcast went out at the height of almost everybody’s New Year party. Yeltsin also made it clear that he had chosen a reliable successor on the whole electorate’s behalf. This person, though relatively unknown to the public, had been appointed as Prime Minister in August 1999, and he remained, as Yeltsin assured his audience, ‘a strong man, fit to be president’. Vladimir Putin was to take over as caretaker head of state immediately. For the future, Yeltsin told the Russian people that he ‘had confidence in their amazing wisdom’. Having brought Putin to the public’s notice, the retiring president declared that he had ‘no doubt about the choice that they would make’ at the polls, now re-scheduled for March.65

  At this point, Vladimir Putin was forty-eight years old. A life-long practitioner of judo, he was not only fit but sober, for which the Russian electorate, used to ailing and unsteady leaders, was certainly grateful. But he had come to Moscow from his native St Petersburg relatively recently, and was still regarded as an outsider in most of the capital’s close-knit political circles. His sponsors faced an uphill task as they set out to market his political brand. The solution was an unexpected one. As a former lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet-era KGB, Putin had proved his mettle as an effective and reforming leader of its Russian successor, the FSB, and he continued to cultivate a positive image for that organization once he was president. In time his vulpine features seemed to personify all that was best – if such a notion were possible – in the ideal secret policeman.

  As the euphoria of New Year’s Eve wore off that January, however, Kremlin-watchers were unimpressed. Putin, wrote political analyst Lilia Shevtsova, was ‘not a charismatic or a bright personality’. His qualities included ‘modesty, dullness … and the ability to use street slang’.66 She might have been gloomier still if she had recollected that Stalin’s early rivals, such as Leon Trotsky, had once made broadly similar comments about him. In private, even Yeltsin later came to rue his choice of protégé.67 But the president was there to stay. In March 2000, Putin took advantage of a storm of fear – the spectre of Chechen terrorism that his own security forces had worked to summon – and returned to the Kremlin with 52.94 per cent of the vote, against 29.21 per cent for his nearest rival, the Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov.68 Four years later, riding a wave of prosperity based on the international price of Russia’s oil and gas, he secured an even more convincing winning margin. There was an interval from 2008–12, the four-year break after two presidential terms prescribed in Yeltsin’s 1993 Russian constitution, but in 2012 Putin returned to the Kremlin again, and this time he looked very much at home.

  The watchwords of the new regime had been prefigured at the moment of its birth; whatever his private goals, in public, Russia’s leader was to stand for anti-corruption, a sleek and steely masculinity, and an untiring fight against crime. Above all, Putin represented the stability that many tired post-Soviet Russians craved. They talked about normality as if it were a kind of right, but what they wanted was a government that looked convincing and refrained from making intrusive demands. Since the state in fact remained very weak, Putin’s regime worked hardest to deliver on the looks. Instead of fear and poverty and shame, this leader seemed to promise that his people could again feel proud, infusing their beloved patriotism with a twist of xenophobia, especially towards the west.

  Voters were so distracted, and so relieved, that a majority chose to ignore the tedious, depressing facts behind the fairy-tale, but the price they paid for ineffective government was high. Crime continued to rise during the Putin years,69 and in the first decade of the twenty-first century Russia lost more citizens to terrorist attack than any other industrialized country. The only places with bleaker records were Iraq and Afghanistan.70 Corruption among government officials reached such an extreme that by the end of 2005, ministerial posts and governorships were said to be exchanging hands for multiples of $10 million.71 As for investment confidence, the official figures for Russian capital flight topped $40 billion in 2010, and the indications for the future offered no prospect of change.72 But Putin really did convince large numbers that their country had returned to its essential course. Even before he took office, on 29 December 1999, his name had appeared at the foot of an online Kremlin posting about the nation’s future called ‘Russia at the Turn of the New Millennium’. It emphasized what was unique about the place, dismissing imported western ideas such as individual freedom of expression. ‘For Russians,’ Putin had written, ‘a strong state is not an anomaly … but the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of any change.’73 It was that version of normality, not some imported democratic dream, that he had pledged himself to build.

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  The Kremlin was, of course, the only possible base for Putin’s state. Personally, Russia’s leader seemed more at ease in his luxurious suburban dacha, pulling pints of straw-coloured St Petersburg beer for Tony Blair or entertaining guests around a table of his own.74 Before long, he even had a string of better palaces at his disposal, the most controversial of which, in a protected forest near the Black Sea town of Praskoveyevka, was rumoured to have cost a billion dollars to build.75 But the Kremlin offered s
omething beyond price. If a strong state were indeed Russia’s destiny, then here was its eternal sacred heart, the nation’s citadel. As Yeltsin had once put it, ‘There is a strange magic to the place, the magic of the air of history. Certain defence mechanisms subconsciously kick into gear, the mechanisms of genetic memory: people realise that in spite of everything, this is the Kremlin, this is Russia, this is my country.’76 Like so many previous Russian leaders, Putin set out to harness the aura of the red fortress. It helped that history had been his favourite subject at school.77

  The past – or an invented version of it – became an instrument of yet another government. For glamour, the new regime invoked the romance of the tsars much as Yeltsin had done; official ceremonies and even smaller meetings were televised against the gold and crystal backdrop of the Kremlin halls. Unlike his predecessor, however, Putin also allowed his people to pretend to be good Soviets again. The Patriotic War played an ever-increasing role in public discourse, connecting present-day Russians with noble suffering, personal heroism, and world-class military glory. Its stirring music still made many hearts beat faster, as did the new national anthem, a reworked version of the war-time Soviet one, which Putin revived at the end of 2000.78 Critics complained that a return to Stalin’s tunes insulted his unnumbered victims, but their protests were to no avail. Yeltsin had sometimes looked like a foreigners’ lackey, a creature of the rotten capitalist world. Putin would never play that role. His message was exactly what most Russians seemed to yearn to hear.79 Between 2000 and 2003, repeated polls reflected ordinary Russians’ belief in their country’s special path, its ‘unique way of life and spiritual culture’, ‘predestination’ and, inevitably, its strong and centralized tradition of government.80