Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The exploitation of the past was systematic and sustained, but it seemed to peak around election times. In 2007, as the speculation about plans for a possible (and unconstitutional) consecutive third term for the president began to build, cinema audiences learned of a blockbuster film, 1612, produced by Putin’s great admirer, Nikita Mikhalkov. Set towards the end of the Time of Troubles, it told the story of Moscow’s salvation from the invading Poles. For some reason, almost every scene in Mikhalkov’s interpretation of the epic demanded the bizarre appearance of a magical unicorn, a creature that had no connection to the real Romanovs’ well-documented purchases of narwhal tusk. ‘It’s important for me that the audience feel pride,’ the director, Vladimir Khotinenko, told journalists. He did not want young people to regard the struggle against enemies as ‘something that happened in ancient history but as a recent event’.81 The film was released in Moscow on National Unity Day, 4 November, the holiday that had replaced the Soviet revolutionary festival in 2005. Its message, that the latest time of troubles had given way to a new Muscovite golden age, led critics in the liberal press to dismiss the whole thing as ‘trash’.82

  But image-makers did not take the hint. ‘Do we love Moscow?’ the conservative Moskovskaya Pravda asked in 2007. The pretext for the question was an online poll in which Russian voters had failed to place the Kremlin among the seven wonders of the modern world. The implication, couched in several pages of romantic prose, was that true patriots should speak up for the site that the poet Lermontov had called ‘the altar of Russia’. ‘We must learn to appreciate our connection with everything that took place and will take place in the land of our birth. The land of our fathers – in Latin, patria – our Motherland.’83 To help viewers to understand the unique greatness of that national home, they were soon to be offered another historical example: tenth-century Byzantium. In 2008, a pseudo-documentary film shown on the Rossiya television channel praised the ancient empire’s wealth, its bureaucratic structures, and its all-seeing networks of security.84 The only flaw identified by the presenter (Putin’s personal confessor, the archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov) was the weakness of early Byzantine constitutionalism, which allegedly insisted on electing emperors for four-year terms rather than anointing them for life.85 This proved to be too much even for Putin’s office, and the reform that his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, pushed through later that year merely extended future presidential terms from four years to six.

  There were a few other U-turns, not least because the internet and liberal press were giving voice to sceptics who might once have gone unheard. In 2007, a scandal erupted when a much-anticipated school textbook, The Unknown History of Russia 1945–2006, went so far as to excuse Stalin, describing him as ‘an effective manager’. The book was withdrawn and amended.86 But the president and his supporters continued with their vivid history lectures. Putin seemed to identify with the statist reformers of Russia’s past, notably Nicholas II’s prime minister, Petr Stolypin, and he enjoyed promoting their images. Yeltsin had adorned his Kremlin office with life-sized statues of Peter and Catherine the Great, but by 2005, the scale of themed redecoration had turned the Senate into a veritable pantheon. Official visitors – and television-viewers who saw the statues and portraits on screen – would never doubt which prophets of Russia’s destiny were meant to be inspiring them.87 No historical revival was more incongruous, however, than the new cult of the secret police. The 1990s had been Russia’s decade of repentance. Historians had worked like archaeologists then, joining survivors and human-rights workers in a sustained effort to uncover the extent of Stalinist violence, the evidence of repression and death. The FSB had not been implicated in these atrocities, but no-one would lightly have praised its Soviet predecessors, the Cheka and NKVD.

  When a new television series, Kremlin-9, began in 2004, it seemed innocuous enough at first. Its purpose was to tell more of the stories that had once been buried in archives. The researchers focused on the elite rather than the people, and included tales of Stalin’s inner circle, war-time government, and even the decline of Brezhnev’s health. The series title referred to the secret police department that had long protected the top brass. But nothing that related to the Cheka was ever quite what it seemed. The cameras took viewers on many interesting tours, but the atmosphere resembled that of a Cold War spy novel. Crime and rivalry in politics were presented as the preserve of a fictional-seeming Kremlin where life was always lived by separate rules; the people’s real nightmare of mass-death and wanton cruelty was simply swept aside. And all was well, or normal, in the Kremlin of today. It was a place that Russians should again regard with pride. As the presenter, Pavel Konyshev, joked with his viewers, ‘They even built the towers in the seventeenth century as if they already knew that a future Russia would be the first to send men to space.’88

  The FSB and its forebears were about to bask in official acclaim. There was no further need to dwell on slaughter, sadism, or corruption. On the eve of the ninetieth anniversary of the Cheka’s foundation, in 2008, a group of patriots proposed that the thirteenth-century prince Alexander Nevsky should become the security services’ patron saint, giving their gruesome work the blessing of a paragon.89 The Kremlin, too, was drawn into the rehabilitation of the Cheka’s image. A lavish commemorative book was produced, in a scarlet-bound limited edition, to celebrate the secret policemen’s ninetieth jubilee. The heads of every major state archive were listed among the contributors, and the cited documents included many that were usually inaccessible to scholars. The subject of this work was the security services’ historic role as guardians of the Kremlin.90 Everything was open now, the book implied: the Cheka and its heirs had nothing to hide. Indeed, the country’s sacred heart, Moscow’s Kremlin, had them to thank for its survival.

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  In June 2001, the Kremlin was voted Moscow’s foremost tourist attraction, well ahead of the White House, Kolomenskoe, and even the Tretyakov art gallery. Although they were not very large by international standards (the Louvre has packed more than eight million people through its doors each year since 2000), its visitor numbers have remained the highest for any comparable attraction in Moscow. In 2010, they hovered at just under five thousand a day. But Sergei Khlebnikov, the Kremlin commandant, conceded that the welcome for tourists needed improvement. Plans to sell food inside the walls were duly approved. The rules about photography were also informally relaxed. The Kremlin’s museum service even prepared to raise its profile (and its income) by selling branded products such as pens and T-shirts, and in December 2010 names like ‘Kremlyovka’ and ‘Kremlin’ were trademarked in advance of future vodka sales.91 ‘I am proud to think that my country has such an architectural heritage’, a visitor wrote on a guest site. ‘To be in Moscow and not see the Kremlin’, wrote another, ‘is impossible.’92

  To visit is indeed to toy with history. ‘See the palace of the Romanov tsars,’ the guides near Red Square squawk through megaphones. ‘See the throne of Ivan the Terrible; see the jewels of the Russian emperors, the famous crown of Monomakh.’ A ticket, clearly, buys you heritage, and even possibly a glimpse of some forbidden world. Seduced by hope and promises, almost every tourist is likely to make the Kremlin a highlight of their stay in Moscow. Braving the inevitable guards, the majority enter through the Trinity Gate, walking across the dry moat (the bed of the lost Neglinnaya) from the Kutafia Tower. From there, they hasten to Cathedral Square. A short detour would have rewarded them with a view of the palace where the Stalins used to live, but the history that modern pilgrims seek is narrowly defined: like the nineteenth century’s official nationalism, it is orthodox and autocratic. In pursuit of it, almost all will soon be admiring the caskets of dead Riurikids, the iconostasis in the Annunciation Cathedral, and the space and colour in Fioravanti’s breathtaking Cathedral of the Dormition. A lucky few, armed with passports, will also tour the Grand Kremlin Palace. As they are ushered from one marble cavern to another, their guide will make sure they appreciate t
he effort that went into the dismantling, under Pavel Borodin, of Stalin’s 1934 congress hall. On my tour, we were shown a postcard of the Soviet space, dog-eared and dimly coloured; just the thing to make the recent renovation seem as dazzling and as true as possible.

  On the upper levels of the palace, beyond the lions and some heavy doors, the gold and marble give way to rich reds and deep greens, the Terem Palace of Fedor Solntsev’s ambitious nineteenth-century vision. Back then, the idea was to create a fantasy of Muscovy based on exotic Russianness; today, the aim is to invoke the empire of the tsars. But now as then, the impression that the fortress is designed to make is a broadly soothing one. Whether they visit it for themselves or glimpse it on their television screens, the Kremlin reinforces Russians’ unexamined pride. People see what they expect to see, and the clean-cut buildings seem to prove that yet another time of troubles has been overcome, another firebird reborn.

  Reams of gold leaf must have been unrolled in the process – the Annunciation Cathedral positively blazes with the stuff – while the modern stonework of the new Red Stair is almost indistinguishable, in its sparkling newness, from the brilliant walls of the restored palace next to it. Only a few will note the many ravaged chambers that are not on view, the damage done by neglect, upheaval and cynical state vandalism. In the Senate, the president’s library is sometimes shown to television-viewers as a show-case for efficient government, complete with Stalin’s famous globe. Only the museum staff (and guests like me, thanks to their care) can climb up to the crumbling former church, high above Cathedral Square, that houses the real researchers’ library, complete with crack-tiled bathroom, leaking tap and a sink stained brown by old tea leaves. The same curators are the only ones to see the bare wood and the whitewash in the padlocked palace churches. No-one else will get to hear that Russian history is difficult, contested, or fragmentary. Smooth stonework and familiar tropes create a mirror-like surface, so glassy that no awkward doubts can settle. It suits this state if citizens are contented and even half-asleep. Whatever still goes on behind the scenes, the tourist Kremlin is designed to be impressive but unchallenging; pompous, flawless, and ultimately just a little boring.

  A new exhibition in the Ivan the Great bell tower brings this official line to vivid life. I was privileged to get a ticket, for visitor-numbers are ferociously restricted, and I saw it with just two other guests. The three of us were ushered into the base of the tower by a pair of guards, who quickly shut and locked the heavy door behind our backs. Armed with personal headphones, we then began our tour – our digital Kremlin experience – in the tiny, roundish ground-floor chamber. A projector here threw a succession of evocations of the medieval Kremlin over the whitewashed walls, and as the commentator spun the usual romantic line, lights also flashed on a series of fourteenth-century limestone blocks, the relics of Ivan Kalita’s time, that had been stationed in convenient niches. It was the start of a fairy-tale, the first of several beautifully documented chapters that took us up, floor after floor, each time revealing yet more splendours from the seamless and organic past. The high point (literally) was our visit to the famous bells, each one a witness to the Kremlin’s sumptuous, heroic history. We were encouraged to strike these to appreciate their tone (so resonant, so masculine), and then, still under the eyes of a guard, we had a chance to pause and admire the view.

  The two young women who were with me (total strangers) did what many other tourists would do at this point and started taking pictures of each other. But I was keen to see everything else first, including the all-round view of Moscow. To the east, I gazed over Cathedral Square, while southwards, across the Moscow river, I could see the low-slung suburb that radiates from the spine of Great Horde Road. Luzhkov’s reincarnated cathedral loomed on the Moscow riverbank, and further on I could see at least three of Stalin’s massive ornate towers, including the vast complex of Moscow State University. But one direction was roped off. There was no access to the view towards the Kremlin’s presidential building. Even the unprepossessing administrative Block 14, which stands on the old Chudov Monastery site, is out of bounds for everyone who does not have a special pass. Visitors to today’s Kremlin are welcome to a portion-controlled helping of Russian history, but present-day politics, like any remnant of past failure or decay, are reserved for insiders. The cars that speed to Senate Square have blacked-out windows.

  The cut and thrust of real politics, the compromises, corruption and deals, are hidden because everything depends on myth. Like many regimes of the past, today’s Russian government continues to shelter behind iconic Kremlin walls and the Kremlin’s mirror-smooth perfection. The lesson of these mighty buildings is that Russia has always been great. Its spirit shaped this fabulous fortress. Though Europe makes them fight to keep their country’s place as a world power, its people show such courage and tenacity that they cannot be vanquished from outside. Their only enemy is disorder within, and to defeat it – to preserve them from their own imperfect selves – they rightly welcome strong, pure-minded rulers; just the types, in fact, for whom this citadel was built. At this point in the tale, the idea dawns that it is Russia’s people, rather than their leaders, who are blamed for any history of tyranny. Nothing has changed, we might even muse, since the murky days when Riurik and his two brothers (at least according to old chronicles) were invited to rule the warring tribes round Novgorod because they could not live in peace without some outside help. As the Harvard historian Richard Pipes declared at a recent meeting of the elite Valdai club, an organization closely identified with the current leadership, the Russian people ‘want a strong ruler … Russia always needs a strong hand … the roots for this lie deeper than is usually understood.’93

  On the surface, today’s Kremlin is like an essay on that general theme. The message it conveys is hypnotic, a repetition of the obvious and the familiar. As the obedient groups walk round, it takes a well-informed and imaginative visitor to picture the things that have vanished, such as the ghosts of ancient churches long demolished, the scorch-marks left by heavy guns, or the deep tracks, in now-buried mud, of horse-drawn carts sagging under the heavy rubble from the latest fire. The empty space where the prikazy used to be, or where once there were warrens for the slaves and palace rats, may yet suggest the shades of long-dead Muscovites, some wielding clubs, some armed with fists, their hearts set on plunder, justice, or the obstinate quest for a true tsar. A thoughtful visitor may picture the red flags, the crowds, the icy silence of the Stalin years. But only those who really know their history will protest, despite all the romance and gilded domes, that the state whose flag is flying here is yet another new invented thing, the choice of living individuals rather than timeless fate. Its creators are not among the milling crowds, whatever the extent of the Russian people’s exasperated collusion at different historical moments. The system is not even the product of some vaguely conceived collective being called the Kremlin. Ultimate responsibility, for better or worse, rests with specific people, and they have real names.

  By looking at the Kremlin over centuries of time, I have seen how successive and very different regimes have used it – and changed it – in their effort to set down firm roots in cold northern soil. The journey has been thrilling, and has led from the medieval forest to a glittering eighteenth-century court and on through Lenin’s revolution to the secretive world of the black-belt president. Time after time, the fortress has witnessed the accession of new groups: new princes, new dynasties, and sometimes entirely new regimes. Few had unassailable claims to Russia’s throne, but before long, each had cast itself as the bearer of some form of divine will. The message was and remains a powerful one, but it has always been crafted by real people, not handed down in tablets of stone, and the rulers’ urgent purpose is always to stay in power. The Kremlin’s history is a tale of survival, and it is certainly an epic, but there is nothing inevitable about any of it. Today’s glorification of the Russian state, like that of previous regimes, is a deliberate and calcula
ted choice, and real people can certainly be made to answer for it. This may not seem a cheerful conclusion, but in the end it might just be a liberating one.

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  A tale that started with one icon now comes to a close with two. In 2010, the Russian press reported an exciting discovery. A pair of icons – the famous images of the Saviour and St Nikola that had once hung over the Kremlin’s gatehouse-towers – appeared to have survived the purge of Stalinist times. It had been thought for decades that the icons, one of which was believed to date from the early sixteenth century, had been obliterated in honour of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution in 1937. More than seven decades later, however, an Orthodox religious organization called the Foundation of St Andrew the First-Called launched a campaign to investigate the exterior brickwork in the hope of finding traces of the precious art. Backed by the Kremlin administration (including the head of state security, Evgeny Murov, as well as the Kremlin commandant and the director of the Kremlin museums), the Foundation’s experts started to explore the walls, under thick protective covering, in February 2010.

  In April, they announced a triumph. The story went that the workmen who had been ordered to destroy the icons in the 1930s had in fact covered them up. They had done it so skilfully that the old paint could now be restored to pristine condition. The discovery suited the government perfectly. It was a story of how pious Russians had once risked their lives – at a time of all-pervasive terror – to save Moscow’s miracle-working images. In the age of Russia’s national rebirth, equally pious art experts were about to make the icons live again.94 While the relevant stretches of wall remained obscured behind their opaque sheets, the loyal press provided additional historical background. These icons, journalists reminded readers, had escaped fire and shelling in 1917. Newspapers reprinted a famous photograph that showed the features of Nikola in a penumbra of soot. And the story did not end in 1917. The images had endured both the French occupation and the fire of 1812, and almost exactly two centuries before that, they (or their predecessors) had survived the vandalism of Catholic Poles. No less a figure than Grabar had authenticated them in the 1920s. The pair were national treasures, heirlooms in a resurgent Russian state. By July 2010, the Saviour was on display, and when I visited again in 2012, a flawless St Nikola was gazing kindly from a niche not far from Stalin’s former office window.