Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  61. For more, see its website, www.mabetex.eu, where visitors can explore its promise that ‘we build the future’.

  62. Grigorii Smolitskii, ‘Moskovskii kreml’ mogut iskliuchit’ iz spiska Iunesco’, Izvestiia, 10 August 2012, available at http://izvestia.ru/news/532590.

  63. Moscow Times, 18 March 2002.

  64. Ekspress gazeta online, 3 November 2006, available at http://www.eg.ru/daily/sports/8410 (accessed 25 Aug. 2011).

  65. For the full text, in English translation, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/584845.stm.

  66. Shevtsova in Brown and Shevtsova, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, p. 93.

  67. Lilia Shevtsova, writing in Lilia Shevtsova and Andrew Wood, Change and Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Washington, DC, 2011), p. 42.

  68. There are many accounts of the bombings, allegedly staged by the FSB, that precipitated the second Chechen war. For a recent summary, see Satter, Long Time Ago, p. 301.

  69. For officially derived figures, see Hans-Henning Schroder, ‘What kind of political regime does Russia have?’, in Stephen White, ed., Politics and the Ruling Group in Putin’s Russia (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 20.

  70. Taylor, State Building, p. 293.

  71. Anders Aslund, ‘The hunt for Russia’s riches’, Foreign Policy, 152 (Jan–Feb 2006), p. 47.

  72. Figures cited by Lilia Shevtsova in Shevtsova and Wood, Change and Decay, p. 102.

  73. http://valdaiclub.com/politics/37000.html, cited by Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, ‘Putin and the Uses of History’, Valdai Discussion Club, 10 January 2012, p. 4.

  74. As witnessed by the late British interpreter, K. A. (Tony) Bishop, interviewed in July 2006.

  75. For reportage in English, see Andrew Osborn’s article in the Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2011, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8323981/Vladimir-Putin-has-600-millionItalianate-palace.html.

  76. Yeltsin, View, pp. 210–11.

  77. Gaddy and Hill, ‘Putin and the Uses of History’, p. 2.

  78. For commentary, see Satter, Long Time Ago, p. 188.

  79. A point made by Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Enigma variations’, The Economist, 29 November 2008, pp. 3–18. See also Satter, Long Time Ago, pp. 212–15.

  80. Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia (Washington, DC, 2003), pp. 169–70.

  81. http://www.heraldscotland.com/kremlin-funded-blockbuster-casts-putinin-a-tsar-role-1.829539 (accessed 15 Jan. 2013).

  82. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 26 October 2007 (‘Russkii tresh’).

  83. ‘Liubim li my Moskvu?’, Moskovskaia pravda, 30 August 2007.

  84. Gibel’ imperii: Vizantiiskii urok (a book based on the film was also published by Eksmo in 2008). I am grateful to Sergei Ivanov for introducing me to this material at a lecture in London in 2009.

  85. ‘Uroki istorii: rabota s natsional’noi ideei’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December 2008.

  86. On the proposed textbook, by Aleksandr Filippov, see Novaia gazeta, 24 September 2007, ‘Poslednii pisk istorii gosudarstva rossiiskogo’, and the critical remarks by Iurii Afanas’ev (‘Eta kniga – sledka s sovest’iu’). On its fate, see also Satter, Long Time Ago, p. 212.

  87. The statues were described to me by K. A. Bishop. On Putin’s devotion to Petr Stolypin, and also on the prominent displays of historical figures that Valdai Club members observed in the Kremlin of 2005, see Gaddy and Hill, ‘Putin and the Uses of History’, pp. 1–2.

  88. The episode, Neizvestnyi kreml’, was broadcast in 2004.

  89. ‘Aleksandra Nevskogo predlagaiut v pokroviteli FSB’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/hi/russia/newsid_7629000/7629205.stm (accessed 26 Sept. 2008).

  90. The book, whose general editor was Sergei Mironenko, was entitled The Moscow Kremlin: Russia’s Citadel (Moskovskii kreml’: tsitadel’ Rossii).

  91. marker.ru/news/3124 (accessed 2 Sept. 2011).

  92. These and other comments can be accessed on autotravel.ru/otklik.php/3490.

  93. http://valdaiclub.com/history/a162860813.html (accessed 31 Jan. 2013).

  94. ‘Na bashniakh Kremlia obnaruzheny ikony’, Izvestiia, 12 May 2010.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  This book has covered nine hundred years in the history of the Russian state, and a bibliography that attempted to catalogue every source would present a formidable and probably impenetrable challenge to the reader. I have given full references in the endnotes, but here I offer a more general guide to further reading, restricting myself mainly to materials that are available in English.

  GENERAL

  The brave company of authors who have written on the whole sweep of Russian history is small but distinguished. Among the best general books are Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation (London, 2001) and James A. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1966). In preparing this book, I also consulted W. Bruce Lincoln’s Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia (New York, 1998), Nicholas Riasanovsky’s Russian Identities: A Historical Survey (Oxford, 2005) and Mark D. Steinberg and Nicholas Riasanovsky’s two-volume A History of Russia, 7th edn (New York and Oxford, 2005). Michael Cherniavsky’s Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York, 1969) was an inspiration, as was the much older The Russian Idea (London, 1947) by Nikolai Berdyaev. For an equally ambitious work that was written, refreshingly, by an expert in the medieval and early modern Russian world, see Marshall Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton, NJ, 2003). Readers with a taste for controversy will also enjoy Richard Pipes’ classic Russia Under the Old Regime (London and New York, 1974), which proposes the idea of the patrimonial state. By contrast, a brilliant collective endeavour, the Cambridge History of Russia (multiple volumes, 2006–8), presents very recent research in accessible form. Many of the individual essays are cited elsewhere in this survey.

  The general histories of the Kremlin are more disappointing. The most serious one in English is Arthur Voyce’s The Moscow Kremlin: Its History, Architecture and Art Treasures (London, 1955). For more sumptuous illustrations (but fewer words), see David Douglas Duncan, Great Treasures of the Kremlin (New York, 1967). By contrast, Laurence Kelly’s collection of excerpts, Moscow: A Traveller’s Companion (London, 1983) includes a section on the Kremlin that provides glimpses of the fortress and the myths that have surrounded it. For the architecture of Moscow in general, see also Kathleen Berton Murrell’s Moscow: An Architectural History (London, 1977).

  William Craft Brumfield’s History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge, 1993) is the best general introduction to its subject, while Dmitry Shvidkovsky’s Russian Architecture and the West (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2007) contains much valuable new material in a stunningly beautiful volume. There are several general histories of Russian art (the classic English-language work, in three volumes, is George Hamilton’s Art and Architecture of Russia (Harmondsworth, 1954)), but one of the most accessible is Tamara Talbot Rice, A Concise History of Russian Art (New York, 1963). Icons are discussed in illuminating ways by John Stuart, Ikons (London, 1975) and Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin Milner-Gulland (London, 2002). As for the Orthodox Church itself, Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, 1997) provides the best general introduction.

  MEDIEVAL RUSSIA

  Among the best introductions to the story of Rus is Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London and New York, 1996). The early chapters of Janet Martin’s wonderful Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge, 2007) also cover early Rus. The Byzantine connection is beautifully presented in Dmitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth (London, 1971) and John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1981). Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of Rus (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) deals with important controversies about the traders from the nor
th. On Bogoliubsky, see Ellen S. Hurwitz, Prince Andrej Bogoljubskij: The Man and the Myth (Firenze, 1980).

  A traditional survey of early Muscovy is provided by John Fennell’s two volumes: The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200–1304 (London, 1983) and The Emergence of Moscow, 1304–1359 (London, 1968). A bracing antidote can be found in D. G. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier (Cambridge, 1998), which delivers a refreshing view of the lasting role of Mongol culture. Further grist to that mill appears in G. A. Fyodorov-Davydov, The Culture of Golden Horde Cities (Oxford, 1984), C. J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Russian History (London, 1987), and even Michel Roublev, ‘The Mongol tribute’, in M. Cherniavsky, ed., The Structure of Russian History (New York, 1970), pp. 29–64. For the role of trade, as well as a discussion of the region’s international networks, see Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge, 1986).

  For an introduction to the sacred architecture of the Orthodox world, see Cyril Mango, Byzantine Architecture (New York, 1976). The impact of Mongol conquest on building in the Moscow region is traced in David B. Miller, ‘Monumental building as an indicator of economic trends in Northern Rus’ in the late Kievan and Mongol periods, 1138–1462’, American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp. 360–90, and the same author has written on the most famous of Russian icons in ‘Legends of the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir: a study of the development of Muscovite national consciousness’, Speculum, 43, 4 (October 1968), pp. 657–70. The artistic connections between Byzantine and early Russian art are explored in Robin Cormack’s useful introduction, Byzantine Art (Oxford, 2000).

  RENAISSANCE

  The only biography of Ivan III in English is John Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (London, 1961), and the period of his reign has not attracted large numbers of English-speaking specialists. For an overview of the era as a whole, see Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (London and New York, 1987). For different aspects of the evolution of Ivan’s court, see Gustave Alef, ‘The adoption of the Muscovite two-headed eagle: a discordant view’, Speculum, 41 (1966), pp. 1–21, and G. P. Majeska, ‘The Moscow coronation of 1498 reconsidered’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 26 (1978), pp. 353–61.

  Ivan the Terrible has drawn a larger press, including Isabel de Madariaga’s biography, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2005). Today, the most thoughtful writing on Ivan the Terrible and his era is the work of Sergei Bogatyrev, and an introduction to it might be his chapter, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, in Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689. On the coronation, see also D. B. Miller, ‘The coronation of Ivan IV of Moscow’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 15 (1967), pp. 559–74. Ivan’s peevish correspondence with his former courtier Andrei Kurbsky was translated by J. L. I. Fennell as The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564–1579 (Cambridge, 1955), but see also Edward L. Keenan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) for the suggestion that the whole thing might be a fraud. On Ivan’s health, see Charles Halperin, ‘Ivan IV’s insanity’, Russian History, 34 (2007), pp. 207–18 and Edward L. Keenan, ‘Ivan IV and the King’s Evil: Ni maka li to budet?’, Russian History, 20 (1993), pp. 5–13; for his image and later reputation, see Maureen Perrie, The Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Folklore (Cambridge, 1987).

  The structure of the Muscovite elite is discussed in Gustave Alef, Rulers and Nobles in Fifteenth-Century Moscow (London, 1983), Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System (Stanford, Calif., 1987) and also Ann Kleimola, ‘The changing condition of the Muscovite elite’, Russian History, 6, 2 (1979), pp. 210–29. The whole issue of slavery, which played such a role in large state projects at this time, is explored in Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago, 1982), and a related but more technical issue of court language in Marshall Poe, ‘What did Russians mean when they called themselves “Slaves of the Tsar”?’, Slavic Review 57, 3 (1998), pp. 585–608. For the structure of Ivan’s new bureaucracy, see Peter B. Brown, ‘Muscovite government bureaus’, Russian History, 10, 3 (1983). Art, religion and court ideology are discussed in two articles by Daniel Rowland: ‘Moscow – the third Rome or the new Israel?’, Russian Review, 55 (1996), pp. 591–614, and ‘Two cultures, one throne room’, in Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia (University Park, Pa., 2003), pp. 33–57. Michael Flier’s essay in the same volume (‘Till the end of time: the apocalypse in Russian historical experience before 1500’) provides an insight into the mentality of the times, and also see his essay on the Palm Sunday ritual: ‘Breaking the code: the image of the tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday ritual’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland, eds., Medieval Russian Culture, vol. 2, California Slavic Studies (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1994), pp. 213–42.

  For European travellers’ tales, see W. Thomas et al., trans., Travels to Tana and Persia by Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini (London, 1873), which relates Contarini’s experience of Ivan III’s Moscow. The impressions of Jenkinson and others are collected in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey, eds., Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison, Wisc., 1968). Staden’s vivid memoir of Ivan the Terrible’s Muscovy is available in English as Heinrich von Staden, The Land and Government of Muscovy, trans. Thomas Esper (Stanford, Calif., 1967), and Possevino has been translated by Hugh F. Graham as The Moscovia of Antonio Possevino, SJ (Pittsburg, Pa., 1977).

  TIME OF TROUBLES

  Among the English sources, I learned most from Chester S. L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park, Pa., 2001), a thoughtful as well as thought-provoking study of early modern Russia. Maureen Perrie’s Pretenders and Popular Modernism in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge, 1995) was also illuminating, and the chapter on Boris Godunov’s career in volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Russia that she edited and translated (A. P. Pavlov, ‘Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov’, pp. 264–85) is insightful.

  The most respected Russian historian of the Troubles is S. F. Platonov, whose authoritative but dated Time of Troubles has been translated by John T. Alexander (Lawrence, Kans., 1985). Two biographies of Boris Godunov, one by Platonov (Gulf Breeze, Fl., 1973) and one by Ruslan Skrynnikov (Gulf Breeze, Fl., 1982) are accessible in English, as is Skrynnikov’s vivid Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604–1618 (Gulf Breeze, Fl., 1988).

  The travellers whose witness illustrated my account deserve a chapter of their own. The most colourful are Jacques Margeret, The Russian Empire and the Grand Duchy of Moscow: A Seventeenth-century French Account, trans. and ed. Chester S. L. Dunning (Pittsburg, Pa., 1983); Isaac Massa, A Short History of the Peasant Wars in Moscow under the Reigns of Various Sovereigns down to the Year 1610, trans. G. E. Orchard (Toronto, 1982); Stanislaw Zolkiewski, Expedition to Moscow: A Memoir, trans. M. W. Stephen (London, 1959) and The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, trans. Samuel H. Baron (Stanford, Calif., 1967).

  Readers with an interest in maps may pursue it through Valerie Kivelson’s Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2006). The economic background to the Troubles is one subject of Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London, 1971) and similar problems are also explored in Marshall Poe and Eric Lohr, eds., The Military and Society in Russian History, 1350–1917 (Leiden, 2002).

  ROMANOV MUSCOVY

  I can think of no more entertaining introduction than Paul of Aleppo’s notes, the full version of which is available in English as The Travels of Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch: Written by His Attendant Archdeacon, Paul of Aleppo, in Arabic, trans. F. C. Belfour, 2 vols. (London, 1836). The history of the period, however, is covered more
soberly in Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801 (London, 1982) and Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, NJ, 1983). Religion, which played such a prominent role at the Romanov court, is explained by Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1992), while P. Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1991) and G. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, Calif., 1999) both deal with the Great Schism. For blood-curdling detail of the results, see Michael Cherniavsky, ‘The Old Believers and the New Religion’, Slavic Review, 25, 1 (March 1966), pp. 1–39.

  The Romanovs are the subject of Lindsey Hughes’ book of the same title (London, 2008), and Philip Longworth has a biography of Aleksei Mikhailovich, Alexis, Tsar of all the Russias (London, 1984). The impressions of Aleksei’s doctor, Samuel Collins, were published as The Present State of Russia: A Letter to a Friend at London, by an Eminent Person residing at the Czar’s Court (London, 1671). Aleksei’s law code can be consulted in Richard Hellie, ed. and trans., The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (Irvine, Calif., 1988), and serfdom’s effects on the peasants, then and later, are discussed in David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930 (London and New York, 1999) as well as Jerome Blum’s older, magnificent, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1961). At the time of writing, one of the most illuminating eye-witness accounts of the Muscovite court, written at the Swedish court by the defector Grigory Kotoshikhin, was being translated into English in its entirety for the first time; the publication will add considerably to the general appreciation of this arcane world among English-speaking readers.

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  Lindsey Hughes’ biography of Sofiya, Sophia, Regent of Russia (London and New Haven, Conn., 1990) remains the best available in English, and her biographies of Peter (Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2004)) and the more comprehensive Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1998) are models of scholarship and clear writing. For even more, see Robert K. Massie’s award-winner, Peter the Great (London, 1980 and reissued several times). Catherine has also attracted many biographers, the most recent of whom include Isabel de Madariaga (Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981)) and Simon Dixon (Catherine the Great (London, 2009)). The rulers after Peter’s death are the subjects of E. V. Anisimov, Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-century Russia, trans. Kathleen Carroll (Westport, Va., 2004).