Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Among the most illuminating pieces of new scholarship on this era, Ernest A. Zitser’s, The Transfigured Kingdom (Ithaca, NY and London, 2004) stands out for its approach to Peter’s raucous court. A more traditional work, which covers the development of court ceremony and Russian sovereignty since Peter’s time, is Richard Wortman’s magnificent Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, most widely available now in a single volume edition (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2006). For politics at the beginning of Peter’s reign, see Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power (Cambridge, 2001).

  The sudden change in architectural style is the subject of James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, Ill., 1988) and Albert J. Schmidt, The Architecture and Planning of Classical Moscow (Philadelphia, Pa., 1989). Cracraft’s later volumes include The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago, Ill., 1997), which continues many of the discussions begun in his work on buildings. Catherine’s passions are among the subjects discussed in Dmitry Shvidkovsky’s work on Charles Cameron, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1996). For a more general survey, see Lindsey Hughes, ‘Russian culture in the eighteenth century’, in Dominic Lieven, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 2, Imperial Russia 1689–1917 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 67–91.

  NINETEENTH CENTURY

  The nineteenth century began with the Napoleonic Wars and ended on the eve of revolution, so the potential literature is vast. An introduction to the war of 1812 is Adam Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London, 2005), which draws on many Russian sources. Daria Olivier, The Burning of Moscow 1812 (London, 1966), is a more specific account of Moscow’s suffering. Among the memoirs available in English (it would take a whole book to list those in French or Russian), the best is probably Comte P.-P. de Ségur, History of the Expedition to Russia Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812, 2 vols. (London, 1826) or the abridged New York Times edition, Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, trans. J. David (New York, 2008). Another first-hand source is General Armand de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, With Napoleon in Russia, from the Original Memoirs as edited by Jean Hanoteau; abridged with an introduction by George Libaire (Mineola, NY, 2005).

  The conservative intellectual atmosphere in Moscow is reviewed in Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, Ill., 1997). Martin’s essay in the Cambridge History of Russia (‘Russia and the legacy of 1812’, vol. 2, pp. 145–61) is another excellent starting-point for the culture of the period, as is Rosamund Bartlett, ‘Russian culture: 1801–1917’ in the same volume, pp. 92–115. On romanticism, and especially its view of landscape, see Christopher D. Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002). The mid-century romantic nationalist movement is the subject of Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past (Leiden and Boston, Mass., 2010), and was also featured in a major exhibition at the New York Public Library, Russia Imagined, from March–June 2007 (catalogue by Wendy Salmond (New York, 2006)). The best introduction to the music of the era is Richard Taruskin’s Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997).

  Slavophilism is treated brilliantly in the classic study by Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford, 1975), while the origins of Russian history as a discipline may be explored in Anatole G. Mazour, ‘Modern Russian historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 9, 2 (June 1937), pp. 169–202, and subsequent individual studies such as A. G. Cross, N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literary Career (London, 1971).

  The court of Nicholas I would not be complete without an introduction from the marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, reprinted with an introduction by George F. Kennan (New York, 1989). For a biography of Nicholas himself, see W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (London, 1978), and for Alexander II, W. E. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernisation of Russia (London, 1958). Moving into the tenser world of the later nineteenth century, Anna Geifman’s Russia Under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917 (Oxford, 1999) provides a good introduction to dissident politics. For 1905, see Sidney Harcave, First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905 (London and New York, 1964), while John Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge, 1995) and S. Hoffmann and E. Mendelsohn, The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (Philadelphia, Pa., 2008) deal with official (and unofficial) anti-Semitism. For biographies of Nicholas II, start with D. C. B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London, 1993) or Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: Last of the Tsars (New York, 1993). The literature is voluminous.

  REVOLUTION

  Utopia is a wonderful subject, and Russia’s version has attracted wonderful historians. For an introduction, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford, 1989), which covers the range of utopian thinking. Semen Kanatchikov’s memoir, translated and edited by Reginald Zelnik (A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, Calif., 1986)) provides a grass-roots testimony, as does Eduard M. Dune’s Notes of a Red Guard, ed. and trans. S. A. Smith and Diane Koenker (Urbana, Ill. and Chicago, 1993). Avant-garde painting is the subject of John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934 (New York, 1976 and 1988), while the Knave of Diamonds is covered in an introduction called The Knave of Diamonds in the Russian Avant-Garde (St Petersburg, 2004). Malevich is the subject of an extensive literature, but his own views are reflected in The Non-Objective World, ed. Howard Dearstyne (Mineola, NY, 2003). For critical biography, see Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (London, 1994) and A. S. Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origins of Suprematism (New Haven, Conn., 2012).

  The atmosphere in Moscow in the early twentieth century is beautifully captured in Karl Schlögel’s Moscow (London, 2005), and this is also the point to introduce Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), which is strongest on the Soviet period and especially the first half of the twentieth century. For architecture, see Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (London, 1995).

  A full bibliography of writing on the revolution itself would require another volume, for which I have to thank The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography, compiled and edited by Jonathan D. Smele (London, 2003). The best account of the February revolution in Petrograd is Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London, 1996); Moscow’s revolution was the subject of Diane Koenker’s Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1981). For a (jaundiced) alternative view, that of one of Moscow’s conservative intellectuals, see Terence Emmons, trans. and ed., Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e (London, 1988), while John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (Harmondsworth, 1966) is unfailingly positive about Lenin and his revolution.

  On the man himself, Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (London, 2000) is unlikely to be bettered in the near future, while Leon Trotsky’s memoir, My Life (London, 1984) provides an account of the Bolsheviks in the Kremlin as well as outside it. For Soviet leaders more generally, Dmitry Volkogonov’s The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Political Leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, 1998) marked a watershed in that its author had access to archive materials no-one had seen before (and even to some that ordinary mortals would not see again).

  The Bolshevik campaign against the church has been the subject of a number of recent studies. For focus on the saints themselves, see Robert H. Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2010) and S. A. Smith, ‘Bones of contention: Bolsheviks and the struggle against relics, 1918–1930’, Past and Present, 204 (August 2009), pp. 155–
94. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist (New Haven, Conn., 2008) discusses the seizure of assets generally, including those of the church and of wealthy individuals (and the tsarist state). For one of several eye-witness accounts of the famine that was the pretext for some of this, see C. E. Bechhofer, Through Starving Russia, being the record of a journey to Moscow and the Volga provinces, in August and September 1921 (London, 1921).

  SOVIET RUSSIA

  The story of the Kremlin’s partial destruction in the late 1920s has not been told in any detail in an English-language source. The best introductions to this era, then, are those that deal more generally with Stalin and Stalinism. On the man himself, start with Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London, 2007) before graduating to the mature dictator in the company of Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him (London, 2005) or Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004). Oleg Khlevniuk’s Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle (New Haven, Conn., 2009) extends the story further with the aid of new archival material. Rosamund Richardson, The Long Shadow. Inside Stalin’s Family (London, 1994) provides a unique account of family life in the Kremlin, and complements the memoir of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Allilueva herself: Twenty Letters to a Friend (London, 1967). Larissa Vasileva’s best-selling Kremlin Wives, trans. Cathy Porter (New York, 1994) gives another alternative view of the leadership, albeit an informal one.

  The politics of the era have attracted saturation coverage, especially since the recent declassification of many Soviet archives. Among the more intriguing accounts of high politics are J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks (New Haven, Conn., 1999) and Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning (Cambridge, 1993). For further essays, see S. Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000) and David L. Hoffmann, Stalinism: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 2003). A classic account, still worth reading today, is Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, revised, edited and translated by George Shriver (London, 1995). For Stalinist society, start with Sheila Fitzpatrick’s brilliant Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford, 1999) and see also Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (London, 1995). Post-war Soviet politics are the subject of Yoram Gorlitzki and Oleg Khlevniuk’s Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (Oxford, 2004).

  John Steinbeck’s 1949 memoir, A Russian Journal (with Robert Capa’s pictures) was reprinted in 1994, while Mark Frankland’s memoir, Child of My Time (London, 1999), which covers a later period, is even more revealing. For an excellent study of the post-war mentality, see Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York, 2011) which traces the post-war generation to the present. On Khrushchev, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London, 2003), and also Sergei N. Khrushchev’s Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park, Pa., 2000).

  By the 1960s, Soviet leaders were beginning to write memoirs for themselves, most notably Khrushchev Remembers, intro., Edward Crankshaw, trans. and ed., Strobe Talbott (Boston, Mass., 1970) and Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, intro., Edward Crankshaw, trans. and ed., Strobe Talbott (London, 1974). For Gorbachev, see his best-selling Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London, 1987) and also his Memoirs (London, 1995).

  One of the best accounts of the Soviet Union’s dramatic end is David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (London, 1994). For insiders’ accounts, see also A. Grachev, Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, trans. Margo Milne (Boulder, Colo., 1995) and Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (London, 2002).

  DEMOCRATIC RUSSIA

  Boris Yeltsin wrote (or at least signed) a lot of memoirs, most of which have been translated into English. In chronological order, the most significant are Against the Grain: An Autobiography, trans. Michael Glenny (London, 1991), The View from the Kremlin, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (London, 1994) and Midnight Diaries, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (London, 2000).

  For more balanced analysis, a good place to start would be A. Brown and L. Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition (Washington, DC, 2001), while Richard Sakwa’s textbook, Russian Politics and Society, 4th edn (Abingdon and New York, 2008) provides basic context. Among discussions of the dilemmas of Yeltsin’s Russia, two articles by Michael Urban deal with issues raised in Chapter 12. For more, see his ‘The politics of identity in Russia’s Postcommunist transition: the nation against itself’, Slavic Review, 53, 3 (Autumn 1994), pp. 733–65, and ‘Remythologising the Russian state’, Europe-Asia Studies, 50, 6 (September 1998), pp. 969–92. For a concise discussion of organized crime, see Joseph L. Albini et al., ‘Russian organized crime: its history, structure and function’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 11, 4 (December 1995), pp. 213–43. Another readable account, this time with a biographical focus, is Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York and London, 2000).

  Putin’s regime is already the subject of numerous readable studies, including David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2003), Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (London, 2004) and Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West (London, 2008). For a selection of academic views, see Stephen White, ed., Politics and the Ruling Group in Putin’s Russia (Basingstoke, 2008). Brian D. Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia (Cambridge, 2011) is a particularly perceptive study of the weak new Russian state, and its problems are also reviewed in Lilia Shevtsova and Andrew Wood, Change and Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Washington, DC, 2011).

  On the abuse of history by the current Russian regime, see David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, And It Never Happened Anyway (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2011). Architecture is a more specialized topic, but I was inspired by Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, ‘Unravelling the threads of history: Soviet-era monuments and post-Soviet national identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 3 (September 2002), pp. 524–47, and Dmitri Sidorov, ‘National monumentalization and the politics of scale: the resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90, 3 (September 2000). On the destruction of Moscow’s historic buildings, see Edmund Harris, ed., Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point, 2nd edn (Moscow, 2009).

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Afanasy, Metropolitan of Moscow and all Russia

  Afghanistan, Soviet war in

  Agapetus

  Alberti, Leon Battista

  Aleksei Alekseyevich (son of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich)

  Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar; recaptures Smolensk; subdues revolt of; removes serfs’ rights to leave landlords’ farms; removes Patriarch Nikon from office; renovation of Terem Palace; builds new palace at Kolomenskoe; wives

  Aleksei Petrovich (son of Peter the Great)

  Aleksii, Metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia

  Alexander I, Tsar: collusion in father’s murder; coronation; response to Napoleon’s invasion; commissions reconstruction of Moscow after Napoleon’s occupation; and Kremlin treasure collection; planned memorial for victory over Napoleon

  Alexander II, Tsar; abolishes serfdom; assassination; monument to

  Alexander III, Tsar

  Alexander Nevsky (film 1938)

  Alexander of Lithuania

  Alexander of Tver

  Alexandr
a Feodorovna, Empress of Russia

  Alexandra Saburova

  Alexandria

  Alexandrovskaya sloboda

  alphabet reform

  Amsterdam

  Amvrosii, Metropolitan and Archbishop of Moscow

  Anastasia Romanovna Yureva-Zakharina

  Andrei Ivanovich (brother of Vasily III)

  Andropov, Yury

  Anglo-Saxons, and fur trade

  Anisimov, A. I.

  Annibale, Pietro

  Annunciation Cathedral

  anti-Semitism

  Arabs, and fur trade

  Archangel

  Archangel Cathedral (Cathedral of the Archangel Michael)

  architecture: Italian influence; Nikon and; Moscow school of architecture founded; Peter the Great introduces European practices; neo-classicism in the Kremlin; pseudo-Byzantine style; ‘Russian’ style; style moderne; plans for Moscow’s reconstruction in 1920s; and Russian identity; and the Russian Orthodox Church

  Argamakov

  Armand, Inessa

  Armoury Chamber museum

  arms race, superpower

  army: expands under Romanovs; gentry militia men; streltsy

  Arsenii, Archimandrite

  arts and crafts workshops, in the Kremlin