Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 185
ROBERT S. KRAVCHUK
KREMLIN
Few architectural forms have acquired greater resonance than the Moscow Kremlin. In actuality many medieval Russian towns had a “kremlin,” or fortified citadel, yet no other kremlin acquired the fame of Moscow’s. The Kremlin structure, a potent symbol of Russian power and inscrutability, owes much of its appearance to the Russian imagina-tion-especially the tower spires added in the seventeenth century by local architects. Yet the main towers and walls are the product of Italian fortification engineering of the quattrocento, already long outdated in Italy by the time of their construction in Moscow. Nonetheless, the walls proved
KREMLIN
The Moscow Kremlin at twilight. © ROYALTY-FREE/CORBIS adequate against Moscow’s traditional enemies from the steppes, whose cavalry was capable of inflicting great damage on unwalled settlements, but had little or no heavy siege equipment.
In the 1460s the Kremlin’s limestone walls, by then almost a century old, had reached a dangerous state of disrepair. Local contractors were hired for patchwork; as for reconstruction, Ivan III turned to Italy for specialists in fortification. Between 1485 and 1516 the old fortress was replaced with brick walls and towers extending 2,235 meters and ranging in thickness from 3.5 to 6.5 meters. The height of the walls varied from eight to nineteen meters, with the distinctive Italian “swallowtail” crenelation. Of the twenty towers, the most elaborate were placed on the corners or at the main entrances to the citadel. Among the most imposing is the Frolov (later Spassky, or Savior, Tower), built between 1464 and 1466 by Vasily Ermolin and rebuilt in 1491 by Pietro Antonio So-lari, who arrived in Moscow from Milan in 1490. The decorative crown was added in 1624 and 1625 by Bazhen Ogurtsov and the Englishman Christopher Halloway. At the southeast corner of the walls, the Beklemishev Tower (1487-1488, with an octagonal spire from 1680) was constructed by Marco Friazin, who frequently worked with Solari. This and similar Kremlin towers suggest comparisons with the fortress at Milan. The distinctive spires were added by local architects in the latter part of the seventeenth century.
Although he built no cathedrals, Pietro Antonio Solari played a major role in the renovation of the Kremlin. He is known not only for his four
KREMLIN
entrance towers-the Borovitsky, the Constantine and Helen, the Frolov, and the Nikolsky (all 1490-1493)-as well as the magnificent corner Arsenal Tower and the Kremlin wall facing the Red Square, but also for his role in the completion of the Faceted Chambers (Granovitaya palata), its name due to the diamond-pointed rustication of its limestone main facade. Used for banquets and state receptions within the Kremlin palace complex, the building was begun in 1487 by Marco Friazin, who designed the three-storied structure with a great hall whose vaulting was supported by a central pier. Much of the ornamental detail, however, was modified or effaced during a rebuilding of the Chambers by Osip Startsev in 1682.
The rebuilding of the primary cathedral of Moscow, the Dormition of the Virgin, began in the early 1470s with the support of Grand Prince Ivan III and Metropolitan Philip, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Local builders proved incapable of so large and complex a task. Thus when a portion of the walls collapsed, Ivan obtained the services of an Italian architect and engineer, Aristotle Fiora-vanti, who arrived in Moscow in 1475. He was instructed to model his structure on the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir; and while his design incorporates certain features of the Russo-Byzantine style, the architect also introduced a number of technical innovations. The interior-with round columns instead of massive piers-is lighter and more spacious than any previous Muscovite church. The same period also saw the construction of smaller churches in traditional Russian styles, such as the Church of the Deposition of the Robe (1484-1488) and the Annunciation Cathedral (1484-1489).
The ensemble of Kremlin cathedrals commissioned by Ivan III concludes with the Cathedral of the Archangel Mikhail, built in 1505-1508 by Ale-viz Novy. The building displays the most extravagantly Italianate features of the Kremlin’s Italian Period, such as the scallop motif, a Venetian feature soon to enter the repertoire of Moscovy’s architects. The wall paintings on the interior date from the mid-seventeenth century and contain, in addition to religious subjects, the portraits of Russian rulers, including those buried in the cathedral from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries.
The culminating monument in the rebuilding of the Kremlin is the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, begun in 1505, like the Archangel Cathedral, and completed in 1508. Virtually nothing is known of its architect, Bon Friazin, who had no other recorded structure in Moscow. Yet he was clearly a brilliant engineer, for his bell tower-60 meters high, in two tiers-withstood the fires and other disasters that periodically devastated much of the Kremlin. The tower, whose height was increased by an additional 21 meters during the reign of Boris Godunov, rests on solid brick walls that are 5 meters thick at the base and 2.5 meters on the second tier.
The most significant seventeenth-century addition to the Kremlin was the Church of the Twelve Apostles, commissioned by Patriarch Nikon as part of the Patriarchal Palace in the Kremlin. This large church was originally dedicated to the Apostle Philip, in implicit homage to the Metropolitan Philip, who had achieved martyrdom for his opposition to the terror of Ivan IV.
During the first part of the eighteenth century, Russia’s rulers were preoccupied with the building of St. Petersburg. But in the reign of Catherine the Great, the Kremlin once again became the object of autocratic attention. Although little came of Catherine’s desire to rebuild the Kremlin in a neoclassical style, she commissioned Matvei Kazakov to design one of the most important state buildings of her reign: the Senate, or high court, in the Kremlin. To create a triangular four-storied building, Kazakov masterfully exploited a large but awkward lot wedged in the northeast corner of the Kremlin. The great rotunda in its center provided the main assembly space for the deliberations of the Senate. To this day the rotunda is visible over the center of the east Kremlin wall.
During the nineteenth century, Nicholas I initiated the rebuilding of the Great Kremlin Palace (1839-1849), which had been severely damaged in the 1812 occupation. In his design the architect Konstantin Ton created an imposing facade for the Kremlin above the Moscow River and provided a stylistic link with the Terem Palace, the Faceted Chambers, and the Annunciation Cathedral within the Kremlin. Ton also designed the adjacent building of the Armory (1844-1851), whose historicist style reflected its function as a museum for some of Russia’s most sacred historical relics.
With the transfer of the Soviet capital to Moscow in 1918, the Kremlin once again became the seat of power in Russia. That proved a mixed blessing, however, as some of its venerable monuments, such as the Church of the Savior in the Woods, the Ascension Convent, and the Chudov Monastery, were destroyed in order to clear space for government buildings. Only after the death of
KREMLINOLOGY
Josef Stalin was the Kremlin opened once again to tourists. The most noticeable Soviet addition to the ensemble was the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1959-1961, designed by Mikhail Posokhin and others). It has the appearance of a modern concert hall (one of its uses), whose marble-clad rectangular outline is marked by narrow pylons and multi-storied shafts of plate glass. The one virtue of its bland appearance is the lack of conflict with the historic buildings of the Kremlin, which remain the most important cultural shrine in Russia. See also: ARCHITECTURE; ARMORY; CATHEDRAL OF THE ARCHANGEL; CATHEDRAL OF THE DORMITION; MOSCOW; RED SQUARE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, George Heard. (1983). The Art and Architecture of Russia. New York: Penguin Books.
WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD
KREMLINOLOGY
Close analysis of the tense power struggles among the Soviet leadership. A term coined during the last days of the Stalin regime with the onset of the Cold War.
Usually more than jus
t a study of contending personalities, or a “who-whom” (who is doing what to whom), Kremlinology was an indispensable analysis of Soviet policy alternatives and their implications for the West. It also turned out to be a point of departure for any serious political history, inevitably connected to the ideas that drove the Soviet regime and in the end determined its fate. Western intelligence experts, academics, and journalists all made contributions to this pursuit. Attention was often focused on “protocol evidence,” such as the order in which leaders’ names might appear on various official lists, or the way they were grouped around the leader in photographs. However, since factional rivalry was usually expressed in ideological pronouncements and debates, the most widely respected practitioners of Kremli-nology were emigr? writers who had direct experience of the ways of the Soviet communists. The most famous of these was the Menshevik Boris Nikolayevsky. Initially Kremlinologists centered on quarrels among Josef Stalin’s subordinates in order to get an idea of his policy alternatives and turns. After Stalin’s death, Kremlinology mapped out the succession struggle that occasioned the rise of Nikita Khrushchev. It was again useful in understanding the politics of the Gorbachev reform era and the destruction of Soviet power.
The domestic and foreign policy issues were debated in the ideological language of the first great Soviet succession struggle in the 1920s that brought Stalin from obscurity to supreme power. After his defeat and exile, Leon Trotsky explained Stalin’s rise to the Western public as the victory of a narrow insular national Communism, according to the slogan “socialism in one country,” over his own internationalist idea of “permanent revolution.” Materials from three Trotsky archives in the West later showed these extreme positions to have been less crucial to Stalin’s ascent than his complex maneuvers for a centrist position between right and left factions. Trotsky continued to analyze Soviet politics during the Great Purge of 1936-1938 in his Byulleten oppozitsy (Bulletin of the Opposition). This was matched by the commentary of the well-connected Moscow correspondents of the Menshevik Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist Courier).
For various reasons, the ?migr? writings had to be read with caution. Often they were employed to establish a position in the debate over the Russian Question: What is the nature of the Soviet regime, and has it betrayed the revolution? In 1936 Niko-layevsky published the Letter of an Old Bolshevik, presumably the confessions of Nikolai Bukharin interviewed in Paris. It contained important information indicating the origins of Stalin’s purges in a 1932 dispute over the anti-Stalin platform document of Mikhail Ryutin. However, the Letter was dramatized and embellished by Nikolayevsky’s gleanings from other sources. Some historians later rejected it as spurious and even denied the existence of a Ryutin Program. But during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign the full text was published, reading quite as Nikolayevsky had described it.
In Stalin’s last days, Nikolayevsky tried to interpret the antagonism between Leningrad chief Andrei Zhdanov and Stalin’s prot?g? Georgy Malenkov by linking Zhdanov to Tito and the Yugoslav Communists and Malenkov to Mao and the Chinese. Later studies bore this out. The rise of Khrushchev as successor to Stalin was charted by Boris Meiss-ner, Myron Rush, Wolfgang Leonhard, and Robert Conquest. Michel Tatu described Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 and the central role played by Mikhail Suslov, the ideological secretary.
KRITZMAN, LEV NATANOVICH
Suslov loomed large in Soviet politics from this point until his death at the end of the Brezhnev regime in 1982. The ideological post was the center of gravity for a regime of collective leadership under the rubric of “stabilization of cadres.” That Suslov died a few months before Brezhnev in 1982 meant he could not oversee the succession in the interests of the Kremlin gerontocracy. The result was a thorough housecleaning by Yuri Andropov in his brief tenure. An even more thorough shakeup by Mikhail Gorbachev followed. This would have been unlikely had Suslov lived.
In defense of the Suslov pattern of collective leadership, the Politburo tried its best to shore up Yegor Ligachev in the ideological post as a limit on Gorbachev. But Gorbachev managed to destroy all the party’s fetters on his power by 1989, just as he lost the East European bloc. After that, he behaved like a conscious student of Soviet succession and proclaimed himself a centrist, balancing between the radical Boris Yeltsin and the weakened consolidation faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The last stand of the latter was the attempted putsch of August 1991, the failure of which left Gorbachev alone with a vengeful Yeltsin.
Commentary on the Yeltsin leadership of post-Soviet Russia echoed some themes of Kremlinology, especially in analysis of the power of the Yeltsin group (“The Family”) and its relation to well-heeled post-Soviet tycoons (“The Oligarchs”). However, power in the Kremlin could no longer be read in Communist ideological language and had to be studied as with any other state. Kremlinology, or analysis of Soviet power struggles, nevertheless retains its value for political historians who can take note of a recurrent programmatic alternance between a leftist Leningrad tendency and a rightist Moscow line. The centrist who defeated the others by timely turns was able to triumph in the three great Soviet succession struggles. See also: HISTORIOGRAPHY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARI-ONOVICH; SUSLOV, MIKHAIL ANDREYEVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1961). Power and Policy in the USSR. New York: Macmillan. D’Agostino, Anthony. (1998). Gorbachev’s Revolution, 1985-1991. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Gelman, Harry. (1984). The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of D?tente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1962). The Kremlin Since Stalin, tr. Elizabeth Wiskemann. New York: Praeger. Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Nicolaevsky, Boris. (1965). Power and the Soviet Elite. New York: Praeger.. Rush, Myron. (1974). How Communist States Change Their Rulers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
ANTHONY D’AGOSTINO
KRITZMAN, LEV NATANOVICH
(1890-c. 1937), Soviet economist and agrarian expert.
Born in 1890, Kritzman became a Menshevik in 1905. After a long period in exile, he returned to Russia in early 1918 when he joined the Bolshevik Party. An expert in economic policy and a strong advocate of planning, he held various posts in the Supreme Council for the National Economy and in 1921 joined the Presidium of Gosplan (State Planning Agency).
In addition to his professional duties, he published numerous works on planning and the economy in which he argued for introducing a single economic plan. He was criticized by Lenin for this position. After the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, Kritzman, together with Ya. Larin, Leon Trotsky, and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, continued to advocate an extension of state planning. During the 1920s, Kritzman produced a number of important works, including a major study of war communism, Geroichesky period velikoi russkoi revolyutsy (The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution), still one of the key analyses of economic policy in the early Soviet period. As director of the Agrarian Institute of the Communist Academy from 1925 and editor of its journal Na Agrarnom Fronte (On the Agricultural Front), he promoted empirical research into class differentiation among the peasantry and called for greater state support for socialized agriculture. He also served during his career as assistant director of the Central Statistical Administration and a member of the editorial boards of Pravda, Problemy Ekonomiki (Problems of Economics) and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Stalin’s launch of mass collectivisation and dekulakization in late 1929 rendered Kritzman’s work and ideas obsolete by eradicating the individual household farm. After
KROPOTKIN, PYOTR ALEXEYEVICH
some years conducting private research, he was arrested and died in prison either in 1937 or 1938. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANT ECONOMY; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cox, Terry. (1986). Peasants, Class and Capitalism. The Rural Research of L.N. Kritzman and his School. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Solomon, Susan Gross. (1977). The Soviet Agrarian Debate: A Controversy in Social Science 1923-1929. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
NICK BARON
KRONSTADT UPRISING
The Kronstadt Uprising was a well-known revolt against the Communist government from March 1 to 18, 1921, at Kronstadt, a naval base in the Gulf of Finland, base of the Russian Baltic Fleet, and a stronghold of radical support for the Petrograd Soviet in 1917.
By early 1921 the Bolshevik government had defeated the armies of its White opponents, but had also presided over a collapse of the economy and was threatened by expanding Green rebellions in the countryside. The Kronstadt garrison was disillusioned by reports from home of the depredations of the food requisitioning detachments, and by the corruption and malfeasance of Communist leaders. In response to strikes and demonstrations in Pet-rograd in February 1921, a five-man revolutionary committee took control of Kronstadt. It purged local administration, reorganized the trade unions, and prepared for new elections to the soviet, while preparing for a Communist assault. It called for an end to the Communist Party’s privileges; for new, free elections to soviets; and an for end to forced grain requisitions in the countryside.
Communist reaction was quick. A first attack on March 8 resulted only in bloodshed; however, on March 18 a massive assault across the ice by 50,000 troops, stiffened by Communist detachments and several hundred delegates to the Tenth Party Congress and led by civil war hero Mikhail Tukhachevsky, captured the island stronghold. Thousands of Kronstadt activists died in the assault or in the repression that followed. The Kronstadt rebellion, along with the Green Movement, presented a direct threat to Communist control. While the rebellions were put down, their threat led to important policy changes at the Tenth Party Congress, including the abandonment of War Communism (the grain monopoly and forced grain requisitions) and a ban on factions within the Communist Party. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; GREEN MOVEMENT; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES