The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  The entire city was surrounded by the Kamer–Kollezhskii rampart (some 38km in length), which was built as a customs wall in 1742 but had effectively marked municipal jurisdiction since 1806; the municipal cemeteries that initially remained within the Kamer–Kollezhskii confines were moved outside the city limits following the plague epidemic of 1771. The rampart featured sixteen barriers (zastava) that regulated people’s movements into and out of the city.

  Early nineteenth-century maps of Moscow show closely packed urban development throughout the city. Its quarter of a million residents lived in 9,151 houses, including 2,367 stone and 6,584 wooden ones,9 the majority of which were private property; only 387 buildings belonged to the state or public organizations. Under Empress Catherine II the Russian government continued the social engineering launched by Peter the Great some six decades earlier, and focused on urban renovation in an attempt to bring enlightenment to Russia. Moscow’s neighbourhoods were gradually reconstructed and its old and narrow streets replaced with paved thoroughfares and street lighting: almost 7,300 street lamps illuminated its streets at night by 1812.10 Neoclassical architecture had made an appearance, but visitors often marvelled at the mixed architectural images to be found in the city. Many were struck by the magnificence of Moscow’s buildings and the vastness of some of the architectural ensembles. ‘Everything appears here on a gigantic scale,’ commented a Russian diplomat returning from Constantinople to St Petersburg in 1790s. ‘The palaces of the men of distinction, and of the majority of the Russian nobility … possess a colossal grandeur, and are filled with considerable numbers of domestic serfs, attached to the service of all the men of rank.’11 ‘Every object we behold in Moscow is, like the city itself, in a certain degree gigantic,’ echoed the scientist and traveller Peter Simon Palas.12 A similar observation was made by an Englishman visiting the city six years prior to the conflagration: ‘It is not a city of houses in mere rank and file of streets, but rather a collection of mansions, each embosomed amidst its own lawns, gardens, pleasure grounds and the dwellings of its necessary slaves. Some of the most ancient princes of the empire have very splendid palaces in Moscow, ornamented with basso reliefs, gilding and every Asiatic decoration.’13 One Russian contemporary, Philipp Vigel, recalled that

  every year, in December, the nobles from the neighbouring provinces considered it their responsibility to travel with their entire families from their villages to Moscow for Christmas and then return to the villages during the first week of Lent … They were preceded by long trains of wagons loaded with frozen piglets, ducks and chickens, as well as grains, flours and butter and other necessary provisions. Each family had its own wooden house, modestly furnished, with a large yard and garden … All of Zamoskvorechye [beyond the Zemlyanoi Val] was peppered with these houses.

  Moscow had originated in the twelfth century as a small fortress at the confluence of the Moscow and Neglinnaya rivers. From this early, triangular-shaped stockade, the city grew outwards in concentric circles protected by earthworks and stone walls. By 1812 the city consisted of twenty districts14 grouped into four historical quarters or ‘cities’ (gorod), the Kremlin, Kitai-gorod, Belyi Gorod and Zemlyanoi Gorod. For most of the city’s history, the Kremlin was at the heart of the city, serving as a powerful symbol of the Russian rulers’ authority. ‘What can rival the Kremlin,’ wondered the poet Mikhail Lermontov, ‘which, having ringed itself with crenellated walls and adorned itself with the golden domes of the cathedrals, sits on a high hill like the crown of sovereignty on the brow of an awesome ruler?’ Surrounded by its famous crenellated white-washed brick walls,15 the Kremlin featured twenty towers (nineteen with spires and one outlying barbican tower) that were built by Italian architects (most notably Pietro Solario) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most important towers, featuring gates, were those of the Saviour (Spasskaya, in the east), St Nicholas (Nikolskaya, in the northeast), Trinity (Troitskaya, in the west), and the Borovitskaya (in the southwest). Some towers have been used variously as prisons, storehouses and even as water pumping stations, as exemplified by the Vodozvodnaya (water-pumping) Tower. Perhaps the best known, and nowadays the most photographed, is the Saviour Tower on Red Square, first built in 1491; its tented roof and famous clock were installed by the Scottish clock-maker Christopher Galloway in 1625. Entering through the Saviour Gates – the main entrance to the Kremlin used by the tsars – visitors found (and still do) a remarkable ensemble of striking churches, palaces and squares inside the Kremlin confines, and were often surprised by their architectural diversity. Johann Gottfried Seume thought that there was ‘a singular mixture of New Grecian half-oriental appearance, and of the more modern improved architecture of Italy’.16 Edward Daniel Clarke found it

  difficult to say from what country [the architectural style] has been principally derived: the architects were chiefly Italians but the style is Tartarian, Indian, Chinese and Gothic. Here a pagoda, there an arcade! In some parts are richness, and even elegance; in others, barbarity and decay. Taken altogether, it is a jumble of magnificence and ruin: old buildings repaired, and modern structures not completed; half-open vaults and mouldering walls and empty caves, amidst whitewashed brick buildings; and towers and churches, with glittering, gilded or painted domes.17

  By 1812 many of the ancient buildings in the Kremlin complex had been replaced. The decaying buildings from the sixteenth century (most of them located in the western section) were first to be pulled down and replaced by newer edifices. In 1802 repair of the crumbling walls commenced and four years later the tottering Vodozvodnaia Tower was dismantled and rebuilt, while the Nikolaskaya Tower was renovated in the neo-Gothic style. The most magnificent of the new additions was the Senate building, designed by Matvei Kazakov and built between 1776 and 1787. Designed in the classical style, the building was triangular with an inner court, its exterior corners severed and a cupola-capped rotunda (with a monumental Doric colonnade) wedged on the main entrance axis. In front of the Senate building lay three magnificent cathedrals – the Cathedral of the Assumption (Uspenskii Sobor, built in 1475–1479), the Cathedral of the Annunciation (Blagoveschenskii Sobor, 1484–1489) and the Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel (Arkhangelskii Sobor, 1505–1508) – grouped around the central square that also featured the mid seventeenth-century Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles and the adjoining Patriarchal Palace, the magnificent soaring white bell tower of Ivan the Great (1505–1508), the enormous Tsar Bell (cast in 1733–1735 but never rung) and the Tsar Cannon (cast in 1586 but never fired).

  The most important of the Kremlin cathedrals was the five-domed Cathedral of the Assumption, where the tsars were crowned, patriarchs and metropolitans were buried, and important state services were held. The smaller Cathedral of the Annunciation served as the imperial family’s private chapel, and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, visiting Moscow in 1866 for the coronation of Alexander II, was more impressed by this ‘narrower, stranger, and richer [church] than all the rest. It is a complete casket of jewels. The cross of the cupola is of wrought gold, and the floor is inlaid with jasper, agate and chalcedony from Siberia.’18 Surrounding the cathedrals were the Palace of Facets (1487–1491) and the Terem Palace (1635–1636), which later merged into the Great Kremlin Palace complex that served as an imperial residence in the mid-nineteenth century as well as the seat of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the twentieth century. The grand entrance to the Palace of Facets is up the Red Staircase, which was demolished in the Soviet era but rebuilt in the 1990s. It was from this vantage point that the young Peter the Great is said to have witnessed the massacre of his relatives by the rebellious streltsy in 1682. Here, too, Napoleon stood and watched on the fateful day in 1812 as the fires raged through the city. Along the northwest wall of the Kremlin stood the Arsenal, which was initially laid down in 1702 but could not be completed due to lack of funds during the Great Northern War with Sweden. The building was eventually finished in 1736 under the supervision of Field Marshal Burkh
ard Christoph von Münnich; gutted by a fire the following year, it was fully restored only in 1796.

  To the east of the Kremlin was Kitai-gorod, a bustling centre of trade since the fourteenth century. As Moscow grew, this district became a vibrant commercial hub both for the powerful merchant class and for the boyars (nobles) not favoured with residences within the Kremlin. The popular translation of Kitai-gorod as ‘Chinatown,’ which can be found in quite a few memoirs and later studies, is almost certainly erroneous since the district’s name seems to have been derived from the word kita (woven baskets filled with dirt), the method of construction used to build the mid sixteenth-century walls that surrounded the area.19

  Like the Kremlin, Kitai-gorod was protected by a wall and towers, although of smaller size. In addition, both the Kremlin and Kitai-gorod were surrounded by earthen bastions and a shallow moat built by Peter the Great in 1708. After a century or so of neglect, these defences were in a derelict condition; in fact, Emperor Paul had considered levelling them but never got around to accomplishing it. The houses of Kitai-gorod were principally of wooden construction, although there were a few masonry buildings. It was separated from the Kremlin Wall by Red Square, once the Russian realm’s political, social and economic nerve centre, which was gradually transformed during the course of the eighteenth century. In 1812 it was smaller than it is today but it was, nonetheless, Moscow’s busiest square as pedestrians and equestrians jostled for space and trade overflowed to every corner of the plaza. It was here that the infamous Tsar Ivan the Terrible had constructed the magnificent Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed in 1554–1560 to commemorate the Russian victory over the Kazan and Astrakhan Tatars. Here too Peter the Great ordered the execution of hundreds of mutinous streltzy in 1698. Late eighteenth-century prints show the square choked with people on foot, in carts or carriages making their way across an unpaved open space, and idlers, serfs, artisans, clergy and nobles all intermingled. In 1786 the square benefited from the construction of new commercial rows that bracketed both the east and west sides of the square and obscured from the plaza the unseemly view of hovels and shops of Kitai-gorod. A sense of how the square looked when the Grande Armée arrived there can be gleaned from the painting of Red Square by Fedor Alekseev, which shows the moat that used to run down the western side of the square, with bridges joining it to the Kremlin gates, as well as numerous trading stalls lined up along its length.

  Beyond Red Square, Kitai-gorod featured narrow, crowded streets, containing numerous stores, warehouses, stalls and other commercial buildings. ‘From the number of its shops and warehouses, and the Asiatic apparel of the buyers and sellers,’ commented one European visitor, ‘it reminded me of what I had read of Baghdad in the time of the Caliphs, when the chief merchants of the east used to assemble in its populous streets. The number of shops and warehouses which compose it are nearly six thousand.’20 Indeed, visitors were often struck by the abundance of people, transports and goods that jammed the Ilyinka, Varvarka and Nikolskaya streets and their interconnecting alleys. The most notable building in this area was the massive Gostinnyi dvor, or Merchant Court, designed along classical lines by Giacomo Quarenghi and possibly Matvei Kazakov. Considering Kitai-gorod’s central role in Moscow’s economy, this edifice was appropriately located in its busiest Ilyinka and Varvarka streets. Because Russian sovereigns used the nearby radial Nikolskaya street as a grand entrance into the Kremlin, triumphal arches frequently had to be erected where the street entered Red Square. The street was home to both prominent noble families (notably the Cherkasskiis and Sheremetevs) and bookshops, twenty-six of which were located there by the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

  Between Varvarka Street and the embankment of the Moscow river lay Zariadye, which by the late eighteenth century was an overcrowded slum of craftsmen, tradesmen and workmen. The construction of Peter’s bastions around Kitai-gorod had caused considerable traffic difficulties but, worse than that, had severed the merchant quarter’s sewage connection with the river, so that the filth and waste emanating from the Varvarka shops collected in Zariadye and contributed to the outbreaks of epidemics there. In an attempt to resolve the traffic issues and improve the sanitary conditions, the Moscow river embankment was built beneath the Kitai-gorod walls in 1796–1800. A British visitor described ‘the new promenade forming on its banks; immediately beneath the fortress is a superb work … it is paved with large flags [and] fenced with a light but strong iron palisade, and stone pillars executed in very good taste’.21 On the east side of Kitai-gorod the Kitaiskii Passage, a circular boulevard skirting the district, was constructed in 1790 by filling in the moat of Peter’s bastions. In 1806–1808 the houses there were demolished and rows of trees planted but the relics of the bastions remained until the 1820s.

  In the first half of the eighteenth century the southeastern corner of the Kitai-gorod featured an open space known as Vasilievskii Meadow, which in 1770 became the site of the famous Foundlings Home. Designed by the architect Karl Blank, the Foundlings Home was an architectural milestone since it was the first edifice in the city to be built in the classical style. The building was designed to accommodate some 8,000 orphans and consisted of two buildings enclosing a rectangular court, where a central complex featured three structures, each of which was crowned by a cupola. Visitors often marvelled at the building’s long façade (over 1,200ft) stretched along the riverbank.

  While Kitai-gorod was a largely commercial district, the main residential sector lay in the city’s Belyi Gorod quarter, which comprised two districts (II Tverskii and III Myasnitskii). Like the Kremlin and Kitai-gorod, this district was also once surrounded by the massive white walls built at the behest of Tsars Feodor I and Boris Godunov in 1585–1593. The wall featured over three dozen towers and gates, but was demolished during the reigns of Catherine the Great and Alexander I to create space for a series of open and long (up to 7km) boulevards that became known as the Boulevard Ring; the first boulevard, the Tverskii, was built in 1796 but the ring was not completed until after the great fire of 1812 had levelled much of the city. Today many of the traffic intersections along the Boulevard Ring still bear the names of the old gateways into Moscow. The district took its name ‘Belyi Gorod’ (‘white city’) from the tax-exempt nobility who lived there. By the late eighteenth century, however, parts of the district were also populated by commoners, and the area between the Moiseevskaya Square and Bolshaya Nikitskaya, to the west of the Kremlin, contained shops and taverns of every description jammed into narrow alleys; these were destroyed in the fire of 1790 and replaced by larger and more affluent shops. The district also featured several large open spaces, including Okhotnyi Ryad, which featured the Nobility’s Meeting House, and Mokhovaya Square where, in 1793, the architect Kazakov constructed the magnificent, classical-style building of Moscow University overlooking the Neglinnaya river. Further along the Mokhovaya, the architect Vasilli Bazhenov created one of Moscow’s most famous and graceful residential estates, the Pashkov House. Built on a promontory opposite the Borovitskaya Gates of the Kremlin and surrounded by an exquisite fence, the gleaming white three-storey house was praised for its magnificence, becoming a symbol for princely living and taste in late eighteenth-century Russia. ‘It comprehended within itself all conveniences and delights of life,’ commented a contemporary. ‘This little garden situated on a pretty high eminence presented a kind of Garden of Eden.’22

  Outside the Belyi Gorod was the last historical quarter of Moscow, the Zemlyanoi Gorod (‘earthen city’), which included six administrative districts23 and was surrounded by the third defensive circle known as the Zemlyanoi Val (‘earthen rampart’). Until the sixteenth century this territory lay outside the city proper and featured numerous settlements for palace servants, tradesmen, craftsmen, gardeners and other commoners. One area of the Zemlyanoi Gorod, adjacent to the Kremlin in the south, was called Zamoskvorechye (‘beyond the Moscow river’), and was often beset by flooding. In 1593, during the Russo-Swedish
War and in the wake of a Crimean Tatar raid two years earlier, the Moscow authorities decided to strengthen the city defences by building a massive earthen rampart – with a moat and more than thirty towers – encircling a wide swathe of territory around the Belyi Gorod; destroyed by the Polish invasion in 1611, it was rebuilt (and reinforced) in the mid-seventeenth century. The newly delimited territory was quickly colonized by the expanding population of Moscow and became notorious for its bustling but congested life. By the nineteenth century the earthen rampart, although repaired in its northern section, had been long ignored by the authorities and was in a decrepit state, offering no military advantages. In fact, by 1812 eleven administrative districts had spread beyond the confines of the historical Zemlyanoi Gorod quarter;24 according to Ker Porter, these suburbs were intersected by ‘numerous and antiquated streets [that] show all the varieties attached to a great capital: on one side splendid mansions, on the other dingy hovels filled with all the repressing effects of bondage. The pleasantest parts of these suburbs are inhabited by Germans, and also a band of noble Georgians,25 who, with a large train of followers, retired hither. The districts allotted to these strangers partake of their character and are very interesting.’26 An earlier visitor, the English clergyman William Coxe, who came to Moscow in the late 1770s, had similarly remarked on the great diversity of the city and the variety of different types of buildings that he saw: