Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (20 page)

In 1588, two years after the Shuisky crisis, the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah, travelled to Moscow to petition for financial aid. Such missions had become a tedious necessity for Orthodox leaders from the Middle East, who were struggling to raise revenue under Turkish rule. Jeremiah’s first audience with Godunov and the
d’yak
Shchelkalov took place in July. Further conversations would be inescapable, but his plan was to return home before the first serious autumn rain. In the event, however, the patriarch and his suite were subjected to luxury house-arrest for nearly ten more months. Pretexts were found for each delay, and no-one mentioned
force majeure,
but as the weeks passed it became clear that Tsar Fedor’s government (for which read Boris and Shchelkalov) would not release the visitors, still less afford their church financial aid, until certain conditions had been met. Months were wasted in the boredom of official politesse. Even if the foreigners managed to venture out, their path was always lined with Kremlin guards. If the Russians’ purpose was to isolate their visitors from reality, the tactic worked. At one point, as if mesmerized by the Kremlin’s splendour, Jeremiah started to play with the idea of moving his own patriarchal seat to Moscow in a bid to escape the Turkish yoke.

This was not Godunov’s plan. The regent used a range of methods to make his points clear (Shchelkalov threatened to drown a member of the Greek delegation in the Moscow river
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), and in time Jeremiah acceded to his wishes. In 1589, with the agreement of the ancient churches of the east, the leader of Russian Orthodoxy was formally elevated to the rank of Patriarch. Yov was enthroned in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral, and glory shone on smooth-faced Fedor for a second time. If Moscow had ever pretended to be a third Rome, the proof – and the responsibility – was evident now.
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The creation of the patriarchate also added to the traffic in and out of Moscow’s fortress; the Kremlin’s opportunity to become a world-class centre of spirituality and culture had finally dawned.

The triumph did a lot to bolster Godunov’s position, but the other testimony to his skills was more immediately visible. The regent was a large-scale commissioner of building-works. His main programme began in 1586. For nearly two decades to come, Godunov’s architects employed a small army of builders, in the process providing work for thousands of hungry citizens at a time of economic stress. The projects sometimes took place far from Moscow, transforming landscapes in the provinces with brick and stone. But Godunov was also constantly aware of the Kremlin. Just before his death, indeed, his last construction scheme was meant to fix its place for ever as the capital of universal Orthodoxy.

The system for procuring builders was based in the Kremlin itself. At the end of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, with Moscow a semi-ruin, a Buildings Chancellery (the
prikaz kamennykh del
) had been added to the list of central government offices. Its main task was to manage the supply of skilled workmen. There was nothing particularly new about the idea that a craftsman might be liable to call-up on the crown’s behalf, but the Buildings Chancellery made the system more official, and in Godunov’s time it was tested to its limits. Under his regency, the Kremlin came to act as patron, master, and even the administrator of a sort of national apprentice-scheme. The labourers, whose trades were handed down in families, were drawn from more than twenty provinces. They included stone-masons, bricklayers and the men who worked the ovens and the quarries, and at times of need the
prikaz
could send its officials out to summon all of them to Moscow. From there, the men could be deployed to any site the tsar’s officials had marked out for them, including cities in the provinces and new defensive forts. As a magnet for numerous grand projects, Moscow soon became accustomed to its builders’ shanty-town, a makeshift settlement, well outside the Kremlin, that swelled each spring and shut down only when the frosts set hard.
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No labourer was likely to be rich, and members of the building trades were barely paid enough to feed and clothe themselves. But they had one unusual advantage, for they were exempt from tax. This privilege (which they shared with other specialists, including the
streltsy
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) was intended to recognize the fact that they were summer-migrants, and could not farm the land like ordinary peasants. What it also meant, however, was that they could make easy profits if they worked in their spare time. They cultivated kitchen-gardens round their settlements and sold the food. They also set up private markets, traditional Russian trading rows, and these could undercut tax-paying local businesses. In Tula the builders sold pots, in Vladimir footwear; in Suzdal they were noted for fur coats. Many were also willing to mend shoes and sheepskins, paint icons, fix tools or make furniture. When local people needed services like these, they knew exactly where to look, for the ground around the builders’ settlements was always white with lime.
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That dust must have got into everything in the summer of 1586: Boris Godunov had commissioned a new defensive wall for Moscow.

The massive enterprise involved enclosing 1,300 acres of the city in nearly six miles of fortified masonry. There were to be at least twenty-seven functional towers and ten sets of gates, beginning with an imposing entrance at the crown of the road to Tver. The architect was Fedor Kon, whose first clients (like those of many Russian masons) had been the monasteries.
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But public works seem to have suited him. The peasants of the quarry-region, Myachkovo, were soon petitioning for help; the very bedrock of the meadows where their cattle grazed was disappearing on to builders’ carts, and the fields for miles around were hard and sour with limestone dust.
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When the new wall was finished, Moscow could boast three separate sets of fortifications – the Kremlin, Kitai-gorod, and Godunov’s so-called White City – as well as a system of earthworks that stretched for miles beyond. But Kon was not allowed to stop until he had completed yet more walls, this time of wood, so that the entire city was enclosed.
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The Kremlin’s glamour was renewed, for the successive walls, like Chinese boxes, gave it the allure of a secret treasure.
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In all, Moscow’s fortification was an historic achievement, but it was not the epic project of the age. That prize went to the fortress at Smolensk, a strategic border city on the banks of the Dnieper, which in its time was the largest construction site in the world.

Moscow had ruled Smolensk since 1514. The city was wealthy and colourful, and its former suzerain, Poland-Lithuania, had not stopped coveting the place. Godunov’s answer was to set about ringing it in four miles of sixteen-foot-thick walls, a scheme he again entrusted to Kon. At this point, Moscow’s brick Kremlin was a century old, and siege-technology and guns had both evolved apace. The new design had to be more massive than Moscow’s, less concerned with elegance, and sterner. The excavations for the fortification of Smolensk began in 1596, and from then until the project was completed in 1602, the Buildings Chancellery mobilized about ten thousand men. Between them, the labourers hefted at least a million loads of sand, while blacksmiths bashed out literally millions of nails. Like Fioravanti in Moscow, Kon built an on-site factory to make the bricks. His project called for 150 million of them, all of a regulation size; the ovens alone consumed such vast amounts of firewood that forests were cleared and the land left barren for miles around.
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The awestruck locals, meanwhile, were forced to provide tools for an army of workers. For seven summers in a row, the deep ravine through which the Dnieper flowed rang to the sound of hammers and the slap and clatter of the trays of brick. Centuries later, Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht both spent harsh months in Smolensk, and neither treated the place with respect, but the remnants of Kon’s walls endure, as obstinate as the sarsens of Stonehenge.

Whatever else he was doing, meanwhile, the regent Godunov always paid careful attention to the Kremlin. By the 1590s, his own palace there rivalled even Tsar Fedor’s, and he staffed it with retainers whose titles mirrored those of the real court.
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Across the square, he commissioned a team of the Kremlin’s best artists to repaint the interior of the Faceted Palace, a task that called for more than fifty skilful icon-masters and quantities of expensive paint.
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Years later, and before they were destroyed in a new round of improvements, the icon-painter Ushakov made careful drawings of these frescoes; he also added written notes. His records show that their artistic theme was the familiar genealogical fantasy: the Riurikids as heirs of Emperor Augustus. But one sequence was strikingly up to date. In it, Ushakov wrote, ‘the Autocrat of All Russia [Fedor] sits on the throne, the crown on his head studded with precious stones and pearls … On his right hand, next to his throne, stands the regent Boris Godunov.’
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There were other boyars in the picture – the line stretched out to right and left – but Godunov had been made to look the tallest and by far the most magnificent.

It was a point that needed almost constant emphasis. The terror of the previous reign had steeped the Kremlin in malice. Aside from the unfortunate new tsar, the pawn in one of its most dangerous games was Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, Dmitry, the child of Mariya Nagaya, his last wife. In 1584, not long after the old tsar’s death, the regents had exiled this infant, with his mother, to the city of Uglich, a move intended (at least ostensibly) to protect the fragile Tsar Fedor. Seven years later, when he was nine years old, Dmitry died in what was said to have been a freak accident. The enquiry that Godunov ordered into his death found no evidence of foul play, concluding instead that the child had cut his own throat while playing with a knife. Surprisingly, historians have tended to accept this tale, pointing out that Godunov had nothing to gain directly by killing Dmitry when Fedor was still alive and capable (perhaps with discreet help) of siring an heir.
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But people at the time were far less gullible. Many believed an account spread by Dmitry’s maternal relatives, the Nagois, who accused Godunov of attempting to poison the child before resorting to an assassin’s knife. This was the story that Isaac Massa heard some years later, and the proof was said to lie in another terrible fire – the devil’s work – that swept through Moscow two nights after the killing.
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In 1592, Irina bore Fedor a daughter, Feodosiya, but the infant’s death, in 1594, again raised doubts about the future of the Godunovs. Fresh rumours of Irina’s fall, and of her brother’s imminent arrest, were whispered round the crowded trading rows.
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In answer (or at least to reinforce a message that was being delivered on a more personal basis by the torturers that he had started to employ), Boris again began a round of building-work. The Kremlin was where power had to be defined, and so the site he chose was almost in the centre of it. The project was a new cathedral, and it was to be presented to the Ascension Convent as a pious gift in Godunov’s name. The endowment of a religious building was not especially ambitious on its own (many boyars had built them before). What counted was that this one was the grave of Russia’s grand princesses.

The scale of any major building was meant to advertise its patron’s wealth, and there was nothing modest about Godunov’s proposed cathedral. As its walls and cupolas rose within their cage of wood, however, the more specific implications of the regent’s design-choice grew clear. His building paid an overt homage to the flamboyant Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, the tomb of Russia’s male tsars, which had dominated the southern entrance to the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square since 1508.
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It is unlikely that Boris chose the blueprint by accident. Instead, his building, as a mausoleum for Russia’s royal women and an assertion of the rights and status of the female line, deliberately echoed the striking appearance of the tsars’ own burial place.
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No woman had ever reigned alone in Muscovy (Elena Glinskaya had come close), but female sovereigns were not unknown in Europe, and Godunov had to believe that women mattered. After all, the one most closely linked to Russia’s throne was his own sister.

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Tsar Fedor died in January 1598. He and Irina never had a son, and so his death marked the end of Moscow’s founding dynasty, the pure line of ‘true tsars’. In the first hours, Boris is said to have tried to persuade his sister to accept the crown, but her answer, wisely, was to exchange her royal robes for a nun’s habit and a life of prayer. Her brother followed her into the Novodevichy Convent, where he seemed determined to wait out the traditional forty days of deepest mourning. But ultimately the boyar’s ambition prevailed. On 21 February, when a crowd of Muscovite petitioners and priests assembled at the convent doors, Boris Godunov finally agreed to end the dangerous uncertainty and take the throne. He even (literally) sat on it, but though he was now Russia’s sovereign he made no swift move to be crowned. Instead, he forsook his beloved council chamber to nurture wider public acceptance and possibly to acquire a dash of military glamour. Boris spent part of the summer with his troops, ostensibly to stiffen their defence against Kazy-Girey.
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It was only in September 1598 that he was crowned a tsar, in the Dormition Cathedral, by his political ally, the brand-new Patriarch Yov.