Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (21 page)

‘The ceremony took place with a great show of splendour,’ Isaac Massa related. The spectacle eclipsed even Metropolitan Makary’s best efforts. The customary Russian symbols were, of course, evoked, but Moscow was now a patriarchate, and that meant that its tsar could claim the full imagined glory of Byzantium.
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‘The crown’, wrote Massa,

was set upon [Boris’] head in the church of the Virgin by the Patriarch, surrounded by bishops and metropolitans, with all the prescribed ritual and a host of benedictions, together with the burning of incense. All along the road the tsar was to travel on the way from the churches to his palace at the crown of the fortress, they had spread out crimson cloth and covered it with gold; before the procession gold pieces were thrown down in handfuls, and the crowd fell upon them …

Money was not the only inducement on offer for this loyal mob during the eight-day celebration. ‘At various places in the fortress,’ Massa was told, ‘they had placed great barrels filled with mead and beer from which all could drink … The tsar ordered the distribution of triple wages to all those in the service of the state … The whole country was glad and rejoiced, and everyone praised God for having granted the empire such a master.’
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The rejoicing was not entirely misplaced. Boris was one of the most gifted men who ever sat on Russia’s throne. But he was also anxious to make certain of his right to rule. Some of his subjects could be bought with public works, others suborned with threats. Still, these were things a mere
d’yak
could have done. A tsar had to be seen in splendour, and that meant using the Kremlin. A crown was made, new jewels set, and Boris also accepted royal gifts, including regalia from Rudolf II’s workshops in the Habsburg lands and a splendid throne from Isfahan.
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But it was Ivan the Terrible’s Golden Palace, with all the drama of the court, that made the deepest impression. When Boris received the Polish ambassador, Lew Sapieha, in 1600, Jacques Margeret observed each detail. The boyar tsar, he wrote, was

seated on the imperial throne, the crown on his head, the sceptre in his hand, the golden orb before him. His son was seated next to him on his left. Seated on benches all around the chamber were the lords of the council and the
okol’nichie
[senior courtiers] wearing robes of very rich cloth of gold bordered with pearls, with tall hats of black fox on their heads. On each side of the emperor two young lords stood dressed in white velvet garments, bordered all around with ermine to the height of half a foot. Each wore a white tall hat on the head, with two long chains of enamelled gold criss-crossed around the neck [and over the chest]. Each of them held a costly battle-axe of Damascus steel on his shoulder, as if in readiness to let fly a blow, thus giving the impression of great majesty.
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The ritual and its setting were awe-inspiring, but Tsar Boris would have known of the constant plots and whispers out beyond the palace steps. Any boyar on the Russian throne was vulnerable, and a Godunov, still viewed by nobles with distaste, was at excessive risk. To protect himself, Boris created a network of informants and spies. His prisons filled, and several magnates felt the chill of imminent arrest. Servants were encouraged to inform on their masters, slaves on everyone in sight. The tsar himself grew increasingly reclusive, relying for information on the advice of his uncle, Semen Godunov, who ran the system of interrogations. Semen was no more than a torturer, and his cruelty further added to the number of the tsar’s enemies.
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For them, the Kremlin must have felt like a pit of snakes, but it was also the acknowledged centre of state and religious power. The opportunity to colonize it – to absorb two whole centuries of dynastic splendour into the Godunovs’ pedigree – became the boyar tsar’s obsession.

The drawing of
Kremlenagrad
dates from this time, and to be accurate it really should have featured carts and scaffolding and piles of bricks. As it is, the buildings that the map outlines include the tsar’s most daring project in its final form. In 1600, Godunov ordered that two extra tiers should be added to the bell tower on the east side of Cathedral Square. The height was so vertiginous that even the scaffolding was a challenge, but soon the masons had begun their work, hauling bricks and lime to levels that no builder in the Russian lands had climbed before. The finished tower, an extension of Bon Fryazin’s own so-called Ivan the Great, was nearly 270 feet high.
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It was visible for thirty miles, and for centuries it was to be the tallest building in Moscow, surpassing Ivan the Terrible’s Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat (St Basil’s) in height if not in bravado. Once he had made the famous tower his own, Boris ordered an inscription to be added. It was a proclamation to the world, and it is still there now, written on the uppermost tier in giant, gilded letters:

By the will of the Holy Trinity, by the command of the Great Lord, Tsar, and Grand Prince Boris Fedorovich, Autocrat of All Russia, and of his son, the Orthodox Great Lord Fedor Borisovich, Tsarevich and Prince of All Russia, this church was completed and gilded in the second year of their reign.

‘Boris hoped above all to appease the divine anger,’ Isaac Massa concluded.
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An observer from a different age might draw a parallel with twentieth-century cults of the leader’s personality, but Boris did not have such far-reaching designs. The object was not to become a god, but just to occupy a higher plane of existence, a place where envy and conspiracy were impotent. And Boris would have used his eminence in creative new ways. The tsar’s next projects included smart new buildings for the
prikazy
and playful battlements to top the walls that ran along the Kremlin’s outer moat. Joan Blaeu’s map shows both, but the most important structure of them all is missing, and was never built. It would have stood next to the enlarged Ivan the Great, which was intended to serve as its campanile. Its presence would have changed the Kremlin’s geography for all time, focusing it on a new site. Where Ivan III had turned to Italy, Boris sent to James I of England in search of engineers with skills that his own subjects lacked (successfully: two of the country’s most reputable builders arrived in Moscow in 1604).
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The projected church was not to be like any other in the Kremlin. The tsar’s intention was to build it large enough to hold thousands of souls, filling the citadel with ordinary Muscovites and inviting the entire Orthodox world to worship at the high altar of Russian faith.

What Boris had in mind was a cathedral for Moscow the Jerusalem, the holy city. His plan was to call it the Holy of Holies, and experts think it was designed in the image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It would have been a place of pilgrimage, of majesty, and its completion would have set the seal on Godunov’s dynastic rule. The shrines that the Daniilovich princes had built, including the Dormition Cathedral, would have been relegated to the second rank. By the time of Boris’ death, in 1605, the new cathedral’s general design had been approved, and a troupe of workmen at the site had assembled heaps of stone, lime and timber.
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The tsar had also commissioned some opulent sculptures for the sanctuary. A reliquary was planned, a version of the Holy Sepulchre itself, and artists in the Kremlin workshops had created a pair of golden angels to stand guard at either end of it. The figures were life-sized, and one of them was said to have been placed in Godunov’s own coffin when – as people later liked to say – his restless spirit rose to walk the earth after his death.
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This, then, was high tide for Kremlenagrad, a moment full of possibility. When that tide turned, the fortress closed its iron locks. The huge cathedral vanished without trace. The Kremlin is a place whose past is usually hallowed, but the Holy of Holies, that witness to the optimistic grandeur of the Godunovs, is all but absent from its chronicles. Even Andrei Batalov, who not only leads the Kremlin’s architectural research effort but specializes in the age of Godunov, cannot be certain what it would have looked like if it had been built.
Kremlenagrad
appears in almost every guide to the Kremlin – the image is so well-known that readers tend to turn the page – but the real thing would have been terrifying at the best of times, and events were about to transform it, once again, into a theatre of the macabre.

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According to Isaac Massa, Godunov’s coronation oath had included a promise to shed no blood in Moscow for five years; an oath that he kept, the cynical Dutchman observed, by smothering and drowning his enemies or forcing them into monasteries.
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His main rival, a close friend of the late Tsar Fedor, was the handsome Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the son of the old co-regent. The truce between the Godunovs and Romanovs had been abandoned when Tsar Fedor died. In 1600, Godunov’s agents accused the older clan of using witchcraft, if not poison, in a plot against the ruling family. Boris ordered his men to burn the main Romanov residence in Moscow, purged the boyar council, and forced the forty-five-year-old Fedor Nikitich to take the vows of a monk (an irreversible transition to the church’s world) under a new name: Filaret.
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Whatever else the rival courtier might achieve, there was no further chance he could ascend the throne. With that competitor removed, the skilful Godunov might yet have established a stable government, or at least cemented a more certain rule. But his hold on power was irreparably damaged by natural disaster. The summer of 1601 was cold and wet, reducing the yield of the toughest rye and wrecking some crops altogether. The winter that followed was colder and longer than the winters of the past, and then, in the summer of 1602, unseasonal frost and snow destroyed the harvest that a hungry people desperately needed.
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The worst famine in memory took hold, and nothing Tsar Boris could do would make the fields green again. ‘At about this time,’ Massa explained,

heaven afflicted the whole land of Muscovy with scarcity and famine such as history has never recorded … There were even mothers who ate their children. The peasants and other inhabitants of the countryside, having consumed all their resources, cows, horses, sheep and fowls, without observing the prescribed fasts, began to look for vegetables such as mushrooms and other fungi in the forests. They ate them hungrily along with husks and the winnowings of wheat, cats, and dogs. Then their bellies swelled; they became distended like cows, and died swiftly in great agony. In winter, they were prey to a sort of fainting. They doubled up and fell on the ground. The roads were encumbered by bodies that were devoured by wolves, foxes, dogs, and all kinds of wild animals.
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As the countryside starved, Moscow’s streets filled with beggars and fugitives. Massa was appalled. ‘They had to organize teams of men who went every day with carts and sleds to gather bodies,’ he wrote. They took this miserable cargo

outside to large ditches in the open fields. There they were thrown in heaps, as is done with mud and refuse at home … One day, I myself wanted very much to take some food to a young man seated in front of our lodgings, whom I had watched for four days as he fed himself on hay, dying of starvation. Yet I dared not do so for fear of being seen and attacked.
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The reproach implied by Massa’s shocked and hostile tone should not detract from Godunov’s record, for the tsar in fact made determined – and expensive – efforts to avert calamity, at least in Moscow and the larger towns. At the start of the famine, in 1601, he passed laws to fix the price of bread. He also ordered his agents to hand out food and money to the starving, and in Moscow his men were soon feeding 70,000 people a day. Boris used his own funds, and his grain stores, to keep his people alive, and when they went on dying he paid for their shrouds. When the snow started falling in the summer of 1602, however, his soldiers were unable to stem the influx of refugees. Speculators converged on Moscow to claim the free food he intended for the city’s poor. The tsar’s own agents were the greediest of all. ‘The poor, the lame, the blind, the deaf … fell dead like animals in the street,’ Massa reported. ‘With my own eyes I have seen very rich secretaries, dressed as beggars, slip among those receiving alms.’ The people of Godunov’s nearungovernable capital must have wondered, at the height of the famine, if God were not punishing them for crowning a tsar who did not have genuine royal blood.

And then the portents started to appear. ‘At about this time,’ Massa relates, ‘a series of terrible prodigies and apparitions occurred in Moscow, almost always at night and almost always in the vicinity of the tsar’s palace.’ The frightened guards maintained that ‘they had seen a chariot in the sky drawn by six horses and driven by a Pole, who cracked his whip above the palace, crying out in such terrible fashion that several soldiers of the guard fled to their quarters in terror’. A scourge from Poland was indeed poised to destroy Boris and to unleash a war. The Dutchman (who had books to sell), described it as ‘one of the strangest events to be recounted since the beginning of the world’.
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Tsar Boris had withdrawn from public life. The strain was telling on his health, but even in the deepest chambers of the Kremlin, his demons would give him no rest. The most persistent source of worry felt like vengeance from a ghost, for it concerned the shade of the dead boy, Prince Dmitry of Uglich. At first the tale was just a whisper, and Boris did no more than punish the gossips and spy on the crowds. But soon the facts were too disturbing to ignore. A man who claimed to be the last surviving son of Ivan the Terrible, the people’s only living hope of a true prince, had entered Russia from Poland and was attracting followers in the south-west. Whatever his identity, the man himself was flesh and blood, and by 1604, when rumours that he had crossed Russia’s borders reached Boris’ ears, he had already raised an army with help from his sponsors in Poland-Lithuania. Boris attempted to dismiss the tale as a ruse by his enemies: the Poles would use a monkey to embarrass Russia if it suited them. Within a few months, however, the man who called himself Dmitry Ivanovich had established a court of his own on Russian soil. At the end of 1604, his army inflicted its first significant defeat on Boris’ troops in a campaign to take Moscow and seize the crown.