Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (24 page)

Gosiewski also ordered the destruction of any district where troublemakers might have taken shelter. With the approval of the terrified boyars, parts of Moscow were set alight. ‘Out of this,’ wrote a German diplomat called Adam Olearius, who heard it all from witnesses two decades later, ‘came such a colossal fire that the whole great city of Moscow, except for the Kremlin and the stone churches, was reduced to ashes in two days.’
⁹⁹
Only the lines of ruined chimneys, like accusing fingers, suggested where rows of houses had stood before the massive fire took hold. For preaching his fierce anti-Polish views, Hermogen was imprisoned in the Chudov Monastery. What remained of Moscow was then looted over several days. When there was nothing left that looked worth stealing, the mercenaries dug in to wait for Sigismund behind the Kremlin’s smoke-blackened walls. Sharing the fortress with them, the monks in the Chudov fasted and prayed, while just across the citadel’s internal square, below Godunov’s gleaming tower, the members of the boyar council, like the woebegone hosts of a squatters’ commune, huddled with their skeleton clerical staff.

In 1611, the state of Muscovy ceased to exist. There was no legitimate government, no ruler, and the capital was occupied by foreign troops. Smolensk had fallen to the Poles, Novgorod was in Swedish hands, and much of the most productive countryside elsewhere had been abandoned or ruined by fighting. What saved the Russian lands from final dismemberment was not a tsar, nor the Kremlin’s fabled charisma, but the people themselves. Hermogen, now starving to death in his cell, wrote letter after letter as he weakened, and his passionate calls to arms were smuggled out of the Chudov Monastery to monks and waiting citizens along the Volga and in the north-east. The Orthodoxy that he invoked meant a range of different things, but piety combined with guilt and shame, hatred of the devil and the foreigner, and love of homeland and the local saints made it a powerful mix. Among the thousands who heeded the call to liberate the Russian people was a trader in the Volga town of Nizhnyi-Novgorod called Kuzma Minin. By 1612, the army that he helped to found, led by the soldier-prince Dmitry Pozharsky, became the force the Poles feared most. Along with several other military bands, especially the one now under the command of the nationalist leader Prince Dmitry Trubetskoi, it might have established a separate state within the wider Russian land. Instead, the combined militia set its sights on the Kremlin. The truth was that no fortress in Russia could command a comparable measure of sacred power.

For another eighteen months, however, the Kremlin was still occupied by a dwindling band of foreign mercenaries. As ever, it was a little universe in its own right. Moscow had become a wasteland, food supplies were scarce, and no news of the future ever seemed to come, but like all armies the garrison complained the most when it was not paid. The boyar council had no cash to its own name, so it began to loot the Treasury. This was a quasi-government matter, so the first round involved melting the gold and silver plate down for coins. The money, struck in the tsars’ mint in 1611, was stamped with the name of Tsar Wladislaw. But treasure has a magic of its own, and soon Gosiewski and members of the Russian elite were packing up sables (hundreds of them), removing gems, and helping themselves to bolts of velvet and fantastic golden robes.
¹⁰⁰
Predictably, with such a glut, the price of gold and other treasure soon dropped heavily against more mundane goods, and gold chains scarcely bought a single cabbage, let alone a loaf of bread. If they could find a route out through the lines of walls, inventive troops now started to desert.

Even Gosiewski did not stay until the end. Before they quit the Kremlin in the spring of 1612, the hetman and his closest retinue removed the most valuable of the royal crowns, insignia and other precious items from the heyday of the Riurikids. The so-called Cap of Godunov, which blazed with two enormous Sri Lankan sapphires, was one of the occupiers’ most valuable prizes, but the mercenaries also took a crown intended for the first Dmitry and a gold staff decorated with jewels.
¹⁰¹
The golden cap of Ivan Kalita vanished, too, and so did icons, crosses, gems and furs.
¹⁰²
Some of this booty found its way across the border – two jewel-encrusted objects of devotion, an icon and a reliquary, landed in Munich in 1614, where they remain in the Schatzkammer of the Residenz
¹⁰³
– but much was plundered by the cossack bands that preyed on any traveller who lingered on his journey west. And Russia was impoverished whoever took the gems. The looting of the Treasury was a primitive version of capital flight, and where the current generation has Swiss bank accounts, the thieves of 1612 buried any gold that they could not contrive to smuggle out. ‘Unbelievable wealth, in the form of gold, silver, precious stones, and other valuable things, was seized and sent to Poland,’ reported Olearius, and ‘for amusement the soldiers loaded large single pearls in their firearms and shot them in the air.’

For several months after Gosiewski’s departure, the remnants of the garrison clung on. By the summer of 1612, most of Moscow had been taken in the name of Russia’s people, and only the Kremlin and Kitai-gorod remained in boyar and Polish control. Cut off from almost every regular supply, the Kremlin mutated from army slum to charnel-house. In September the first soldiers began to starve. A foreign merchant who visited the Cathedral of the Dormition discovered a sack full of human heads and legs in a shallow grave near the walls. Beyond the Kremlin, starving Muscovites stopped venturing out, for there were rumours that hungry Polish troops stalked the suburbs at night in search of succulent meat; the Kremlin itself became a symbol of dread. Behind its walls, the mercenaries fought over the bones of dead comrades, took shots at crows, and duelled for the corpses of the rats.
¹⁰⁴
From 3,000, the garrison had shrunk to roughly 1,500 men. It took till October for the liberators to break through, and by that time the citadel was little better than a morgue.

No sacred site was undespoiled.
¹⁰⁵
As they counted their dead, people were unlikely to mourn the precious manuscripts and books that had been burned, the history that they had lost for ever.
¹⁰⁶
An outsider might even have thought that this was a good time for Russian patriots to start afresh. The people had rescued their country from destruction, the tsars were dead, and now a new sort of elite, perhaps some form of parliament, could plan a better, more enlightened future for everyone. But though the Russian people had indeed acquired a voice, the impulse of the time turned out to be conservative. The nation was still at war on many fronts (the Swedes and Poles each held substantial chunks of Russian territory), the Kremlin was a gaping ruin, and the old elite, the great boyars, had failed everyone. But for all that, the past – in foggy, tinted, and romantic form – seemed safer than divisive and untried alternatives. Of all the things that had been taken or destroyed in 1612, after all, it was not Godunov’s sapphire crown, let alone the piles of plate, that people mourned. The loss that really rankled, as Russians prepared to build the Kremlin and their government anew, was Ivan the Terrible’s cruel staff, the one that had been carved from the magical horn of a unicorn.
¹⁰⁷

5

Eternal Moscow

Four decades after the Troubles ended, a Syrian priest arrived in Moscow on the coat-tails of his father, the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch. He is known to Europeans as Paul of Aleppo, and his travels made a writer of him. Paul’s charm was that he noticed things: the pearls and beading on a bishop’s cope, the rancid smell of raw meat on a tribesman’s breath. In our age of political correctness, you can read him for the grumpiness alone. As his visit to Russia dragged on, young Paul was nearly felled on several occasions by the strictness of his hosts’ religious fasts. The stench of Russia’s unwashed monks disgusted him. He found the interminable holy rituals exhausting too, and seldom seemed to end a day without complaining of his aching legs and back. And then there was the cruel, the intolerable cold; the poor Syrian’s ‘hands and feet and nose were nearly bitten off’ by that on several occasions. The first of these, in early January 1655, was the result of an outdoor ceremony to mark the Feast of Epiphany. At the end of it, predictably, Paul and his father ‘were so much affected by the cold, that we were unable to perform mass in the Cathedral’.

The ordeal took place around a platform on the Moscow river ice. From the first lines, the Syrian’s description has an eerily familiar ring. Each January, he wrote,

they construct a large inclosure of paling on this [Moscow] river, for it flows near the Imperial Palace; and the Patriarch goes forth with the Heads of Clergy and of the Convents, and the whole of the inferior clergy, in their robes, two and two, in grand procession to … the Water-gate. The Emperor follows them with his Great Officers of State, on foot, and wearing his crown; but at the moment they begin the Prayer, he uncovers his head, and remains until the conclusion, thus exposed to the dreadful severity of the cold.

It happened that in January 1655 the tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov (ruled 1645–76), was not in Moscow, but in any other year he would have waited for his icy dose of river water while the court stood by and watched. Thereafter, by custom, ‘his majesty returns to his palace on his royal sledge, which is covered inside with red velvet, and is studded on the outside with gold and silver nails. The caparison of the horses is made of sable furs.’
¹

A century after the first Englishmen witnessed it, here was the Muscovite Epiphany ritual again. Here, too, were all the velvet and the gold, the courtiers, the splendid priests. The contrast with the Kremlin of just forty-three years previously could scarcely have been more extreme. In 1612, the idea of a royal sledge, and even of a royal backside to sit down in it, would have seemed almost ludicrous. There had been no tsar then, and it was far from certain that the Treasury still ran to a passable crown, let alone the gorgeous robes that courtiers had worn in other times. As the Syrians prepared to meet the sovereign in his Kremlin court in 1655, however, they laboured through the same long preparations as had Jenkinson and Chancellor a century before. They, too, were ushered into the Kremlin’s awe-inspiring hall, where the tsar presided over a court of ‘grandees … in dresses loaded with gold, pearls, and precious-stones’. Aleksei’s crown, ‘resembling a high calpack’, was ‘covered with large pearls and the most precious gems’, and his yellow brocade cape was fringed with so much gold and lace and coloured stone ‘as to dazzle the sight’.
²
A feast awaited in the Faceted Palace. ‘The august Emperor was sitting in the centre,’ his guest noted, ‘at a large table entirely covered with silver.’
³

For anyone who knew the recent history, this scene may well have appeared strange enough, but Moscow’s air of timelessness was even more incongruous when set against the turmoil to the west. The English took things to extremes in their experiment with revolution, but by Paul of Aleppo’s time the challenges to traditional authority were surfacing in almost every corner of Europe. Thanks to the likes of Galileo and Descartes, indeed, even the universe was threatening to break out of the frame that religion had made for it. The first half of the seventeenth century was a time of adventure. It was the era of the Pilgrim Fathers and the
Mayflower,
of the Dutch in Connecticut and the first scholars at Harvard. Explorers ventured north to Baffin Bay and south and eastwards to Tasmania; back home, in London and Paris, attempts were made (with mixed success) to sell the public a new drink called coffee. Most crucially of all, the science of war grew ever more sophisticated, mainly because the European world was almost always under arms. The guns that craftsmen made became more accurate, and battle-formations grew ever more deadly. Soldiers were trained as professionals, drill and discipline refined. The pace of change promised to make early modern Europe richer and more powerful than any other region on the planet. In this exhilarating context, the Russian court looked almost cataleptic.

The point, however, is that the illusion generated by the Kremlin was a deliberate contrivance. Like the regalia and golden robes, the ceremonies that Paul described were replicas. The luxury of standing still had not been open to Russia at the beginning of the seventeenth century because it had no stable ground on which to stand. The old regime had disappeared, the old landscape was wrecked. Perhaps in part because of that, the ruling families longed for nothing more than the imagined ease of their grandfathers’ day. The civil war that had ended in 1612 had never been a revolution, after all, and the new tsar’s accession was not a coup. As the smoke above the Kremlin cleared at the end of 1612, there was no sense, at court or beyond it, that fresh ideas could possibly be better than remembered pieties.
⁴
If anything, the trials of war had reinforced the widespread yearning for a golden age, a time when the True Tsar had sat in splendour on his throne.

The elite appeared to hold this line throughout the next half-century. As Russia’s government regrouped, the leading role was played, at first, by the ancient ruling caste. A fragile order was restored, and the heirs of the old nobility (and even some surviving members from the previous age) clutched at the symbols, prayers and relics of the past in a bid to shore up their pre-eminence. The tsar – once they had found their man – was meant to guarantee stability; the church, which Hermogen had cast in a heroic mould, would then oblige with all the settings and the bells.
⁵
Throughout, another element of continuity was provided by officials that the government employed. In 1613, more than half the staff of the country’s
prikazy,
far from all of whom were noble, had been working in offices of some kind (not always in Moscow) since Godunov’s time, and clerical jobs themselves were more or less hereditary.
⁶
There were no schools in the Muscovite state, let alone professional academies, so fathers trained their sons for the limited pool of posts. The country had been shattered and the Treasury was bare, yet here again was repetition, the memory of things as they were surely meant to be.