Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (27 page)

The greatest changes of all, however, were prompted by the demands of Russia’s expanding army. The Kremlin stores held glinting troves of armour: swords and daggers, axes, helmets, suits of mail, bows, arrows and guns in their thousands. Many were exquisite pieces designed for the tsar, though all were calculated to function in war. As late as the 1660s, swords and bow-and-arrow sets predominated in the collection, but most of these had started gathering dust. What counted now were muskets, carbines, pistols and artillery pieces. The tsars’ workshops made hundreds of them.
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It was one thing to manufacture a large stock of arms, however, and another altogether to put them to effective use on seventeenth-century battlefields. This was a lesson that the Russians had first learned during the Time of Troubles, when their country was invaded by the Swedes and Poles. As they faced professional troops from Europe for the first time, Russian
streltsy
and militia-men were appalled to find how ineffective their time-honoured methods of fighting had become. However much they might have disliked westerners, both Mikhail and then Aleksei Romanov were soon obliged to solicit their military advice.

The first group arrived in the 1630s. By then, officials from Moscow had scoured the Netherlands, England and the German lands in search of experts who might train and lead a Russian standing army. The days of traditional cavalry and
streltsy
units were drawing to a close; some of the latter ended up fulfilling their life-long service obligation to the tsar by working on his building-sites.
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The foreigners set to their task at once, collecting over 60,000 men and stiffening their ranks with well-paid recruits from their own countries (Germans, mainly, but also numbers of Scots).
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Most were equipped at the tsar’s expense, and many of their weapons had been fashioned in his Kremlin Armoury.
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By mid-century, Russia’s army, according to one careful estimate, was regularly absorbing an eighth of the country’s annual wealth.
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The reward came in 1654, nine years after Tsar Mikhail Romanov’s death, when his son and successor, Aleksei Mikhailovich, recaptured Smolensk, the city that the Poles had occupied since 1610. The victory was a cue for the old world, the land of golden robes and gazing saints, to stage one of its final pageants. In years to come, it would be the sheer number of Aleksei’s troops that outsiders admired.
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But earthly things like manpower were not the point for onlookers that day. Aleksei’s return was a festival of religious thanksgiving and dedication. Paul of Aleppo described the scene:

First came a banner accompanied by two drums beating, followed by the troops in three even ranks, in allusion to the name of the Trinity: if the banner was white, all the troops that followed it were dressed in white; if blue, those who followed it were dressed in blue; and so if it was red, or green, or pink, so as to include every possible colour. The order and arrangement appeared truly admirable, and they all moved forward, both infantry and cavalry, in the name of the Trinity. All the banners were new, having been recently made by the Emperor [i.e. the Kremlin workshops] before he set forth on his expedition. They were large, and much to be admired, astonishing the beholder with their beauty, the execution of the figures painted on them, and the richness of their gilding.
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The fall of Smolensk that was celebrated with those drums and banners paved the way for Moscow to negotiate for the control of Kiev (this was for a fixed term in the first instance) and also to extend into the territory of today’s Ukraine and parts of White Russia (a region roughly corresponding to modern Belarus). Another Muscovite expedition had reached the shores of the Pacific in 1637, but victory in the west brought the vast continental power, which now ruled almost the entire Russian world, directly into Europe’s orbit. It also brought Europe to the centre of the Kremlin court for good. Attracted by the prospects and the wealth, craftsmen and scholars from the ancient cities of Kiev and the old Rus south-west converged on Moscow in a renewed wave of intellectual and artistic migration. Unlike the specialists from England and the German lands, the new arrivals often came to stay, not least because they shared the Orthodox religion of their hosts. Their influence was unprecedented, for these people were insiders, not heretics. At the same time, however, their education and outlook were essentially European. No-one had guessed it, but the drum-beats of the holy court in 1655 would soon prove utterly inadequate to drown the clamour of relentless change.

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For all the Kremlin’s outward show of stability, the challenges were multiplying. Towards the end of Mikhail’s reign, a Swedish diplomat even concluded that some form of uprising in Moscow was imminent.
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Soon after, with a young Aleksei Mikhailovich on the throne, the prophecy was fulfilled. In 1648, the fortress was to witness violent revolt.

The Troubles had left the Russian people with a wariness of injustice and corruption round the throne. The death of the old sovereign brought these tensions to the surface. In the first years of Aleksei’s reign, suspicion focused on a magnate called Boris Morozov. This man had been the prince’s tutor, and he put that situation to good use. The late Tsar Mikhail’s body was scarcely cold in 1645 when Morozov awarded himself the posts of Treasurer and head of several key chancelleries. His hold on Aleksei was further strengthened through their women: the two men married a pair of sisters, the daughters of a nobleman called Ilya Miloslavsky.
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A delighted prince presented his tutor with a magnificent silver wedding carriage, covered inside and out with gold brocade and draped with costly sables. The upstart had soon built himself a palace in the Kremlin, installed his bride, and set about promoting his clients to influential positions at court. The most notorious of these were Levonty Pleshcheyev and Petr Trakhaniotov, another pair of brothers-in-law, and also Nazary Chistyi, a merchant who now doubled as a reforming bureaucrat. The conservative citizens of Moscow loathed the entire crew. Chistyi was closely associated with a hated new salt tax, but all four men were regarded as interlopers, cheats, and traitors to historic Russian ways.
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The sparks ignited on 1 June 1648. The tsar and his retinue had left the Kremlin on a pilgrimage, and as the royal group rode back an assembly of petitioners, greeting Aleksei with bread and salt, asked him to hear their grievances regarding ‘the intolerable great taxes and contributions, whereby they were overburdened’. They also had a list of specific complaints about Pleshcheyev. Aleksei listened in surprise, promised to consider the petition, and rode on into the Kremlin, but as his horse trotted away from the crowd the boyars and the guards behind him turned on the protesters. The documents their leaders had prepared were destroyed on the spot, the petitioners who had come nearest to the royal party were beaten, and a number of the most vocal were arrested.

The next day, when Aleksei appeared on the steps of his Kremlin palace to attend a church service, he found a larger and more angry crowd in the square below. They wanted him to put Pleshcheyev, their current hate-figure, on trial. They wanted the tsar’s views on their grievances, and they also wanted their arrested comrades to be freed. Aleksei withdrew into the palace, so it was Morozov’s handling of this second incident that turned the public anger into violence. The shopkeepers, small tradesmen and artisans of Moscow pressed and jostled in the Kremlin square. Taking charge, Morozov ordered the
streltsy
to drive the malefactors out and lock the fortress gates, but the
streltsy,
whose hereditary status had been downgraded when the tsar’s army was modernized, were no longer a reliable force. Instead of protecting the court, the elite guard turned on the man who had, as treasurer, reduced their wages. ‘The musketeers refused the order from Morozov,’ an anonymous Swedish writer recorded. ‘Some of them went to His Tsarist Majesty and announced that they … would willingly … protect him, but that they had no wish to make an enemy of the crowd for the sake of the tyrant and traitor.’
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More seriously still, the
streltsy
also told the crowd that they would take no steps to hold them back. ‘The streltses,’ runs another foreigner’s account, ‘whose pay being lessened and diminished, in so much, that they were not able to live by, took the Commons part.’
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The Kremlin now became a magnet for the protesters. The tsar appeared for a second time to remonstrate with the crowds, but his words had little effect. The mob stormed Morozov’s palace. The treasure inside, seemingly massed at their expense, silver carriage and all, drove them to a frenzy, and

all the stately and pretious things they found they hewed in pieces with shabolts and axes; the plate of gold and silver they did beate flat, the pretious pearles and other jewells they have bruised unto powder, they stampt and trampled them under feet, they flung them out of the windowes, and they suffered not the least thing to be carried away, crying alowd: To Naasi Kroof, that is to say, this is our blood.
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Real blood was also shed in quantities that day. Morozov managed to slip away, but one of his aides fell to his death as the boyar’s Kremlin palace was looted. Nazary Chistyi, who had been in bed recovering from a riding injury, was tracked down to his hiding-place and beaten to death. The German diplomat and traveller Adam Olearius, from whom Chistyi had wrung a grievous bribe, described the scene with little sympathy. The victim’s head, he gloated, ‘was so battered that he could no longer be recognised. Then he was cast into a manure pit, and boxes and trunks were thrown on top of him.’
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In desperation, the tsar agreed to surrender Pleshcheyev, and the wretched official was led out of the Kremlin through the Saviour Gate, accompanied by an executioner with an efficient-looking axe. Before the death sentence was even read, however, the mob had snatched the prisoner and clubbed him to death. ‘His head was beaten to such a pulp that his brains splattered over his face,’ Olearius recorded. ‘His clothing was torn off and his naked body dragged through the dirt.’
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The head itself was later hacked off by a monk, who muttered that the dead man had once had him cudgelled.

The Moscow crowd was focused, venting its rage on boyars, bureaucrats and a small group of the very wealthy. But someone was always bound to find supplies of drink. That afternoon, a posse of looters waded knee-deep in Morozov’s wine, and some of these would later drown. Outside, the city was growing calmer, but the day’s events held one last tragedy. By sunset fires had started in five separate places in Moscow. The blaze ripped through the sun-baked streets, killing hundreds, maybe thousands of citizens in its path. One writer estimates that up to 15,000 houses were destroyed; all agree that half the city burned.
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Some people said that Morozov himself had set the fires to cover his escape, but others believed the blaze to have been a curse, insisting that deliverance depended on the burning of Pleshcheyev’s bloody remains. The headless body was duly doused with vodka and dragged towards the embers. ‘As soon as the body began to burn,’ Olearius was assured, ‘the flames began dying down before the eyes of the astounded spectators, and went out.’
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In the aftermath of the fire, Aleksei sent the patriarch, together with two popular boyars, to remonstrate with the protesters. Trakhaniotov, who had fled Moscow, was captured and brought back for execution, but Aleksei begged for Morozov’s life in person, and as a compromise the treasurer was exiled to the Kirill-Beloozero Monastery ‘in perpetuity’. In the short term, the protesters had won, a victory that paid off, literally, as cash was handed out and some taxes reduced. There was even an interlude during which more congenial leaders, including Nikita Romanov, the tsar’s broad-minded uncle, replaced Morozov’s men in the Kremlin. Foreign observers reported a widespread change of government personnel, but the reform was short-lived. By the end of October, Morozov had returned to Moscow, and soon after that he and his surviving associates were back in power.
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There were revolts in other towns, but the tsar himself still commanded a visceral loyalty almost everywhere. In 1649, a sober and determined Aleksei called another Assembly of the Land to codify the laws, establish social hierarchies, and draw some of the venom from the public mood. The crowd had called for justice and its tsar responded with a legal code. The document has become famous for the restrictions it placed upon the peasant serfs, whose very limited right to quit their landlords’ farms was now removed entirely, permanently binding them to the land.
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This was a gesture to the struggling provincial militia-men, and there were more, affirming a view of the social order that was meant to curtail further change. But the currents of unrest were not so readily stilled. The many pressures of this era – on
streltsy
burdened by unwanted innovation, on townsmen labouring to pay the ever-higher rates of tax, and always on the righteous Orthodox who faced injustice at the hands of evil favourites – threatened to erupt into violence at almost any time. For the rest of the century, the Moscow crowd remained a volatile and angry chorus underneath the Kremlin walls.