Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (30 page)

*   *   *

‘The seventeenth century,’ a Russian historian observes, ‘was an epoch marked by changes so radical that the very principles by which Russian culture defined itself were transformed.’
¹¹³
Moscow had witnessed all of this; its Kremlin nurtured much of the important change despite itself. But the old citadel continued to face both past and future simultaneously, as if its course were being set by a demented double-headed eagle. Most cultures evolve by increments, and the pace of change is often determined by the tastes of educated city-dwellers in organized professions or guilds. In Russia, there were no such groups, and the people’s longing for stable and unchanging justice under God and tsar made innovations at the top seem positively dangerous. The tension could be so profound that some writers speak of a late-seventeenth-century cultural crisis.
¹¹⁴
Since they rejected every foreign innovation from tobacco to printed books, the Old Believers in particular were appalled by what they viewed as the apostasy, the decadence, of court life in this era. Their protest burned on for decades, but when it combined with more focused and material grievances the result was explosive. Old Believer influence was strong inside the hereditary corps of
streltsy,
and in 1682, the old world and the new collided in a bloody revolt.

The rising coincided with the death of Aleksei’s successor, Tsar Fedor. The young man had been ailing for some time, but all the same there were rumours of poisoning. Worse, an elective assembly, convoked by the nobility and drawn from a narrow group within Moscow, broke the usual rules of succession when it announced an unexpected choice of tsar. After Fedor, the next in line was his brother, Ivan Alekseyevich (1666–96). This teenager was pious and dutiful, but he was also severely handicapped and physically weak. A son from Aleksei’s second marriage, however, had impressed everyone who set eyes on him. In 1682, Peter Alekseyevich was just ten, but the assembly elected him unanimously.

It was a reasonable course, but some outsiders saw the substitution as a plot to unseat the true tsar, Ivan. Traditionalists also muttered that Peter’s maternal relatives, the Naryshkins, were conspiring to take the throne. Disgruntled
streltsy
expected no less, and they seized the chance to scapegoat the unloved boyars for a range of other grievances that included the cruelty of their own officers, the ‘Latin’ innovations in the prayer book, the unhindered progress of the Antichrist and their own poor pay. Just weeks later, on 15 May, someone started a rumour that Tsarevich Ivan had been murdered by evildoers in the Kremlin. The date coincided with the anniversary of another alleged murder, the death of Prince Dmitry of Uglich, in 1591, and the obvious parallels were drawn. The
streltsy
overran the old fortress, first to discover the truth (they were allowed to see the live Ivan) and then to vent some pent-up rage. Their victims included the unpopular head of the
streletskii prikaz,
Yu. A. Dolgoruky, against whom they had genuine grievance. But the musketeers also turned on the relatives and supporters of the supposed ‘usurper’, Peter, including his uncle, Ivan Naryshkin, who was believed to have tried on the crown and now died on the pikes for it. A number of other unfortunates, including several foreign physicians, were hounded to their deaths for sorcery and poisoning. Traditionalists to the last, the
streltsy
hacked most of their victims to pieces by hand.
¹¹⁵

The tsar-elect, Peter Alekseyevich, was also brought before the terrifying crowd. At one point, the ten-year-old was standing next to his mother and a powerful kinsman, Artamon Matveyev, when rough hands seized the latter and threw him to his death among the knife-sharp blades in the palace square. Some think this early horror followed Peter through his life; his manic stare and twitching muscles later alarmed the foreign visitors who noticed them.
¹¹⁶
But at least he lived, and he was even permitted to take his crown. After frantic negotiations, the court agreed to anoint both boys at once (a double throne was made for them in the Kremlin workshops). Since one was a simpleton and the other a child, Aleksei Mikhailovich’s formidable daughter Sofiya, Peter’s half-sister, promptly assumed the powers of regent. In fact, this was the solution for which the ambitious and educated princess had been scheming all along.

Throughout Sofiya’s regency, the Kremlin stood for Muscovite tradition in a city whose court continued to be torn between the old world and the new. Thick-set and bearded men, their long robes glittering with pearls, could be observed through steamy windows in the palace, but the forward-looking were now learning German in the foreign quarter’s smokiest taverns. Dressed like an empress, Sofiya ran a dazzling government with the aid of her advisor, Vasily Golitsyn. Its high point, in 1686, was a Treaty of Eternal Peace with Poland. The terms, which were generous to Russia, included the transfer of Kiev to the Muscovites in perpetuity.
¹¹⁷
Closer to home, and following a major fire in 1682, Golitsyn (whose own mansion was as sumptuous as any royal house) supervised much-needed renovations in the Kremlin, including repairs to the Faceted Palace. The work added complex new detail to a building from the age of Ivan III.
¹¹⁸

But the Indian summer of Muscovite Russia was destined to be brief. Peter’s star was rising. The young man spent his teens in the suburban residence at Preobrazhenskoe, the name of which, appropriately, derives from the Russian for ‘transfiguration’. The pious
streltsy,
with their fixation on words and symbols, would have been well advised to notice that. As tsar, Peter would overturn their traditions and then destroy their entire world. One of his earliest acts was an assault on the notion of time itself. He soon despatched the church’s calendar, bringing Russia more closely into line with Latin Europe and the
anno domini.
He also got rid of the azure clock over the famous Saviour Gate. When it came to machines of any kind, this emperor had northern European tastes. In the next century, the Kremlin clock that he commissioned in Amsterdam would cut each Russian day and night, with military precision, into twelve exactly equal hours.

6

Classical Orders

On 6 January 1696, the twenty-nine-year-old co-tsar Ivan Alekseyevich attended the annual Epiphany service on the Moscow river. The tsar himself wore gold, the court their splendid damasks and their furs. There were glinting lines of
streltsy,
cantors, icons, priests in pearl-encrusted robes. It was a classic celebration of the feast day, and it was also one of the last.
¹
Just over three weeks later, on 29 January, Tsar Ivan died. By custom, the funeral had to be held within twenty-four hours; Ivan’s took place the following afternoon. The corpse was washed and wrapped in golden cloth. It made its final journey on the royal funeral sledge, a mere few dozen yards across the square, to the sixteenth-century Cathedral of the Archangel Michael. The patriarch presided, and the coffin was accompanied by a procession of icon-bearing priests. Their every step towards the tomb seemed to be answered by the rhythmic tolling of a bell. Behind the sledge came the lay mourners, all in black, chief among whom was the dead man’s half-brother and co-tsar, Peter, and also (well behind the men), his widow, the doughty Praskovya Saltykova.
²
The Kremlin nuns sang burial hymns (they later presented an itemized fee). There were candles, icons, incense, prayers. There was also, probably, a spike in crime. Solemn royal events like these were almost always a bonanza for the city’s murderers and thieves.
³

Twenty-nine years later, in the chill of another northern January, the funeral candles were lit again. In the brand-new city of St Petersburg, four hundred miles north-west of Moscow, the late Ivan’s erstwhile co-tsar was dead. This time, there would be no procession and no burial in the Kremlin. Indeed, the funeral did not happen at all for several weeks. In a complete break with the tradition of centuries, Peter’s corpse was put on display in a special hall in St Petersburg’s new Winter Palace. There were icons and prayers, but the open casket also lay among a fine collection of military honours, and the backdrop included classical columns and a set of four white pyramids.

There was no precedent for this strange scene. The late emperor’s advisors had to invent the pageantry themselves. Having agreed that Peter’s body should be interred in the new Peter-Paul Cathedral, their problem was to arrange a procession from the hall where he lay in state to the mausoleum on the other side of the frozen River Neva. On the day of the funeral, 10 March 1725, there were drummers and even trumpeters at the head of this cortège. The
streltsy
had been abolished years before, so the route was lined with 10,638 uniformed troops in the new style. A counterpoint to the inevitable tolling bells came from the deeper bass of cannon on the nearby fortress walls; these fired at one-minute intervals for what seemed like hours as the line of courtiers, priests, military officers and foreign guests made their way over nearly half a mile of ice.
⁴
There was no patriarch, there were no nuns. The sight would have been unimaginable thirty years before.

The eighteenth century was the Kremlin’s classical interlude. For five hundred years, the citadel had carried Moscow’s royal culture like an ark, preserving the illusion of genetic continuity throughout a grand succession of catastrophes. During Peter’s reign, many of the fragile trophies of that past were washed away as a reforming tide engulfed court politics and high culture. First came the liquidation of the
streltsy
and the complete shake-up of the court. Then the office of patriarch was abolished, while further moves reduced the church’s power and wealth. But the most far-reaching of Peter’s reforms was the decision to shift his court to St Petersburg, leaving the Kremlin orphaned and marooned. By the time his grandson’s wife, the German-born Empress Catherine the Great, assumed the throne in 1762 the citadel was no longer the religious and administrative heart of a backward-looking government. Instead, it had become another site for the display and exercise of power, essential for some ceremonial purposes, expensive and magnificent enough, but not the sort of thing a Royal Person wanted every day. It had its uses, it was full of historical curiosities, and the troublesome Muscovites remained attached to it, but try as One might (and One certainly did) it was an impossible place in which to conduct any kind of civilized life.

*   *   *

It is always hard to picture the historical Kremlin, not least because the current incarnation is so memorable. The fact that there were so few drawings, and certainly none that used the European techniques of perspective, makes the task harder still. But at the start of Peter’s reign, in the final years of the seventeenth century, the images began to change.
⁵
Peter was the first Russian ruler to encourage the arts of printing and engraving on a serious scale, and certainly the first to put them to secular use. It was a Dutchman, Adriaan Schoenebeck, who taught him what a good engraver could achieve.
⁶
Schoenebeck’s stepson, Pieter Picart (1668–1737), and Russian colleagues such as Ivan and Aleksei Zubov, went on to record all of the most important landscapes of Peter’s reign, including (in 1707–8) a famous
View of Moscow from the Stone Bridge.
⁷
Thanks to perspective, and thanks also to the rigour of the artists’ training, the Kremlin was captured in three dimensions at last, and in years to come the size and quality of paper available to the country’s elite printers began to permit a broad, even a comprehensive, view.

When I try to grasp what it was like to live inside the Kremlin during Peter’s reign, however, I still find monochrome engravings strangely dumb. They are beautiful, of course, but part of their beauty is their very poise. Classical landscape-artists were not really trained in the chaos of cultural meltdown. For that, I think, we need to imagine sound. Peter loved noise. Indeed, he made so much of it that Kremlin residents may well have waved him off in dazed relief each time he saddled up for the two-hour ride to the royal hunting estate of Preobrazhenskoe. It was there that he preferred to spend his leisure time, especially until the later 1690s. Once he was gone, the Kremlin saints could sleep safe in their silver crypts, while priests and monks filled the surrounding air with unaccompanied, mesmeric, chant.
⁸
Across the square and up canopied steps, meanwhile, the royal women were disturbed by nothing more strident than the protests of their captive parrots. There were church bells, of course, and the chiming of Galloway’s clock, but these were noises that the Kremlin staff controlled. The fortress was accustomed to being the master of its own soundscape.

The first intrusion may have been the banging of a child’s drum. Even as a boy, Peter played soldiers with the palace dwarfs, but as he grew the make-believe became more serious. This tsar was always drawn to guns and ropes and bags of tools. By his early teens he had created two regiments at Preobrazhenskoe. Although they were dismissed as play-soldiers at first, the Semenovskys and the Preobrazhenskys were the forerunners of his future elite Guards. Their ranks included a group of his own friends, some idle members of the palace staff, and a sprinkling of regular soldiers and foreign officers, but their exercises quickly ceased to be mere games. The cannonballs that Peter’s soldiers fired were real; his bullets sometimes left men bleeding in the grass. Peter himself often played the role of bombardier, a rank and filer who took orders from above, but no-one ever doubted whose authority could kill.