Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (32 page)

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Not all Peter’s reforms hit Russia out of the blue. The church had been in turmoil since the days of Filaret. The tsar’s impatience with clerical meddling (he had dismissed the patriarch’s attempt to save the
streltsy
in 1698
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) reflected a broader eighteenth-century consensus that religion should be confined to its own, rapidly shrinking, spiritual sphere.
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And the point of many other changes was the need for military reform. Ivan the Terrible’s reign, and the succeeding century of trouble and revolt, had stalled all possibility that Russia might become a modern European state. Thereafter, reformers had been thwarted by their colleagues’ fear, and often also by a lack of money. But Russia could not stand up to the Europeans if it did not regroup and rearm. Merely to hold on to Ukraine (and Peter always wanted more), the tsar needed to bring his armies, and the fiscal arrangements that supported them, into line with those of powers that confronted Russia across the Dnieper and the Don. Peter’s radicalism certainly offended and shocked some of the Muscovite elite, but their own collective sense of purpose had become so weak that they could not agree to resist him.

The style and scale of change effectively amounted to a revolution. Classical references – to Bacchus, to Victory, to Jupiter – are so familiar that it is hard to imagine the shock of their appearance in late-seventeenth-century Russia. Up to that point, few Russian nobles had set foot abroad, and almost none had the least idea about classical art or poetry. Those who listened to their priests would have considered statues (whether clothed or not) to be idolatrous. As for the mass of Russia’s people, the citizens who bowed and crossed themselves whenever they walked past a church, Rome and all its heresies were abhorrent. But in the early eighteenth century, an entire pantheon of antique deities, centuries of classical art, and bewildering multitudes of figurative statuary, much of it in celebration of the female nude, burst into Orthodox Russia with the suddenness of an invading horde. As Lindsey Hughes, Peter’s British biographer, perceptively observed, no-one outside the court elite could even understand the references. When a clerk was cataloguing recent acquisitions to Peter’s Armoury collection in 1701, he listed a silver globe, on top of which were seated ‘two men: one large one in a hat, with wings on his hat and his feet’.
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He clearly had no idea that the figure in question was Mercury.

New buildings changed the feel of Moscow on an even grander scale. First came the Sukharev Tower, which Peter commissioned in the 1690s. Originally a gatehouse on the road that he had ridden to the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery, this became a landmark as imposing as the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower. From 1701, its third floor housed Peter’s new School of Mathematics and Navigation, while its upper chambers were used as an astronomical observatory.
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Another tower (at just under 266 feet, briefly one of Moscow’s tallest) belonged to a church on the city estate of Peter’s favourite, a courtier of humble origins called Alexander Menshikov. Until it was reshaped by lightning, its narrow spire prefigured those of the future St Petersburg. Peter himself ordered transformations on the margins of Red Square, first by removing (yet again) the hazardous impromptu market that spilled into it and then, in 1699, by constructing an imposing three-storey pharmacy, part of a wider campaign against folk remedies and general peasant ignorance.
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As the ever-caustic Korb observed, not all were pleased. ‘Formerly the people used to live to a great and reverend age, using nothing except simples,’ the Habsburg diplomat recalled. ‘Now they die in a more costly fashion, and, as some complain, much earlier.’
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In the midst of all this rebuilding, in June 1701, the Kremlin was all but consumed by a particularly devastating fire. The flames swept through the whole fortress, destroying every wooden mansion and gutting even the stone ones. For years to come, some palace buildings were left without roofs, doors or windows. Many offices of the
prikazy,
including the prestigious Foreign Affairs Chancellery, were burned to the ground, and though rebuilding began in 1703, not all were restored. Large numbers of officials were left to improvise accommodation or to move out in search of better premises in Kitai-gorod and the White City.
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But Peter viewed the devastation as an opportunity. Almost at once, he ordered the most severely affected site, a large triangle near the Nikolsky gates, to be cleared, and in January 1702, Kremlin staff began to record the arrival of ‘all manner of supplies’ for an enormous new building.
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The proposed arsenal was to be Peter’s landmark in the Kremlin. An engraving by Adriaan Schoenebeck shows an entrance flanked by classical columns and pediments, Roman gods, and a fearsome double-headed Russian eagle. Beneath the eagle, twenty-six crests, representing Russia’s expanding list of provinces, were added after consultation with the Foreign Affairs
prikaz.
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The local masons protested when a Saxon, Christopher Conrad, was hired to oversee the work, and more recriminations followed in the winter of 1713, when the half-completed roof caved in.
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It was another ten years before the scaffolding came down, but by that time there was no resisting the imported European style.

The new brand of classicism was an awkward fit inside the Kremlin, and the truth was that a tsar who wanted wide streets and straight building-lines could never have lived in comfort in the venerable fort. Peter yearned to find a place for his own version of Moscow’s German quarter, a suburb so neat that an Italian visitor thought the houses ‘looked like caskets’.
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The tsar imagined nights spent in the mixed (and raucous) company he had kept with Franz Lefort, days passed in the style of the court he had seen in Habsburg Vienna. From that perspective, the Kremlin was no better than a nagging maiden aunt who stubbornly refused to die (but whose riches were too precious to renounce entirely). When he rejected the constraints of the old place, Peter broke the mould of Muscovite politics. Soon, he would start presenting himself as Peter I, dropping the formal patronymic favoured by his predecessors. No longer tied to genealogy, no longer servant to the ancient sites and sacred rituals, he could determine for himself where power was to be exercised, what symbols it would develop, and also how to use the Kremlin spaces whose disposition had prescribed, for centuries, the rituals of his forefathers.
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He would, of course, build a new capital as well. The most protracted military campaign of Peter’s life opened with an alliance against Sweden in 1700. The tsar’s Grand Embassy had visited Riga on its European tour, and Peter now claimed that the Swedes had slighted him. There were also rumours, probably fabricated, that the Swedes themselves were preparing to attack Russia’s northern trading cities, including Novgorod, Pskov and Archangel.
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In reality, Peter and his allies, Christian V of Denmark and Augustus II of Poland and Saxony, may well have decided to take advantage of the inexperience of Sweden’s new ruler, the eighteen-year-old Charles XII. But the calculation backfired. The austere Swede proved an even more determined warrior than Peter, and in November 1700 the Russians, who had fielded four times as many troops as Charles, sustained a punishing defeat at Narva on the Baltic coast. More than 10,000 Russian lives were lost, 150 Russian cannon captured, and Peter (shamefully) was forced to flee.
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Russia’s military iron age began with a catastrophe.

The victories that followed probably owed more to Charles’ low opinion of Peter than to any Russian prowess in the field. From 1701, the main part of the Swedish army was occupied in wars with Poland and Saxony. Confronted with a smaller force, the Russians won a series of battles, capturing the fortress of Nöteborg on Lake Ladoga in October 1702. The following spring, Russian troops took a Swedish settlement called Nyenkans further down the River Neva. After a boat-trip to assess the strategic possibilities of the low-lying delta, Peter chose an island downstream, which the Finns called Yannisaari, for his own defensive military fort. The site was dedicated by Russian priests on Peter’s name day in the summer of 1703. Poor as it seemed, remote and bleak, this was the future kernel of St Petersburg.
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Moscow paid an ugly price for these adventures. For years, there was a real danger that the Swedes might strike directly at the Russian capital. The renaissance Kremlin would have been an easy target for their European guns, so Peter ordered that the citadel should be refortified. In 1707, he brought his best siege-engineers to excavate and build eighteen massive bastions to Dutch designs.
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The work meant shifting mountains of soil and timber in the centre of Russia’s busiest city, displacing street vendors and merchants’ halls, and even ploughing up Aleksei Mikhailovich’s beloved apothecary garden. At first, the builders dragged their feet, constrained by lack of money, but in October 1707 Peter’s son, Aleksei Petrovich, suggested that each bastion be assigned to a specific boyar. The list that was eventually approved reads like a last roll call of historic Muscovy – the first two bastions were assigned to Peter and his son, but then came Golitsyn, Dolgoruky, Saltykov, Prozorovsky and all the great dynastic names.
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It was the most ambitious addition to the Kremlin’s fortifications since the time of Ivan III. Thirty thousand labourers were involved in the project, which was the largest of its time in Russia. When it was finished, a jumble of civil buildings and market stalls had been swept aside, and the Kremlin was trapped behind a double row of freshly turned ramparts.
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The change reflected recent European military science, but it cut through the medieval city-centre like a scar.

Peter’s armies ultimately won. In June 1709, a Swedish force under Charles XII’s leadership was defeated at Poltava in central Ukraine. The celebrations were compulsory, lavish, and loud. There were fireworks and cannon-rounds, fanfares, drummers and Russian pipes. The centre-piece, in January 1710, was a triumphal procession through Moscow. Peter entered his capital on horseback behind the Preobrazhensky regiment, his route adorned by seven wooden arches in the classical style with inscriptions praising Russia’s ‘Mars’, its ‘Hercules’, the emperor who conquered like a Roman god. The temporary structures cost small fortunes to design and build, but Russian nobles now vied jealously to pay for them. Aleksei Zubov produced the usual commemorative engravings – orderly, narrative, classical in design – and they show processions in the European style, devoid of long robes, fur hats, or hirsute boyars.
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Every detail was carefully recorded, from the sword in the hand of a carved gladiator on an arch to the tricorne hats that the real soldiers wore, but the Kremlin, landlocked relic of a different age, barely figured anywhere at all. Peter used the fortress merely as an extra prop. Its towers made a good support for garlands, and its gates looked grand when they were lit with thousands of his multi-coloured lamps.
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Peter’s foreign policy ensured Russia’s place at the European table. Muscovy was all but forgotten as a new imperial Russia took the stage. From 1721, when Peter signed the Peace of Nystad with Sweden, the Russian empire, which already stretched from the Pacific to the Dnieper, came to embrace the Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga, parts of Karelia, and islands in the Baltic Sea. At the heart of it all, however, the Kremlin entered an age of eclipse. The turning point was probably 1711, when the bulk of government business shifted to St Petersburg. As Peter departed from Moscow, so did his wife, his family, and the usual troupe of guardsmen, flunkeys and informers. The citadel of the old state must have felt strangely empty.

The noblemen themselves were torn between the comforts and familiarity of Moscow and the chance of promotion at Peter’s Baltic court. In 1714, Peter resolved the matter for at least a thousand of them when he issued an order that forced them to relocate, with their households, to his new city on the Neva. According to a survey of 1701, there were forty-three significant households (
dvory
) inside the Kremlin walls at the start of Peter’s reign, five of which were headed by courtiers and the other thirty-eight by elite priests.
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Thirty years later, however, even that small total had been cut to ten. There had also been a reduction in the number of wealthy courtiers living at expensive addresses nearby.
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Everyone complained about the thieves and ruffians who seemed to have replaced them on Moscow’s exclusive and once-fashionable streets.
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Moscow remained the ‘first’ capital, but over time less and less of the sovereign’s business took place in the Kremlin itself. For years, Peter had held his meetings at Preobrazhenskoe; he issued numerous decrees from there. Only the great files of paper stayed in the Kremlin, stacking up in requisitioned rooms, many of which had never been designed as offices. To add to the problems of co-ordination, especially in war-time, Peter was constantly on the move. In 1711, in the interests of efficiency, the tsar created an entirely new body, the ten-man Senate, whose task it was to run the country on a daily basis whenever he was on campaign. For two years, this met in a building behind the Kremlin’s Annunciation Cathedral, but when the Senate moved north, all that was left (apart from a new, less glamorous, government for Moscow) was the paper. In years to come, reports would start alluding to activities by mice.
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