Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (33 page)

As part of the same reform, the
prikazy
were replaced by ‘colleges’. Far from making government simpler, this second move led to a multiplication of offices, many of which remained in Moscow or retained an extensive set of sub-departments there. The noble politicians might have left, in other words, but those of lesser rank now moved into the fortress, installing servants, horses and wives. A number of palace buildings – notably those that had once served as bakeries and stores – were transformed into office-blocks and even unofficial tenements.
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With the administrators came the need for facilities, including a prison for offenders awaiting sentence and several sets of public stocks. A tavern sprouted up as well.
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The royal apartments themselves were untouched, but even that, in a city of cold and damp, amounted to a death sentence. By the end of Peter’s reign, large parts of the old Kremlin palace were uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, to pay for Peter’s war, a team of bureaucrats was charged with squeezing money from the two great Kremlin monasteries. In requisitioning a portion of monastic wealth, the emperor was only continuing policies his father and others had begun, but his style was unapologetic. In 1699, for instance, as part of a wider review, the Kremlin cathedrals and monasteries alike found their spending and tax privileges under scrutiny. Among the claims that were dismissed was one from the Annunciation Cathedral. It turned out that its staff had been submitting an inflated candle order for years, supposedly to provide spares in case the usual ones miraculously self-ignited.
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Two years later, when the Patriarchal court was abolished in favour of a Monastery Chancellery, church income began to be collected centrally, and in 1706 the Kremlin’s religious foundations, like all others, lost the tax exemption that had allowed them independent control of land and serfs.
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In 1721, Peter finally abolished the patriarchate altogether, and the grand buildings that Nikon had built in the 1650s were reassigned. Church leaders now met as a committee, the Holy Synod. The atmosphere was muted, even drab, for bureaucrats will always lack the charisma of wonder-working saints. And Peter changed the rules for verifying miracles, which meant that almost nothing qualified for years.
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Moscow still had its metropolitan, a man to lead cathedral prayers and the processions at great feasts, but the patriarch’s seat in the Dormition Cathedral remained empty.
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With that, the meaning of the citadel itself began to change. To some, it was a landmark and a talisman, a jewel; but by the early eighteenth century it was also possible to view it in a very different light. Eternal Moscow was a myth; Peter’s reforms had proved that people could be forced to live in rapidly moving secular time. The past, meanwhile, had finally turned into history. It was a new diversion for the emperor and his close friends. Peter initiated a series of measures to catalogue, preserve and explore what he referred to as ‘curiosities’.
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He began, in 1701, by ordering his palace workshop staff to create an inventory of the Kremlin’s treasures, possibly with a view to raising cash. At a time when the wealthiest man in Russia, Sofiya’s co-plotter Vasily Golitsyn, had just forfeited estates worth 71,000 rubles, the value of Peter’s treasury was estimated at approximately 250,000 rubles.
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A century after the Time of Troubles, when so much had been lost or looted, this was a satisfying tally. And the list itself may well have piqued the emperor’s interest. In Europe, he had visited palaces where treasures were prized, and not as holy objects, nor as cash deposits in the safe, but as pieces of art. In 1718, Peter had parts of the Kremlin treasury displayed, commissioning glass cases for the choicest items.
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Gold cups, pearl robes and jewelled swords, recently part of ceremonial life, were now available for his guests to admire like the relics of a vanished civilization.

Peter also ordered his empire’s churches, cathedrals and monasteries to submit their most interesting parchments and papers to the Senate for scrutiny and possible copying.
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Historically, it had been the Russian church that kept the records of the past. The Holy Synod still resisted the idea that anyone might be allowed to work through the material and write a book (its condemnation used words such as ‘pointless’ and ‘deceitful’), but Peter’s new collection formed the basis of a valuable archive for the historians of later times. A reform of the alphabet in 1708, aimed at creating a rational script for government, made many older documents seem more exotic still. And then there was a treasure-hunt, also inspired by the idea of half-forgotten manuscripts. For years, there had been rumours of valuables and a priceless library, a collection saved from lost Byzantium and brought to Moscow by Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother, Sofiya Palaeologa. Long buried somewhere under the Kremlin, its fabled riches now began to beckon the impious Kremlin residents of this very different age. The first search was initiated by Fedor Romodanovsky, who used the excavations for Peter’s arsenal as an opportunity to hunt for hidden vaults (he later claimed to have discovered two complete underground palaces, but the story has never been corroborated). In 1724, a
d’yak
called Osipov began a second dig around the Tainitsky gates, which was continued, with the blessing of the Senate, a decade later. A lot of tired servants moved a lot of soil, but nothing was found.
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The rumours and the dream, however, would prove more durable, over the centuries, than any cache of old vellum.

The Kremlin was becoming a visitor attraction. Peter even introduced an entrance charge. Worldly though he was, the Habsburg envoy Johann Korb was impressed after his tour of the relics and icons.
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But signs of neglect were everywhere, from gardens ‘going to ruin on account of human sloth’, as he observed, to royal apartments falling victim to burst guttering and moss.
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By mid-century, the Kremlin was decaying into Russia’s Fontainebleau, the poor relation to St Petersburg’s Versailles. Indeed, a Russian nobleman who visited the old French palaces at Fontainebleau in 1756 (travel abroad was almost commonplace by then), wrote that he felt ‘as if I were in Moscow in the Kremlin palace. There is no symmetry of any kind; it’s mostly chambers and entrance-ways. In a word, every single prince seems to have built something somewhere by whatever architectural rules happened to prevail.’
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Inconvenient though it was, the Kremlin was never totally abandoned. The citadel had two main symbolic uses in the new imperial Russia. In the first place, it was still a valued symbol of apparent continuity. In the decades to come, there was no better place to crown a tsar, especially when the candidate was mad, female, illegitimate, or a suspected regicide. And the Kremlin also mattered because it was the heart of Moscow; no-one ever held Russia without that capital’s support. In 1718, when Peter disinherited his eldest son, Aleksei, he chose to hold a trumped-up treason hearing in the Kremlin’s banqueting hall; it was a way of facing down the simmering opposition of a city that had not grown used to bowing to St Petersburg (and still, perhaps, believed in royal primogeniture). On 3 February 1718, the court listened in silence as a tearful Aleksei renounced his claim to the throne. The new heir, Peter’s infant son Peter Petrovich, was proclaimed in the Dormition Cathedral immediately afterwards. Beneath the Kremlin walls, meanwhile, the fact of Peter’s absolute personal rule was emphasized to every Muscovite bystander by the elite guards who patrolled day and night in groups of five or ten.
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The choice of Moscow for the first of the new era’s coronations was also politically inspired. Aleksei died in St Petersburg in June 1718, quite possibly at his own father’s hands and certainly after weeks of the torture that his father had supervised. But the tsar-elect, Peter’s adored Peter Petrovich, did not survive beyond his infancy. In his last years, Peter the Great was left without an obvious heir. Whatever happened, he would have to make a choice, and his people would have somehow to be induced (even after his death) to accept it. The court ideologue of the time, Feofan Prokopovich, produced the necessary legal reform (it stated that each tsar henceforth should have the right to name his own successor), but legitimacy needed more than the mere letter of the law. By 1722, Peter had decided to trust his empire to his second wife, Catherine. This woman, born Marta Skavronska, came from provincial Lithuania and had started life as a laundress. Her origins, however, were only one of many possible objections to the idea that she might reign as Russia’s empress. No woman (with dubious exceptions such as Elena Glinskaya and Peter’s half-sister Sofiya) had ever ruled the Russian lands. And Peter wanted to crown her himself. There was no patriarch to preside, no dead tsar to replace, and no cluster of golden-robed boyars to kiss the cross. Legitimacy was the central problem, so Peter wisely gravitated to the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral for the ceremony. Every new sovereign after him would do the same.

The script, the symbols and the velvet uniforms were all Petrine creations. The preparations for Catherine’s great day were as thorough as Makary’s plans for Ivan the Terrible, and the atmosphere was probably as tense. The ceremony was planned as a ‘coronation’ (
koronatsiia
), a European term that Peter chose in favour of the traditional Russian
venchanie.
Having set their faces against one tradition, however, the members of the coronation commission were careful to combine the most impressive European borrowings with concessions to Russian taste. While reading all they could about the customs of ancient Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, Peter’s advisors also studied old Byzantium, for this at least was one place where women had ruled as empresses.
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They observed that regalia were central, and while they could make use of an existing sceptre and orb, they decided to commission a new crown, since the traditional Russian jewelled cap lacked the desired elegance. A jeweller called Samson Larionov, whose trade was ‘to make things with diamonds for her imperial highness’, was approached in deepest secrecy. His commission was to produce a crown that would appear, when finished, ‘as if old, and not newly-made’.
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The Kremlin buildings also needed work, and the preparations began in 1722. Staff were drafted to the Kremlin workshops, which had seen little business for a decade. They began with the refurbishment of the Faceted Palace. In the years between his accession and departure for St Petersburg, Peter had allowed this space to be used for theatrical performances. As a result, the remnants of the old frescoes had suffered irreparable damage, and now there was neither the time nor means to restore them. Instead, as court engravings show, the venerable walls were covered with cloth and the carved detailing given an entirely new look with red and gold paint.
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The banqueting hall received the same kind of well-meant attention. As the painters whitewashed and made good, other craftsmen worked to build the thrones, walkways and galleries that would be needed for the sovereigns and their guests. The schedule was tight, and no allowance was made for refurbishing the Terem Palace, which gaped on to Cathedral Square like a sightless guest. Someone estimated that it would cost 50,000 rubles merely to repair its window-frames.
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On 5 May 1724, Moscow was woken by the sound of trumpets. For forty-eight hours, the heralds announced the coronation to a city and its numerous expensive visitors. The Kremlin bells might ring as they had always done, but this was a new kind of pageant, and Peter intended to shake the old stones to the ground. On 7 May, Peter and Catherine entered the cathedral in a spirit very different from that of Peter’s own coronation three decades before. Instead of
streltsy,
there were members of the newly formed Guards regiments; instead of robed boyars, a line of courtiers in European dress. The crowd, indeed, included many foreigners, not least the families of Peter’s married daughters. As to the principals, Catherine herself wore an embroidered purple robe with gold trim, imported from Paris, and Peter a kaftan and breeches in sky-blue silk, embroidered in silver, topped off with a matching hat with a magnificent white feather. Led as it was by uniformed marshals and Peter’s closest aides, the procession gleamed in rainbow hues, a far cry from the golden monochrome of Peter’s youth.

The assembly was also a more diverse social mix than Moscow’s cathedrals had seen on previous occasions. The courtiers included many who had never waited for promotion through the ranks of the old clans. There were new names, new manners and a new swagger. Even more significantly, it was Peter, not the church leaders, who took the central role. The archbishops said their prayers, but it was he who created the new empress as she knelt at his feet to receive the imperial crown, that old-new masterpiece ‘adorned with pearls, diamonds, and a huge ruby of marvellous beauty larger than a dove’s egg’.
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The cathedral was silent as Peter stooped to place the diadem on his wife’s head, but signallers outside were waiting to order the first cannon-blasts at once.
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The emperor had been unwell for months, and the proceedings in the Dormition Cathedral marked the end of his public involvement that day. But Catherine still had some important appointments to keep. Like every tsar of ancient Muscovy, the former laundress planned to visit the tombs of her adoptive predecessors. Walking under a golden canopy supported at each corner by hand-picked stewards, she led her retinue across the square towards the Archangel Cathedral. Inside, she communed with the spirits of Ivan Kalita, Dmitry Donskoi and Ivan the Great. She even offered prayers to Ivan Alekseyevich, the half-brother who had once ruled at Peter’s side. It was a theatrical tour de force, a grafting on to Moscow’s past; in the trance-like atmosphere of sacrament, the new empress may even have been partially sincere about her place in this bizarre succession. The irony was compounded by Catherine’s special reverence for the boy-prince Dmitry of Uglich, whose supposed corpse had played such a peculiar role in the legitimacy struggles of the 1600s.
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