Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (34 page)

The day ended with feasting and more fireworks, but Moscow itself was the backdrop, rather than a participant, throughout. Where previous coronations had been accompanied by gifts of food and drink for its citizens, this one was a party for Peter’s elite. For those who had been living in the Kremlin, and for those who worked or prayed in it, the quick and superficial renovation of selected buildings had been strange, but the sudden arrival of a colourful, strutting court was more like an invasion. The newly widened, newly tidied central streets were flooded with alien silks and liveries. Broad-shouldered guards in uniform held ordinary citizens at bay. And when the court had left, grumbling about the damp and the inconvenient rooms, the Kremlin slipped back into ineluctable decay.

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The tone was set for the imperial era. From the early eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, a succession of autocrats – male and female, rapacious, crazy, foreign and sometimes even competent – chose to hold their coronations in the Kremlin. With very few exceptions, they opted for smarter accommodation (and more congenial company) when the time came to select their final resting-places, and almost all were interred in St Petersburg. But at the start of every reign, and often as the Guards had barely sheathed the weapons that had brought the winning candidate to power, the court splashed out on new costumes and made its way to Moscow for a round of coronation balls. In the Kremlin, the cathedrals were repaired and swept, damp patches screened, and kitchens stocked for epic catering campaigns. Across the old White City and Kitai-gorod, a swarm of squatters (some quite affluent) were bundled off to the country, and rooms prepared for fancier, and more exigent, inhabitants. Almost every court grandee had lodgings in Moscow – many retained mansions in the ancient capital – but to read their complaints and gossip is to sense a collective intake of breath as each prepared to suffer the expected chills and grime, the inconvenience, and the inevitable smell of shit.
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The compensation, between the formalities and balls, was that many could relax. Russia’s first capital had managed to retain a comfortable air of shabbiness, of village anarchy, that greeted starch-faced courtiers with the warmth of an apple-cheeked old nanny. In 1762, when the obligation to serve the tsar at court was finally commuted, and noblemen could choose to live exactly where they wished, many left St Petersburg for the old capital at once.
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‘They here support a large number of retainers,’ an English traveller remarked, ‘gratify their taste for a ruder and more expensive magnificence in the antient style of feudal grandeur, and are not, as at Petersburg, eclipsed by the … imperial establishment.’
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The empress Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–96) agreed, noting in her own memoir that Moscow’s nobility ‘would happily spend their entire lives being taken about all day in a coach and six … which hides from vulgar eyes the master’s own dirt and the disorder of his household in all matters and especially its economy’. Even Moscow’s noblewomen seemed to disgust her, for their heavy jewels and sumptuous clothes (‘superb’, the sharp-eyed Catherine observed) looked vulgar and incongruous when their servants were so ill turned-out, and even barely clean. ‘You would hardly dare to say,’ the empress concluded, ‘that they were people like us.’
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But the first capital was not a backwater. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw its nobility at its most brilliant, as if the old elite had needed nothing more than Peter’s death to start adopting voluntarily the lessons he had sought to force on it. A lively mood pervaded Moscow’s salons (themselves unthinkable as a concept just a few years before); people read and argued, flirted, and sent smart sons off to do the European tour. An architectural school, headed by the influential Dmitry Ukhtomsky (1719–74), was opened near the Kremlin in 1749, and in 1755 Moscow also became the site of Russia’s first university.

One topic for the soirées was the rediscovery of ancient worlds. In 1738, the whole of Europe (in which Moscow now counted itself) had watched enthralled as workmen digging near Naples began to exhume the city of Herculaneum, buried under volcanic ash since the eruption of Vesuvius in the first century. When a Spanish expedition unearthed Pompeii a decade later, Russian nobles were among the first to sketch and document the site. This could have been the start of similar excitement over Russia’s past, and a series of geographical expeditions led by Vladimir Tatishchev indeed explored some Russian sites, including medieval Vladimir. But what these pioneers would find was hardly as satisfying. Not only was the style perplexing (there was no order, there was no geometry, no balance), but what remained was disappointing, largely built of perishable wood.
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By common consent, classical Italy was not only better preserved but also far more picturesque.
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Cities and their buildings were on everybody’s minds. St Petersburg had been a splendid project (or so it seemed in retrospect), and other centres now aspired to the same style. At this point it was natural for Russian planners to look to Europe for their inspiration. The fashion had been set by Peter the Great, who personally supervised the first Russian edition of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s famous treatise,
Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture,
in 1709. The work explained the rules of symmetry and proportion, it insisted upon measurement (rather than the usual guesswork and improvisation), and with its prescriptions for style it became the eighteenth-century Russian architects’ bible.
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By mid-century, it was also part of any sophisticated education to have read the works of Vitruvius and Palladio. As for the improvement of existing sites, many Russian travellers to Rome were particularly struck by Michelangelo’s restoration of the Capitoline Hill. In 1763, the medieval city of Tver burned to the ground. The project to rebuild it was an opportunity to test the lessons that had just been learned. When the new centre rose on faultlessly neo-classical lines, with wide streets and a spacious elegance, it was acclaimed a triumph. Tver’s airiness exposed the rambling, muddy chaos of its sister towns. The race was on to turn all Russian cities into paragons of European order.
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But that still left the problem of the old Kremlin. While Moscow’s educated class debated plans to make their city rational, the simple people (who outnumbered them) clung to their beloved religious sites.
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Successive rulers improvised. At the end of the 1740s, for instance, the empress Elizabeth (ruled 1741–61) instructed her favourite architect, Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700–71), to build her a new Winter Palace in the Kremlin. Completed in 1749 (and rather more modest than its St Petersburg namesake, also built for Elizabeth by Rastrelli), this largely wooden building, which rambled over several wings and seemed to flummox visitors, survived till 1838. In 1812, it was here that Napoleon would spend several awkward weeks waiting in vain for Russia’s surrender to the Grande Armée.
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The Winter Palace did not make the Kremlin a convenient place, and it fell to Elizabeth’s successor, Catherine the Great, to grasp the nettle of improvement on an epic scale. There is some irony in this, since the German-born empress was so decided in her aversion to Moscow. Her impressions of the Kremlin had not been improved by visits during Elizabeth’s reign, nor by the illness that she suffered there as a young bride (as a result of which her head had been completely shaved). The ever-industrious Catherine considered Moscow to be a ‘seat of idleness’, and even its precious history seemed to hold little charm. ‘Never can a people have been confronted by more objects of fanaticism,’ she fulminated, ‘more miraculous images at every step, more churches, more men of the cloth, more convents, more of the faithful, more beggars, more thieves, more useless servants in the houses – and what houses, what dirt…’
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For all that, Catherine understood that Moscow’s iconic fortress occupied a special place in Russian hearts. She chose the city for her coronation, she remained in the capital for months thereafter, and she returned several times for state affairs over the course of her reign. When it came to parks and landscape and exotic halls, no European ruler of the time was more ambitious.
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Her principal efforts focused on St Petersburg and the suburban palaces with which she planned to surround it, but she could not leave Moscow alone.

Catherine had originally come to Russia (at the age of fourteen) as Princess Sophie Fredericke Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst. It was her destiny to be a royal bride, the consort of Peter the Great’s unattractive grandson, the future Peter III.
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She was already estranged from him in 1761, when a committee of architects was appointed to advise the Moscow Senate on the condition of the Kremlin in readiness for the young tsar’s coronation. It was a troubling subject, for the citadel had suffered yet another devastating fire in 1737. As a result, the frescoes in the main cathedrals needed urgent renovation, not least because the fire-damaged ceilings often let the rain and snow-melt pour right through, to the point of disrupting services inside.
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The ancient Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest had full-grown trees emerging through its roof.
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Elsewhere, the damage was so ugly that it had become customary, on state occasions, to erect temporary hoardings to conceal the worst-affected buildings, which included Peter the Great’s Arsenal.
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Russian craftsmen were adept at hiding rubble and fire-blackened stones behind enormous gold-trimmed banners, but it was clear that money needed to be spent quite soon.

In the event, it was not Peter III (who was murdered), but Catherine herself who swept up to the Kremlin gates to star in a protracted round of coronation celebrations in September 1762. The ceremony was lavish by any standards, even Russian ones.
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Catherine’s imperial crown, completed specially for the occasion, included nearly 5,000 diamonds; the rest of her outfit (the dress was a spectacular confection in silver brocade with an ermine trim) cost at least 20,000 rubles. These sums could have paid for a lot of guttering and paint. But though the pageantry was breathtaking, the slow decay behind the scenes continued for some time to come. It was not until eight years later, in 1770, that Catherine finally approved a schedule for the renovation of the main cathedrals. Only sober and pious artists, she wrote, were to work on them: ‘the type of people that you find in monasteries’. These persons were to understand that the renovations should be completed ‘without revision and where there is gold it must be replaced and not with yellow paint’. But Catherine also approved the use of modern oil-based pigments (they lasted better, after all). She could not have known, but these were guaranteed to wreck the ancient plasterwork. Her intervention also set a precedent. The frescoes were retouched and cleaned for almost every coronation to come, with the result, by the early twentieth century, that it was a struggle to imagine the originals behind the garish oils.
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And there was still a lack of space – of really imposing space – for state events. Elizabeth’s palace was small (by imperial standards, that is), the old
terema
were uninhabitable, and the Faceted Palace was cramped and antiquated. Aleksei Mikhailovich’s wooden palace at Kolomenskoe, meanwhile, which Catherine had hoped to use, was in such a dangerous condition that the empress ordered its demolition.
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In 1767, when Catherine, influenced by the teachings of her friends the Paris
philosophes,
convened a Legislative Commission to deliberate on Russian government, the Kremlin could offer only the most basic facilities. Indeed, the 460 delegates had no option, at first, but to gather in the Chudov Monastery, and their first meeting with Catherine, ‘the new Justinian’, held in a seventeenth-century audience-hall, lacked the required elegance. The whole assembly, complete with a small army of staff, eventually decamped to St Petersburg.
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In Catherine’s splendid new age, the Kremlin’s dilapidation amounted to a national disgrace. What the empress required, what Moscow needed, was a setting for truly royal gatherings: a palace and parade-grounds, squares, and at the very least a decent meeting-hall (provisionally described as ‘the attendance place’). The question of the architect was next, for this was a project of imperial proportions. The right man for the task was Vasily Bazhenov (1737–99). Widely tipped as Russia’s creative star, he had won a prize scholarship to Europe as a youth, garnering acclaim (and a medal) in Paris. In Italy, he had been voted into both the Bolognese and Florentine academies. He was fascinated by St Peter’s basilica in Rome, and inspired by architecture’s potential for emphasizing empire and enlightened power. A Muscovite to the core, however, Bazhenov had grown up in and around the Kremlin. No commission was more appealing than the chance to transform its iconic site, perhaps even to become Moscow’s Michelangelo. In place of Ivan III’s Third Rome, Bazhenov imagined a successor to the first, the imperial, original. The secular empire of reason, not inward-looking theocracy, was his ideal. Tellingly, he considered Peter’s classically inspired arsenal to be the finest building on the Kremlin hill.
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In 1768, Bazhenov accepted a commission from the government’s ‘Kremlin expedition’.
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Inspired by the success of Tver, a small group under Catherine’s eye asked him to prepare a report, to schedule essential renovations, and to make a plan for new accommodations. But Bazhenov was not to be contented with a few repairs and a new audience hall. His critics in St Petersburg, including the poet Gavrila Derzhavin, scented disaster. From what they heard, the plans were so ambitious that they seemed to challenge nature itself.
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This was no more than Europeans from Christopher Wren to ‘Capability’ Brown had been doing for decades, and it was exactly the trick that Rastrelli had performed in the Baltic marshes of St Petersburg. But this was Moscow, and from the outset Bazhenov’s project was a controversial one.