Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (35 page)

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He started with a site survey. Since Peter’s time, Bazhenov knew, there had been plans to change the Kremlin’s axis, to make a new grand entrance near the arsenal, so that the fortress, once built to protect Moscow from armies that came from the south, would turn north-westwards towards St Petersburg.
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Bazhenov toyed with this idea, but soon rejected it in favour of a grand façade along the Moscow riverbank on the side that looked out over the district of Zamoskvorech’e. This orientation, facing south, would afford the new palace a splendid entrance by the water. Inside, meanwhile, there would be room for several impressive squares (or rather, an oval, a circle and a diamond-shaped parade-ground). The cursed mud would disappear for ever under geometric marble slabs. The proposed palace – a huge building – might rise upon a spectacular ground-floor colonnade that could run for half a mile. Although a massive structure, it would then appear to float, so light would its proportions be; it could have wings and cupolas, it could outshine St Peter’s basilica in Rome. As Bazhenov’s pencil flashed across each page, the plan emerged for Europe’s largest palace-complex, a second Capitoline Hill. It was, of course, unfortunate that there was an ancient fortress wall and towers in the way. But the same problems must once have faced the improvers in Rome.

The
prikazy,
long ruined, were the first to go. More contentious was the removal of a cathedral dedicated to the Chernigov martyrs, but the sixteenth-century edifice had suffered from decades of neglect and its structure was becoming hazardous. That gone, the wreckers started on a stretch of wall and three of the towers on the Moscow riverbank. As far as Bazhenov could tell, Catherine was enthusiastic. She even intervened to make sure that the kitchens would be handy for the proposed banqueting-hall, and at first she studied every detail of the excavation plans. It looked as if the whole of central Moscow would be realigned, as if Tver’s lessons had at last been learned.

Bazhenov was a man possessed. Now that he had an overall vision in his mind, he threw himself into making a detailed model of the new complex. Indeed, he made two models, for the first was rejected by his patron, the empress, after which he patiently began again. For years, he was preoccupied with shapes, installing his design team in a specially constructed model-house (between the arsenal and the Chudov Monastery), which itself had fifty-three windows and took a whole year to build. The Lilliputian palaces that rose inside were masterpieces. The modellers needed well-seasoned wood, so Bazhenov requisitioned timber from demolished Kolomenskoe. When each shell was complete, his team mixed plaster for the tiny mouldings, and real marble was added in some places to test its finish and hue.

The architect needed to be certain of the play of light and colour everywhere, so artists worked beside his draughtsmen from the first. Their task was to create a set of elfin versions of the future wall and ceiling panels for the interiors, perfect in every detail. Catherine put her foot down when she heard that ‘finished paintings’ were being created, at her expense, for a mere maquette, but by this time the sum of 60,000 rubles had already been poured into Bazhenov’s miniatures.
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The models were so lifelike that they became tourist attractions in their own right. They also constituted a kind of advanced architecture school: the brilliant Matvei Kazakov, Bazhenov’s deputy, used them to train young draughtsmen as they worked on them. The plans provided a beautiful focus for reformers’ dreams. Catherine herself decreed that Bazhenov’s model-house should be open for viewing by the public, ‘except for the baser sort’.
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The plague that hit Moscow in 1771, however, respected neither class nor education. It was deadly even by eighteenth-century standards, and by the time it had run its course, about a quarter of Moscow’s population (or just under 57,000 people) had perished.
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At the height of the infection, in August–September 1771, as many as nine hundred people were dying in the city every day, and the survivors trembled in panic. A riot broke out when a rumour started that plague spots had appeared on the icon of the Virgin that was kept in a public chapel not far from the Kremlin. Crowds began to gather – and to spread the plague – beside one of the city’s principal gates. Moscow’s archbishop, Amvrosii, ordered the contentious icon to be secured inside the Chudov Monastery till the epidemic was over, but this act, a violation of the people’s right to see, worship, and even touch their Virgin’s painted face, provoked a fatal uprising. ‘Moscow is a crowd,’ wrote Catherine to Voltaire, ‘and not a city.’
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A mob stormed the Kremlin and broke into the monastery, later hunting down and murdering Amvrosii himself.
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Through it all, Bazhenov stood guard in the model-house, keeping watch over his latest prototype as the rioters surged by outside. His pupils whispered that he was ready to defend it unto death.
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His work on the project did not resume until the start of 1772. In sombre but determined mood, Bazhenov tested samples of the pale Myachkovo stone, he built a brickworks, and his men made progress in shoring up the historic buildings (notably the three great cathedrals and the bell tower of Ivan the Great) that every Russian always wished to save. He must have paused and worried when he learned that the first cracks had appeared in the Archangel Cathedral walls. It was at this point that the bulk of the demolition-work along the riverbank was carried out, giving a fine view of the old building, but disturbing the groundwater and the underlying rock. Despite all that, on 9 August 1772, the first foundation stone was laid. A giant square was cleared for the ceremony, in each corner of which stood Doric columns respectively dedicated to Europe, Asia, Africa and America. One of these bore an inscription in alexandrines comparing the Kremlin with the finest buildings of classical Greece and Rome. As the first trench was dug (appropriately nearest to ‘Europe’), a participant recorded that ‘joy was written on every face, combined with the wish to see the happy completion of the building’.
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But Catherine was losing heart. The empress was absent from both Bazhenov’s dedication-galas, and notably from the one in June 1773 when the architect himself laid the ceremonial bricks, with their emblems of Catherine and her son, Paul, that were to form the basis of the palace’s principal wings. The grandeur of this occasion already belied a troubling lack of funds. Bazhenov’s critics were also beginning to draw their sovereign’s attention to the likelihood of further damage to the Archangel Cathedral. The architect travelled to St Petersburg, perhaps to plead for cash, but the strain proved overwhelming and he became so ill that work was halted for several months. Nature, as the sceptics had predicted, was proving stronger than the human will. A change in fashion also doomed the great palace. As Europe’s fascination with the ruined and the exotic grew stronger, Catherine’s tastes were changing. She liked a bit of gothic now, she wanted to explore chinoiserie.

Bazhenov never built his palace. His principal legacy in central Moscow is a stunning private residence, the Pashkov House, which stands on a hill opposite the Kremlin (and is now part of the Lenin Library). Instead of transforming the Kremlin, the Muscovite genius was assigned to projects at Tsaritsyno, a site outside the city that Catherine imagined as a sort of grand country retreat. He planned a range of gothic park-buildings for that, but they were never completed. As for the Kremlin, Bazhenov’s most enduring contribution was his fantastically detailed model. In a later age, this was displayed in the Kremlin museums, but it was an inconvenient object to exhibit, needing an entire hall to itself. In the Soviet era, it turned up in the Don Monastery, a nationalized space which at least had a large enough room (the former cathedral) in which to display it. But when the monks returned in 1991, the model disappeared again for twenty years. It was only in the summer of 2012 that parts of it finally emerged into the daylight of Moscow’s Shchusev Museum of Architecture. The museum has no single gallery with the space to display it all, but something of its severe glory can at last be glimpsed, albeit as a series of broken sections in two separate rooms.

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It was not Bazhenov who ultimately solved the problem of the Kremlin’s new ‘attendance space’ but his pupil and colleague, Matvei Kazakov. The son of a sailor, this man – who had never travelled beyond Russia (and had not even seen St Petersburg) – originally trained in the Ukhtomsky architecture school. His early work included some buildings in Tver and also conservation in the Kremlin itself. More recently, he had worked with Bazhenov on the unbuilt palace, and it was often he who supervised the real work, from stone-cutting to the preparation of foundations. A draughtsman of unusual talent, Kazakov also drew numerous Kremlin scenes, including the restoration of the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest, which he directed, and also every stage in the unfolding saga of Bazhenov’s plan.
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When Moscow’s new archbishop, Platon, was looking for an architect for his official residence, the site for which, next to the Chudov Monastery, had been approved by Catherine herself, Kazakov was an obvious choice. This so-called ‘Chudov Palace’ was completed in 1776, and though its occupants complained about the noise that nearby cannon made on public holidays, it soon became the most comfortable address in the entire fortress.
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In 1776, Kazakov won an even more glittering prize: the commission (which Bazhenov had not managed to fulfil) for the new attendance-place. The building is still among the most beautiful on the Kremlin hill. Now known as the Senate, it is a triangular structure of neo-classical design, topped with an elegant dome that is just visible above Red Square. When it was opened, its magnificent audience-hall, eighty-nine feet high and eighty-one feet wide, won universal praise, as did the gracious scale of its internal courts and handsome upper rooms. Kazakov’s Senate was to be a model for neo-classical buildings across the Russian empire, and the architect went on to beautify his native Moscow with a new home for the university (1782–93), a grand building for assemblies of nobility (1793–1801), and numerous private houses of palatial proportions.
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There was some question, nonetheless, about the Russianness of the new style. The eighteenth century in Russia has been described as an era of ‘imitation and apprenticeship’.
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If the state of Muscovy was like a tree, then Peter’s goal was to create a brand new graft, keeping the virile rootstock but exchanging the visible top-growth for something more productive and possibly more appealing. The new plant blossomed under Catherine, but it was still an experimental hybrid. The question of Russian identity was complicated, and in the coming age of the nation-state, the autocracy’s very success, and its imperial expansion in particular, made the issue still more complex. By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796, her court conversed and wrote in French. The empire that she governed from St Petersburg was no longer wholly Russian, either, and included large parts of Poland, the former khanate of the Crimea and parts of the Caucasus, as well as territories in Siberia that stretched as far as the Pacific coast. Only the state itself united these; there was no single culture for the entire space. Russia faced a dilemma. No longer content to be an apprentice to Europe (especially as France dissolved into revolution after 1789), it would attempt to revert to its roots, reviving a half-forgotten language and an eclectic range of visual styles in pursuit of prized uniqueness. But Peter’s hybrid had evolved too far. Whatever traditions might still persist among the peasants closest to the soil, the scions of Russia’s cosmopolitan elite, the courtiers and guardians of the Kremlin, could not abandon all the new things they had learned. The only route back to old Muscovy was in romantic dreams.

7

Firebird

A courtier whose business took him to Moscow at the beginning of the nineteenth century would probably have welcomed the journey. For one thing, it meant escaping from St Petersburg, where everything cost twice or three times the accustomed price and life revolved around display. And then there was the visceral, the almost atavistic draw of the older city. As the English engineer John Perry observed, ‘Mosco is the native place which the Russes are fond of … they have here all their comforts.’
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The time-worn capital was Russian to the core. Despite a string of energetic schemes in Catherine’s time, no planner had managed to tame it. Its courtyards were a jumble of the rustic and the new, there was a reassuring barnyard smell, and even major thoroughfares were blocked at frequent points by relics of defensive wall and the polluted coils of rivers.
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For all its brand-new mansions with their colonnades, the place continued to strike visitors as medieval. After a century of legislation calling for stone and brick, three-quarters of its buildings were still built of wood, including the new theatre.
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A recent run of pipes now brought fresh water from a village twenty miles away, but at sunset, and even close beside the Kremlin, there were always women with baskets of laundry and carters with their thirsty horses crowding on the sloping riverbanks. In the ramshackle trading rows, pie-sellers jostled between stalls laden with everything from cloth and paper to knives and sweet long yellow melons. It was a place where a man could wear his second-best boots, the comfortable ones, and where he could afford to waste an hour in the bookshops on Nikolskaya street or reading the newspaper,
Vedomosti.
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