Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (36 page)

In 1810 Moscow was the largest and probably also the wealthiest city in the Russian empire. Its population, calculated in 1811, was just over 270,000, but the numbers fluctuated sharply by season. Although it was the second capital, it was mainly a winter city, a place where provincial nobles spent the colder months, complete with their retinues of servants and the tradespeople who surfaced in their wake. And it was also an increasingly cultured place, boasting Russia’s first university and three academies, that wooden theatre, fourteen printing presses, and, for the nobility and wealthy merchants, separate and exclusive clubs.
⁵
The rich might be wealthier than ever, but they no longer enjoyed their old monopoly on civilized discourse. An entirely new class, the intelligentsia, had made its entrance in recent decades, and though their influence remained quite small, the pallid, intense, ink-bespattered types now made up almost 4 per cent of the city’s population.
⁶
The largest social group, meanwhile, included servants, traders and petty craftspeople, all of them serfs whose obligations included annual payments or indentured labour in their lord’s service. A single nobleman might run his Moscow household with several hundred staff of this kind, ranging from cooks and nursemaids and the lad who swept the carriage yard to the members of his serf-choir and even his serf-artist. None of these people was free to leave, or even, in most cases, to marry without permission. Their slavery was something that a few of the more thoughtful of their masters were beginning to find uncomfortable.
⁷

In all seasons, males outnumbered women in Moscow, sometimes by more than two to one. The reason for that was the growing practice, among serfs, of earning the cash to pay their obligations by leaving their villages to seek work elsewhere, usually in the quietest months of the agricultural year. At the turn of every season, there were thousands on the roads, walking between Moscow and the provinces, their efforts justified by the small sums they earned by selling shoes or mending roofs or even seeking work in factories. As well as hosting trade on a grand scale, Moscow was becoming a centre of paper-milling and textile production. By 1812, there were more than four hundred factories in the old capital, and to Catherine the Great’s disgust, some had been established in the city’s ancient centre.
⁸
There were also military barracks, parade-grounds, and, to cater for the famous Russian soul, innumerable monasteries.

At the top of this uneven social pile, the world seemed to belong to Moscow’s tiny elite of noblemen.
⁹
More at ease than in the past, free to enjoy the best that Europe could offer of art, of fashion and of luxury, the members of this gilded class devoted much of their lives to elegance. They gambled and they drank champagne, but the Europe that they knew so well had also taught them to converse for fun. As they gathered in the fashionable new salons, their talk was of culture, language, Russia’s future, and, increasingly, its past. If they ventured into prose, a longing for history (and, in some cases, an obsession with death) imbued the writing with a Romantic quality that recalled the great Germans – Schiller, Herder, Goethe – that so many had begun to read.
¹⁰
But even if they wrote in Russian, as opposed to the politer French, most were looking for echoes of Italy, or for a gothic shiver of delight, when they began to praise landscape. Poetic writings by the likes of Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) and Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855) were among the finest, but all the same they tended to evoke a predictable range of European, as opposed to Russian, scenery, and they did it using Greek and Latin verse-forms.
¹¹

The sentiments these poets were supposed to feel on viewing Moscow would also have been standard fare for other Europeans of the time. Lyrical odes came easily to the era’s sensitive travellers, and most shared an enthusiasm for mournful groves, shepherdesses and the ruins around Athens, Rome and the Bay of Naples.
¹²
Indeed, it was precisely to find an echo of those antique sites that Russian visitors wandered the Kremlin in the last years of the eighteenth century.
¹³
True, there was always bustle somewhere on this particular hill. The Kremlin’s monasteries hummed with holy business, the cathedrals could draw massive crowds, and the more sinister corners harboured vagabonds and cut-purses. ‘The worst den of thieves in Moscow’ was one contemporary’s view of the old place.
¹⁴
But a literary soul could always find a quiet space, and if he liked the feel of ruins he might step into a palace yard. The pressures of the city really could give way to silence there. The
terema
were almost derelict; of the older buildings, the Faceted Palace alone continued to play host to court events. Aleksei Mikhailovich’s Poteshnyi Palace, also in very poor repair, was patched up for the newly created Kremlin commandant in 1806, but though it accommodated several noble families from time to time, it was never exactly teeming.
¹⁵

The eye could rest contentedly on the building that Rastrelli had designed for Elizabeth in the 1740s (though it was now considered cramped), while the service quarters behind it, which housed army officers and senior Kremlin staff, could easily be ignored (as could the heaps of rubble in the grounds nearby
¹⁶
). In all, the place was definitely romantic, if not quite up to Italian standards, and its ruins held a touch of pathos and more than a pinch of oriental spice.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, as a young bride, Catherine the Great had lamented the Kremlin’s various discomforts in her letters. When her son, the emperor Paul, was crowned in 1797, large numbers of the royal party preferred to reside outside the citadel for the same reasons.
¹⁷
But romance, the lure of gothic sensation, was already drawing others to the ancient site. When she arrived in Moscow for the new tsar’s coronation, Princess Golovina complained, as most did, about the lack of dressing-rooms and boudoir-space, but she allowed herself to be enchanted by the overall impression of the citadel. ‘You would have to have the talents of an historian to describe in mere words all the awe that the Kremlin instils,’ she wrote in her diary that spring.

You would need the pen of a poet to extol the impressions that this ancient and wonderful place plunges you into, this cathedral, this palace, the gothic style of which with its terraces, railings and vaults gives it an air of fantasy and which in its height stands lord above the whole of Moscow.
¹⁸

The princess had no real desire – and no obvious means – of exploring the Kremlin’s past with any precision. Her response was based on a fantasy, and it combined a well-bred classical sensibility with an inchoate (but conservative) nationalism and a good (safe) helping of the macabre. For her, as for so many others at the court, the Kremlin had become a prop for a new brand of theatre. In the wake of the French Revolution, Catherine’s heir rejected anything that smacked of liberal cosmopolitanism. Instead, Emperor Paul made a point, on his accession, of reaffirming his connection to the spirit of old Muscovy. When the time came for his coronation, he chose to enter the ancient Russian capital on Palm Sunday, creating echoes of festivities from centuries before. ‘The procession’, Golovina wrote, ‘was colossal.’
¹⁹
The ceremony itself, with its overtones of rebirth and divine nomination, took place on Easter Day.
²⁰

As a literal re-enactment of the past, however, the pageantry was inconsistent. Paul rode into the Kremlin to be crowned (whereas tsars of old had walked); he lined the squares with modern guns; and soon he was exploring plans to rebuild the entire site. The architect he chose was Kazakov, and the brief included a new palace, a riding school and hanging gardens.
²¹
If this tsar had lived, a round of demolitions would almost certainly have followed, and some of the cleared space would have been used as a parade-ground for his beloved Prussian-style troops. As it was, however, even his plan to remove Peter the Great’s now derelict earth bastions, approved in 1799, was postponed and then forgotten.
²²

Paul was never a popular ruler. Personally, he seemed to combine the worst qualities of a spiritual mystic with the sadism of a sergeant-major, while his Francophobia (which was at least as much about his mother as about Robespierre) was jarring to a court raised on the
philosophes.
Catherine had encouraged the fashions and tastes of Paris, recoiling only at the prospect of an uncouth mob; Paul, however, was part of a reactionary group that rejected the entire culture of the regicide French.
²³
His subjects were forbidden to use any word – such as ‘fatherland’, ‘citizen’ or ‘club’ – that he suspected of revolutionary overtones. Under his increasingly repressive regime, guest lists for balls and soirées required prior approval, and even music was subject to censorship. A great lover of uniforms and boots, Paul also imposed his own views on the nation’s clothes. Round (as opposed to three-cornered) hats were banned on political grounds, and fashionable tail-coats were magnets for his gendarmes, many of whom carried shears so that they could chop off the dandyish flaps of cloth on the spot.
²⁴

There was an obvious precedent here – Paul was a great admirer of Peter the Great – but where Peter’s reforms had transformed an empire, Tsar Paul’s merely looked spiteful. His enemies gained confidence each time he made them watch him strutting with the troops. If the conspirators delayed, it was only because they could not act without the consent of the presumptive heir, Alexander Pavlovich, the tyrant’s eldest son; but by March 1801 even that young man had stopped objecting to the idea of a merciful arrest. The final act, however, was neither humane nor particularly just. The textbooks usually describe it as a ‘scuffle’, thereby evading reference to bloodshed, let alone premeditation. In reality, a group of courtiers burst into the emperor’s bedchamber at night on the pretext of arresting him. When Paul tried to hide behind a curtain, one of them grabbed a heavy snuffbox and aimed it at his head. The rest then fell upon the injured man and beat him to death, though none would ever admit to having struck the fatal blow.
²⁵
The murder was never investigated. It ought to have ranked among the most popular crimes in Russian history (an interesting shortlist to compile), but instead it became another cursed regicide, and for decades to come the site of the killing, in St Petersburg, was shunned by princes and passers-by alike.
²⁶

The new emperor, Alexander I (ruled 1801–25), had been Catherine’s favourite grandson. Sensitive, intelligent, but famously weak-willed, the twenty-five-year-old may well have regretted his own, albeit passive, part in his father’s murder. At best, it was an inauspicious start to the new reign, but contemporaries chose to overlook the tragic portents as they prepared to welcome their new ruler. ‘You shine like a divine angel / With goodness and beauty’, the historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote in an ode on Alexander’s accession to the throne.
²⁷
‘What a beauty, and in addition what a soul!’ declared another noble fan; another likened him to Apollo.
²⁸
Though Alexander himself insisted that his coronation should be a modest and businesslike affair, so many flocked to Moscow for the occasion that the city’s population temporarily doubled.
²⁹
In the imaginations of his people, if not in practice, the new emperor promised a fulfilment of the hopes raised by Catherine the Great, a golden age of reason and justice. There was talk of the emancipation of the serfs, of law-codes and prosperity. For months, enormous crowds would gather just to see the young man’s face.

*   *   *

The cloud on the horizon was a European of humbler birth: the upstart Corsican, Napoleon. This brilliant strategist had made himself master of most of western Europe. He had overturned the last revolutionary regime in France, crowned himself emperor, and now behaved as if he were the equal (or superior) of any autocrat in the known world. His success, and the relatively enlightened use that he was deemed to be making of it, had earned him respect, and in some quarters adulation. He seemed to be a hero for the time, a man who could talk to a foot soldier as easily as he could snub a prince of royal blood. By 1806 he had defeated almost every army in Europe (including Russia’s), dictated a new continental order, and presided over the dissolution of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire. The Francophiles within the Russian liberal elite were mesmerized, though they could not always approve. In Moscow, however, which had always preferred the cultures of Germany and even England to the Gallomania of St Petersburg, the French advance seemed like a call to patriotic arms.
³⁰

A new topic began to circulate at the Thursday soirées in Moscow’s salons. The talk was now of nationhood. American independence had opened a debate about citizens and their right to rule, while the French Revolution and the new French emperor had brought the same issues to the heart of Europe. As the world blazed, Russian patriots divided. Some were inspired by the Napoleonic vision of orderly new governance, but many counterposed the vigour of the Russian state to the decadence that had doomed so much of Europe to the Corsican’s control.
³¹
It was admittedly a problem that Russia’s courtiers still corresponded, flirted and worried in French; there was no real Russian literature, no native high culture. But Russia was a mighty state, and patriots began to extol its specific virtues. They decided that autocracy itself was the measure of their land’s historic greatness. The strong state, Russian-style, might even turn out to represent Russian culture’s highest achievement, though the nation’s Orthodox faith ran it a close second. Sergei Glinka, elder brother of the composer, was one of the earliest advocates of this sort of line in Moscow, but its most famous exponent, and certainly the most prolific, was the historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826). His
Notes on Ancient and Modern Russia
appeared in 1811, taking an anti-European line and praising the Romanov dynasty even before Napoleon had crossed into Russia.
³²