Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (40 page)

The Russian nation clearly needed something else, not just this theme-park for the leisured rich. The memories of 1812 were everyone’s. By all accounts, Alexander himself disliked the story of Moscow’s great crisis, preferring to think about his more victorious moments (and especially his entry into Paris, at the head of his troops, in 1814).
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But tens of thousands of victims, and Moscow’s own ashes, were not easily forgotten. In a brief interlude of messianic passion, the emperor allowed himself to be inspired by visions of the Russian people and its mystic sacrifice.
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In 1813, his court announced a competition for a permanent memorial to the epic of 1812. Significantly, there was no plan to build it in the Kremlin itself; Alexander refused to contemplate such an upheaval. Instead, a site – and an idea – had to be found in Moscow, and to Moscow it would then belong.

Buildings, portrait galleries, fountains, statues and parks were all sketched and discussed, but eventually it was agreed that the central landmark should be a cathedral, a holy building dedicated to Christ the Saviour. The first round of the competition came and went. Preliminary drawings, which ranged from a version of St Peter’s basilica to Giacomo Quarenghi’s take on the Pantheon in Rome, were soon dismissed.
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As universalist ideas like these were aired in St Petersburg, however, Moscow’s thinking took a nationalist turn. In 1818, a statue to the victors of 1612, Minin and Pozharsky, was installed on Red Square. It had been designed for Kuzma Minin’s city, Nizhnyi-Novgorod, but in Moscow it came to stand for a nation that was Orthodox, conservative, and proud.
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Tellingly, the helmet that the bronze Pozharsky cradled in the crook of his left arm was deliberately based on an original (mistakenly) thought to have belonged to Alexander Nevsky.
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In the next few years, the victory over Napoleon would inspire numerous buildings across Russia, including St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral (which housed the banners captured from French troops and also the keys to many of the cities that the invaders had occupied). But the scheme for Moscow’s own shrine continued to stall. The architects, it seemed, were torn between the old ‘classical’ world and Moscow’s new, ultra-Russian, nationalism. In 1817, however, Alexander finally approved a plan to build the cathedral in the universal European (as opposed to an identifiably Russian) manner. The winning entry, by the architect Alexander Vitberg, was scheduled to tower above Moscow from a site on the Sparrow Hills. Vitberg himself described its style as ‘Egyptian-Byzantine-Gothic’, and though the idea is hard to visualize, his sketchbooks show just what he meant.
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The building – which would have been vast – included obelisks and columns and a huge Byzantine dome. Its spirit was international, and it was meant to be inclusive rather than purely Slavonic. But tensions built around the project from the first. Though cash was found, and 11,275 unfortunate serf-labourers were assembled for the long task of constructing it, Vitberg’s vision was never realized. Alexander I died in 1825. His heir and brother, Nicholas, was never one for universal brotherhood.

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The marquis de Custine visited Russia in 1839. Something of a social outcast in France, where his homosexuality had brought censure and considerable personal pain, he was looking for a subject for his real passion: writing. The empire in the east was no longer a provincial outpost; in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, most people knew it as an arbiter of European politics. At the same time, its huge size and its untapped power were fascinating. As Ottoman Turkey continued to decline, Russia looked set to take its place, straddling the frontier between Europe and Asia, holding the line between the world of modern comforts and the seething, tempting, maelstrom of the Orient beyond. Like many Europeans of his time, and certainly the French, Custine was hoping to find some first-hand oriental barbarism for his book, and like many other visitors to Russia with that mission, he ended up perplexed.

There were the usual inconveniences. Every traveller to Russia seems fated to describe vast spaces, an extreme climate, and the extraordinary drinking-capacities of the Russian male. In some ways, these, and even the attentions of an ever-watchful state police, were just the things Custine was looking for. He also found much to admire in the new emperor, Nicholas I. This tsar was handsome, if severe; he bore himself as a true despot should, frowning from the strain of responsibility; and though he wore a corset, which Custine deplored, from the neck up he looked noble and even ‘rather German than Slavonic’.
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The singularity of the emperor’s power, his absolute but lonely eminence, was mesmerizing. ‘If I lived in Petersburg,’ Custine remarked, ‘I should become a courtier, not from any love of place or power, nor from any puerile vanity, but from the desire of discovering some road that might reach the heart of a man who differs from all others.’
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When it came to authentic local colour, however, the foreigner found the court in St Petersburg to be Janus-faced. It had taken a real effort on the part of Peter the Great, of the reformers in the age of Elizabeth and Catherine, but by 1839, when Custine visited the country, Russia was almost as European as it is today. Its businessmen made money out of European trade, its libraries were stocked with European books, and its young nobles travelled just as any other wealthy Europeans might. Even those who stayed at home continued to take whatever they saw fit from Europe, from fashion to technology and even (with explosive results) political ideas. Against this background, Nicholas encouraged Russian nationalism, but his variant on the theme was specific. In 1833, his conservative advisor, Sergei Uvarov, defined Russian nationhood in terms of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’. ‘The trick,’ as the musicologist Richard Taruskin has commented, ‘was to associate love of country not with love of its inhabitants but with love of the dynastic state.’
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Custine accepted the autocratic politics as part of his tourist package (it is a deal that foreign visitors have gone on striking ever since), but what he really revelled in was the official promotion of Russianness. Though it was never more than costly palace make-believe, court life had certainly acquired a nationalist veneer. Flying in the face of decades of sophistication, Nicholas introduced a ‘national’ dress-code for certain court functions. Mistaking this innovation for something timeless, Custine described the elaborate head-dress that elite women had lately been obliged to wear: ‘it is very ancient,’ he wrote, ‘and gives an air of nobleness and originality to handsome persons’. At the wedding of a royal princess, he was also delighted to observe ‘the Russian, that is to say, the Persian, costume of the men’. These people, ‘in their long robes and brightly-coloured girdles … created the illusion of an immense Turkey carpet’.
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What troubled the visiting Frenchman was not the exotic and alien, but rather the Europeanness of the court: the extent to which, in Catherine the Great’s shadow, the ‘enrolled and drilled Tatars’ aspired to a civilized life. ‘I do not reproach the Russians for being what they are,’ he explained, ‘what I blame in them is, their pretending to be what we are.’

It was a sentiment that some of Russia’s own elite were coming to endorse. In an age when every educated citizen was discussing the country’s future, a range of thinkers saw salvation in the traditional, the Slavonic, and the Orthodox. Moscow was such people’s true spiritual home, and by Custine’s time, the city had become a Mecca for conservative historians and philosophers. Among these were the antiquarian Ivan Snegirev, who also worked as a literary censor (one of his projects was to check the Bible for sedition), the artists and restorers Fedor Solntsev and Alexander Veltman, and patrons of theirs from the Golitsyn and Stroganov clans.
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These people’s lives revolved around historical research, religious ritual, and loyal service to their emperor. It was to find their kind of Russia that Custine set off for Moscow.

He was not disappointed on his arrival in the old city. ‘The first view of the capital of the Slavonians,’ he wrote,

rising brightly in the cold solitudes of the Christian East, produces an impression that cannot easily be forgotten … The whole plain is covered with a silver guize. Three or four hundred churches … present to the eye an immense semi-circle, so that when approaching the city, towards sunset on a stormy evening, it would be easy to imagine you saw a rainbow of fire.

Even greater thrills awaited in the city’s heart:

The citadel of Moscow is not merely a palace. It is the bulwark of Russia, the revered asylum in which sleep the tutelary saints of the country, it is also the prison of spectres … In this prodigious creation strength takes the place of beauty, caprice of elegance: it is like the dream of a tyrant, fearful but full of power; it has something about it that disowns the age … an architecture that has no connection with the wants of modern civilisation: a heritage of the fabulous ages, a gaol, a palace, a sanctuary, a bulwark against the nation’s foes, a bastille against the nation, a prop of tyrants, a prison of peoples.
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The problem, at least from the romantic point of view, was that Nicholas had plans to bring things up to date. The autocrat had always felt at ease in Moscow. In 1818, while Alexander was still emperor, he had taken over the old Chudov Palace, the building that Kazakov had created for Archbishop Platon in 1776, and rather than moving out of it on his accession, he had extended and adapted it several times. For all his efforts, however, the building, which was now known as the ‘Nicholas Palace’, was feeling, as he put it, ‘inconveniently small’. A new residence was required, especially since he planned to spend more time in the historic city. ‘We will show you the new works that we are making in the Kremlin,’ Nicholas promised Custine. ‘My object is to render the architecture of these old edifices better-adapted to the uses now made of them.’
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The Frenchman was horrified. ‘This is a profanation,’ he wrote. ‘Were I the Emperor, I would rather raise my palace in the air, than disturb one stone of the old ramparts of the Kremlin.’
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It was a classic foreigner’s misapprehension. Where Custine saw a site as fabulous as old Peking, a treasure-house if not exactly a theme park, Nicholas saw his patrimony, and he also saw a catalogue of disrepair. Since he entirely shared the conservatives’ reverence for Muscovy, he did not plan to rebuild in a European style. Russia’s ancient architecture, as every Slavophile agreed, embodied the essence of its spirit for the modern age. And that same spirit could be used to build anew, or, as one conservative put it, ‘to teach the newest generations about the solidity and moral strength of Russia’.
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Along with Muscovy, the other model for the builders was Byzantium, for there, surely, lay the ideal image of a strong, Orthodox state, a spiritual empire, the prototype for everything that Russia’s governors now wished to counterpose (again) to Popish and Protestant Europe. There was not much of old Byzantium left to copy by the 1830s, but the idea was everything.

The pastiche Russian style that Nicholas admired evoked its adoptive antecedents with a blatant disregard for history or taste. The strident, even xenophobic Russian chauvinism, the Slavophilism, of Nicholas’ time was deliberate and selective. It was also an elite pose, the cost of which, in terms of stalled reform, was largely borne by the poor. That pose, however, soon became a habit. The Grand Kremlin Palace was to be one of its most conspicuous monuments, the architectural equivalent of dressing sophisticated (and French-speaking) courtiers in ‘national’ costumes.

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The supervisor of Kremlin buildings, Baron Bode, watched Nicholas take his decision. ‘In the autumn of 1837,’ he wrote,

the Emperor came to Moscow. His Majesty having found the ancient palace too ugly and small, walked round it, beginning with the boyars’ terrace, where there were plans to build a new great hall. Seeing all the inconveniences of this project, and those of making the throne room larger, the Emperor, coming to the end of the reception rooms, that is to say to the study of the late Empress Mariya Fedorovna, stopped, examined the plans, and gave an order to add to the palace a new great hall [currently the Throne Room or St Andrew’s Hall] … Meanwhile, it was pointed out to the Emperor that the old [Elizabeth] palace was falling into ruin. This palace had been rebuilt in great haste after the 1812 fire, in 1817, for the arrival of the late Emperor Alexander I … After a detailed examination of the ceilings and roofs, the [engineers] were persuaded of the impossibility of guaranteeing the security of the palace in regard to future fires. It was probably this last that decided the Emperor to have a new palace built, more solid and in greater conformity with the grandeur of the first capital.
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The next stage was to find an architect, and though several worked on the palace in the next decade, none would bear a greater responsibility than Konstantin Ton (1794–1881). His name would become synonymous with the pseudo-Byzantine architectural style that epitomized Nicholas I’s official nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century, but Ton was no vulgar Slavophile. He trained in St Petersburg and spent his formative years, in professional terms, working in Europe. By the time he came to Nicholas’ attention, he had worked in Paris and also in Rome, where he had helped restore an ancient palace on the Palatine Hill.
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But Ton knew how to meet the needs of Russia’s autocrat. His work in Moscow, which included the majestic railway terminus (1844–51), combined a homage to imagined pasts with all the comforts of modernity. Riurikid Muscovy was a direct inspiration (Ton made a study of its old churches), and more distant antiquity – in its autocratic, Orthodox variant – was conjured by Byzantine domes, an exercise that always called for quantities of gold. Most critics comment that the results lacked the elegance of Moscow’s real medieval buildings. One specialist refers to Ton’s work as ‘a horizontal, earthbound mass’, another writes of ‘arid grandeur’.
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But Ton’s two greatest buildings were designed to satisfy the tsar’s demand for space – and for magnificence – while also celebrating the very past that their construction swept away.