Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (41 page)

The Grand Palace was not the architect’s first Moscow commission, and nor was it the most famous. In 1831, Ton had started work on an alternative Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to commemorate Moscow’s 1812. This time, the current emperor approved, and the site, not far along the Moscow river from the Kremlin, was easier to develop than Vitberg’s abandoned terrace on the Sparrow Hills. The new building was to be a vast Byzantine-style basilica (some antiquarians preferred to call it ‘old Russian’), a monument to the Russian state rather than to Russia’s people.
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Technologies that Ton would hone on Moscow’s railway terminus came in particularly handy when the time came to secure the dome. But even this ambitious architect could not devote himself to two monsters at once. For much of the 1840s, his focus shifted from the new cathedral to his palace on the Kremlin hill.

The work was taxing, costly, and boundlessly frustrating. Every contractor wanted to choose his own workmen (Ton himself liked railway engineers), co-ordination was a nightmare, and the costs spiralled from month to month.
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Nicholas was a problem, too, for he took a maddening interest, demanding frequent reports and giving endless pettifogging orders. Each time poor Ton, who was exposed to every Russian winter chill, missed a few days at work, he felt bound to apologize like a schoolboy.
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From his base in St Petersburg, Nicholas tried to specify the flooring and the tiles, asked endless technical questions about the heating, and checked the progress of the kitchens and the chimneys and the drains. He was also very keen to track the mounting cost. As Bode carefully explained: ‘His Imperial Majesty took a personal involvement in practically every detail, and from the beginning to the end of the works everything was done according to His Imperial Majesty’s instructions.’
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The central problem was the site itself. Nicholas wanted his palace to stand on the south-west corner of the Kremlin hill, but any building there was always going to impinge on older palace buildings and the churches that formed part of them. A giant office tower in the middle of the Vatican could not have made a bigger splash. Ton’s solution was ingenious. He would incorporate selected key structures in his design. Like fragile creatures fossilized in rock, the Faceted Palace, parts of the Terem Palace, and numerous churches – including several of the Kremlin’s oldest – were engulfed within the new structure, more or less becoming part of it. The new sections of the palace connected to the old by means of a ceremonial staircase and a domed reception hall. The Saviour in the Forest, the oldest church on Kremlin soil, ended up in a courtyard, with Ton’s walls looming over it on three sides. The golden palace of the Moscow tsars was buried underneath St George’s Hall, the reserve palace below Ton’s new St Andrew’s Hall, and the historic boyars’ court beneath a hall named for the Order of St Vladimir. An illusion of continuity prevailed. Even the old hanging gardens were remembered by a steamy glasshouse filled with palms. It was a clever approach, but not all visitors were pleased. ‘How the Russian committee of taste could have induced themselves to set up an eyesore of such gigantic proportions on so holy a spot,’ the earl of Mayo wrote after a visit that took place while the work was still in progress in 1845, ‘can only be conceived by those who have mused upon the edifices of Trafalgar Square.’

When it was opened, in 1849, the Grand Kremlin Palace was the largest building on the Kremlin hill, and it remains the most imposing. In that respect, it perfectly embodied the values of its imperial patron, though the aforementioned earl of Mayo cannot have been the only person to think that it looked ‘more like a Manchester cotton-factory than the Imperial residence of the sacred Kremlin’.
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The finished colossus, which cost about twelve million rubles, boasted the largest audience hall that Russia had ever seen, a massive space that was nearly two hundred feet long and three times the size of the Faceted Palace. And this was only one of five such spaces; the place could swallow several separate crowds at once. In addition to these public rooms, the building also included seven hundred private apartments.
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The most elegant of these, separate from the main residential wing, were reserved for the imperial family itself. The tsar was a great champion of married bliss.

By all accounts, Nicholas was delighted. On the occasion of its formal opening, he described his Kremlin palace as

a beautiful architectural work, which will be a new ornament for my beloved ancient capital, the more so because it harmonises entirely with the buildings that surround it, and which are sacred to us, as much for the secular memories that are attached to them as for the great events of our national history.
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He timed its opening to emphasize that sacredness. The Grand Kremlin Palace was inaugurated in 1849, at Easter, and the emperor and his family made their Easter devotions in the restored Church of the Saviour Behind the Golden Grille, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s favourite place of worship and now physically part of the new building. It was the first time a Russian ruler had spent Easter in Moscow since Paul’s coronation in 1797, and the first time that the Saviour Church had been fit to receive such a distinguished party in decades. The new metropolitan was effusive. His sermon explained that,

Sovereigns, like private individuals, build their houses to have a home that is peaceful, pleasant, suitable for their rank and in conformity with the needs of their social engagements. But these things were not enough for our Tsar, who does not wish to live a life apart, but wishes to live in complete unity with his people and his empire. He consented to wish that his dwelling should symbolise the Tsar and the Empire and made a Tablet of Commandment or a Book in Stone, where can be read our present grandeur, the venerated memory of the past and an example for the future.
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This ‘venerated memory’, however, turned out to be selective. What Ton’s great palace really did was to create a new Kremlin, renovating and giving precedence to sites that were considered important and singularly disrespecting others. Aleksei Mikhailovich’s Saviour Church, like several others in the palace, was given a new prominence as well as a more elegant general environment. New roofing was also designed to resist the vexatious leaks. But one of the oldest churches on the Kremlin site, an ancient foundation dedicated to St John the Forerunner, was demolished. With it went a whole chapter of Moscow’s pre-Mongol history, as well as many memories of later palace life.

The Church of St John was a fifteenth-century masonry building near the Borovitsky gates. It was not striking in itself, but it may have marked the first religious site on the entire hill. The usual history of fire and redevelopment had altered its original appearance, and even antiquarians were only lukewarm in their praise, but the site, all Muscovites agreed, was sacred. In 1814, during renovations, wooden posts found near the building led to speculation that this had been the site of Peter the Wonder-Worker’s Kremlin residence.
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Ivan Snegirev described it as ‘the oldest of churches’, and others noted that its festival, St John’s Day, coincided with the midsummer feast of Ivan Kupalo, a pagan holy day that Russian folklorists had just begun to rediscover. Everyone’s excitement increased after the church’s eventual demolition, when bones, including a horse’s skull, were found in the deepest layers of earth beneath, suggesting – so the experts hoped – that the place had once seen animal sacrifice.
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A young employee in the Kremlin’s armoury museum called Ivan Zabelin later recounted what happened. In 1846, Nicholas I, on a visit to inspect the progress of his building work, observed that the old church obscured a particularly lovely view of his new palace from Moscow’s Stone Bridge. The bridge was a fixture and the palace his pride, so the church would have to be moved; he left the details to the architects. Only the fear of popular outcry – that lesson from Valuev’s day – delayed immediate destruction. But even Baron Bode agreed that the church was too fragile to move intact. Its demolition was approved instead, with plans to transfer the church’s sacred objects to a room above the Borovitsky gates. The only other concession offered was that a plaque might one day mark the site where, so the experts all supposed, Muscovites had prayed since their original conversion to the Christian faith.
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‘When they demolished the church,’ Zabelin wrote, ‘the view from the other side of the river was even more unsightly. A curved space, wide and empty, opened up on Moscow’s most ancient site, between buildings, which, running as they also did along a curve, lacked any kind of regular facade.’
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Custine was equally dismissive of the grand new style. Although he lacked Zabelin’s sense of history, he had the same distaste for new white slabs. He studied the flat surfaces and solid lines on the plans of Ton’s palace and concluded, disgustedly, that ‘all who preserve any sentiment of the beautiful ought to throw themselves at the feet of the emperor and implore him to spare his Kremlin … He is destroying the holy ramparts of which the miners of Buonaparte could scarcely disturb a stone.’
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8

Nostalgia

The search for an authentic Russia released a new kind of energy. Imported ideas engaged and collided with recovered Russian ones to create the conditions for a cultural golden age. From Alexander Pushkin to Lev Tolstoy, from Glinka to T chaikovsky, the arts attained an excellence that few in Europe at the time could rival. Whatever Custine might have wanted, too, the creativity was not confined to obviously ‘national’ themes, and much of it transcended politics and even questions of identity.
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One branch of late imperial Russian cultural life, however, at least as it developed in Moscow, concerned itself with little else. The nineteenth century was the golden age of Russian history, an age that began with Nikolai Karamzin and ended with the readable, wide-ranging work of Vasily Kliuchevsky (1841–1911). Between the two stood another giant, Sergei Soloviev (1820–79), the author of an encyclopaedic narrative history of Russia in twenty-nine volumes. He had material to write much more, but he died, in mid-sentence, at the age of fifty-nine.
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Today, much of this writing has a dated, rather heavy feel. Like Karamzin, Soloviev was the sort of person Josef Stalin later called an archive rat. His output, rapidly produced, makes little enough concession to the reader, while that of his less-talented contemporaries, though full of information, is often genuinely turgid. For years now, hardened Moscow library staff have been shrugging in sympathy as they hand me volumes that have not been ordered, and certainly not read, since well before we were all born. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, there was something really thrilling in the process of discovery. It was not just that the stories themselves were dramatic (although that certainly helped). The point was that history really mattered. The past, the Russian past, was now the raw material for nationhood, and while a writer of Fedor Dostoevsky’s calibre might think of everything in terms of spiritual philosophy, those of a more prosaic stamp needed their facts. In nineteenth-century Moscow, historians were there to help, inspiring readers with the evidence that Russia’s entire course on earth – as witness the pre-Petrine past – was sacred, precious and unique.
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By definition, systems of dynastic rule must always emphasize their continuity. The Kremlin had been an important witness to that tale – and also a main theatre for state display – for centuries. Even in the heyday of St Petersburg, despite the renunciation of Moscow’s customs, dress and calendar, the ancient capital as a whole had played an important role in the idea of Russian nationhood. But as St Petersburg began to breathe the aniline air of Europe’s industrial revolution, Moscow came to represent the place where Russia might still be most real.
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Peter the Great’s reforms were not exactly regretted, but nostalgia grew for a Slavic authenticity that many believed to have been lost. In Moscow’s salons and, increasingly, in libraries, conservatives reconstructed their collective past as a tale of new Byzantium, Third Rome and holy empire all in one. In the Kremlin, which was one of the movement’s most important sites, historians and artists worked together to restore old buildings, establish museums, and get to grips with the archives.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Moscow had become an epicentre of activities that spanned the disciplines of history, archaeology, architectural preservation and even folklore.
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Its university hosted the gatherings where papers were read (and provided both Kliuchevsky and Soloviev with their prestigious chairs); its wealthy nobles bought and preserved whole archives, encouraged scholars, and collected art. In 1861, the city took delivery of a treasure-house of books and objects from the deceased Petersburg antiquary Count Nikolai Rumyantsev, and other noble patrons purchased manuscripts that might otherwise have disappeared. Most, in the tradition of aristocrats at any time, were willing to open their collections for (some people’s) scholarly research.
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For artists needing more material support, Moscow was now also home to patrons of a modern kind, the empire’s richest and most ruthless merchants and industrial entrepreneurs. The best known was probably the merchant-magnate Pavel Tretyakov, who laid the basis for the city’s pre-eminent gallery of native art when he presented Moscow with his collection (and a building in which it could be housed) in 1892.
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