Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (42 page)

The extent of cultural change was increasingly reflected in the atmosphere at court. There was a yearning for the purity of former times, which were imagined as an age of pious riches. By the end of the century, God’s last anointed tsar, Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917), had even managed to convince himself that simple people could adore him with a simple love.
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Nostalgia (the original meaning of the word links it with homesickness) was almost the sum of his politics. In April 1900, Nicholas celebrated Easter in Moscow. He was the first tsar to do so since Nicholas I had opened the Grand Kremlin Palace in 1849, and the occasion was a landmark in his private spiritual life. As he wrote to his mother, he and his consort, Alexandra, ‘spent the best part of a day’ visiting the Kremlin’s holy places and ‘deciding which church we shall attend for Morning Service or Mass or Evensong … We also read a good deal of history about the “Times of Moscow” [i.e. Time of Troubles].’ As he added, ‘I never knew I was able to reach such heights of religious ecstasy … I am so calm and happy now.’
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The new tsar’s Muscovite romance continued. In 1906, the tenth anniversary of his coronation, Nicholas’ famous jeweller, Carl Fabergé, created one of the most celebrated of his renowned Easter eggs, based on the Kremlin and its Dormition Cathedral.
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The charming trinket was the tsar’s gift to his consort that year, but it was far from the sum of their nostalgic pleasures. In February 1903, for instance, the couple had presided over an unforgettable Muscovite costume ball at which the guests had all appeared in authentic-looking seventeenth-century robes. As Nicholas noted in his diary, ‘the hall looked very pretty filled with ancient Russian people’, while one witness described the scene as ‘a living dream’.
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Though Russia teetered on the brink of civil unrest, a series of historic gala jubilees followed throughout the reign, the most spectacular of which was the tercentenary of the Romanov accession in 1913.
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After a royal progress through the land, this culminated in extended celebrations in the Kremlin.
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Moscow’s loyal historians were ready with a special exhibition to accompany the banquets and the balls, a full-scale celebration of Muscovy that featured 147 rare pre-Petrine icons as well as fabrics, silver and a display of original documents. Many of the items had been loaned from private collections in the city. For the elite, even the bourgeoisie, the celebration of the golden past had turned into a patriotic act.
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In general, the past seemed to appeal the most to those who feared prospective change. The nineteenth century is often associated with the stress and transition that produced such radicals as Alexander Herzen(1812–70), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), and Georgy Plekhanov (1856–1918), respectively the founders of Russian socialism, anarchism and the Russian Marxist movement. By the 1900s, Russia could boast several different brands of revolutionary party, numerous would-be political assassins, and a fledgling trade-union movement. At the time, few of Moscow’s more prosperous types – its notaries and professors, its businessmen with their new money and hand-rolled cigars – spared much thought for the greasy youths and home-made bombs. Almost none had heard of communism, and most thought of revolution as a horror once inflicted on the French. There were many – including several historians – who regarded the impulse to commit acts of terror as a kind of psychological illness.
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But the injustice and inflexibility of tsarist rule unquestionably drove enlightened Russian citizens to near-despair, and hardship was a real spur to clandestine, illegal, labour organization.

On Moscow’s streets, however, and in the basement rooms where people lived without cigars, the talk was seldom about revolution, let alone Karl Marx. The city’s population boomed, increasing by 65 per cent in the decade after 1861 and comfortably exceeding a million by 1902.
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The newcomers who hung around the taverns, markets and pavement stalls might have been poor, but most could still afford cheap souvenirs.
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Old photographs – the Russians loved them – show turn-of-the-century crowds against a city lined with shops and signage, and folklore and history are suddenly everywhere. Some of the posters and advertisements bore images derived from fairy-tales (the water-spirit,
rusalka,
was popular), and some showed landmarks like St Basil’s and the Sukharevka Tower, but the Kremlin was a recurrent, an inescapable, motif. It featured in picture-postcards, magazine-covers, and on the lids of decorative chocolate-boxes. It also turned up on thousands – millions – of icons. By the 1890s, the workshops in Palekh and Mstiora were turning these out like bars of soap; the craftsmen in a single village (Kholmy) could produce as many as two million in a year, and they soon began using the Kremlin’s image as a shorthand for holy Russia.
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As time went on, the fortress also started to feature on mass-produced scarves and postage stamps, on printed calendars and the covers of souvenir theatre programmes.
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Russian style had, in effect, become a brand, and the Kremlin was its instantly recognizable trademark.

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That style, however, was a nineteenth-century invention. It drew on early works of art, the products of an age as yet unsullied by the neo-classical revolution, it drew on Russia’s scattered churches, peasant costumes, and icons from a range of different schools, but the nineteenth century’s achievement was to interpret and synthesize these diverse, eclectic, and not always truly Russian objects into an entirely novel artistic idiom. Distinguished by a weakness for the onion dome and
kokoshnik
(the decorative Russian corbel arch), the fashion was far from austere. Magpie-like, its exponents collected everything from peasant woodcarvings to drinking-cups, and that was where the treasures of the Kremlin played their role. Largely untouched, and often prey to mice and rot, the relics of pre-Petrine Muscovy that the fortress contained had been little more than lumber for a century; at best they made a collection of random curiosities. The process of their rediscovery took decades. But in the end, a neglected assortment of icons and decorative weaponry, a trove of awkward, heavy ceremonial regalia, and the motifs in a set of semi-ruined buildings emerged as the inspiration for a nation’s cultural revival. Elaborate and faintly exotic, its colours, shapes and lettering have gone on symbolizing Russia, to itself and others, ever since.

The objects in the Armoury Chamber had swum into official view on several occasions since the days of Peter the Great. As early as 1755, a palace official called Argamakov had argued for the creation of a permanent exhibition space. But it was only in 1801, when Alexander I, on the eve of his coronation, began to take an interest that the condition of the Kremlin collection attracted any serious concern.
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It turned out that there were thousands of objects, almost jumble, in the Kremlin’s various strongrooms. Icons were more or less familiar, but the original purpose of some of the rest remained a puzzle. An eye-catching golden ewer, the metal twining round a large exotic shell, was one such mystery, but even the more familiar objects could be difficult to identify precisely.
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The collection included elaborate religious vestments, not least some pearl-encrusted mitres from the seventeenth century, but then there were the jewelled tankards and court plate, drinking-vessels adorned with niello work, quantities of swords and bows, saddles, harness and decorated horse-armour. None of this had been examined for decades. Some things were literally falling to pieces.

As soon as the collection had been noticed by St Petersburg, questions started to be raised. One thorny issue was the cost of curatorial staff. Their numbers, the accountants saw, seemed to have mushroomed even as the collection continued to decay. The supervisor of all Kremlin works, tidy-minded Petr Valuev, promptly reorganized both staff and treasure, though he thought that all ‘useless’ objects should be sold.
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It fell to others to see the real value in the old robes and the tarnished swords. One hopeful theory, proposed by no less a person than the president of St Petersburg’s Academy of Arts, Aleksei Olenin (1763–1843), was that a true study of such objects would reveal the classical (i.e. European) origins of medieval Russian culture, establishing a long-lost link to Europe’s common ancestors in Greece and Rome.
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It was a tempting idea at the time, and in 1806 the tsar commanded that the remaining objects in the Armoury and associated workshops should be put in order pending more investigation.
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Olenin worked in the collection from 1807, joining a small group of other experts and enthusiasts, and the first catalogue, prepared by A. F. Malinovsky, was published that same year. The task of establishing the authenticity of anything was complicated by the eagerness of wealthy patriots who proffered items from their own strongrooms, and even by a few donations from public-spirited peasants, who came to Moscow bringing objects they had turned up in their masters’ fields.
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In 1810 the architect I. V. Egotov completed a special building, in the finest neo-classical style, to house it all. Valuev assumed the role of curator, a task he fulfilled with his usual energy.
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But the collection’s troubles continued. First came the panic and last-minute packing as Napoleon advanced; the treasures that came back from Nizhnyi-Novgorod in 1814 had been so roughly handled that some of the most delicate items, including fabrics and porcelain, had been damaged beyond repair.
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To compound the losses, a good number of smaller items, including collections of rare manuscripts (and also including Karamzin’s own archive), had disappeared when Moscow burned.

The destruction was catastrophic – by 1814 the palace collection must have felt like the salvage from some great shipwreck – but Napoleon’s invasion of the homeland inspired a new respect for the legacy of old Russia. People might not know quite what an object was, let alone how best to place it in context, but a new sense that Russia had its own art, in style and spirit different from that of Europe, was detectable at court and among some intellectuals. The accession of Nicholas I in 1825 was not untroubled, sparking a failed revolt by disaffected members of the Russian intelligentsia, but that, too, gave an impetus to patriots. The emperor harnessed their enthusiasm in his political programme, encouraging Russian-centred art and style at court as eagerly as he bore down upon dissent. The precise story of this Russianness, however, was a problem that forced Nicholas to take advice, especially from his court antiquarians. It was confusing enough to have to deal with unintelligible script, for Old Russian was almost Greek to Nicholas’ generation. But there were also tough questions to be answered about provenance; unless there was crystal-clear documentation, it was almost impossible to determine the date of anything.

Nicholas was not a scholar, and his interest was always pragmatic. Faced with this collection of treasures, whose use and origin were often unknown, his priority remained the promotion of official nationality, and to that end he needed someone who could interpret the past. Olenin knew exactly whom to recommend. In the 1830s, he encouraged his emperor to hire the award-winning artist Fedor Solntsev (1801–92) to explore and record the Kremlin collection.
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In later life, Solntsev would recollect that his commission had been to document Russia’s ‘ancient customs, dress, weaponry, church and imperial accoutrements, everyday objects, and archaeological and ethnographic information’ from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries.
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His execution of that mammoth project (if not his actual name) would soon be famous, and it still shapes most people’s idea of ‘real’ Russian style.

Solntsev’s work was not confined to copying; the tsar additionally commissioned him to create a series of Russian motifs to decorate a new ‘Kremlin’ porcelain dinner service comprising five hundred settings. The work took sixteen years to complete (the final pieces were fired in 1847), but the service was spectacular, and would be used whenever the court wanted a Russian nationalist theme, most notably at the Romanov tercentenary in 1913.
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A second service, this time for Nicholas’ son, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, was fired later in the 1840s. For both commissions Solntsev drew on his explorations in the Kremlin, and though some of the objects that he copied had been made by foreign masters in the tsar’s employ (or, at least, by Russians working under instruction from Germans, Scots and Persians), the porcelain became a landmark of national art. A whole series of Kremlin plates, for instance, followed seventeenth-century designs, while the distinctive shape of the so-called ‘Alexander Nevsky’ helmet (which had, ironically enough, been made at a nostalgic moment in the reign of the first Romanov tsar) was recycled to inspire the lid of Grand Duke Konstantin’s new coffee-pot.
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In 1834, a very busy Solntsev was also charged with the renovation of a suite of rooms associated with Mikhail Romanov in the old part of the Kremlin palace.
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The
terema
became – and still remain – a showcase for his new, imagined, version of the past. The colours on the walls and tiles were deep and rich, the patterns intricate, organic, as if inspired by the meadow-flowers in a Russian fairy-tale. Some of the design was authentic (Solntsev retrieved and copied anything that had survived), but much was improvised, and some relied on flights of creative imagination. The furniture, for instance, included Solntsev’s copies of pieces rescued from Kolomenskoe, but the heavily draped beds – never a feature of the real
terema
– had no historical connection to the chambers where they were to stand. The colour-scheme, favouring deep red and green, was also chosen to evoke the romantic feel that Solntsev wanted.
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