Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (44 page)

By then, however, the Kremlin had acquired a giant of its own to even out the competition. Today, the most famous monument to the assassination of Alexander II is in St Petersburg. Alexander III commissioned the shrine, now known as the Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood, in 1883, and it was built in an uncompromisingly nostalgic (for which read pastiche) neo-Russian style, complete with colourful mosaic panels and the standard-issue onion domes. But while St Petersburg endured years of disruption during the construction of that (and still endures the finished building), Moscow’s elite found its own way of commemorating the murdered tsar. S. N. Tretyakov, the brother of the art-collector, took the initial lead, and it was his idea that any monument should stand near the Kremlin palace where Alexander II had been born. The site of the old
prikazy
looked just right, and then a ground survey added an appropriate
frisson
by turning up hundreds of skeletons, suggesting hurried burial, perhaps during a Mongol raid.
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This bloody precedent was a good start, but though it sanctified the site it did not help much with the future monument’s design. Statues were not in keeping with the old Kremlin, and Alexander had never been a robes and candles man. In the end, it took three competitions and a lot of argument to settle on a winner, by which time the project – which those involved seemed to treat as a spiritual test – had taken on grotesque dimensions.
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It had also acquired a royal patron in the shape of Alexander III’s own brother, the pious, prim and reactionary Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, who became governor-general of Moscow in the spring of 1891.

The first stone for the Kremlin monument to Alexander II was laid, to the sound of bells and a full 133-gun salute, on 14 May 1893 (the buried skulls, meanwhile, were borne off quietly to Moscow University). Five and a half years and just under two million rubles later, in August 1898, the finished structure was opened by the new tsar, Nicholas II. Towering above the Moscow river, especially when illuminated at night, its centrepiece was a bronze statue of the murdered emperor roughly four times natural size. Leading up to that was an open-air gallery lined with 152 columns, a pointless space that Muscovites were quick to dub ‘the bowling-alley’. Pink granite from Finland completed the ensemble, which even the most sheepish members of Moscow’s intelligentsia were known to hate. Inside, meanwhile, the theme was romantically historical. A team of artists had created a mosaic cycle within the colonnade to lead visitors through nine hundred years of supposedly continuous Russian history. The starring roles were played by thirty-three officially approved rulers from Vladimir to Nicholas I and finally – glancing outside – by Alexander II himself.
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The main inscription on the façade ran: ‘To Alexander II with the love of the people.’
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Strangely, once they had lived with it for a few months, large numbers of ordinary Muscovites seem genuinely to have made the Alexander monument part of their lives. It was secular and accessible, and the view from the top was great. The paved space underneath the colonnades became a favourite for ladies seeking to enjoy the sights and also for the gentlemen who idled round to wait for them. Thousands of humbler mortals treated the mosaics as a useful introduction to their nation’s history, or at least as a place to take their visitors when the weather was wet. One of Moscow’s nimbler textile factories cashed in, and began marketing a woven headscarf that featured the monument (in red, on a cream ground) surrounded by a tasteful greenish border composed of the royal portraits rendered as a series of medallions.
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This comfortable version of the past grew ever more alluring as the pace of economic change increased. As Moscow’s population boomed, and new smokestacks and loud machines intruded on its calm, the attractions of nostalgia grew ever more powerful. So did the threat to the people’s sense of Russianness from endless tempting foreign goods and brash ideas. The Kremlin itself was not safe. In 1893, a citizen called Kozhevnikov drew attention to the citadel’s poor state compared with the Upper Trading Rows (now known commonly as GUM), the glass and iron palace that now challenged it across Red Square. With so much building going on, so much regeneration, the Kremlin urgently cried out for help; its renovation, Kozhevnikov wrote in an essay published in the journal
Russian Archive,
amounted to ‘the sacred duty of sons before their fathers’. ‘To become what they should be,’ he continued, ‘the Kremlin walls should not be whitewashed, nor painted, but they should be artistically decorated with hand-painted illustrations … all around and from top to bottom … showing scenes from the drama of Russia’s history.’ The themes proposed were patriotic: Russia’s heroic stand at the crossroads of the continents, its history of holy struggle and its war against infidels, Asians, and (wrote Kozhevnikov) the ‘armies of fanatical Islam’.
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The idea seems outlandish now, but at the time there would have been a stampede if an artist had been called upon to do the job. The pack might well have been led by two brothers, Victor and Apollinary Vasnetsov (1848–1926 and 1856–1933 respectively), whose work in these years included paintings, ceramics, carved wood and even architectural designs that gave the nation just the Muscovy it seemed to want.
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Real Kremlin life was no romance, but nor was it in keeping with the new commercial frenzy out on Moscow’s streets. The pace of life had slowed in the fortress since the building of St Petersburg. By 1909, the Chudov Monastery, which at its height had been home to three hundred monks and their servants, housed only seventy-two men, of whom twenty-three were non-religious palace staff.
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The Ascension women’s monastery had declined in the same way; by 1917 its complement had dwindled to just fifty-one.
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Both institutions had been forced to find new ways of generating revenue since their heydays, the men by selling candles, holy books and consecrated bread, the women by weaving palm crosses and making artificial flowers for sale.
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Meanwhile, though ceremonies for the tsars were still magnificent (and the Synod choir, which sang in the Dormition Cathedral, remained a wonder of Moscow’s cultural life), the daily services in many Kremlin churches were perfunctory. ‘The service was crude,’ one visitor recalled after attending vespers in 1911, ‘the deacons and the singers had the most disagreeable bass voices, the church was empty and dark, and the whole thing had a most disagreeable effect on me.’
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Outside the confines of the church, on land where weeds and even full-sized trees had lately grown, a dull parade-ground order now ruled almost everywhere. Though visitors, if decently attired, were permitted to stroll about the hill by day, Cathedral Square itself was enclosed by railings and guarded by a row of sentry-boxes. All gateways and main thoroughfares were locked at night. The guards belonged to the permanent palace staff, all of whom were carefully screened for deviant political views. The other residents included policemen and grenadiers, but the Kremlin’s full-time population also numbered several doctors and architects, a midwife, and at least seven accountants. An army of servants (known, to their own well-documented discomfort, as ‘lackeys’
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) completed the population. Many lived on the site itself – there were about two hundred such official residents in 1905 – but conditions were modest (few occupied more than one small room) and the atmosphere could be more or less subtly oppressive. Even occasional overnight visitors were watched and sometimes subject to arrest.
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The staff themselves led languid, even boring, working lives. In 1862, Sofiya Behrs, the daughter of a resident palace doctor, held her wedding in a Kremlin church. The groom was Lev Tolstoy, who later used the scene (complete with his embarrassing last-minute search for a clean shirt) when he described Kitty and Levin’s marriage ceremony in his novel
Anna Karenina.
Like the fictional Kitty, the real Sofiya had spent the entire day in tears, but she managed to control herself in the presence of ‘a great many strangers, palace employees mostly’ who gathered round to watch. As Tolstoy put it, ‘Those who had arrived too late to get into the middle of the throng pressed round the windows, pushing and disputing and trying to peer in between the bars.’
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There was normally so little for such people to do that when the imperial family needed to accommodate large numbers of important guests (as they might on almost any state occasion), the Kremlin’s less important residents – whole families – were obliged to vacate their rooms, sometimes for months at a time.
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‘Kremlin life is oppressive,’ Tolstoy’s new wife reflected on a return visit to her parents’ apartment. ‘It evokes the oppressive, lazy, aimless life I led here as a girl.’
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The circumstances were not conducive to determined effort. It must have felt quite strange to quit the city for the Kremlin’s tranquil squares, nod at the sentry, and to step inside the Armoury archive. The building was magnificent, a blaze of gold; the ill-lit desks, by contrast, narrow, cluttered and austerely functional. And yet the nineteenth century’s nationalist historians could not keep away from the fortress, for besides its gems and lavish gold, the Armoury’s other major treasure was its store of documents. The majority of these papers had started life in Muscovite
prikazy,
and had been shifted, like unwanted baggage, from shelf to store to strongroom as the Kremlin landscape changed. The collections included account-books and treaties, details of fire legislation, and the names of every foreign worker in the Kremlin’s hire. The paperwork was incomplete – parts of the archive had burned and other documents had disappeared in the many government reorganizations of Romanov times – but this was raw material for real professional research. While lackeys next door in the palace rubbed a languid thumb across the silver spoons, a new team of historians began to write.

They did not get to work in special light or pull on clean white gloves. They were not like the specialists who use archives today, and they tended to share a particular outlook and cast of mind. The older generation was represented by Ivan Snegirev (1792–1868), historian, ethnographer, official censor and arch-conservative. A professor in Moscow by the 1830s, his output included historical accounts of famous monuments, among them several of the Kremlin churches, and news of his efforts soon reached as far as London’s British Museum. Snegirev took great delight in decoding the documents that wealthy patrons could not read (‘they say the writing of the seventeenth century looks like shorthand,’ he wrote in 1841
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), and used that skill to open doors into the lost world of pre-Petrine tsars.

As his diaries show, however, Snegirev’s was a spiritual, not merely scientific quest. He was a regular attender at both the Chudov Monastery and the Dormition Cathedral, and his love of dusty papers was part of his deep religious faith. He read and wrote, in other words, in search of the imagined city, saint-filled and still untouched by Europe, that had produced the art and religion he loved. Beyond the church, his circle included many of Russia’s conservative patriots as well as the cream of artistic Moscow. He spent evenings in the company of the writers Sergei Glinka and Ivan Turgenev, he dogged Fedor Solntsev round the Kremlin, and he lectured Konstantin Ton about the building he was planning to erect. The writer Alexander Veltman (1800–70), later curator of the Armoury Museum, became a friend, as did the noblemen – mainly Golitsyns – who sponsored Snegirev by buying ancient manuscripts for him to decipher. His wife, however, was no admirer of his monkish tastes, and in return he found her wild and vulgar, even slightly mad. On a day-to-day basis, he took refuge in libraries. ‘I got on with my own affairs,’ the historian wrote in January 1843, ‘which my wife greatly obstructed.’
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As well as cultivating the elite, Snegirev used his influence to encourage talent and attract new minds to his projects. Among his protégés was a penniless young man from Tver called Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908). In 1837, when the latter was forced to abandon his studies for lack of funds, Snegirev took him on to work with documents in the newly accessible Kremlin archives. In compensation for his meagre pay, the youth was given rooms in the Cavalry Building behind the Kremlin palace, and he took the opportunity to immerse himself in the lives of dead Muscovite tsars. He would give his best years to that subject, though he also led successful archaeological expeditions to the Crimean steppe.
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Snegirev approved Zabelin’s first publication, an article based on Kremlin papers, in 1842. Exactly twenty years later the younger man completed his first masterpiece, a study of the seventeenth-century Kremlin called
The Home Life of the Muscovite Tsars.

Snegirev and his protégé lived in a world apart from liberal reforms and revolutionary politics. For Snegirev, patriotism was a holy duty almost indistinguishable from religious service. In 1855, for instance, on the day after the death of Nicholas I, while the bells rang and the cannon boomed above the shocked, clamouring crowd, Snegirev joined a select group of Moscow’s elite in the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery to hear the imperial succession manifesto. The sombre mood there was far more to his taste than a noisy crush among the mob. ‘It is remarkable,’ he noted, ‘that Nicholas I died on the very same day and hour (Friday at noon) that Christ suffered for us when He was on the cross.’
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It did not matter that the late tsar was a prig, nor that he had demolished large parts of a building Snegirev revered. A loyal subject was supposed to view the dead ruler with religious awe.