Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (46 page)

Tremer directed his audience to an article in the pages of an obscure journal that had been published in 1834. Its author, one von Dabelov, was a professor from the Baltic city of Dorpat. In the course of his research in Riga, Narva and Reval, Dabelov wrote, he had found several old notebooks, some parts of which bore writing that looked like Ivan the Terrible’s. Deciphering the rest, he concluded that the notes were fragments of a lost list that Vetterman had prepared during his brief stay in the Kremlin in the 1550s. The catalogue included at least eight volumes of classic history, including one of Cicero’s; there were also autograph manuscripts by Tacitus, Sallust and Livy, a copy of Justinian’s
Codex,
and parts of Virgil’s
Aeneid.
The Greek texts supposedly included lost works by Aristophanes and Polybius, and there were many other items from the court library of Constantinople.
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Von Dabelov had vanished into Dorpat’s mist, but Tremer, turning up when Moscow’s ear was tuned to history, became a celebrity. He told the public that he had found documents in Leiden that looked like parts of a fourteenth-century copy of an older manuscript. He had come to Moscow in search of the rest, for he believed that the larger part of it was probably in Moscow and must have arrived with Sofiya. The text he was after was a lost section of the
Iliad,
rumours about which, as he understood, persisted among archivists in the Kremlin.
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The idea of a library of priceless works caused a sensation. Emotive pieces appeared in the Moscow press, and disputes of a more pedantic kind were to fill the learned journals for years to come.
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Sergei Aleksandrovich, the reactionary governor-general of Moscow (and by now Zabelin’s boss as Director of the Historical Museum), at once formed a commission to explore the evidence and advise on the necessary excavations. This was chaired by Prince Shcherbatov and included a sceptical Zabelin, both also representing the Historical Museum. Under its supervision, workers dug under the Kremlin’s most historic towers, exposing subterranean defensive works but finding no trace of the sealed doors. They made a new effort to uncover the passageways that might once, in medieval times, have linked strategic palace buildings, paying special attention to the Archangel Cathedral, since some assumed the books to have been buried close to Ivan’s grave. The work was not entirely fruitless: it uncovered several lost buildings, including the foundations of the fifteenth-century Treasury.
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What the explorers never found, of course, was Ivan’s library.

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The establishment of the Historical Museum was an epic labour in itself, but the industrious Zabelin also continued to publish. His last major work,
The History of the City of Moscow,
appeared in instalments between 1902 and 1905. The book was written under the supervision of the Moscow City government, the wealthy and august Duma, and its purpose was to foster civic pride.
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But though the city was officially his theme, Zabelin chose instead to write a history of the Kremlin in the guise of a walking tour. The citadel had been his first love, and now he brought together a lifetime of anecdotes, the fruit of decades of original research. His book contains accounts of court life, government, and even prisons. It combines a knowledge of architecture with a sense of drama and spiritual destiny. Detailed and scholarly, it is also a hymn to the Kremlin of martyrs and Russian heroes, and that explains why, in the early twenty-first century, the new age of historical chauvinism, the book has been reprinted several times.
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But Zabelin’s was not the ultimate account of the tsarist Kremlin. That laurel belongs to the work (now also reissued) of Sergei Bartenev (1863–1930).

Bartenev was the son of a prominent Moscow historian, Petr Bartenev, the founding editor of the journal
Russian Archive.
From such beginnings, naturally, the younger man rejected history in favour of music and composition. But the Kremlin exerted a special pull on him, and eventually he joined its staff as a curator. In 1912, he published his best-known book, an elegant history of the Grand Kremlin Palace, printed in both Russian and (for twice the price) French. The volume covered the history of the site, including a survey of the original stone palace of Ivan III, before taking its readers on a stunning tour of the current palace, its churches and its ceremonial halls. There were numerous black-and-white photographs, some of which now constitute the last pre-revolutionary record of buildings, such as the Saviour in the Forest, that were later destined for extinction. The book did not discuss the recent restoration-work (interiors were shown as if they were perfectly preserved versions of their original selves), but it certainly encouraged Russian hearts to swell.

Bartenev’s most ambitious scheme, however, was a projected three-volume history of the entire Kremlin:
The Moscow Kremlin in Old Times and Now.
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Though only the first two volumes ever appeared, this work was as compendious as any encyclopaedia. Its readers, if they had a desk of sufficient size, could find in it the exact dimensions of every battlement and tower. They could discover how the walls were built and roofed, what kinds of foundation were dug, and often who exactly paid for what. If they preferred to read chronologically, they could follow the stories of the Moscow tsars, and they could picture all of this with the help of five hundred years of maps and drawings, Russian and foreign. Bartenev cited experts like Karamzin and Kliuchevsky, but he also incorporated lengthy excerpts from original documents. The book was almost unreadable, and it could only have been written by someone who lived in the Kremlin and had been more or less seduced by it. In fact, Bartenev worked with the official blessing of the Kremlin’s chief administrator, Prince Odoevsky-Maslov, and the two were neighbours in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building.
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The Moscow Kremlin
reflected the academic spirit of its time but also the nineteenth-century’s main fantasies about the Kremlin as a place, including a meticulous, almost religious, deference.

Bartenev’s
Moscow Kremlin
was written in the florid language of Russia’s nineteenth-century court, but anyone can still enjoy his most original idea. It is a map, a plan of the Kremlin on which are superimposed the outlines of every known structure, whether lost or extant. Four colours – red, yellow, blue and green – provide a chronological guide, existing buildings featuring in red and vanished medieval buildings (the oldest) in green. The map is very large, over three feet square, but the detail is so fine that it takes a magnifying glass and patience to discern the names and dates of individual monuments. With these, you can make out the courts of fifteenth-century boyars, the ghosts of churches, the rectangular outlines of the old
prikazy
and the folds of Peter the Great’s bastions (the latter yellow, since they dated from the neo-classical age). The complex shapes of long-demolished palace buildings also feature, coloured blue, beneath the red lines of Ton’s much more recent structure. It is a fascinating, utterly absorbing document, and it is still in use. On my first day as a researcher in the Kremlin library, the staff brought me a mounted copy, larger than a table-top, and left it by my desk for reference.

Like most historical sources, however, this beautiful object has to be read critically. Bartenev’s map does not show the Kremlin as he knew it, or even as it grew and altered through history, but as he wanted to imagine it. The historical developments, even the loss of churches or the disruption caused by Peter the Great’s earthworks, all point to a noble outcome, a beautiful present. In reality, there would have been uncertainties, not tidy lines, at almost every point. More seriously, the map offers no trace of the pervasive clutter of encroaching modern life. One thing that it carefully overlooks, for instance, is the coal-burning electricity generating station that had recently been completed in the Kremlin grounds. Built to power the illuminations at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896, it remained a semi-secret, almost shameful, addition to the palace complex, not least because the city as a whole had four more years to wait for its first power-station.
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Indeed, most streets remained in the gas age (or that of candles and oil) until the 1920s. The Kremlin’s new facility caused so much confusion that it took years for palace officials to decide upon the uniforms that its technical staff were to wear. It was a question they were still discussing when the monarchy collapsed in February 1917.
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Another subject that Bartenev’s map does not discuss is architectural style (as an existing building, Ton’s new palace is shown in the same triumphant red as the ancient Dormition Cathedral), and it passes no political comment. So it takes a reader with some knowledge of the space to understand the meaning of a small red outline, marked with the symbol that the author used to indicate a consecrated site, in the middle of Senate Square. It was, in fact, another monument, a substantial metal cross in the Russian revival style, designed by Victor Vasnetsov to mark the site of a murder that had horrified conservatives and loyal Russian patriots. In 1910, the date of Bartenev’s map, the monument was only two years old, and its story would have been fresh in the minds of every Kremlin resident.

The drama began in January 1905, when Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, whose reactionary views had made him a prime target for terrorists, had moved into the Kremlin’s Small Nicholas Palace (so-called to distinguish it from the Grand Palace that Nicholas I had later built) for his own protection and that of his family and staff. The grand duke’s fortunes had taken a dive since the accession of his nephew, Nicholas II. Devoted husband though he was, and thoughtful master to his own immediate retainers, his inflexibility as an administrator was rapidly becoming an embarrassment at court. On 1 January 1905 he resigned as governor-general of Moscow, but the threats to his life continued.

Grand Duke Sergei was about to become the first royal victim of the coming revolutionary storm. The Russian nationalist project had not succeeded in including everyone. The mass of Russia’s poor was not convinced; historic art did nothing for the workers in their airless dark or peasants struggling with debt. Such people might enjoy a festival, they might turn out to cheer their tsar, but the grinding hardship of their lives attracted them to any revolutionary spark. Among the most alienated were the students, disgusted by the empire’s repressiveness, its chauvinism, and its complacent assumption that the poor deserved – even enjoyed – their fate. In 1904, a war with Japan revealed the full extent of Russia’s weakness. Again, it was the poor who bore the brunt, enduring food shortages and extended working hours as well as providing the bulk of the foot soldiers who would have to die. The imperial elite consistently underestimated the public mood, ascribing any protest to the work of isolated malcontents. In January 1905, a peaceful crowd of protesters in St Petersburg was hacked to pieces by the tsar’s cossacks. This atrocity, universally known as Bloody Sunday, became the rallying cry for a nationwide revolt. The pressure of the public’s rage was one of the reasons why, back in Moscow, Sergei Aleksandrovich, daily expecting an attack, had started to forbid his adjutants to share his carriage, fearing for their lives.

The assassin, Ivan Kalyaev, was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a group whose aim was to destroy the current system in the name of the peasants. He had made several visits to the Kremlin – his face was a familiar one – but when he walked through the gates on 17 February 1905 the newspapers that he habitually carried concealed a bomb. No-one looked too closely that cold afternoon. The grand duke’s carriage-wheels crunched over snow, his coachman whipping the horses towards the Nikolsky gates. As the carriage rounded the Senate building, Kalyaev threw his bomb, killing the victim instantly by blasting him to bits. The grand duke’s widow, Elizaveta Fedorovna, who had heard the explosion, rushed out of the palace where the pair had been eating lunch a short time before and threw herself into the bloodstained snow, gathering up the pieces of her husband’s corpse. A schoolboy later remembered how he and his friends found more scraps of flesh during a sledging expedition the next day. Some of the grand duke’s fingers, still wearing their heavy rings, were blown on to the Senate roof.
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It is the sort of detail that could never feature on Bartenev’s map.

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The revolution of 1905 hit Moscow with punitive force. Neither the imperial authorities nor the Duma was prepared for the strength of public outrage. The bourgeoisie itself was divided, some joining the calls for reform while others condemned any proletarian demand as insurrection. Zabelin, by now an old man, wrote a dismal list of words in his diary, the lexicon of a changing world. ‘Revolution,’ he began. ‘Bureau – resolutions – petitions – delegates – cadres. Qualifications. Functions. To function. To get qualified. Provocateur.’ Later that season he thought that

everyone has stopped asking; instead they importunately DEMAND that their lives must improve, that the working day should be reduced and wages raised, and they demand this AT ONCE. They also demand the introduction of a democratic republic AT ONCE. Russia [
Rus’
] has become a madhouse … it’s like an epidemic of plague or cholera.
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But this, of course, was no passing affliction. In January 1905, a third of Moscow’s workforce went on strike in protest at the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg. By spring, the public mood had hardened even further, and political parties on the left, including democrats and socialists, had gained considerable ground. The most extreme conservatives responded by arming themselves, and Russia saw a series of clashes between the protesters and vigilante groups such as the Black Hundreds, a nationalist and anti-Semitic band of thugs. In Moscow, these were rallied by
Moskovskie vedomosti,
the newspaper of choice for people like Zabelin. The pogroms that disfigured other Russian towns were only averted in Moscow because it had already lost most of its Jews. In vain did the prime minister, Count Witte, warn the tsar agains ‘finding an energetic soldier to crush the rebellion by sheer force’.
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All Nicholas could think of was repression; the coming months destroyed his dream of a mystical union with the people. In the face of blatant state brutality, the workers, and even Duma members, responded with further strikes, and by October the entire city was at a standstill. Only the army and police seemed to share the emperor’s view that the best answer was to use the troops. Nicholas II confessed as much in a letter to his mother, whining that ‘I had nobody to rely on except honest [police chief] Trepov’.