Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (51 page)

Government, of course, was the priority, and that meant meetingrooms and offices. The Senate had always housed assemblies – that was its purpose – so it was a natural location for the new revolutionary cabinet. The Council of People’s Commissars met in a long room, its members choosing leather chairs around a baize-covered table. At one end was an old-fashioned Russian stove, and it was here that the smokers had to sit so that their habit did not trouble the famously clean-living Bolshevik leader.
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Larger assemblies, the Congresses and Conferences of the Bolshevik Party that were held in more or less alternate years, were sometimes fitted into the Grand Kremlin Palace. Since these could last for several days, a canteen had to be provided, and someone chose to use the fifteenth-century Faceted Palace for that. Soldiers in their grubby jackets jostled party officials, always talking and always in a hurry. By 1922, despite the discreet efforts of the palace staff, there was soot on the historic walls and spots of grease on the carpets and parquet. Steam had lifted antique plaster from the walls and cigarette-smoke had thickened the air. Nearby, a group of several palace rooms, including a church, was being used to dry residents’ laundry. The windows were left open summer and winter, and, as an inspector later wrote, the snow and wind were making sure to finish any damage that had not already been accomplished by the occupants.
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The frantic pressure on Kremlin space left little time for sentiment. Government workers needed lavatories and typing pools, secret police needed cellars, everyone needed cleaners and maintenance-staff, and then there were the soldiers, the garrison, together with their bulky and explosive weapon-stores. The land outside was wracked by poverty and civil war, but members of the new elite employed maids, some added cooks, and Lenin himself had a loyal chauffeur, Stefan Gil. The old palace staff, meanwhile, had also managed to cling on, and some were even starting to teach their new masters how to use the china and the knives and forks.
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By the middle of 1918, the Kremlin teemed with housekeepers and drivers, resident bodyguards, and nannies for the children of not one, but many new-style ruling families. That summer, there were 1,100 people living in the Kremlin, 450 of whom had moved in since the revolution.
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Additional personnel and servants increased these numbers to 2,100 by the end of 1920. The old Kremlin, with its official complement of just two hundred staff, had never witnessed such an influx. The assorted inhabitants were crammed into 325 apartments, not all of which were really fit to live in.
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Leon Trotsky, whose role in these early months was almost as important as Lenin’s, took to the new environment with ease:

With its medieval walls and its countless gilded cupolas, the Kremlin seemed an utter paradox as the fortress for the revolutionary dictatorship … Until March 1918 I had never been inside [it], nor did I know Moscow in general, with the exception of one solitary building, the Butyrsky transfer-prison, in the tower of which I had spent six months during the cold winter of 1898 to 1899.
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Now he was living in a world of gilded mirrors and Karelian birch: ‘The aroma of the idle life of the master class emanated from every chair.’ An ornamental clock, decorated with the figures of Cupid and Psyche, stuck in his memory. Soon after he moved in, its chimes had broken into one of his snatched business conversations with Lenin. ‘We looked at each other’, Trotsky wrote, ‘as if we had both caught ourselves thinking the same thing; we were being overheard by the past, lurking over there in the corner. Surrounded by it on all sides as we were, we treated it without respect, but without hostility either, rather with a touch of irony.’
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A different mood afflicted those who had to fight to win a room. From the accommodation point of view, there were only three viable buildings: the Senate, the Cavalry Building, and part of the Grand Palace. Many of the rest, including the Small Nicholas Palace, were too badly damaged for any use (though Lenin tried to overrule the experts several times
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), while detachments of Latvian guards now occupied the barracks. Trotsky’s sister Olga and her husband, Lev Kamenev, moved into the Cavalry Building (they were so grand that they disdained to pay their rent), and so, for a while, did Stalin, who briefly shared a lodging with his future henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. Others, including the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, were given rooms on the ‘Frauleins’ corridor’ of the Grand Palace. It was an extension that lacked proper sanitation and seemed to be permanently cold.
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Both Malkov and his comrade Malinovsky joined the hunt for space.
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While the architect explored the palaces, Malkov’s attention was directed at the church. As he recalled, the Kremlin’s religious residents, ‘all flapping in their black … lived by their own rules and took no notice of ours’. Worse, ‘I had to provide these people, most of them enemy brothers, with permanent and single passes to the Kremlin: how do you protect the Kremlin from hostile elements that way!’
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It was common knowledge that valuables were disappearing under the priests’ flapping cloth. On one occasion, Malkov claimed to have exposed the church’s ‘fortress’ in the city, stuffed with smuggled treasure from the Kremlin. Partisan though he was, the tale was true. An archive document from April 1918 confirms that Malkov’s police indeed ‘repossessed’ a cache of items from the Chudov’s inventory, among which were thirteen crosses, four golden icons, seven diamond-encrusted mitres, a gold star, and a golden box containing holy relics. Believers had also removed five chalices, two gospels, lamps, mitres and other valuables from the Ascension Convent.
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The Bolsheviks condemned the whole tribe of churchmen as spies. In July 1918, Malkov was mandated to expel most of the Chudov’s monks, though a separate enquiry continued in the women’s case.
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By late July, about a third of the Kremlin’s monastic residents had gone, but the core of men and women that remained included the most stubbornly pious of all.
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These people argued – and truly believed – that their duty was to pray beside the ancient shrines. They also promised that they worked in other ways, physical ones, baking communion bread and scrubbing their cells. The nuns’ days were numbered, however, when an official called Kuznetsov reported to his masters in the late summer. Only thirty-six women were left in the Kremlin convent, he noted, and most of those were old, too decrepit to carry out the advertised monastic chores. At least nineteen of them were over fifty, an age at which, as he put it, ‘a woman is considered unfit for work’.
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On that undignified note, a religious tradition that had flourished on the Kremlin hill for six hundred years was brought to an end.

Malkov could now use some parts of the old convent as rooms. But the pressure on space continued to increase remorselessly, and the cramped conditions left the Kremlin seething with rivalry. The situation came to a head when Trotsky’s wife, Natalya Ivanovna, took over the plum job that Malinovsky had been doing running Moscow’s art. The new governing lady was taken with the idea that the palace could be turned into a museum. In 1920, that belief led to a bitter argument with Stalin. At issue were rooms in the wing that led from the Grand Kremlin Palace to the Armoury Chamber. The rooms themselves were covetable: elegantly furnished and flooded with light. Lunacharsky was already in residence, and one or two nearby suites had been occupied by other fortunate comrades, but Natalya Ivanovna was not pleased to learn that the boorish Georgian commissar wanted to join them. As she explained in her letters to Lenin, the annex opened straight into the treasure-house of the Armoury Chamber. It ought to be part of a great museum, it should be sealed off, and anyway it was inconvenient and ‘hellishly cold’, for there was neither heating nor modern plumbing.

The argument involved such major players that Lenin was forced to adjudicate personally. He made a few enquiries and discovered to his horror that the use of the royal apartments as emergency residences had resulted in ‘samovars being placed under eighteenth-century Gobelins [tapestries] and baby-clothes being dried over Augsburg tables’.
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It was a fire-hazard at the very least. Stalin was not permitted to annex the gracious rooms, and other colonists were soon moved out. From Stalin’s point of view, however, the story did not end in defeat. In 1921, when he returned from the civil war’s southern front, the leader rewarded him with apartment No. 1 in the so-called Poteshnyi Corpus, part of Aleksei Mikhailovich’s crumbling Poteshnyi Palace. It was a large flat, grand enough for the servants and children to have their own rooms, but its place in Lenin’s affections, its status as he signed it off to Stalin, can be judged from the fact that the previous occupant had been a woman very close to Lenin’s heart: his alleged mistress, the beautiful Inessa Armand.
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‘Around the city, many talked of orgies in the Kremlin,’ a Red guard wrote in his memoir of these years. He was not talking about sex (that would come later), but about the greatest issue in most people’s lives at the time: food. ‘The Russian intelligentsia,’ he went on, ‘knowing that the treasures of generations of Russian tsars were preserved [in the Kremlin], assumed the Bolsheviks must be stuffing their faces.’
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At a time when the whole country was starving, such rumours were not only natural but damaging. Beyond the Kremlin walls, in a land of failed harvests and abandoned farms, the average Muscovite was eating a mere 1,700 calories a day by 1918, close to starvation rations.
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Any guaranteed supply, however simple, was a luxury. Hot meals were one of the perks of Kremlin life. But it was a far cry from the bacchanalia of later Soviet times. Junior Kremlin staff had only the most basic food, and even the elite ate modestly at first. ‘Instead of fresh meat,’ Trotsky wrote, ‘they served corned beef. The flour and the barley had sand in them. Only the red Ket caviare was plentiful, because its export had ceased.’
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Austerity, however, did not last for long. It took just months for a hierarchy to form behind the Kremlin walls, for ‘higher’ staff to lord it over ‘lower’ ones and for almost everyone to start living better than the lesser mortals in the world outside. The excuse was that busy public servants should not waste their time on practicalities, but the effect was an inflation of luxury. Under the soviets, the people themselves were supposed to be the new tsar, but in this respect at least their leaders were content to act on their behalf. The rumours of privilege that were circulating in Moscow by 1920 had become so poisonous that Lenin created a special commission to investigate and report.

Its findings painted a picture of self-righteous and growing excess. The bulk of Kremlin staff ate in the Central Executive Committee canteen, where each person was allowed just over 100 grams (roughly 4 ounces) of meat or fish at a sitting. There were also rations for bread, vegetables, rice, butter and sugar, none of which was orgiastic by any measure. What really might have sparked a riot was the list of items set aside for the elite. Ministers in the Council of People’s Commissars were thought to need 300 grams (12 ounces) of meat or fish at every meal, twice the other staff’s generous ration of rice or macaroni, and four times the regular amount of bread.
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No later document would ever show that these amounts had been officially reduced.
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Instead, the privileges multiplied. Elite families who found life in the Kremlin inconvenient, for instance, could soon take a generous hamper (and servants) to their country homes. By the early 1920s, the out-of-town mansions of former millionaires, most famously that of an oil magnate called Zubalov, had been assigned to Russia’s Stalins and Dzerzhinskys. From 1918, when he went there to recuperate from bullet-wounds, Lenin himself spent increasing amounts of time at Gorky, taking the air in a mansion that had lately belonged to a General and Mrs Reinbot.
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The country houses on the estate at Zubalovo provided the setting for many of the parties and the fragrant summer days that Kremlin children of the 1930s later recalled in their memoirs. Even in Lenin’s time, the provision for what were euphemistically known as state rest-homes was generous. ‘We’ll spend gold on this,’ Lenin had promised in May 1918, ‘but the rest-homes will only be model ones if we can show that they have the best doctors and administrators, and not the usual Soviet bunglers and oafs.’
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The leader also wanted a secret transport connection between any retreat-complex and the Kremlin, but for the present his charmed elite made do with a small fleet of cars. You might have found them if you had walked past the Cavalry Building, behind the so-called ‘children’s wing’ of the palace, and through a stuccoed arch. The garages were ramshackle buildings, reeking of petrol-soaked rags, and they included a yard for lorries, armoured cars and other big mechanical beasts. A neglected corner behind them provided Malkov with the quiet spot he needed in 1918 when he received the order to shoot Lenin’s would-be assassin, Fanya Kaplan, an execution that he tried to disguise by running the engines of several lorries before he opened fire. It was also somewhere around here that he poured petrol over her remains and burned them.
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Nearby, meanwhile, in readiness for the Kremlin’s new masters, there gleamed a row of Packards, a Rolls-Royce, and, until it was taken from Lenin’s chauffeur at gunpoint in March 1918, at least one of the tsar’s own favourite Delaunay-Belleville limousines.
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