Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (58 page)

Abel Enukidze, ‘Uncle’ Abel, was a popular figure, and he was a favourite in the circle of Stalin’s own family. What emerged from the police reports on him was that he had become soft-hearted, and had offered jobs and small handouts when friends had found themselves in need. It was his doing, indeed, that so many figures from the intellectual and cosmopolitan opposition (the movement identified with Trotsky) had ended up working in the Kremlin library. Ezhov tarred Enukidze with corruption, a charge that could probably have been levelled at any officer of state with a budget to manage. Uncle or not, he lost his job in 1935, though he was left alive for two more years. Kamenev, meanwhile, could only watch in stupefaction as a cruel tale, fantastic and elaborate, was assembled around him. Mukhanova had been the first piece of the jigsaw, but in 1935 successive Kremlin hangers-on were questioned, usually over several days. A case was fabricated piece by piece, eventually forming Stalin’s desired picture of a Kremlin terrorist cell with links to Kamenev, his brother, and his wife. The plotters’ goal, of course, was nothing less than the murder of the Boss himself. The jigsaw was complete by the middle of 1935. It is said that Kamenev walked calmly down the Senate corridors to his final interview with Stalin. Zinoviev, however, reportedly collapsed on his way to the stifling Kremlin study and had to be carried between two of his guards.

As the Kremlin affair of 1935 gathered pace, Rudolf Peterson, the citadel’s trusted commandant and holder of the Order of the Red Banner, tried to avert disaster by sending a statement to the police. As he explained, the summer of 1933 had been a time of frantic building work. His entire effort had been focused on completing the great hall of the Kremlin Palace in time for the Seventeenth Congress. Perhaps, then, he had not attended the right classes in Marxism-Leninism, and perhaps his men, working till the small hours and at weekends, had not made time to read the latest pamphlets either. Perhaps, too, he had avoided working with Finns, Estonians and Jews, but maybe he was wary of potential foreign networks and not simply an enemy of universal brotherhood. He had more trouble with tales of his drinking, and especially with reports that he had got so drunk at a party for the great hall’s completion that he had danced around in it, singing and kissing the builders, but even this would not have been a problem at another time. The entire staff enjoyed a drink, and men were often drunk at work.
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The point was that Peterson, like Enukidze, was a marked man: the Kremlin could not be purged unless his security regime could be shown to have failed. The police found all the evidence that they required.
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The new commandant, clearly, would have to be a ranking officer in the secret police, and he would also have to have a personal connection to Ezhov.

The 1935 Kremlin affair eventually claimed 110 people. As staff in the fortress were later told – at a closed session chaired by Ezhov himself – ‘it was only thanks to Comrade Stalin that it was possible to uncover the hidden … nest of … scum’.
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The library in the Kremlin was closed, and several other facilities were shut down overnight. Among those left was the private hospital, located near the Kremlin on Vozdvizhenka street. Stalin was preoccupied with his own health. He was, in fact, as fascinated by research into longevity as he was haunted by the fear of enemies. He needed doctors, but he also mistrusted them, not least because he had a team of his own working to develop undetectable poisons in a secret toxicological laboratory behind the Lubyanka.
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While Ezhov was getting rid of Enukidze and his men, therefore, another of Stalin’s aides, Karl Pauker, was sent to purge the Kremlin’s medical establishment.

Pauker’s team reported a series of melodramatic discoveries. In the age of Agatha Christie, the Soviet secret police could write detective fiction with the best. Some of the lapses they claimed to have uncovered at the hospital could have been merely careless: bottles of pills had been mislabelled, quantities misread. A patient had been given caffeine instead of codeine. But when it was alleged that twelve cyanide capsules had disappeared, the sleuths knew that they had a case.
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In the hospital, as in the Kremlin itself, older staff and experts trained under the old regime came under scrutiny and were dismissed. In a series of charges that was to become standard in the years of the great purge, they were found to include former White-guardists, criminals, and foreign agents. One, unusually (the secret police were ever prudish in their use of terms), was declared to be a homosexual, a crime compounded by the discovery that he was also ‘very religious’ and often received visits from priests.
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The fear and the repression followed, and medicine, like engineering, agronomy, and most forms of historical research, became a potentially lethal vocation. But so was most security work. As Stalin’s aide, Pauker is said to have personally attended Zinoviev’s execution. He was himself shot soon after, perhaps because he felt secure enough to sneer as he delivered his report.
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The Kremlin, once a much-loved landmark, became an object of dread. ‘We were afraid to go near it,’ Muscovites repeat as they describe its place in their affections during Stalin’s rule. There were, of course, the state functions and formal banquets. Stalin is said to have made more welcome speeches to parties of shock-workers and hero-airmen in 1935 than in any other year before or after, but though the lights were bright and the food abundant, no-one warmed to the Kremlin itself.
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The few remaining residents seem to have disliked it. In the wake of the Kremlin affair, the number of elite politicians with Kremlin apartments shrank to less than a dozen. ‘It was dead,’ Sergo Mikoyan (the son of Stalin’s minister of foreign trade) explained. ‘Just stones.’ Stalin’s daughter, who lived in the Kremlin for twenty-five years, claimed that she ‘could not stand’ it.
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By the middle of the 1930s, the leader himself seldom spent a night there, preferring to sleep five miles away at the dacha that his architects had built for him after Nadezhda’s death. Even the citadel’s historic population of hooded crows was subjected to an inventive campaign of persecution by the Kremlin commandant, for Stalin could not tolerate the birds.
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The jolliest creature in the fortress was probably Bukharin’s fox, a former pet. Years after its master had been shot, Svetlana Allilueva remembered watching it playing hide and seek in the Tainitskie gardens, well out of sight of all the men in grey.
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The security alone must have been stifling. The bodyguards stuck to their VIPs like ticks, and also kept tabs on them for Stalin’s police.
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Whenever several members of Stalin’s clique gathered at once, which happened almost every afternoon, the guards were multiplied, and on Thursdays, when the Politburo was scheduled to meet, the Kremlin as a whole was sealed. Svetlana Allilueva remembered the surreal processions that sometimes took place on the nights when her father wanted to watch a film after one of those meetings. In later life, Stalin occasionally convened the Politburo in the cinema itself, a space he had created in the former conservatory of the Grand Palace, but before 1939 there was still some semblance of collective government.
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The official business in the Senate building would end at nine or ten in the evening, and then the whole group would move off to watch their movie, crossing the cold deserted square to the palace with young Svetlana in the lead. The gates were locked, the walls bugged, and nothing could approach the Kremlin from outside without detection, but all the same the huddled band had to be followed by an armoured car, bumping around the dark buildings at walking pace.
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Everything was suspect. Sergo Mikoyan remembered his father receiving a crate of wine from the Caucasus, every bottle of which had to be removed for testing. The leaders’ children could not bring packets of sweets from town into their flats. No visitor could bring a parcel and no bag was left unchecked.
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But not even Stalin could stay in the Kremlin all the time. The greatest danger threatened when the leaders had to travel. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, remembered how the great man would order his driver to take a different route every night as he drove to and from the Kremlin. He used his own street plan of Moscow, and neither driver nor bodyguard was told the route in advance.
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In 1949, a short-sighted woman who was careless enough to use a pair of opera-glasses to check the time by a city-centre clock accidentally caught sight of Stalin’s car as it sped up to the Borovitsky gates. She was arrested and spent six years in a labour camp.
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A Muscovite who used to live on Mokhovaya street, opposite the Kremlin, told me that his father’s camera and film were seized the morning after he made the mistake of testing them by taking a single picture from the back of a room whose windows faced the Kremlin walls.
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And there were other secrets underground. Stalin’s agents were fascinated by tunnels and hidden rooms. In 1923, during the restoration of Golitsyn’s palace, the secret police combined work on their own projects with a fresh attempt to find Ivan the Terrible’s lost library, searching the lower end of Okhotnyi Ryad for underground chambers and iron doors.
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Thereafter, any city-centre work brought them down from their grisly roosts, torches and measuring-tapes in hand.
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Always fascinated by the great leaders of Russia’s past, Stalin himself took an interest, and in 1933, under Peterson’s security regime, a civilian enthusiast called Stelletskii received a permit to dig inside the Kremlin. At the interview where they agreed the deal, Peterson told the explorer that his own men (all secret police) had not located any chambers during work to build the military school (he meant, of course, under the sites of the two monasteries that they had just destroyed). Obediently, Stelletskii dug on the opposite side of the fortress, carting large quantities of earth from underneath the Arsenal Tower throughout the early months of 1934.
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His dig received some expert help from the architect Shchusev, who had found an old tunnel of his own (soon open to the elite through a private entrance near the Senate Tower) during excavations for the Lenin mausoleum.
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There was a flicker of hope that something really new might soon be learned about the Kremlin’s past, but the operation shut down for some major Party meetings in the late autumn of 1934, and then came Sergei Kirov’s death.

The public would learn little more about the networks underground. The stories of a secret world under their city, however, continue to fascinate Muscovites even now. The Kremlin catacombs, they believe, are extensive enough to accommodate a large part of the nation’s gold reserves, as well as a vast communications system.
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Stalin certainly added a bomb-shelter, his bunker, which had at least two exits and very strong walls. In 1994, during the restoration of the Senate, builders found a further hidden tunnel, whose location would have allowed someone (the evidence points to the post-war secret-police chief, Lavrenty Beria) to eavesdrop on Stalin himself.
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There are always stories about a secret metro, too. From the time of its completion, it was widely observed that the public line that started on the edge of the Alexander Gardens and ran out through the Kiev train station was unusual because it did not cross the whole city as later lines were all to do. Muscovites immediately reasoned that there had to be a hidden extension, a parallel line leading under the Kremlin. If it followed the main public route from there, like all the service tunnels that were known to exist, it could easily have reached Stalin’s dacha. The most persistent story now suggests that the order to complete the connection came in the aftermath of the war, when Stalin was afraid of an atomic strike.
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The only route really known to exist, however, is served by an antiquated underground tram, and connects the Senate building with nearby Old Square, though it may run out further under Moscow at some point.
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Whatever the extent of that specific line (‘it is hardly a transport artery’ insists a former Kremlin aide
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), there is no doubt that Stalin’s fort still sits on a maze of underground systems, far larger than the ‘Pindar’ network that was built for Winston Churchill under London’s Downing Street. The Kremlin’s director of archaeological research, Tatiana Panova, would not show me her complicated maps of groundwater and geology as we leafed through an unpublished study of the site. ‘It’s secret,’ she insisted, flicking through to safer stuff, ‘secret, secret. You can’t look.’ Strain as I might (for all the good it would have done to anyone), I saw nothing but coloured lines, most of which were probably out of date several geological eras ago. In 2010, I asked Mikhail Gorbachev’s friend and interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, to help me out, at least about the mythical metro. ‘Of course it exists,’ he replied at once, ebulliently waving his hands. But then he lowered his voice.