Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (61 page)

On completing their Kremlin tour (main features of the hill, main landmarks, Cathedral Square, and, if you were lucky, Armoury and Diamonds), most excursions followed their guides through the exit gate down to the Alexander Gardens. The manuals for tour-leaders recommended that they visit Lenin’s mausoleum at this point, although the queues for that were formidably long at any time of year.
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To visit Lenin was to share in something greater than mere pride; it was a kind of sacrament. You did not slouch, you did not spit, and even you ground out that cigarette. Moscow’s schoolchildren learned this at an early age, for someone dreamed up the idea of bringing the pick of them here, to the very presence of the corpse, when they were sworn in as young Pioneers. As they accepted their red scarf and scroll, the lucky few would glow with pride, but grinning, in the presence of Ilyich himself, was definitely not allowed.
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For all that, Khrushchev’s thaw was genuine, and no-one warmed to it with greater glee than educated Muscovites. In the 1950s, a narrow circle of these got their first opportunity in over twenty years to take professional stock of the Kremlin. Buildings that had been assigned to the secret police since 1935 were suddenly transferred to the Ministry of Culture. The Armoury Chamber museum also expanded for a time, absorbing Marshal Voroshilov’s recently vacated rooms in a wing of the Grand Palace.
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New research staff were hired, young men with history degrees, and by 1963 there was a curator for each room for the first time in half a century.
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They worked within an ideological frame, but they did not have to tell obvious lies. The guidebook,
Kreml’ Moskvy,
had chapters on the medieval and renaissance forts by several of Moscow’s most distinguished authorities, including the architectural historian V. F. Snegirev.
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Po Kremliu,
a volume that was published for the Festival of Youth in 1957, is still regarded as a classic. The team of authors who created it included the architect-restorer A. I. Khamtsov, and the curator of Kremlin museums, A. A. Goncharova.
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Stalin’s shadow was not exorcized entirely. Armoury staff encountered it in an unusual way, for in the later 1950s they developed plans to hold an exhibition of the gifts the leader had received during his quarter-century in power. The collection was assembled and catalogued, and the planning went so well that tickets for a private view were printed on two separate occasions, but each time someone found a reason to delay. Eventually the exhibition was dismantled and the rooms intended for it handed back to the commandant’s office, otherwise known as the ninth directorate of the KGB. By this time, as ever, the secret policemen needed extra space, but there would have been other rooms for them. In truth, while there was always scope for a museum of Muscovite tsars, and though it was vital to preserve the shrine to Lenin, no-one knew what gloss to put upon the Stalin mugs, the gilded armadilloes and the grotesque porcelain models of the Saviour Tower.
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Still more eccentric, as a legacy, was the rebuilding of a long-dead face. At the end of his life, Stalin had ordered that Ivan the Terrible’s coffin should be opened and the bones and skull researched. The brick-built tomb gave up its secrets in April 1953, a month after Stalin’s own death, but it was only in 1965 that Russia’s famous ‘face-finder’, the forensic anthropologist M. M. Gerasimov, published his conclusions. By then, the coffins of both of Ivan’s older sons had also been opened, and all three skeletons had been subjected to Gerasimov’s professional attentions. As ever, his priority had been to reconstruct the faces. From Ivan’s skull he shaped a thickset man – at the end of his life, this tsar had been stout, even fat – and added a sharp forehead and petulant mouth. The image was convincing, and the model had a cruel, spoiled glare. But this was no dictator for the modern world. ‘The skeleton,’ Gerasimov recalled,

was partially covered with the torn pieces of a monk’s garment. Over the head and masking the face were the remains of a monk’s cowl and a filet on which were embroidered texts of prayers. On the breast lay a monk’s apron top embroidered with the scene of the crucifixion on Golgotha.
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This kind of detail could cause trouble in a Kremlin where religion was all but taboo. Ivan was still a Russian hero, but monks in any guise were unwelcome. The Kremlin cathedrals, too, remained in cultural limbo. They had not been used for religious services since 1918, and by the 1950s they were badly in need of renovation and frequently closed. Any sporadic repair-schemes were liable to be undermined (sometimes literally) by other government priorities. Later, conservation was typically commissioned to coincide with jubilees such as the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power in 1968 or the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. It was not a recipe for consistency. Hastily completed work generally left fresh, and urgent, problems in its wake.
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The Kremlin’s most important structures hovered at the edge of ideological acceptability, the very scaffolding around them keeping the tourists at bay. The best that religion seemed able to do (apart from looking nice on a postcard) was to foster a confused Soviet pride. ‘Notwithstanding their link to religious rituals,’ a conference of archaeologists conceded in 1970, the preservation of the Kremlin cathedrals ‘has facilitated the development of feelings of national self-consciousness and patriotism in the struggle against enemies of the fatherland, and has helped in the process of education in civic responsibility.’
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Within the limits of a straitened budget and distorting ideology, however, the Kremlin staff entered an age of opportunity at last. Igor Grabar died in 1960. The generation that came after him was almost entirely Soviet-educated, but culture was as valued by this younger intellectual elite as it had been by their fathers. Fresh teams of employees worked doggedly, producing careful papers, debating origins and authorship and analysing ancient paint. There were collective publishing ventures, but the high points were the formal conferences, interminable and stiflingly prestigious. Abroad, the discoveries that Soviet researchers made were often overlooked (or dismissed on the grounds of bias), but volumes in the Kremlin library are witness to the heroism of its many expert staff. They analysed fragments of sculpture, reconstructed frescoes, and traced the early shapes of the great cathedrals.
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With tiny budgets, and often in the teeth of interference from the commandant and political elite, they pursued real scholarship.
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They even struggled with diplomacy, and in 1979, the first joint exhibition in fifty years toured outside Russia, a show collected to display the sheer profusion of the Kremlin’s cultural wealth. It included sixteenth-century reliquaries and a gilded copy of the Gospels from 1568, a copy of the Cap of Monomakh, and icons dating from the middle of the twelfth century. ‘Treasures from the Kremlin’ was supported, notwithstanding the Cold War, by New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
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The post-war years were also a boom time for Soviet archaeologists, with opportunities to dig in war-damaged regions like Novgorod, Pskov and Kiev, but while academic knowledge of these places grew apace, the buried history of the Moscow Kremlin remained mysterious. It had been near-impossible to dig in Stalin’s day: subterranean work was reserved for the secret police. Khrushchev was less concerned with security, but his very openness presented Moscow’s specialists with a new problem. There might now be a real chance of access, and even of state funds, but no-one could agree who was to have the privilege of digging in the Kremlin first.
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The answer, unexpectedly, came from the underground public lavatories outside the gates. Their pit was still being excavated in the summer of 1956 when the archaeologist Mikhail Rabinovich, a man known for his expeditions to Novgorod, paid his first visit to the newly opened Kremlin. Many years later, he still remembered the horror he felt when greeted at the ticket-holders’ entrance by a yawning hole in the ground. The iron bucket of a giant digger was scooping at the earth, and each enormous gulp bore off the record of six hundred years. Rabinovich wasted no time, demanding access to a telephone against the clank and rumble of the huge machines. After several calls he found the right man. The Kremlin commandant, Aleksandr Vedenin, turned out to be a cultured person with an interest in history. The digger’s engines were switched off.
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It was a sudden, and an unexpected, debut. Rabinovich assembled a team, co-opted an eminent colleague called Nikolai Voronin, and began to dig. That year, the two men mapped the brick embankments of the old Neglinnaya, but there were greater finds to come. Although they seemed fated to work in the shadow of enormous cranes, the team would be the first to excavate the west and south-west portions of the Kremlin using modern surveying techniques. It was always a last-minute scramble, a case of glimpses snatched before another vast construction scheme began. Summer after summer, the archaeologists had to race against impatient site-managers with deadlines of their own to meet, and a good deal of the work was done in haste by inexperienced volunteers. In 1963, however, two years after the last of these expeditions, Voronin and Rabinovich published their findings, the first really new material on the Kremlin’s early history to appear in print since Sytin’s reports in the 1930s.
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The technology and time available were so limited that Rabinovich and Voronin could often do no more than confirm nineteenth-century theories. The usual ideological pressures were also there, for even at this time it did not pay to deviate from the official line. For all that, the pair were able to add important details about the Kremlin’s original topography, the design and layout of early fortifications, and the thousand-year-long patterns of settlement. They also located the foundations of the tsaritsa’s chambers (built for Natalya Naryshkina at the end of the seventeenth century), remnants of the old
prikazy,
and traces of Boris Godunov’s palace. The Kremlin, they discovered, had the deepest of urban roots. A fort and then a trading-post, it had never been just an agricultural settlement. For a good communist, for whom the peasants always were the lowest and most boorish social tier, there was a snobbish comfort in that kind of news.

In the wake of Voronin and Rabinovich, the Kremlin’s first official archaeologist, N. S. Sheliapina, was appointed in 1967. The authorities also agreed to fund an exhibition of archaeological finds, although the site they chose was an uninviting crypt under the Annunciation Cathedral. The show, which still exists today, was suspended for years when the building was closed for repair after 1979.
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But those who missed it at the time (and still miss it now, for tickets are not easily obtained) could console themselves with the idea that it was probably a dull affair. There was certainly little enough to attract the masses in the exhibition’s cheaply produced official catalogue. Fragments of bronze and shards of coloured glass were meat and drink to the professionals, but even educated members of the public might have struggled with the dim, brownish displays. If history really began with Marx and Lenin, after all, it was not clear what a person was to make of a half-rotted seventeenth-century musketeer’s boot.
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The people’s history in Soviet times was simpler, firmer, brightly coloured; authentic tissue from the past was out of place.

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Despite the tourists and the research teams, the Kremlin remained primarily government territory. It was a conundrum, for the old idea of a museum-reserve had not entirely disappeared. When Stalin died, no-one knew quite how his successors would decide to deal with the place. The case for letting the curators take over was strong, not least because the politicians of the 1950s still knew every recent Kremlin ghost by name. What stopped them from deserting the old place on this occasion was not so much its symbolic value as its practical utility. By 1953, the citadel was a tyrant’s dream, defended by its own picked guards and furnished with enough military hardware to wage a medium-sized war.
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Its warren of state-rooms and offices was ramshackle, but all were securely bugged, and then there were those bunkers and communications networks underground.
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At a time when other Russians had to queue to make phone calls, the Kremlin had its own telephone and wireless system (located next to the Senate). Cutting-edge technology (because of their distinctive ring, the leaders’ phones were called ‘cuckoos’) connected its occupants with each other if not directly with the world.
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The network, which relied, after the Cold War ended, on communications and encryption equipment imported from Britain (and developed in laboratories at Malvern), was the pride of the political elite, whose hierarchy was partly based on levels of access to it.
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To leave all that untenanted would have been profligate, but Khrushchev did consider the idea. He toyed with a plan to move parts of the government away from central Moscow and up to the breezier south-west. Stalin had chosen this district for his vast post-war university complex, and there was an enclosed estate of elite housing nearby, offering every comfort in domestic terms. For a moment, it was tempting to think of moving the government there, too. Khrushchev stuck with the Kremlin in the end, but true to his peasant origins he tried to make the fortress more home-like by planting part of it with an orchard. The apple trees sounded bucolic, but the project called for hundreds of tons of quality topsoil. Khrushchev, like the Romanov tsars of old, incurred enormous costs on his regime’s behalf, though in his case it was a fleet of khaki trucks, not buckets, that brought the earth up to the fort.
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