Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (62 page)

Having settled on his headquarters, Khrushchev turned his mind to the surrounding view. Stalin’s plan for Moscow had envisaged the creation of a ring of landmark towers, conceived as modern successors to the fortified monasteries that had circled the city in Muscovite times.
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The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, and in the end, only seven skyscrapers out of the projected eight had been built (the university was one of them). Their gothic shapes, tiered and spired like hypertrophic versions of the Kremlin’s own Saviour Tower, still loom out of the urban smog like evil trolls. Each one was meant to be unique: solid, massive and spacious. No expense was spared on the marble detail, the lifts, the heating, or the crystal chandeliers. They were Stalinist palaces, and in Khrushchev’s eyes that made them elitist and oppressive, grotesque white elephants in a city with a housing crisis. They were too solid to demolish, but in 1955 the Communist Party officially registered its aesthetic disapproval, and Leonid Polyakov, the leading light of Moscow’s civic architecture after 1945, was forced to hand back the Stalin Prize that he had won for the design of one recently completed example, the Leningradskaya Hotel.
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Other flagship projects were scrapped at the planning stage. The scheme for a pantheon to contain the remains of dead leaders (this was to face the Kremlin on Red Square) was dropped within months of Stalin’s death. Then there was the projected Palace of Soviets, the giant that was scheduled to take the place of Ton’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Its architect, Boris Iofan, did some more work on the plans in 1953, but then, abruptly, they were shelved. Khrushchev had found a new use for the site, and by 1960 it had been excavated, lined and flooded to provide the city with a heated open-air swimming-pool.
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For the next thirty years, that solved the problem of the giant hole, and it also chimed with Khrushchev’s populism, his determination to house, feed and educate the socialist masses. These were the years when Muscovites expected to ‘catch up and overtake America’, and plenty, health and happiness beckoned to all. The people swam (as long as they turned up equipped with regulation rubber hats), and soupy water lapped and steamed in place of communism’s greatest ever monument.

Khrushchev was never coy about his ambition. He was a leader who loved to dazzle on his Kremlin stage. A reception for the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, held in Ton’s Grand Palace in 1962, would have been unimaginable a decade before. As a British guest recalled:

There were dishes of cold roast fillet of beef so tender and moist that the meat dissolved like snowflakes on the tongue; sturgeon from the Volga, smoked and fresh; Pacific salmon; Kamchatka crabs; silver cups the size of a giant’s thimble containing a mixture of mushrooms and sour cream or a fricassee of wild birds; and in bowls pressed into crushed ice pungent red salmon roe and caviar from the Caspian, the fat grains glittering in colours from almost yellow to darkest grey.
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Between the linen-covered tables milled a crowd of ‘big Russians in suits’ and – almost scandalously – foreigners, all craning, over the delicious food, for any glimpse of their host. The space, in fact, had started feeling just a little cramped. In 1954, a mere five years after China’s communist revolution, Khrushchev had visited Beijing, where the comrades entertained him in a massive conference and banqueting hall. Not to be outdone, the Soviet leader began to dream of a palace of his own. Quickly rejecting yet another site on the Lenin Hills, he took the decision to build in the Kremlin.
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‘Khrushchev wasn’t such a dullard,’ a spiteful Molotov later recalled. ‘He was culturally deprived.’
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What Khrushchev had in mind had to be large enough for every kind of meeting, including gala congresses with vast applauding crowds. When not required for politics, it could be equipped as a theatre: a larger, better, brighter venue for Soviet opera and ballet. The idea – and the budget – grew apace. Again pursuing a personal dream, the Soviet leader appointed his own favourite architect, M. V. Posokhin, the man who had just built him a holiday retreat at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. Posokhin agreed (of course) to design, engineer and complete the entire building in time for the Party Congress of 1962. For two years, working day and night, his men drilled, dug and hammered. At one point, to bypass the need for time-consuming calculations, soldiers were asked to march heavily on the top floor, testing the structure of the balcony.
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When Muscovites complained about the views that the building would block, Khrushchev told them to look from the other side. He backed off only when protesters started to inveigh against the demolition of parts of the Kremlin wall, dropping that aspect of the scheme but retaining – and enlarging – almost all the rest.
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The Palace of Congresses, a stark colossus faced with glass and gleaming stone, remains the most unloved large building on the Kremlin hill, but though some have proposed that it should go (like the nearby Rossiya Hotel, which was demolished in 2006), most Russian intellectuals agree today, quite rightly, that it stands as witness to the spirit of its age.
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Predictably, Khrushchev’s building earned the usual range of plaudits at the time. Professor Nikolai Kolli, veteran designer of underground stations, pronounced that ‘the palace not only fulfils all the multiple functional requirements laid on it, but also represents a new height on the route to the formation of a socialist architecture’.
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Without a trace of irony, Khrushchev praised the unimaginative, brutal lump as fit to grace a site ‘linked with the activities of the great Lenin’. Posokhin himself liked to call it ‘tactful’ and ‘laconic’, though its 6,000-seat meeting hall and the rooftop banqueting space for another two and a half thousand could scarcely be described as minimalist.
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The best that could be said was that Posokhin did not build above the main Kremlin roof-line, but to achieve that small degree of tact he had to drive deep into the historic soil. Egotov’s nineteenth-century Armoury Museum and several older palace buildings disappeared in the process, but the most serious damage was well below ground. As conservation experts later discovered, the reckless excavation had disturbed groundwater drainage patterns under the Dormition Cathedral and some parts of the Kremlin wall. The bill for putting all that right exceeded 500 million rubles, or roughly six times the building’s own original cost.
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‘The space was formed after the removal of a few service buildings, not very important from the point of view of their architectural or artistic quality and without historical interest,’ Posokhin wrote in 1974. ‘Among them the only one to be preserved was a part of the Cavalry Corpus facing Communist street. On the second floor of this Lenin had his first Moscow apartment when he lived and worked here in March–April 1917.’
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An engineer who had been involved in the construction of the new palace recently took me on a tour. He was no longer proud of it, he said, but he would make no apology. In the Leninist spirit, he still remembered the opening night, the ticket-only, all-exclusive celebration of socialism’s latest monument. His mother was especially impressed by her visit to the bathrooms. These, like the dressing-rooms for dancers and the ultra-modern air-conditioning machines, were located in the basement. Unlike the lavatories outside the Kremlin gates, however, the underground facilities here were faced with marble, the doors had locks, and the paper came on real rolls, not from the grudging hands of an attendant by the door. Even the soap was free, and it was smooth, just like the stuff that delegates used to receive in Stalin’s time.

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It was, in part, Khrushchev’s ebullience that ruined him. By 1964, the Soviet leader had been likened to a pig, a clown and a chatterbox. What he had not entirely grasped was that the post-war and post-Stalin Soviet Union yearned for quiet; the system worked best when people felt safe. In his impulsive, well-intentioned way, Khrushchev had violated several unwritten rules. The elite could not forgive him for suggesting that officials should serve for limited, fixed terms, a move that threatened countless networks and congenial private worlds. For the mass, the miners, farmers and factory engineers, his crime was that he did not cure the hardship and uncertainty of their material lives. Receptions at the Kremlin excited the criticism that he and Prime Minister Bulganin were ‘drinking away the nation’s wealth’. ‘Khrushchev has opened the door to everyone and is treating everyone to dinner,’ a Russian muttered in 1958, ‘although we workers have nothing to eat.’
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In Stalin’s time, such opposition would have been repressed before it even formed. One of the greatest testimonials to Khrushchev’s term in power, ironically, was the bloodless manner in which it came to an end. In October 1964, a small group, headed by Leonid Brezhnev and his political cronies Aleksei Kosygin, Mikhail Suslov and Nikolai Podgorny, met in the Kremlin while the leader was away on holiday and engineered his involuntary but entirely comfortable retirement. By the time Khrushchev’s plane touched down in Moscow, it was all over. The seventy-year-old ex-leader disappeared from public view, and other creatures from the Kremlin depths surfaced at last, effortlessly colonizing the vacated offices and bent on introducing more consensual reform.

One of the first things that they promised was ‘stability of cadres’, which meant jobs for the boys (and jobs for life). To create such an extensive and resilient fabric of power, they deliberately separated the two strands of Soviet politics, the interlocking tendrils of the Communist Party and the state. Since Lenin’s time, the two had overlapped: the government and ministries on one hand and the ‘guiding’ organs of the Party on the other, leading, shadowing, and duplicating them. Each branch of government or board of economic managers contained a Party cell, and the Party in turn had secretaries of its own to oversee each element of government. In practice, it was the Party that really called the shots, not least because it was assumed to have responsibility for strategy: as communists, its members knew the true shape of the future. Khrushchev had presumed to head both Party and State, but his successors (at first) resolved to appoint separate leaders to each. The Party leader’s mantle, in this arcane system, fell on the shoulders of its General Secretary, the fifty-eight-year-old Leonid Brezhnev, a loyal bureaucrat from the Dnieper valley in Ukraine.

Of all the Soviet Union’s leaders, according to the late historian Dmitry Volkogonov (who had unprecedented access to the vital files), ‘Brezhnev’s personality was the least complex. He was a man of one dimension, with the psychology of a middle-ranking Party functionary, vain, wary and conventional.’
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He was also a noted womanizer (like anyone who remembers his old age, I find this difficult to credit), devoted to fine food and endless cigarettes and utterly addicted to the hunt.
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His vanity was legendary, and in later years he enjoyed almost nothing more than giving and receiving medals and awards. In middle age, however, he was known as a political fixer, and though less flamboyant than Khrushchev, he had a reputation for shrewd management, vindictiveness, and sharp tactical skills. ‘His forte’, Mikhail Gorbachev believed, ‘was his ability to split rivals, fanning mutual suspicion and subsequently acting as chief arbiter and peacemaker.’
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Talents like these were just the thing for Kremlin politics, but Brezhnev had another plan in mind. Unlike Khrushchev and Stalin, he decided to quit the fortress. Where others might have been content with a refurbishment and new name-plates, this general secretary (in a move that some have likened to Ivan the Terrible’s retreat to Alexandrovskaya sloboda
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) chose to clear out altogether, taking a picked staff with him. As a Party man, he claimed to prefer the grey Central Committee building on Old Square, Stalin’s original stamping-ground. It lacked the Kremlin’s charisma, but it was also free of awkward memories and tourist crowds. The second entrance, fourth floor, was its nerve-centre. No-one could visit that without prior clearance at the highest level. The staff were deferential and the atmosphere refined. Admission was strictly by list. Tuesdays were the sacred day, for that was when Brezhnev’s small group decided on their week’s agenda, effectively determining the business of a whole empire.

The Kremlin, then, as a contemporary later observed, became ‘the external symbol of state power rather than the living heart of the country’.
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Unexpectedly, it even developed a reputation for neutrality. With Brezhnev gone, no political body of any real significance now used it as a base. Six days a week, it was the home of the government, but that meant only relatively unimportant state officials in the Council of Ministers. Every year or so, huge congresses assembled in Khrushchev’s palace, but though these were officially the sovereign organs of the land, foreign journalists were quick to dub them ‘the world’s biggest rubber stamp’.
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While outsiders referred to Soviet rulers as ‘The Kremlin’ to save time, the magic scent of power had evaporated from the place itself, leaving a residue of museums, offices and reception-rooms under the regime of a military commandant.

On Thursdays, however, the balance changed again, for this was still the day on which the Soviet Union’s supreme decision-making committee, the Politburo, convened inside the fort. The tradition – and the pompous rooms – remained unchanged till 1991. An inner circle gathered in the Senate’s Walnut Room, panelled and furnished like a London club, and then the whole meeting sat down in the much larger space next door. However grinding the debates, and however somnolent the ageing members of the group became, the Kremlin setting lent a sense of history. Soon, almost nothing anywhere got done without a nod from someone in this smoke-filled room. The sheer weight of detail was self-defeating. On 1 September 1983, under Brezhnev’s successor, Yury Andropov, the Politburo debated the production of chassis for self-propelled vehicles, colour television sets, methods of raising the productivity of labour, demographic research, aid to Afghanistan, and the choice of speaker for the sixty-sixth anniversary of the October revolution. Well into these toothsome discussions, a note was passed to the defence chief, Dmitry Ustinov, informing him that a Korean airliner with more than two hundred civilian passengers on board had just been shot down by Soviet planes.
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By then, however, everyone was almost numb.