Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (13 page)

The ceremony, which was staged in February 1498, was the first of its kind to be held in Russia, and it took place, like every coronation after it, in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. There was no precedent in Moscow’s past, so Ivan’s priests consulted various Byzantine texts before deciding on the wording of the prayers and the order of the ceremonial. Thrones were made ready on a raised dais, and the entire court prepared to attend in full costume.
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The gold robes that the nobles had to wear were so expensive that most of them borrowed their outfits from the Treasury for the day, but the spectacle left a memory that later churchmen would never forget. Within four years, however, the old grand prince had changed his mind about the heir himself. In April 1502, Dmitry and his mother Elena were arrested, and soon after Vasily was proclaimed the ‘Autocrat of all Russia’. Conveniently enough, and probably not accidentally, Dmitry died in prison just a few years later.
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On Ivan’s death in 1505, it was Vasily who succeeded him.

Vasily III was never crowned, but that, if anything, was a mark of his evident legitimacy. There was no need for theatricality. Although he was successful in the role of leader and grand prince, however, fatherhood eluded him. His first wife, Solomoniya Saburova, failed to produce a male heir, and in 1523 the prince sought a divorce. It was a move that split the court, and some church leaders disapproved of it on moral grounds. But Vasily eventually secured his wish, and Solomoniya (now accused of witchcraft) was packed off to a remote convent. Barely two months later, in January 1526, Vasily and his second bride, the fifteen-year-old Elena Glinskaya, were married. On this occasion, the need to silence court intrigue prompted the prince to opt for a dramatic ceremony.
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The wedding of 1526, then, like the coronation of February 1498, was invented to convey a decisive message at an uncertain moment, and also like the coronation it created an enduring precedent.
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The central sacrament was celebrated in the Dormition Cathedral, and candles from it were then used to illuminate the couple – and their troupe of attendants – in the coming nights. Every detail of the pageant was invested with significance, from the choice of bedchamber icons (depicting motherhood) to the scattering of earth (to call mortality to mind), and the lavish use of ancient fertility symbols such as honey and grain. In August 1530 a first son, Ivan Vasilevich, was born. That night, according to legend, an unseasonal wind of such ferocity swept through Moscow that the bells of the Kremlin’s Saviour Cathedral began to toll of their own accord.
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The succession seemed secure at last, especially after the prompt birth of a second boy, Yury. Vasily presented the crown prince, Ivan, with a tiny helmet at about this time, a symbol of both majesty and future leadership.
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An object of this kind was not a toy, but Ivan had no chance to play in any case. He was still barely a toddler in the winter of 1533 when his father became gravely ill. Vasily had been out on one of his beloved hunting expeditions when he was stricken with a noxious sore and raging fever. The doctors despaired, and Vasily returned to the snow-bound Kremlin on an invalid’s litter. As he lay dying, he told a hastily summoned council that he intended to leave his title and estates to his eldest son. He also drew up a new will, the aim of which, in part, was to establish a regency under the leadership of trusted aides. His last wish, like that of generations of his forefathers, was to become a monk, taking the holy name Varlaam. Over the protests of his weeping wife and of his brother, Andrei, the prince’s head was tonsured by the metropolitan himself, and at midnight, after watching his two surviving adult brothers kiss the cross in fealty to the three-year-old Ivan, Vasily died.
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The regents were an unattractive group. Prominent among them was Ivan Vasilevich Shuisky, a representative of one of the most powerful families in Moscow and an inevitable choice for the regency council as the dying Vasily dictated his will. On her husband’s death, Elena Glinskaya took the first opportunity to add Ivan Ovchina Telepnev-Obolensky, a nobleman assumed by some to have been her lover. It was he whom later writers largely blamed for the murders of Vasily’s brothers, the royal uncles, a move intended to secure the regents’ undisputed power.
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In 1534, the older one was thrown into a Kremlin dungeon. In 1537, it was his younger brother’s turn. In both cases, since there were still taboos about spilling the blood of princes, the victims were starved to death; the younger brother, reputedly, behind a sort of iron gag. Mikhail Glinsky, the veteran council-member and uncle of the dowager princess, whom the dying Vasily had named as his sons’ main personal guardian, was also seized and imprisoned in 1534, perhaps in part because he criticized the other regents’ murderous plans.
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He too was then deliberately starved to death.
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Young Ivan and his brother Yury, a child who had been born deaf and was never taught to speak, were now as good as helpless in some very questionable hands.

If the regents ever planned to isolate the infant princes and remain in power for good, however, circumstances did not favour them. Elena died suddenly in 1538. She was not even thirty years old, and there were rumours that she had been poisoned.
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A group of archaeologists recently claimed to have found proof of this when they discovered toxic chemical salts in the remains of her corpse, but the compounds involved were widely used as a purgative in the sixteenth century, and even for arcane cosmetic purposes, so the cause of her last illness, or at least its author, still remains unclear. On her death, Prince Ivan Ovchina Telepnev-Obolensky was thrown into the prison where he was to die.
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That left two principal groups of contenders: the members of the Shuisky clan and their rivals, the Belskys. In the struggles to come, several members of each family were imprisoned and murdered. As each enjoyed brief seasons of ascendancy, two metropolitans in succession, Daniil and Yoasaf, were also forced from office.
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A government of the boyars had the potential to evolve, and aristocratic rule, perhaps with a monarch as figurehead, need not have been disastrous in the proper hands. But sixteenth-century Muscovite politics were simply not designed this way.

A letter attributed to Ivan himself describes the world he and his brother faced after their mother’s death.
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‘When thus our subjects had achieved their desire,’ he wrote, ‘namely to have the kingdom without a ruler, they did not deem us, their sovereigns, worthy of any loving care, but themselves ran after wealth and glory … How many boyars and well-wishers of our father … did they massacre?’
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The tone is plaintive, a note that Ivan would continually strike in later life, but the facts of his youth suggest a more complicated story. The records of the Kremlin court read as if the boy were exercising sovereign rule almost from the beginning. Even the most ambitious magnate would have been wary of him, not least because the lad soon learned to play the Kremlin’s games himself. In 1543, at the age of thirteen, he almost certainly approved the murder of Andrei Mikhailovich Shuisky, who was thrown into the court kennels and ripped to pieces.
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The prince’s belief that his childhood was a time of culpable neglect may well explain some of his later conduct, but contemporary evidence suggests that he was no mere victim. Whatever the truth, however, one thing the internecine struggles of the prince’s long minority certainly damaged was the Kremlin’s international standing. As the future Ivan the Terrible approached adulthood, his prospects were so uncertain that no European princess could be found who was willing to marry him.
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The court – and the whole country – could well have been poised for yet another civil war. As boyars in the Kremlin weighed their chances, the only figure with the power to prevent disaster was the peevish, rather sickly prince; somehow this heir had to begin inspiring real awe. Just as it had in 1498, a coronation ceremony, combining sacred elements with plenty of old-fashioned pomp, seemed to promise a solution, and the recently appointed metropolitan, Makary, began to look for a suitable prototype. The rituals that had been created for Europe’s high renaissance kings offered a range of possible alternatives, but Orthodoxy could not borrow quite so openly from Papists and heretics. Makary turned instead to sixth-century Constantinople, whose empire’s government had been modelled (the priests said) on heaven itself.
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The plans were finally approved in detail at a joint meeting of the boyar and church councils in December 1546. With so much to be settled and financed, the Kremlin’s entire inner circle must have taken part, but Makary, who was also the young prince’s mentor and spiritual guardian, was the chief architect and impresario.

Ostensibly, the metropolitan’s aim was to install a prince who would unite his people. But the church leader also framed his argument in spiritual terms. Since the fall of Constantinople, he reminded the court, Orthodox believers had lost their first empire on earth, but this time Moscow had been spared. In consequence, its faithful people and their prince had special responsibilities in a world that was awaiting imminent apocalypse. No longer merely a grand prince, Ivan would be crowned an emperor on the model of Constantinople itself; he would be an absolute sovereign, or (in the noble, ancient, Russian word) a tsar. Numerous texts would guide his steps. ‘The Emperor in body be like all other,’ the sixth-century theorist Agapetus had explained, ‘yet in power of his office he is like God.’
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The Catholics might have their charters and their Roman law, but Russia’s master was to rule like a latter-day Solomon, and, in theory, he would answer to God alone. Whatever the reality of court life then or later, the only human voice that had divine permission to restrain him would be Makary’s own.
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Agapetus had insisted, after all, that the church remained a moral arbiter: ‘For though [the Emperor] be like God in face, yet for all that he is but dust.’
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The power of visual images, as Makary would have appreciated, is so vivid that it is hard to imagine the coronation today without remembering Sergei Eisenstein’s wonderfully theatrical staging of it, filmed in the early 1940s. In this version, an actor playing the young prince (and wearing startling false eyelashes) stands before a venerable metropolitan, the latter lean and bearded, ascetic but politically lightweight. From this old man the youth receives the sceptre and the cross, the jewelled collar and the fur-trimmed crown. Slowly, then, and with portentous majesty, the new tsar turns to face his people, and this is the cue for his first major speech. The actor’s script, with its call to national unity and greatness, would have struck chords with Russian audiences in Stalin’s time, but like much of the scene it is a 1940s propaganda fantasy. In January 1547, it was the metropolitan, and not Ivan, who made the most important speech, and much of it concerned biblical kings.
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The point was to make sure Ivan could wield his power at all, to neutralize the factions who remembered a weak boy. Significantly, too, since Eisenstein put several of them in his film, there were no foreigners inside the church. The entire coronation seemed so incidental to most Europeans at the time that it took two years for the news that Ivan had even been crowned a tsar to get as far as Poland.
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Ivan himself could not have missed a single message in the ritual that day. Even the date was loaded with significance, for 16 January coincided, in the Orthodox calendar, with the beginning of Christ’s ministry.
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It also recalled Vladimir’s original conversion of the Rus, and Ivan was to be crowned as Vladimir’s heir. Indeed, his line had been traced back, by the church scribes, to the mythic Riurikids and also (to make sure of a strong Christian and imperial lineage) to the emperors Constantine and Augustus of Rome. The story of Moscow’s royal family, the Daniilovichi, was spelled out in pedantic detail, and the combination of record and fable had the effect of placing Ivan at the end of an indisputably prestigious line.
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The legends were embodied in his very crown, the so-called Cap of Monomakh, a sable-edged and jewelled piece that had probably originated somewhere in Central Asia. In defiance of that awkward fact, the church pronounced that it was Byzantine. This sort of trick – a way of claiming all the rights and honours that could be accorded to new rulers anywhere – showed no more disregard for history than was the norm elsewhere in Europe at the time, but older Muscovites could still remember when their state had been a Mongol fief. At Ivan’s coronation, among other things, it was asserting its young ruler’s right to be treated, inside his realm and beyond it, as an established sovereign lord.

Those were the hopes, at least, that January day. It was a season when no sunlight could have reached the Kremlin’s inner palace rooms, but all the same the fortress was transformed into a blaze of candlelight and gold. Even beyond its walls, the thin air must have carried overtones of hot beeswax and incense, and the spell-bound city, where winter snow could muffle less deliberate sounds, fell silent as the first of many bells began to clang, heaved into motion by a team of men.
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Meanwhile, Makary and a battery of priests stood ready in their full splendour. After the procession into the Dormition Cathedral from the palace steps, the court watched as the prince and cleric took their places in the hallowed space. ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords,’ Makary prayed, his hand on Ivan’s lowered head, ‘who by thy servant Samuel the prophet didst choose David and anoint him to be king over thy people Israel … look down from Thy sanctuary upon Thy faithful servant, Ivan.’
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If the new tsar had looked up, however, his eyes would have encountered those of a painted Creator, an image made by court artists, impassively declining to participate in any human schemes.