Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (14 page)

Ivan stepped into daylight as unnumbered bells renewed their peal. Meanwhile, in a gesture that would have raised eyebrows in old Constantinople (where coins were thrown out to the crowd), the new tsar was showered with silver by his younger brother Yury. Ivan then led his entourage to the Archangel Cathedral to pray at the graves of his ancestors. His route, which was carpeted in cloth of scarlet and gold, became another stretch of holy ground. At the banquet that followed in the Faceted Palace, the tsar held court for his nobles and the highest officers of the church. Seated alone, for none was worthy to join him that day, Ivan began his life as a crowned head of state by pouring wine, breaking bread, and tasting the muddy flesh of a swan. But Makary, also sitting in the hall, must have picked at his fish with secret pride. His ceremony had achieved its goal. The wily cleric had secured the future glory of his church.
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By giving Moscow the attributes of an empire, he hoped to become a patriarch in all but name. The tsar could be as splendid as he wished (and Ivan took the opportunity to have his title confirmed by the real patriarch, in Constantinople, as soon as he could
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), but now there always had to be a place beside the throne for thinner, older men who could read Greek.

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The coronation was followed, on 3 February, by a royal wedding. This, too, was a slightly desperate affair, for Ivan’s bride was not the daughter of a European monarch but Anastasia Romanovna Yureva-Zakharina, the niece of a boyar from the days of Vasily III. But the couple were well matched and clearly happy. It may have seemed, as spring approached in 1547, as if the glamour of a youthful court would dazzle Moscow into amiable warmth. And the season did turn out to be unusually mild. As a result, the city’s wooden buildings dried out fast, and by April the first of several fires had burned part of Kitai-gorod. A disaster of far greater proportions struck in June. On Midsummer’s Day, a fire that had started somewhere in the city’s wooden jumble swept up to the Kremlin walls. Twenty-four hours later, the flames had grown so fierce that they ignited the gunpowder stores in several of the defensive towers.

There was no hope for the buildings in this fire’s path. The flames consumed the churches in the palace precinct and the porch and strong-rooms that led to the Annunciation Cathedral. They tore through heavy storage chests and destroyed a range of ancient treasures in the palace undercroft. The fire also gutted the Annunciation Cathedral itself. Works of art, including a priceless iconostasis, were lost, and then the flames swept through the Treasury, engulfing irreplaceable court documents.
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The palaces that were not razed were scorched and scarred, their wooden detailing and gilt reduced to ash. Senior members of the court fled for their lives. The sixty-five-year-old Makary, who had stayed to rescue an icon painted by his miracle-working predecessor, the fourteenth-century metropolitan Peter, was lowered down the Kremlin walls at the end of a rope; the injuries he suffered in the process never fully healed.
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Beyond the citadel, the destruction was more terrible still. Shocked citizens eventually scraped more than 3,700 corpses from the ash, while many thousands – a majority of Muscovites – had been made homeless.

Even in a city used to fire, it was a catastrophe. With so many people on the streets, there was bound to be unrest, but the public response betrayed a level of political disquiet that no fire could have kindled by itself. As the flames cooled and the tsar himself called for a hunt for arsonists, Muscovites began to mutter that the disaster had been the work of a witch. Their fury – fuelled, no doubt, by the Glinskys’ enemies at court – settled on Anna Glinskaya, the mother of the late and still unpopular Elena.
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This sorceress, the people said, had torn the hearts out of human corpses and soaked them in water. She had bottled the resulting brew and, flying through the brief summer night, had sprinkled it over the wooden buildings of the capital; it was a well-known trick, the rumour went, that witches often used to summon flames.
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A mob gathered below the city walls, and eventually its leaders surged into the Kremlin and onwards to Cathedral Square, thrusting their way into the Dormition Cathedral during a celebration of matins and baying for Glinsky blood. Rough hands seized the tsar’s uncle, who had entered the building in search of sanctuary. Before the startled gaze of Makary himself, the citizens proceeded to stone their captive to death.

The tsar had taken refuge at his hunting lodge at Vorob’evo, on hills overlooking Moscow from the south-west, and from there, he had watched his city turn to ash. That experience was harrowing enough, but soon a human tide began to close in from the ruined streets, demanding that the court hand over Anna and the other infernal Glinskys, whom they believed to have brought ruin on them all. Ivan refused to sacrifice his grandmother, but in the days to come a number of less distinguished suspects were tortured, beheaded, impaled or thrown into the dying flames.
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The Moscow uprising had been brief, but Ivan had witnessed its fury with his own eyes, and, as he later said, this was a moment when ‘fear entered into my soul and trembling into my bones’.
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If the young man had ever liked Moscow, the events of his coronation year seemed calculated to change his mind.

The fire also forced the Kremlin to the top of Ivan’s political agenda. The damage was so extensive that rebuilding and redecoration had to start at once. Moscow had nurtured a pool of talented artists in the decades of the Kremlin’s reconstruction under Ivan III and Vasily III, but there could never be enough skilled men to deal with repairs on this scale. Masons, gilders and artists from as far away as Pskov and Novgorod were summoned to the capital. To save time and money, the tsar also ordered finished icons to be sent from Novgorod, Smolensk, Dmitrov and Zvenigorod. As the packages were opened in the Kremlin stores, the icon-painters, themselves from places far and wide, gathered to admire and compare the styles of several distinctive cultures. It was the inspiration for a kind of national art, and the Kremlin became its gallery and principal patron. From Ivan’s time, a set of buildings in its western corner, beyond the palace, was given over permanently to the insalubrious and often noisy work of carving and fine metalwork, gilding, and mixing paint. In time, new studios opened in the shadow of the Annunciation Cathedral. There was even a special chamber where artists could study the icons in the tsar’s collection that were not currently in use.
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The group that seized most eagerly upon the opportunities created by the fire was not composed of artists, however, but consisted of the ideologues of Muscovite state power. When they had recovered from their shock (and, in Makary’s case, from injuries), these people grabbed their chance to recreate the damaged parts of the Kremlin as visual sermons on topics such as divine kingship, Christ-like government, and Moscow’s unbroken royal succession. The work was managed by a group at court that included a hitherto unknown priest from the Annunciation Cathedral, the monk Sylvester, who had come to Ivan’s notice at the time of the great fire. A team of gifted painters and craftsmen played its part, for this particular history-lesson called for art that was both eye-catching and sumptuous. But the guiding hand in the endeavour, as in so many others during Ivan’s first years on the throne, was Makary’s.

Under the metropolitan’s creative gaze, and no doubt also with Ivan’s blessing, the Kremlin was subjected to a comprehensive renovation programme that included murals, icons and carvings in wood and ivory.
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Particular attention was paid to the palace Cathedral of the Annunciation, where a new iconostasis was furnished with images that echoed the divine aspects of Ivan’s own destiny. An icon of his patron-saint, John the Forerunner (the Baptist), was particularly haunting, and showed the ascetic in profile as a gaunt, tormented figure, the ruined flesh contrasting with a burning spiritual energy. This image stood directly opposite the tsar’s own seat, reflecting his prayers back at him, and near it, other icons seemed to emphasize his part in defending the one true faith.
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An even greater masterpiece was the throne designed for Ivan’s place in the Dormition Cathedral, which told the story of the heirs of Monomakh, and of their close association with a noble court, in twelve carved bas-reliefs.
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Similar combinations of themes inspired the frescoes in Ivan’s main throne room, the Middle Golden Palace. Although these were subsequently lost when the palace was demolished, a record made in 1672 by Simon Ushakov has survived; as he contemplated the painted shapes, indeed, the Romanov court artist may himself have been inspired by them. His drawings show an anteroom that was decorated with figures such as David, Solomon and Jehosaphat, and a throne room that boasted a magnificent display of angels. Real figures also occupied important spaces, however, so Ivan held court in a hall where Andrei Bogoliubsky and Alexander Nevsky, his ancestors, were represented beside biblical scenes in a masterpiece of allegorical time-compression. Though princes from Moscow’s more humble days (including Daniil and Ivan Kalita) were not given the same prominence, Ivan’s father, Vasily III, who had been dead for less than twenty years, was represented in the same series of portraits as the holy Vladimir of Kiev, who had ruled, over five centuries before, in an entirely different place and culture. As if to emphasize the holiness of Kremlin government, the space was crowned by a majestic Christ.
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No foreign visitor remarked on the paintings – their eyes would have been fixed on living hosts – but the murals certainly drew comments from Russians. In the mid-sixteenth century, the worldliness of some of them seemed revolutionary. There were so many unfamiliar themes, in fact, that at least one prominent courtier, Ivan Viskovatyi, claimed that the paintings were blasphemous.
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A church council solemnly overturned his arguments in 1554. In future, no-one would object if icons served the needs of an ambitious Russian state.

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The throne room of Ivan the Terrible no longer stands, but there are several descriptions of his Kremlin in its heyday. One of the most vivid was written by an Englishman. In 1553, an adventurer called Richard Chancellor was forced to seek shelter in a harbour on the White Sea when his ship, part of an expedition to find a north-east passage to China, ran into a storm. By a stroke of good fortune, the company survived, helped by astonished locals, and the English party was arrested and escorted under guard along the Dvina river and southwards to Moscow. Chancellor had ‘discovered’ the port of St Nicholas, near today’s Archangel, and he had also found a route that connected it to Ivan’s capital. Within a year, the English, true to form, were attempting to establish a monopoly on Russian trade, and regular delegations from the newly founded Muscovy Company in London began to beat a path to the Kremlin.

It was the start of a long and troubled relationship. To ease the process, the queen of England sent Ivan a pair of lions, whose enclosure was set up by the Kremlin moat (the site became a menagerie when an elephant arrived in the capital a few years later).
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The human migrants of the time included several fortification engineers, who travelled from London in 1567 during an amiable period in diplomatic relations.
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But everything began with Chancellor’s first formal meeting with the tsar. It was an audience that took twelve days to organize. In that time, almost certainly, the Englishmen were watched and studied, for foreigners were always treated with suspicion; four years later, when Anthony Jenkinson arrived, his company was forced to suffer the same kind of wait. In both cases, the visitors soon felt that they had kicked their heels for long enough. As Chancellor remarked, his men had seen their fill of Ivan’s ‘very faire Castle, strong, and furnished with artillerie’ from the outside; they were more than ready to venture in.

On the appointed day, they were woken early, for it was assumed that they would need time to prepare.
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Armed guards in coloured livery awaited them, and every move they made was watched. Their path probably took them through the Kremlin’s most prestigious entrance, the Frolov (later Saviour) gates. From there, on foot, the English party would have crossed Cathedral Square and mounted one of three sets of canopied steps to an upper terrace that served as the entrance to the recently repainted royal audience hall. Before them, on the far side of an antechamber thronged with courtiers, waited the tsar himself. ‘Our men began to wonder at the Majestie of the Emperor,’ Chancellor wrote.

His seat was aloft, in a very royall throne, having on his head a diademe, or Crowne of golde, apparelled with a robe all of Goldsmiths worke, and in his hand hee held a Scepter garnished, and beset with precious stones: and besides all … there was a Majestie in his countenance proportionable with the excellencie of his estate: on one side of him stood his chiefe Secretarie, on the other side, the great Commander of silence, both of them arrayed also in cloth of gold: and then there sate the Counsel of one hundred and fiftie in number, all in like sort arrayed, and of great state.

‘So great a Majestie of Emperour, and of the place,’ he added, getting right to the point, ‘might well have amazed our men, and have dasht them out of countenance.’
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