Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (18 page)

The end came in the spring of 1571. Russia’s division, its people’s suffering, and the decimation of its military class all pointed to catastrophe. To add to the misery, a series of poor harvests led to famine in the winter of 1569–70, and hunger left the people without strength. The ravaged Novgorod region, where decomposing bodies still blocked the rivers, had already suffered from outbreaks of plague, but in 1570 the scourge spread southwards, and mass deaths occurred in at least twenty-eight cities.
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According to Heinrich von Staden, a special pit had to be dug outside Moscow to hold its piles of dead.
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Russia was sinking, and the following spring, in May 1571, the Crimean khan, Devlet-Girey, seized the chance to attack. Many of the Russian troops who were supposed to block his way deserted to the Tatars, and Ivan himself fled to safety (by this time he had begun to explore the possibility of permanent asylum in England), leaving the khan’s route open to Moscow.

The citizens armed for battle, but in place of the expected siege they faced a more familiar enemy. For the second time in Ivan’s reign, the capital was engulfed in flames, this time deliberately kindled by Devlet-Girey’s army. Heinrich von Staden reported that it took just six hours to reduce Moscow to ash, while ‘not three hundred persons capable of bearing arms remained alive’. Even the massive bells that hung in Ivan’s
oprichnina
palace melted and cracked, and falling masonry killed many who had managed to escape the fire. As the flames swept on, Ivan’s English lions were burned alive in their enclosure, and at least twenty-five human Englishmen, builders and craftsmen in the tsar’s service, perished with them in the blaze. Many Kremlin buildings, including almost all the wooden offices, were swallowed up. ‘In a word,’ von Staden concluded, ‘there is not a man in Moscow who can imagine Moscow’s misery at this time.’
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Although the Kremlin walls endured, the ruins of Ivan’s
oprichnina
palace were abandoned to the wild dogs.

As he crossed the Oka river for a second time in July 1572, Devlet-Girey must have expected easy victory. But Russia, almost perversely, refused to abandon its tsar. An army composed largely of regular troops (incompetently backed by the
oprichniki
), pushed the Crimean horsemen back, and Moscow was spared new calamity. This miracle was Ivan’s cue to change direction once again. He dissolved the
oprichnina
in the late summer of 1572, accompanying the reform with the usual round of executions. Several days’ ride to the south of Moscow, meanwhile, a hard-pressed band of engineers began to fortify the borderlands that had just given such easy passage to the Tatar host.

*   *   *

The Kremlin still provided Ivan with a dazzling throne. Behind the safety of its walls, the tsar’s treasury continued to amaze (he had a weakness for rubies and sapphires), his splendour to impress. According to a German visitor of 1576, Ivan’s crown and mantle were more sumptuous than the regalia of any rival European prince, and outshone treasures he had seen in the Spain of Philip II and Italy’s Medici courts. Ivan also wielded a jewelled staff, a cruel-looking object reputedly fashioned from the horn of a unicorn.
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Like the crown itself, this was a symbol of the royal authority of which the tsar remained so jealous. ‘The deference universally accorded the Prince is something the mind can scarcely comprehend,’ commented a Jesuit envoy called Antonio Possevino. ‘Even if the Muscovites do not really believe it, they incessantly declare that they owe their lives, their health, and all their worldly possessions to him … Even when beaten to the point of death they will sometimes say the Prince has done them a favour by chastising them.’
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At least the nation had a tsar. Indeed, it also had a healthy heir, which mattered because Ivan had worked as hard as any of his recent ancestors to score the hard black line of primogeniture into the Muscovite rule-books. The succession that descended from Daniil, Moscow’s first prince, had been singled out, at least in Moscow, as the true and sacred continuation of the Riurikids of Kiev, and some at least of Ivan’s cruelty arose from his obsession with protecting its future. After the death of his first son, he had shown a conspicuous concern for the second, his namesake. As his father, Vasily III, had done for him, he had even commissioned a miniature ceremonial helmet for the boy in token of his ruling destiny.
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Another son, Fedor, was born in 1557, but Ivan was careful to ensure that the lad (who was in any case slow-witted and physically fragile) made no claim to his elder brother’s crown.

With the succession guaranteed, Ivan’s search for wives in his mature years had nothing to do with producing sons. Like Henry VIII, however, he remained unlucky when it came to marriage, and also like the English king he forced the leaders of his church to bless a long succession of new brides. His luck in that respect ran out in 1572, for though he had managed to get his third marriage annulled on the grounds that it had not (allegedly) been consummated, the Orthodox Church would not condone a fourth union. The last three of Ivan’s numerous marriages were never recognized in canon law, which meant, in theory, that any children would be illegitimate. For years the issue was a legal nicety, however, and few would have dared to speak of it. There were no new male offspring in any case, or not at least until the very end. In 1582, and in a new set of dynastic circumstances, Ivan’s final wife, Mariya Nagaya, produced a son. As a bastard, the child, Dmitry, was not eligible to succeed, but he was robust and sharp-witted, a worthy royal heir.

Just before Dmitry’s birth, however, the story of the sacred house of the Daniilovich princes took an unexpected turn. Antonio Possevino, who visited Moscow at the beginning of 1582, heard his account from local witnesses, including one of the interpreters who worked at court. The background was Ivan’s alleged impatience with his eldest son, Tsarevich Ivan, now twenty-seven years old and keen to make an impact of his own. Among the young man’s many grievances (so the story went) was the tsar’s repeated interference in his married life.
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A first wife, Alexandra Saburova, chosen at a bride show in 1570, had failed to produce children, and the tsarevich was encouraged (or forced) to abandon her. A second princess, Praskovya Petrovna-Solovaya, followed her into the Pokrovsky Convent soon after.
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In 1581, however, the young prince Ivan and his third bride, Elena Sheremeteva, at last conceived a child. Like pregnant women anywhere, Elena found the infant’s bulk uncomfortable, and though it was November she did not always wear the three layers of robes that were required for women of her rank. This might not have been a problem, but the couple were staying with Ivan at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. ‘It chanced,’ Possevino reported, ‘that the Grand Prince [i.e. the tsar] came upon her resting on a bench. She immediately rose, but he flew into a rage, boxed her ears, and hit her with the staff he was carrying. The following night she was delivered of a stillborn child.’

As Possevino’s informant affirmed, the tsarevich was furious. It will always be unclear exactly what happened, but Ivan must have raised the fateful staff a second time, for he managed to deal his son an even more savage, and fatal, blow. As blood poured from the young man’s temple, the tsar struggled to grasp what he had done. A few short seconds of real time had stopped the course of Moscow’s destiny; no helmet would protect this precious skull again. Five days later, young Ivan was dead. The body was laid out at Alexandrovskaya sloboda, but only Moscow and its Kremlin were worthy to be the prince’s resting-place. At the funeral, Ivan the Terrible followed his son’s bier into the Kremlin’s Archangel Cathedral on foot, tearing his clothes and forsaking, for that day and many after, his jewels, rings and crown. He remained in the Kremlin palace throughout the months to come. ‘Each night,’ according to Possevino’s informant, ‘grief (or madness) would drive the Prince from his bed, to scratch the walls of his chamber with his nails and utter piercing sighs.’
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Two years later, as Ivan lay on his deathbed, stinking acridly and covered in maggots, he prepared to face the Judgement that he had been tempting all his life. This tsar had reinforced the Muscovite royal line as no predecessor had ever done. Now he had destroyed it.

4

Kremlenagrad

The Muscovites may well have learned the art of drawing maps in the fifteenth century, when all those self-assured Italians were in the Kremlin.
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The case is difficult to prove, especially since all the evidence has burned. But there are several maps of Moscow from the 1600s, and one of the most beautiful is called
Kremlenagrad.
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The copy that exists today, drawn by the Dutch East India Company’s cartographer Joan Blaeu, was published in Amsterdam after 1662, but it is based on a much older drawing, and shows the Kremlin as it was around 1604. Blaeu’s version has west, not north, at the top, but otherwise it is a model of clarity. As you unfold the Lilliputian panorama, you are drawn in and involved at once. The buildings are represented by little pictures, and every roof looks as if it would be warm and watertight.
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The walls – and there are lots of them – trace reassuringly retentive lines with never an impaled head in view. This is the Kremlin at its flawless best; there must be children somewhere who could build it with a kit.

A map can say a lot about its creator’s idea of the world. Joan Blaeu was very good at making sense of places he had never seen. He also took great pains, with his town maps, to make sure that he got the buildings right. When he began to draw the Kremlin, he called on plenty of the tricks he had already learned in forty years of map-making. The walls are presented accurately, but they also look very like the ones that snake around his lovely map of Delft, a masterpiece he had completed just three years before. In both maps, too, the rivers are the same contented blue. Despite that wishful Dutch precision, however, Blaeu’s map has a great deal to teach us. The original he copied must have been unusually good. Clearly, someone with a trained eye and a sharp pencil had been working in the Kremlin at the turn of the seventeenth century, for the placing of the buildings that Blaeu copied is almost always accurate, as are the basic architectural details. The result is so faithful to its source that even now, scholars who spend their lives among the Kremlin archives can use it when (as they nearly always do) they draw a blank among the more authentic papers there.

To read the map beside the written history, moreover, is to turn it from a snapshot into commentary. One thing it shows is that the Kremlin had been changing at breathtaking pace in the years – not even twenty – since Tsar Ivan’s death. There has been plenty of rebuilding and repair since the last fire, but all the same there are now fewer mansions for boyars. The names of the Belskys, Mstislavskys, Sitskys and Sheremetevs are mentioned in the key that Blaeu provides, and their walled palaces seem like small kremlins of their own, but the Patrikeyevs and Khovrins have disappeared along with half a dozen others. Instead, one name is mentioned several times: there are at least three mansions for the Godunovs. This is not a casual mistake, for the leader of this clan, the great lord Boris Godunov, has clearly added buildings everywhere. He has extended the tsar’s palace, for instance, and he has made the bell tower of Ivan the Great into a serious landmark, adding new tiers and a cupola. Another angular structure, obviously brick, is marked ‘
prikazy
’, and this time the design looks set to last. Meanwhile, there has been a significant change to the stone building, behind the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, that was last known as the metropolitan’s residence. The international status of the Russian church must have improved, for this is now the palace of a patriarch.

The faithful map shows all of this, but despite all that it is misleading in a way that even Blaeu himself might not have grasped. The Dutchman’s buildings cast compact, untroubled shadows, and yet the decades after Ivan the Terrible’s death were among the most turbulent in the Kremlin’s existence.
Kremlenagrad
is incomplete without that darkness, but to begin to look for it you need to know some history, and Blaeu was probably as hazy about Russia’s as any other north-west European. As a map-maker, he would have been distracted, too, by all the new worlds of his day, for his was the golden age of European exploration. The coasts of continents as diverse as America and East Asia were gradually taking shape on paper with Dutch water-marks. These were fantastic places; exotic and terrifying. But the most eccentric sailors’ tales of foreign lands could not have been more wildly wrong than the idea that the Kremlin of
Kremlenagrad
was orderly, immaculate, tranquil.

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When Ivan the Terrible died, in March 1584, the boyars once again held Moscow’s future in their hands. Even now, it is not easy to like the members of this jealous, arrogant elite. The French mercenary Jacques Margeret, who later headed the tsar’s foreign troops, was never enthusiastic. The nobles he met were as soft as grubs. ‘They go on horseback in the summer and in winter on sleighs,’ he wrote, ‘so that they get no exercise. This makes them stout and obese.’
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A Dutch grain merchant, Isaac Massa, whose own well-fleshed features can still be studied in two portraits by Frans Hals, was no more flattering about them. ‘The magnates’, he decided in his memoir of Russia,

lead a fairly unhappy life in this country. Obliged to be at court continually and remain standing for days on end before the emperor, they scarcely have one day of rest in three or four. The more they are raised in honour, the wearier they are out of anxiety and fear, and yet nevertheless they are constantly seeking to mount higher.
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