Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (25 page)

Once the new tsar had been named, setting a reactionary seal on the Russian nation’s fate, the system in the Kremlin became rigid to the point of near-paralysis. Half-fearing that the people would denounce it if they glimpsed weakness or doubt, the court closed ranks. Priests returned to intone the ancient prayers at length, insisting on the perfection of Russia’s faith. The practice of
mestnichestvo,
or rule by precedence, was reinstated in its full glory. But while the elite of both church and state hoped to hold on to their power and wealth by this rejection of unwelcome change, the world could not be kept at bay for ever. The success of Moscow’s innovative neighbours was a constant reproach and also a threat. Inevitably, the Kremlin faced a distasteful, destabilizing choice. It could continue to cover itself in the moth-eaten glories of the past, thereby avoiding any return to the destructive uproar of the Time of Troubles, or it could engage with Europe, whatever the risks, and thus retain a place in it. The price of either course seemed far too high.

The occupants of the seventeenth-century Kremlin opted for a compromise. Instead of taking risks of any kind, they chose the cobweb mantle of nostalgia. Its dusty cloth was like a uniform for some, while for others it was fast becoming a sort of disguise, but either way, it was already very old. Each time a patch was added – a set of hastily drafted laws, a desperate attempt to bring the army up to date – the last authentic strands grew weaker still. The fabric could never have held indefinitely, and at the end of the seventeenth century it fell away completely to reveal a Kremlin primed to host its own version of absolutism, the innovative European form of monarchy embodied by the French Sun King, Louis XIV.
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With new names in the royal chamber, a new army commanded by alien generals, and new cultural influences flowing in from its own fast-expanding territories, this incarnation of the Moscow fortress was a far cry indeed from the longed-for glory days of Ivan the Terrible and his fantastic golden court.

A nation’s collective dreams are powerful, however, and if, one sleepless night, some
d’yak
had thought to check whether the illusion of eternal Muscovite dynastic splendour still looked convincing to the crowds beyond the Kremlin walls, he need have done no more than filch Paul of Aleppo’s travel notes. It would have been no problem, back in 1655, to have found a civil servant who could translate from the Arabic. Page after page would have confirmed that the court’s version of sacred continuity was still vivid enough to mesmerize the world. ‘The origin of this Imperial Family of Muscovy is believed, by persons who examine the truth of history, to have been from Rome,’ Paul of Aleppo had written. ‘Observe how this august race, from that age until now, has been preserved in uninterrupted succession!’
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However much the Kremlin changed, that chorus echoed underneath its walls for decades – centuries – to come.

*   *   *

In the winter of 1612–13, the mere thought of securing the succession might have chilled a Russian’s bones. All the same, the country had to find a new sovereign, and the only hope of future unity was to consult a range of influential people, which meant convening an Assembly of the Land. It was called in November 1612 in the names of Russia’s two main noble liberators, the princes Pozharsky and Dmitry Trubetskoi (the citizen Kuzma Minin, Pozharsky’s ally and backer, carried no real official weight). Weeks after the scheduled opening date, in January 1613, hundreds of delegates converged upon the ruined Kremlin to deliberate. Along the way, their sledges had skimmed over forlorn graves, the snowy whiteness broken only by the wheeling parliaments of crows. The towns and villages the travellers passed were half-abandoned, and the households that remained all had bleak tales to tell. At the end of it all, Moscow could offer them little cheer. Burned, hungry and pitted with cannonballs, the city was desolate. As they assembled in the only space that could be patched up fast enough to hold them all – a chamber in the Kremlin’s Riverside Palace – the delegates’ mood was dour. These gentry, priests and loyal cossacks had paid a terrible price to secure Russia’s future; now they picked their way through rubble. Even the quarters where they slept were semi-derelict. Since there was little shelter to be found outside the walls, many made do with unheated rooms in what was left of the Kremlin’s old palaces and mansions.

The assembly’s principal business was the election of a tsar. No-one considered parliamentary rule (the idea was shocking enough, thirty years later, in England), but Russian politics had shifted all the same. The task of electing a sovereign was momentous in itself, but there was also a sense that Russia’s people ought to shoulder some responsibility for making sure that any future government was just.
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The front runner for the throne, at first, was Prince Pozharsky, whom many saw as the nation’s ultimate saviour, but his humble blood ruled him out in the eyes of the old clans. Their choices included Wladislaw, Sigismund, and at least one member of the Habsburg dynasty, but speakers from less noble ranks declared all foreigners disqualified.
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The patrician warrior Dmitry Trubetskoi looked better, but he turned out to have identified himself too closely with the tainted, pro-Polish boyars. Before long, the delegates started to look for the candidate who divided them the least, the most innocuous if not the most splendid. Their hopes eventually settled on a sixteen-year-old, the son of Filaret Romanov. His formidable father, who would have been a much more impressive contender, had been taken captive by the Poles in 1610 and had yet to return to Moscow. Without his protection, young Mikhail Romanov had the merit of appearing to be an entirely harmless (but blue-blooded) lamb.

Once the assembly had made its choice, a delegation went to Kostroma, the provincial city where Mikhail and his mother had lately taken refuge. They found a pale lad, indecisive and probably terrified. It was an inauspicious start, and Mikhail Romanov did not change much even after he was crowned. He ruled from 1613 until 1645, but there were always other voices in command. At first, these belonged to his maternal relatives, but then his father was released from Poland. In 1619, Filaret Romanov was installed as Patriarch, an office he had sought for years, and from that day until his death in 1633 the older man at last achieved his dream of Kremlin power.
¹¹
Indeed, the title that Mikhail conferred on him, ‘great sovereign’, implying as it did a higher status than the tsar’s, was a reflection of reality. Father and son were unequal in every possible respect. Where Filaret was strong and physically impressive, Mikhail was feeble, ‘afflicted even when young with weak legs and a tic in the left eye’, as Isaac Massa noted. ‘He himself cannot write,’ the Dutchman added, ‘and I am not sure that he can read.’
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The best that can be said was that he seemed to be gentle, at least from a distance. He was ‘a lover of peace and amity with all Christian kings’, his son’s English doctor, Samuel Collins, later wrote, ‘kind to strangers, and very religious’.
¹³

The kindness, however, was conditional. Mikhail came to the throne of a country still at war with several foreign armies and also with itself. He owed his position – he owed his country – to groups of common citizens (such as the cossacks who had fought to oust the Poles), but his court had no intention of sharing power or dividing wealth. Few of the peasants who had helped to liberate Russia grew rich. Few even escaped the toils of serfdom. And in turn, because the country remained tense, the members of the court existed in a state of permanent suspicion. Trained in the schools of Godunov and Shuisky, their reflex was to repress all dissent. Most citizens accepted the idea of a new tsar, but any doubters were soon silenced, in the darkest prisons, by the percussive crack of their own bones. The new version of history was not imposed gently. Even the fact that young Mikhail had been elected was suppressed in favour of a trumped-up fable of divine grace.
¹⁴
It did not do to question this. Indeed, it would not do to question the Romanov tsars at any time to come. ‘The Emperor has spies in every corner,’ Dr Collins observed in the 1660s. ‘Nothing is done or said at any feast, publick meeting, burial or wedding but he knows it.’ And the Kremlin was jealous of its own secrets. ‘’Tis death,’ the doctor continued, ‘for anyone to reveal what is spoken in the Czar’s pallace … No-one dare speak a word what passes in their Court.’
¹⁵

Romanov style was really novelty disguised as heritage. In 1613, the tsar-elect was fortunate that some of the royal regalia (including a couple of pieces that had started life as gifts to Boris Godunov) had escaped the looters, but as his coronation loomed, several other items had to be run up from scratch. There was a hitch when the craftsmen found that there was almost no gold left in the Treasury; they bought their metal from the local merchants in the nick of time.
¹⁶
But when Mikhail Romanov was finally crowned, the ritual emphasized continuity. After the ceremony in the Dormition Cathedral, for instance, the new tsar paid the customary respects beside the Riurikid tombs across the square in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael; the Romanovs adopted all these bones (including that of the alleged Tsarevich Dmitry) as surrogate official ancestors.
¹⁷
Later, similar care was taken over Mikhail’s wedding ceremonies, which took place in 1624 and again (following his first wife’s death) in 1626. The senior official in charge of it all, Ivan Gramotin, scoured the palace records to find details of princes’ weddings from the past, always careful to take note of the most effective gestures. He then inserted a series of calculated revisions, such as a larger ceremonial role for the Romanov family in the public scenes and an extra day of feasting for the city. The idea was to build support for the Romanov dynasty as a whole, and also to make it look every bit as royal, and as eternal, as its predecessor.
¹⁸

*   *   *

Gold was not the only thing in short supply in 1613. So much wood had been looted and burned that the tsar had nowhere to sit, let alone to preside over his court.
¹⁹
Piles of rubble still littered the Kremlin’s squares, the walls were stained with soot and ash, and several streets were physically blocked. The
prikazy
had been used as barracks, and when their liberators first returned they found the bodies of besieged defenders bundled at their feet.
²⁰
The Kremlin was supposed to be a sacred place, but this fortress was gruesome and defiled. It was also very insecure. Gates were hanging loose, bricks missing, and some of the white foundation stones had become dislodged. The moat between the fortress and the public square was choked with rubble and carrion.
²¹
The prospect of rebuilding the symbol of Muscovite sovereignty would have challenged any government, let alone a stricken one.
²²
In the first months of the new reign, taxes were raised seven times to help finance an urgent programme of repair.
²³

The work began at once, and the Faceted Palace was restored (or rather, patched) in time for Mikhail’s coronation. But the task of rebuilding other quarters, to say nothing of giving the whole place a suitably royal air, was going to take much longer. In the past, of course, the Kremlin had burned down so regularly that rebuilding was almost routine. Muscovite craftsmen were used to working with the pre-cut logs from which even a large house could be built in hours. In 1613, however, there were almost no builders of any kind, and raw materials, including timber, had all but vanished from the land. Beams and doors were taken from the late Vasily Shuisky’s palace to fix Mikhail’s, and a set of lodgings for the tsar was ready in 1616, but recycled materials are seldom truly splendid. In any case, new fires gutted the palace buildings in 1619 and again (with even greater ferocity) in 1626.
²⁴
The need for money and materials was insatiable. So was the hunger for skilled men. There was even a labour-crisis in the quarry-region of Myachkovo, which still produced the bulk of Moscow’s building-stone.
²⁵

Mikhail Romanov’s agents grasped at once that they would have to look abroad. A process started that would ultimately bring hundreds of foreign specialists to Russia, among them scores of talented artists and master-craftsmen. Many of these came for the money, for they were paid a reasonable rate and also given lodgings, food, and valuable bonuses such as fur and cloth. A man who made sure of a few trunk-loads of Moscow’s fur for sale at home was bound to make a profit, and the trip was certainly an adventure.
²⁶
For some, it was also a route out of trouble. Moscow provided a haven from Europe’s Thirty Years War (1618–48). Instead of hiding from slaughter in Germany, a master-craftsman could join a lively and creative polyglot community in the tsar’s employ that included the finest Russian artists and their colleagues from as far afield as Persia and the Caucasus. Other migrants came to flee the law, among them an Oxford jeweller whose father (as far as we know) had been arrested in 1608 for dealing in fake stones.
²⁷
Though none lived in the Kremlin, the best craftsmen certainly worked there, as did many of the builders and the engineers (and foreign doctors, whose conditions were the best of all). Once more, and for the last time in its history, the citadel became a centre of artistic innovation on an international scale. In the process, it also opened Russia’s gates to the new ideas and styles that foreigners were certain to import.