Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (26 page)

The most influential group of builders may well have come from England – or at least the British Isles. James I was keen to renew the trade relations that he had negotiated years before with Godunov. In token of his enduring goodwill, he sent experts to help with Mikhail’s building-work as soon as the land routes were safe. The first, who probably took the merchants’ road from Archangel, arrived in Moscow in 1615, and by the early 1620s, a number of ‘English foreigners’ were at work in the Kremlin. The best-known were one John Taler (or Taller) and a Scot, Christopher Galloway.
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It is a pity that the records of their labours are so scant; it would be good to know how hard the court interpreters were made to work as anxious Russian
d’yaks
(and craftsmen) watched the Englishmen unpacking their set-squares and rules. Apart from a few account-books which say how much the top masters were paid, however, the only surviving witnesses are the buildings themselves.

The first new commission came from the tsar’s father, Filaret. The patriarch wanted to create a landmark of his own, so he opted to extend the complex of buildings around the tower that his rival, Boris Godunov, had emblazoned in gold just two decades before. All gifts to churches were made as religious acts, and they were costly (in this case, roughly 3,000 rubles, which was an enormous sum), but Filaret’s new bell tower was also a form of riposte. The building no longer stands, but records show that it too bore a portentous inscription. Where Tsar Boris’ lettering had immortalized his own reign and the glory of his son, Filaret’s triumphantly acclaimed Tsar Mikhail and his father. Eye-catching as that gesture was, however, the lost tower’s architectural influence, at a time when there was so much other rebuilding to be done in Russia, turned out to be yet more immense. Partly because it had to house a single massive bell, its design (possibly by John Taler) was singular.
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It rose into a spacious chamber and was finished with a decorative, tent-shaped roof. That silhouette, in new versions, was soon to pierce skylines in Moscow and for miles beyond.

It was as if the Romanovs, try as they might to cling to the past, were changing Russian culture and identity despite themselves. The royal family preferred to sleep in traditional wooden halls
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but Mikhail’s architects built him a new brick palace all the same, and its completion, in the late 1630s, marked a further development in Kremlin style. The royal chambers (
terema;
terem
in the singular) were built on top of the ground floors and foundations of buildings that Ivan and Vasily III’s Italians had erected in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but though that gave them pedigree, the design paid little homage to the past. Constructed by a largely Russian team that included Bazhen Ogurtsov, Trefil Sharutin and Antip Konstantinov, as well as the mysterious John Taler, the so-called Terem Palace was a riot of intricate decoration, colourful and patterned like a westerner’s fantasy of the Orient. The roof was gilded and the windows exquisitely glazed; each entrance and each architrave was sinuously carved, and most of the stone details were picked out in bright paints: blue, red, ochre, green and white.
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The most luxurious interiors, which were completed in the reign of Mikhail’s son, Aleksei Mikhailovich, were lined with German leather tooled with silver and gold leaf. By the 1660s, the doors, too, had been padded with gilded leather, and even the ceilings gleamed with silver.
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The Russian builders incorporated half a dozen churches, whose cupolas topped off the structure in a rhythm of exotic forms. The most important chambers were restored in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and palace-visitors can find them now beyond the pair of massive lions at the turn of the stone stairs. The churches, on the other hand, are locked behind an ornate golden grille, albeit one of finest workmanship. The space is silent and the doors beyond are almost always sealed.

In Mikhail’s time, however, the court was bustling, and it welcomed European craftsmen who could make machines. In 1633, the clock-maker and engineer Christopher Galloway installed a water-pumping system at the foot of the Sviblova Tower, which occupied a corner of the Kremlin wall above the Moscow river. Until that time, all water for the fortress had been lifted up by hand: henceforth the process would be mechanized. A few years later, Paul of Aleppo described the marvel. ‘Having dug four or five large wells and built over them arches, hollow pillars, and canals,’ he wrote, ‘[Galloway] set an iron wheel on the outside. Whenever they want water for any purpose, they turn this wheel with one hand, and the water flows out in great abundance.’
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The new system made it possible to plant the palace terraces with hanging gardens, and later to add ponds to private courtyards on the upper floors. It was in one of these, allegedly, that the future emperor, Peter the Great, first tried his hand with a toy boat.

The most striking new building of all, completed in 1625, was the renovated and extended Saviour Tower. Its architects were forced to make it soar because the clock-mechanism that Galloway had started to design demanded a substantial inner room, while the large clock-face outside also needed some height.
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Practical though it was meant to be, however, the structure could not have celebrated Moscow’s overall rebirth with greater exuberance. Indeed, the celebration went a bit too far, for the tower’s upper tiers were decorated with a set of naked human figures,
bolvany,
playful free-standing statues. Their nudity caused offence at once, and the figures were promptly dressed in cloth kaftans.
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But this was a detail, and soon forgiven in the race to copy all those stylish curves and ogee lines. The first – and for some years the only – tall and pointed structure in the Kremlin walls, the tower’s outline soon became the emblem of Moscow itself. Since Mikhail’s time, it has featured in countless paintings and postcards, and it often represents the city for the television cameras of the world. In the 1950s, it inspired the ‘Stalin gothic’ style of Moscow’s landmark skyscrapers.
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In part because of this iconic status, most textbooks attribute the Saviour Tower’s design to a Russian, Bazhen Ogurtsov, occasionally giving some credit to the engineering Scot, Christopher Galloway. Recently, however, there has been a new interest in the building’s forgotten western connections. One study, almost heretically, has compared it with possible ancestors in Tournai, Ghent and distant Aberdeen.
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If anyone could ever find it again, an archival document, long since lost, might show that neither Ogurtsov nor Galloway designed the shape. Instead, that prize may well have to go to a man the Russian source named as Vilim Graf, another enigmatic member of the ‘English-foreign’ team that arrived in the wake of Mikhail’s accession. The disappearance of the document that once named Graf has been convenient for extreme patriots, but it was probably lost in a genuine accident when the archives were moved in the early twentieth century.
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For his part, Galloway was fully occupied with clock-making. Mikhail Romanov had a passion for the things, and the Scottish master made several in Russia (including at least two for the Terem Palace). But Galloway excelled himself when he took on the commission for the most important one, which was to dominate the Kremlin’s Saviour Gate. As he sketched out the first designs for this new clock, the existing model, which weighed almost a ton, was taken down and sold (for 48 rubles) to a monastery in Yaroslavl. Skilled bell-casters under the eye of master-campanologist Kirill Samoilov then dug the pits, created moulds, and poured thirteen new bells for its replacement.
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In January 1626, the new clock was complete. The tsar and his father were so delighted that they rewarded their Scottish engineer with the pelts of sables and martens, a silver goblet, and yards of satin and damask cloth, a princely treasure that he was to receive a second time two years later when, after collapsing in yet another fire, the clock was restored, remounted and induced to chime again.

Unfortunately, even this second clock then suffered in a later fire, and in the end its famous face was lost. Reports from the 1650s, and a drawing in the memoirs of a traveller called Augustin Meyerberg (who visited Moscow in the 1680s), describe a generously proportioned circle finished in azure blue. Its whole surface was set with scattered silver stars, and at the top there blazed a golden sun and moon.
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To any European who had seen the astronomical clocks of Prague or Venice, this artifice was not unknown, but even foreigners were fascinated by Galloway’s mechanism. Instead of twelve divisions, his clock-face boasted seventeen, though in winter fewer than eight were actually used. The first hour (in Russian, one o’clock is still called ‘the first hour’) followed sunrise, the last finished at sunset. Moscow’s latitude is 55 degrees north (the same as Edinburgh’s and only 2 degrees south of Juneau in Alaska), so day-length (and the number of hours) varies considerably through the year. In the seventeenth century, a clock-keeper was paid to turn the dial on Galloway’s clock twice a day so that the first and last hours would obey the sun.
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Moreover, as Samuel Collins (himself from Braintree) observed a few years later, the dial itself, and not the (single) hand, revolved. ‘In our clock-dials the finger moves to the figure,’ he noted. ‘In the Russian
a contra,
the figures move to the pointer. One Mr Holloway [sic], a very ingenious man, contrived the first dial of that fashion, saying, because they acted contrary to all men, ’twas fitting their work should be made suitable.’
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The metalwork for that great clock was almost certainly finished in the Kremlin itself. The reigns of the first few Romanovs were a golden age for the workshops that had flourished in the citadel (with interruptions) since the era of Ivan the Terrible. In the fifteenth century, these had started life as a royal armoury, but by the 1650s their ranks included goldand silversmiths, jewellers, engravers, embroiderers, saddlers and tanners, as well as the full range of fine artists and experts in the creation and repair of weapons. The seventeenth century was not a time of boom – the army swallowed huge amounts of cash – but though the nation outside struggled with its taxes, the Kremlin workshops steadily grew in splendour.

Most of the raw metal was imported or recycled (silver-mining did not start in the tsars’ lands till quite late in the seventeenth century), but the craftsmen worked hard once they got their hands on it. The Kremlin workshops produced everything from Russian royal crowns and diadems to robes embroidered with gold thread. Storage soon became a problem, but it was even more of a challenge to find enough space to carry out the work itself. The Armoury’s main premises occupied a large three-storey building behind the Terem Palace (not far from the Trinity Gate), but smaller workshops were scattered round the palace precinct (the embroiderers worked near the royal women’s quarters) and some of the heaviest metal-work, including the casting of cannon and bells, took place just beyond the Kremlin walls on the far bank of the Neglinnaya river.
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Another little empire, this time dedicated to horses and carriages, nestled near the palace by the Borovitsky Gate. Its staff included goldsmiths and tailors as well as the masters who made saddles, stirrups, shoes and whips. By 1673, this Horse Chancellery, which eventually sported a gatehouse clock-tower in the finest European style, also employed eight veterinary specialists.
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The icon-painters occupied an entire floor of the main Armoury. It must have been a busy place, littered with the sea-shells that were used for mixing paint. The artists’ duties included painting furniture and palace interiors and making architectural sketches. They also worked on military maps, so some were asked to travel with the tsar (it was in Polish-dominated Ukraine that Simon Ushakov, who headed the Armoury workshops between 1664 and 1686, came to see the art of the Catholic world at first hand
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). Their main focus, however, was religious art, for which court masters could consult the thousands of icons that the tsars kept separately in the Chamber of Images (
obraznaya palata
). Some of these were very old, but the artists’ exposure to masterpieces from the past did not make them mere copyists. Even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, distinctive colours and new forms had started to appear in Russian painting, and the innovative process never slowed. When the order came to renovate the frescoes in the Dormition and Archangel cathedrals, for instance, a team under the direction of Ivan Paisein produced a new interpretation of the damaged originals.
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And because the Kremlin drew on talent from the entire realm, the freshly plastered walls became a sort of indoor master-class for a new generation of Russian painters.
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By the 1640s, some of these had started to examine European masterworks (often thanks to engravings in the illustrated Bibles of Matthäus Merian and Johannes Piscator).
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Slowly, the faces in the newest icons began to acquire contours, and impassivity gave way to a suggestion of emotion, even flesh. With a few distinguished exceptions, most of the icon-painters’ patrons seem to have approved.
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