Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (29 page)

Emotion, clearly, ran high in the world of faith. Nikon’s dogmatism made him many enemies, most famously a senior priest called Avvakum, who referred to Russia’s spiritual father as ‘the Great Deceiver and son of a whore’.
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The patriarch gave further offence by plundering several existing churches for the building-materials he needed for his projects at Valdai and Voskresenskoe. Personal issues – the jealousy of those he snubbed, the hatred provoked by his tyranny, resentment at the splendour of his earthly goods – deepened the rift within the church, beginning in the precincts of the Kremlin and spreading to the most remote provincial congregations. Once it had split, whatever the original reasons, the church could no longer sustain the fiction of its apostolic purity. And the dissident trend of Old Belief, which gathered pace in the 1660s, soon merged with a more general suspicion of government to feed a small but stubborn national counter-culture.
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Within the Kremlin, meanwhile, another duel, this time between the rival courts of Nikon and Tsar Aleksei, was now set to define the future boundaries of all spiritual power. The patriarch and Aleksei had once been friends. The two men dined together frequently, Nikon was like an uncle to the royal children, and the stone passageway between the two great palaces was warmed by many heavy-treading feet. Aleksei was so pious, too, that some privately dubbed him ‘the young monk’. On each day during Lent, the greatest fast Russians observed, the tsar spent five or six hours in church and bent his body in prostration more than a thousand times.
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Priest though he was himself, Paul of Aleppo was exhausted, but ‘custom has made the [Russians] insensible of weariness. Our feeling was one of intense wonder and we never left the church but tottering on our legs after so much standing … We kept up appearances before them in spite of our inward rage and sufferings.’
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‘Nightmarish religiosity’ was the phrase that sprang to one historian’s mind as he described Aleksei’s court.
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Helped by the fact of Aleksei’s own frequent absences at war, the relations between the two palaces remained cordial for several years. Inevitably, however, Nikon’s dictatorial manner eventually paved the way for his political fall. His plan was almost certainly to turn the Kremlin into an eastern version of the Vatican, an international centre of religious faith where church, not state, made the main rules.
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But Aleksei’s position was too powerful, and the traditions of his court too well entrenched. Though no-one knows the exact cause of his rift with Nikon, the latter’s refusal to appoint a bishop may have been involved. By 1658, the two men had stopped dining together. Aleksei also ordered that Nikon drop the title ‘great sovereign’. In reply, the patriarch preached a sermon in the Dormition Cathedral in which he denounced the tsar for disloyalty, and a few weeks later, in the summer of 1658, he quit his palace and the capital. Ever the showman, however, he did not resign as patriarch. Indeed, basing himself at his New Jerusalem Monastery on the Istra, he continued to issue edicts as the leader of the Russian church.
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He also allowed a corrosive rumour to circulate: it was said that he spent his days in heavy chains, punishing himself for abandoning his religious office because a feckless tsar refused to punish him in person.
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The battle of wills lasted for six more years. In the darkness before sunrise on 18 December 1664, however, a sledge from the countryside made its way towards the Kremlin bearing a heavily muffled passenger and a small group of attendants. Successive ranks of guards at the city’s gates failed to recognize the grand old priest, who then took full advantage of the drama of surprise. Splendid in his pearl-encrusted pectoral cross and vestments, Nikon burst into the Dormition Cathedral and took over the service, dominating the vaulted space as if he had never left.
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It was a challenge to both tsar and church, an assertion of the rebel’s right to choose the terms on which he would perform his duties. Aleksei responded by summoning a court to rule on Nikon’s future. The panel included boyars, members of the tsar’s council, sixty-five senior churchmen, and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch (Macarius and Paul made the journey to Moscow for a second time), and it met in December 1666, gathering in the palace banqueting hall. The outcome was never in doubt, especially as the foreign visitors, who needed Moscow’s financial aid, would have known just what verdict they were meant to find. Nikon was declared guilty of leaving the Russian church ‘a widow’. Before beginning his life-long exile, the big man was taken to a cell in the Chudov Monastery, and there his beard was cut off, his shimmering vestments stripped from his back, and his pectoral cross finally lifted from his neck.
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His bid to turn his church into a kind of sovereign power had failed. The office of the patriarch itself would never quite recover from the blow, while the Kremlin – still a sacred site – passed decisively into the control of worldly masters.

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The pace of further change was erratic, and the Kremlin continued to wear a mask of tradition, but by the 1660s the tsar’s inner court was growing splendid on the wealth of its expanding continental empire. Aleksei’s English physician, Samuel Collins, explained what he observed after his master’s return from a campaign that had taken him to Vilno:

Since his majesty has been in Poland, and seen the manner of the Princes houses there, and guessed the mode of their kings, his thoughts are advanced, and he begins to model his court and edifices more stately, to furnish his rooms with tapestry, and to contrive houses of pleasure abroad.
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Sure enough, in the late 1660s Aleksei ordered a major upgrade of the thirty-year-old Terem Palace, and especially of his own family’s rooms. European trifles such as chairs, cupboards and even beds were not traditional in Russia.
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Now everything was set to change. The private chambers were repainted, and where there had been flat religious scenes the walls now featured plants or planets in the sky. The current (short-lived) heir, also called Aleksei, was given an apartment decorated in imported blue and yellow silk and velvet. At the same time, tables and chairs, display cabinets and library shelves also entered royal inventories, though the tsar himself still slept ‘in his shirt and drawers, under a rich sable coverlid, and one Sheet under him’.
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The purchase of those cabinets attests that Aleksei had become a collector, and like many other wealthy Europeans of the age, his tastes inclined to the exotic. Foreign agents were given the task of sourcing his treasures from lists that he dictated to his secretaries, and soon their efforts had produced a company of several dozen liveried human dwarves. The Kremlin’s brand-new furniture was piled with tropical shells and fabulous tusks. The royal library began to feature a few books of European science, non-sacred volumes that stubborn followers of the Old Belief dismissed as ‘excrement’.
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Assisted by Samuel Collins, the tsar embarked on a series of scientific and alchemical experiments, to conduct which he imported a range of new devices – phials, metals, lenses and measuring instruments – from the German lands. These were exotica in their own right, and since they had no native Russian names, many were called by their original German ones, beginning a long tradition of importing German scientific terms into the Russian language.
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Collins was correct, however, to point out that Aleksei sought his real pleasures well beyond the stuffy confines of the Kremlin. Even after its refurbishment, the old fortress must have felt restrictive. In the 1660s, Aleksei abandoned plans to restore the interiors of several of its most important buildings, including the Faceted Palace, in favour of some projects of his own outside the walls.
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He had always loved falconry, and his estate at Izmailovo, about five miles to the north-east of the Kremlin, was first developed for the sport. It expanded in the 1660s to include a palace and churches, a model farm, and even a small zoo, for which the tsar imported lions, tigers, polar bears and a pair of American porcupines.
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The thick woods round another suburban palace, at nearby Preobrazhenskoe, also provided the tsar with sport and welcome fresh air. His most ambitious project, however, was a palace that he developed from yet another former hunting-lodge, at Kolomenskoe, to the south-west of the Kremlin on the Moscow river.

This new complex was conceived from the outset as a second, and more fashionable, royal court. The meadows by the river were a far cry from Versailles, whose transformation had begun in distant France, but the tsar’s new palace incorporated every luxury his architects could think of. The main structure, which was completed in 1667, was entirely built of wood, and it featured elaborately gabled and shingled roofs, ornate carved windows and massive external stairs. The throne room was magnificent, and in emulation of ancient Byzantium, it boasted a pair of mechanical lions. Constructed out of copper and clothed in sheepskin, they stood on either side of Aleksei’s royal seat, and at the touch of a hidden lever they rolled their eyes and roared, just as the original models had done.
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As the Kremlin’s spell began to break, the tsar was not alone in aspiring to newly designed quarters. By the 1660s, government officials were also chafing in their antiquated rooms. Petitioners still brought their papers to the square beneath the bell tower of Ivan the Great. At times of crisis, the crowds still flocked towards the Kremlin palace steps. But the number of court chancelleries had grown at an astounding pace since Mikhail Romanov’s accession, and his son had added more, many with ever-larger staffs.
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The buildings where they worked had not been restored adequately since the Time of Troubles, and by 1670 some of the
prikazy
were in a dangerous condition. Accordingly, Aleksei’s men laid plans to move both clerks and paperwork to more extensive sites in the White City and Kitai-gorod. The most ambitious of these relocations were delayed by cost, but moves on a smaller scale extended the visibility of government into the city.
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At the same time, expansion also paved the way for the kinds of reform that only a large civil service can achieve.

The geography of power, and the symbolic resonance of the Kremlin, was changing for another group as well. The boyars who quit the fortress in the 1660s did so largely under pressure from the tsar. Though some substantial Kremlin mansions had been kept by members of the influential clans for centuries, Aleksei made a point of reclaiming any that fell vacant. His court was swelling round him, he was uninhibited about appointing new men to the highest ranks, and soon there were so many freshly created nobles that the old walls could no longer have contained them all.
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The rest, now many scores of grand and titled men, colonized the streets of the White City, filling the district with mansions and palaces in the latest style and sweeping through it in a blaze of jewels to attend Kremlin events.

The display was no substitute for real power. The size of the court increased, but only a few truly counted in Aleksei’s inner coterie, and feuds divided many of the rest.
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While politics focused round the person of the tsar, however, wealth spread out across Moscow. The foreign quarter that had been set up in 1652, which now boasted several sumptuous mansions, became a patch of western Europe in the heart of an otherwise Orthodox realm. Far from isolating the infections of scientific thought and unclean diet, as conservatives in the church had originally hoped, it acted as a magnet for any wealthy Russian who dared to visit, the most famous of whom, from the 1680s, was the future Peter the Great. Behind their newly finished walls in the city centre, meanwhile, some of Aleksei’s wealthiest nobles had taken to collecting, like their tsar, stuffing their luxurious rooms with globes and paintings, Baltic amber, European books and scientific instruments.
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A new passion for wealth and splendour, then, became detectable at court, adding a touch of worldliness to the pervasive Orthodox solemnity. In 1671, the atmosphere was lightened even further. Aleksei married for a second time, and his new wife, nineteen-year-old Natalia Naryshkina, introduced a bracing air of youth and optimism. It may have been her influence that inspired the tsar to experiment with Russia’s first theatre. In 1672, he imported a troupe of German actors, providing them with a small stage in the palace at Preobrazhenskoe. The first show was forbiddingly austere – ‘the tragi-comedy of Ahasuerus and Esther’ – but the tsar was so transfixed that he sat and watched for ten whole hours.
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The Miloslavsky mansion in the Kremlin, requisitioned by Aleksei in the 1670s (mainly to accommodate the huge number of adult women in the royal household), was adapted to incorporate a theatre a few years later, and given the delightful name of
Poteshnyi Dvorets,
the Palace of Amusements. (Much later, in the 1920s, this would be the building where the Stalins lived.)

The coming royal generation, too, showed promise and a potential for brilliance. Aleksei’s brightest children were educated under the eye of Simeon Polotsky, a westernized cleric from White Russia, poet and graduate of the academy in Kiev (it was only in 1685 that Russia’s own institution for higher education, the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, was founded in a monastery just outside the Kremlin walls). Though there is now some doubt about the story that this tutor taught his charges Latin, an innovation that would have given them access to the literatures of the Catholic world, their education did involve music and poetry as well as calligraphy and the mastery of religious texts.
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After Aleksei’s death, the reforms introduced by his heir, Fedor Alekseyevich (ruled 1676–82), reflected the progressive notions that he had imbibed. Fedor’s advisors prompted him to abolish the use of torture in his prisons. They encouraged the wearing of shorter robes, a style that churchmen still considered lewd and scandalous. They also outlawed the stifling practice of
mestnichestvo,
the rank-bound system of appointments. One of this reign’s most iconic acts, indeed, was the destruction of the Kremlin’s precedence records. Promotion in the tsar’s service, at court and in the army, was henceforth to depend mainly on merit as opposed to ritual status. The books themselves, those symbols of reactionary thought and practice, were burned.