Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (3 page)

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Foundation Stones

It feels like good poetic justice to begin the tale of an iconic fortress with a real icon. Generations of artists have worked in the Kremlin, so there are plenty of potential images from which to choose. Many of the finest were originally painted for the Kremlin’s own cathedrals and monasteries, including works by masters like Theophanes the Greek and his brilliant fifteenth-century disciple, Andrei Rublev. Serene, eternal, contextless, the saintly faces still gaze out at our frenetic world from an infinity of gold. In the age when they were made, time itself belonged to God, and sinful men (at least if they believed the message of the icon-painters’ art) could find salvation only if they shaped their brief years in the world to the pattern of heaven. But meditation and repentance have never been the Kremlin’s real point. A better image for its founding story, in a very different style, is Simon Ushakov’s masterpiece of 1668,
The Tree of the State of Muscovy.
It was and is a sacred work of art, but it is also a text about history.

Today, the icon’s message is so resonant that the original has been given pride of place in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Although it is modest in size, the painting has a whole wall to itself, and careful lighting on the gold creates an air of special reverence. You know before you even look that this is treasure, but the design comes as a surprise. At first glance the icon seems like a conventional tree of life, a motif that is more familiar from oriental rugs than Russian painting.
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Closer inspection indeed reveals the stylized curling tree, but the fruit (or the blossom, for this is a magic plant) consists of cameos, including a large image of the Virgin and smaller ones of some of Moscow’s ruling princes, tsars and holy men. They are arranged in a succession, adorning branches that rise up towards the gates of heaven. As the Tretyakov’s own guidebook helpfully points out, Ushakov drew his inspiration from traditional representations of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.
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The picture gets even more interesting as you follow the tree to its root, for here imagined space gives way to real buildings. Like a frame within a frame, the fortified walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin run along the painting’s base, and it is here that the icon’s principal historical characters are also to be found. In one corner, like an impresario presenting a particularly successful show, you see the immediately recognizable figure of Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov (ruled 1645–76), the tsar of Ushakov’s time. But at the centre of it all, bending tenderly over their work, are the two men who have planted the tree. On the left, holding the medieval equivalent of a watering can, is a priest, and painted letters tell us that he is Peter, the leader of the early fourteenth-century Russian church. On the right, in charge of the plant itself, is a prince, Ivan I, who ruled Moscow for sixteen years from 1325 until his death in 1341.

You need to know some history to understand what Ushakov was trying to explain. Among other things, his painting is a political manifesto on behalf of his tsar. Like the tree, the picture is saying, Aleksei and his heirs have roots in Moscow’s past; like the pious tsars of former times – like the founder in the foreground, indeed – they are part of a continuous line whose work has always been to nurture and develop Russia’s soil. The case was worth arguing in Aleksei’s time because he was only the second member of his family to take the throne. In the early 1600s, during a prolonged civil war, Russia had almost disintegrated. When peace eventually returned in 1613, a council of citizens had been forced to scour the land for a new tsar. The accession of Aleksei’s father, Mikhail Romanov, was not quite the organic progress that the icon’s imagery suggests, in other words, and the semi-derelict Kremlin that he inherited was a far cry from the pristine red fortress that the painting shows. As his artist’s brush erased the memory of turmoil and murder, Ushakov was urging a new generation to believe that Moscow’s story was specially blessed. His Kremlin was no ordinary place. It had become the link between Russia and heaven, a space protected by the Mother of God herself.

But there is a further message in the founding scene, and it is represented by the planting of that tree. What the head of the Orthodox Church in Russia, Peter, and the newly appointed prince of Moscow, Ivan I, actually did, in 1326, was to lay the first stone of a new cathedral. It features in the icon as a soaring building with exquisite golden domes, but the accuracy of the detail was less important than the symbolism of an act that marked the moment when Moscow, with the Kremlin at its heart, had staked a claim to be the religious and political capital of the Russian world. At the time, the Kremlin was neither magnificent nor serene; its walls were a patchwork of mud and timber and its defences included stretches of noxious swamp. The world around it was at war, and its prince was not even the undisputed sovereign of Russia’s people. But some trees thrive in poor and even thirsty soils. When Ushakov wanted to find a root for his symbolic plant, he was not wrong to choose the ceremony of 1326. Ironically, moreover, the prince he painted, Ivan I, had been invoking history himself as he laid that first portentous stone. The Kremlin’s story, like that of Russia as a whole, is fragmented, and much has been lost. In the midst of the fires, revolutions and palace coups, however, the single genuinely continuous thread is the determination of successive Russian rulers to rewrite the past so that the present, whatever it turns out to be, will seem as deeply rooted and organic as Ushakov’s tree.

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There is no reliable record of the Kremlin’s beginnings. The chronicles that form the most important written source for the period mention a princes’ residence in Moscow in 1147 and again in 1156, but no-one really knows who first built something fort-like on the hill above the Moscow and Neglinnaya rivers. The dates are contested, though the existence of a twelfth-century wall turns out to be a fact.
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Archaeologists digging in the 1950s found its remnants at a depth that corresponds to the correct decades, and though the finds are incomplete, and also disrupted by a lot of later construction, they are consistent with an earth and timber rampart, and a most impressive one. The giant logs alone would have been immovable. The structure enclosed a much smaller area than the current Kremlin, but it would have been impossible to breach. The wooden rampart was not the first building on the wedge-shaped hill, however, as further digging soon revealed. Beneath the earthworks, deeper layers hold bones. There are the ribs and limbs of pigs and cattle, scraps from centuries of meals, and the remains of horses and dogs. There are also the bones of game and fur-bearing animals, including elk, hare, beaver and wild boar. A spindle-whorl made of pink slate, the work of a craftsman in Kiev, testifies to trade links with the Dnieper valley, as do glass beads and metal bracelets in the coldest seams of earth.
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Deeper still there is silence.

The hill on which the Kremlin stands would always have had a lot of potential as a fort. It was easily defensible and well-supplied with workable timber, but in its early years it was remote even by Russian standards. While other regions in the north developed thriving ports and markets, this site stayed huddled in the forest, swamped by brambles and the fungal winter fog. The tapestry of oak and birch that stretched away on every side was so dense that it could easily swallow a whole army. Exactly that was said to have happened in 1176, when two rival princes and their retinues managed to clink past each other, the thud and jangle of their beasts dying to nothing in the web of leaves.
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The rivers were easier landmarks to follow, but even they were treacherous, and local hunters often cut a path through drier parts of the forest when they set out in search of elk and wild boar. Important routes could be kept open for a time by surfacing them with logs, an ancient technique that was still in use a thousand years later when Soviet troops laid their famous ‘corduroy roads’, but many early tracks into these woods were reclaimed in a season by the nettles, scrub and mud. Even if a traveller could find it for a second time, the chilly ground above the river-bend was not an obvious candidate for capital-city status.

The first people to settle here, hunters perhaps, were probably Finns, but no-one can be sure, for though successive rulers came and went, there was no state to count or name the tribes, and no obvious border. Unlike the Christians of the west or the Jews and Muslims to the south and east, the locals here cremated their dead, so there are no graves to excavate, and since they had no alphabet they left almost no words. But their traces survive in the names that these first people gave to the rivers and the wooded swamps; by most accounts (though Slavic patriots dispute the fact) Moscow itself is one.
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The name, derived from the Finnish, was almost certainly established before the first Slavs arrived, probably at the beginning of the 800s.

The newcomers belonged to a tribe called the Viatichi.
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Even in this bloody age they had a reputation for ferocity. They may, indeed, have held back the region’s development, since peaceful travellers would have hesitated before crossing their land. But their world was not entirely sealed off. The Moscow river that flowed through their territory carried wooden boats; it was one of several possible trade routes connecting the Volga with the west and north, and archaeologists now think that at least two important land-based routes also converged near the site of today’s Kremlin.
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Increasing traffic – boats, horses, even camels – had started to venture across the north-eastern European plain by this time. The little town beside the Moscow river was not on a main trade route, but nonetheless someone who passed through at this time managed to drop two silver coins, Islamic dirhams, one of them minted far away in Merv.
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Elsewhere in Russia more substantial quantities of silver, real hoards, have come to light, mostly of Muslim origin and mostly bearing tenth-century dates, a certain indication of the volume and the value of the region’s trade with the sophisticated civilizations of Asia and the Mediterranean.

The merchants must have come with lavish expectations. The caravans that headed south and east to Khwarezm, a market-centre deep in Central Asia, were loaded with the forest’s riches. ‘Sables, miniver, ermines, and the fur of the steppe foxes,’ an Arab geographer gloated. ‘Martens, foxes, beavers, spotted hares, and goats; also wax, arrows, birch-bark, high fur caps, fish glue, fish teeth [i.e. walrus tusks] … Slavonic slaves, sheep and cattle.’
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Accounts like this are reminiscent of much later European writings about Africa, and it turns out that the north-eastern European forest zone was indeed the dark continent of the ninth and tenth centuries. Like Africa in later times, it seemed to be a dangerous, exotic place, where fortunes waited for adventurers. Human slaves were one source of profit, for while Muslims and Christians were forbidden to enslave each other, the pagan Slavs were fair game.
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The appetite for fur, meanwhile, seemed to be inexhaustible, and it was purchased by everyone from the Arabs and Turks of Asia to the Franks and Anglo-Saxons of Europe’s Atlantic fringe. The northern birchwoods and the taiga beyond them produced the best. If the goods could be brought to market – in Constantinople, maybe, or Bolghar, the great city on the Volga route towards the east – serious money, silver, was on hand to pay for them.

The profits on offer, and the many opportunities to set up customs posts and levy taxes on the precious freight, meant that the trade routes were worth fortunes, but the local Slavs were neither organized nor swift enough to take control of them. Instead, the prize fell to some bands of Vikings from Scandinavia, soon known to Greeks and Arabs as
Rhōs.
This used to be another controversial issue (Russian nationalists resented the suggestion that their founding princes might have come from somewhere else
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), but the archaeological evidence around the Baltic is conclusive. By protecting some convoys, raiding others, and seizing any promising tribute, the rough freebooters became formidable regional players. From their first permanent settlement on Lake Ilmen, on navigable water near modern Novgorod, they had extended their network along the Dnieper and the Upper Volga by the middle of the ninth century. Like their relatives, the Vikings who raided Alfred the Great’s Wessex in the same decades, they were ambitious, warlike and incorrigibly mobile. In 860, they even managed to attack Constantinople, the heir of Rome, by closing on the great walled city from the sea. Before long, they had wrested the Dnieper capital of Kiev from the people known as the Khazars and mounted a succession of campaigns against Slav settlements as far east as the middle Volga. In a world where hundreds of miles separated the main ports and markets, and a good average speed for overland travel was no more than thirty miles a day, it was no easy matter to complete a long journey with a fleet of loaded craft. The evolution of the region’s intercontinental trade was an epic of endurance, skill and simple human greed.

It was also the first act of the Russian drama, the founding moment that begins all subsequent histories and myths. The Primary Chronicle, the first official record of the era, relates the story of a semi-mythical figure called Riurik, from whom the princes who ruled Russia’s cities would eventually derive their dynastic title, Riurikids. This man and his two brothers were said to have settled the territory round Lake Ilmen by invitation; the story goes that the perpetually warring local tribes of Slavs, Balts and Finns viewed strong outside authority as their one hope of peace.
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Invited or not, however, these Vikings – referred to now by most historians as the Rus – were not above consorting with the region’s older tribes. They also learned from their steppe neighbours, buying wooden hulls from Slav craftsmen and using local networks to procure the furs, wax, honey, hides and slaves with which to load them. Over time the Rus and native Slavs began to merge and even intermarry, sharing a landscape and its local gods and inventing new stories, in a common language, to make sense of their world. They were not yet a single people, but the foundations of a culture had certainly been laid.