Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (39 page)

Returning refugees, the
beau monde
of the old Moscow, were often the most bitter when the truth struck home. As an uncle of the writer Ivan Turgenev put it: ‘The thirst for revenge is a source of glory and the future guarantor of our greatness. No-one wants peace.’
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Moscow’s fiery crucible certainly burnished the rhetoric of nationalism, but as ever the longer-term material effect depended on a person’s status. The price that ordinary Muscovites had paid – the poor who lacked the means to regroup and rebuild – was incalculable. Large numbers – ten thousand or more – of Moscow’s wealthy merchants also faced ruin; their stocks as well as their grand homes were lost, and many eked out livings in the common trading-stalls for the rest of their days.
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But the real elite, the Stroganovs and Trubetskois, the top tier of the court, absorbed its losses from the safety of alternative estates. Though they attended the sumptuous commemorative ceremonies in the Dormition Cathedral in decades to come, and though they flocked to admire any newly painted portrait of the war heroes, the great magnates escaped with little lasting damage to their livelihoods, and in time many built new mansions even grander than the ones they had lost. The rift with the French would soon close. Contention still lingers about the causes of the Moscow fire, but Ségur could claim to have his version from the horse’s mouth. Rostopchin moved to France in 1815 and he met and talked to Ségur there. In time, they even became kin, for Rostopchin’s daughter married Ségur’s nephew.
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The process of rebuilding Moscow began in an atmosphere of shock. With Russian troops still in the field (and Frenchmen still on Russian soil), there were no easy triumphs for the citizens at first. The Kremlin was hastily locked; that winter it would serve, among other things, as a depot for any valuables that honest people found and handed in.
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But it was also a semi-wreck, and far from totally secure. The patriotic heroism that was supposed to have been kindled by Moscow’s flames was not universally shared. Even the police resorted to looting. Mere survival came first for almost everyone. As peasants from surrounding regions converged on the city to pick the ruins clean, there was also a good deal of cynicism and simple greed.

But their suffering had strengthened many people’s Christian beliefs. There was a sense, expressed by Sergei Glinka among others, that Russia, in its Christ-like guise, had sacrificed itself (and certainly Moscow) to save a sinful Europe from destruction.
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For many, too, the saints were still performing miracles on Moscow’s soil. ‘And the thing that I would not believe if I had not seen it with my own eyes,’ a Russian investigator wrote to Rostopchin after the French sappers’ parting explosion,

was that despite the terrifying quake, which broke the windows in almost all the houses in Moscow and could be heard 40
versts
[26 miles] away, the miracle-working images of the Saviour at the Saviour Gates and of Nicholas the Wonder-Worker on the Nikolsky gates not only escaped any damage, but the lamps that hung in front of them and still do hang, and even the glass that covers the images themselves, did not get broken.
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By a further miracle, the bodies of the saints themselves had also more or less escaped unscathed. Moscow’s metropolitan assured his flock (revealing a bizarre sense of priorities on someone’s part) that the mortal remains of Tsarevich Dmitry had been carted out of the Kremlin before the enemy forces arrived (this honour he would later share, in different times, with Lenin). Whichever corpse’s head the French troops had cut off, it was not the one that Russians ascribed to their dynastic saint.
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The sacred mysteries at the heart of Moscow’s fortress, at least, had survived. Exactly what role they played in the lives of starving, frightened survivors during that homeless winter is unclear. The ragged did not leave memoirs. But when Russians of a different class began to tell the story of the fire, the key to Moscow’s resurrection seemed to be the city’s soul. ‘In the month of October,’ Tolstoy would write forty years later, ‘without a government, without church services or sacred icons, without its wealth and its houses, Moscow was still the Moscow it had been in August. Everything was shattered except something intangible yet mighty and indestructible.’
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That ‘mighty’ thing, perhaps, was the very folk-belief, the visceral affection for familiar saints and local shrines, that planners and enlightened courtiers had been dismissing for so long. A few years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy’s would be the generation that rediscovered it.

In the first months after the fire, however, the main priority was rebuilding. In May 1813, Alexander I convened a special commission to begin work on the city’s reconstruction. The first plans were ready that autumn. Large-scale work started in 1814, but it would be some time yet before the main squares and boulevards stopped looking like a giant building-site, and longer still before the city’s population had recovered to its pre-war high.
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The tsar himself did not visit for three more years. By that time, though there were construction projects everywhere, the immediate evidence of death and looting had been swept away.
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Moscow must have felt unusually spacious for a while. Clutter and rubble gave way at last to new, elegant squares. Three generations of architects were finally vindicated as Red Square acquired its current shape and the Kremlin ceased to be an island surrounded by moats. Peter’s earth bastions were demolished, and the Neglinnaya river was piped underground to make way for twenty-two acres of new gardens, the Alexander Gardens, at the foot of the Kremlin walls.
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These were designed with overtones of Italy, complete with landscaping, fountains and grottoes. ‘Moscow is becoming beautiful,’ the city’s postmaster wrote to his brother in 1820. ‘They are making a park round the Kremlin walls that will be no worse than the Presnya ponds.’
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The improvements were so radical that some outsiders found them disconcerting. In 1839, a Frenchman, the marquis de Custine, on a visit from Paris, could scarcely hide his amazement. ‘What would Ivan III have thought,’ he asked, ‘could he have beheld at the foot of the sacred fortress, his old Muscovites, shaved, curled, in frock coats, white pantaloons, and yellow gloves, eating ices…?’
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The commission for Moscow’s reconstruction functioned until 1842. As it closed its books for the last time, its members could congratulate themselves. The fire had proved to be an opportunity. The planners had swept away much of the city’s medieval jumble, at least in the centre. The village feel had been replaced, the dream of neo-classical order realized. Strict regulation made sure that most new building followed a prescribed pattern, giving the city an unaccustomed harmony, while the sprawl was tamed by grouping houses on to smaller, more regular plots. The city’s isolation from St Petersburg had also been reduced, for the capitals were now linked by a public stage-coach service, the horse-drawn diligence, meaning that anyone could make the journey in two or three days. It would not be long before that time was reduced even further: in 1851, a new railway line, one of Russia’s first, was opened between the cities, again promoting commerce and sparking a local building-boom.
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Among Moscow’s other new amenities were extra street lights (fuelled by oil), better drains, new fountains, and a fire service staffed by more than 1,500 men and 450 horses.
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The Kremlin itself was reserved for the attention of a special commission whose brief was not rationalization but authentic reconstruction. The point was to preserve and cherish the monument that had come, as no other, to define Moscow and even Russia. While the city round it modernized along the now-familiar neo-classical lines, in other words, the Kremlin’s meaning shifted subtly; as a national emblem it had to reinvent itself in national guise. Its morale-boosting value was so widely recognized that a lavish budget for restoration was approved despite the other claims on imperial funds. By the end of 1813 the architects had spent 294,500 rubles (a prince’s fortune) on the restoration of the cathedrals alone.
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In their search for authenticity, some experts, including the Italian-born Dementy Zhilardi, consulted the drawings and ground plans that the pioneering architect Ukhtomsky had created half a century before. Even where there had been extensive damage, builders were encouraged to preserve foundations and original courses of stone, and where new building was inescapable, as was the case with several of the fortress towers, they were supposed to copy anything that had survived. The silhouettes, as they rose against the bare skyline, meant more than they had ever done to local people on the streets below.

But the more observant might have noticed something odd about the shapes of the new spires. The architects of post-war Moscow, like Russian intellectuals more generally, were eager to repair the nation’s most historic monument in an appropriately Russian manner. What that meant in practice, to a generation that considered it a compliment to improve on legacies from the past, was that the builders who restored the Kremlin adopted a Romantic, even gothic, style. Osip Bove, a student of Kazakov, gave the Nikolskaya Tower a new (and unprecedented) decorative spire; St Petersburg’s Karl Rossi designed a confection in stucco, domes and yet more pseudo-gothic detail for the Ascension Convent. The finished church, dedicated to St Catherine, was so ornate (and so prominent, lining the main route into the Kremlin from Red Square) that even at the time it was considered incongruous. The same criticism was levelled at some of the proposed replacements for Filaret’s ruined building, adjoining Ivan the Great, but the most extravagant plans here, complete with gothic towers and classical friezes, were rejected in favour of a simpler and more sober building by Zhilardi based on drawings from the 1750s.
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Among the most controversial ruins was the Cathedral of Nikola Gostunsky, which dated from 1506 and housed an icon of Nikola, the people’s best-loved saint. This building stood on open ground beyond the Ivan bell tower. Prominent and fragile, it had suffered badly during the French occupation, and in 1816, on the eve of Alexander I’s long-awaited visit, the planners viewed it as an eyesore rather than as a national treasure. Some members of the Kremlin commission advocated reconstructing it, perhaps as yet another exercise in the pseudo-gothic style, but others saw the site’s potential for large military parades, and it was this group that eventually prevailed. The old cathedral was demolished by a group of soldiers under orders from the city architects in August 1817.

But knocking down a church of such great age, a symbol of the very spirit Muscovites had suffered to protect, was not straightforward. As Valuev had discovered ten years before, the Kremlin’s buildings had become everyone’s business, and after 1812 there was a sense that Moscow’s surviving monuments might belong, in part, to its people. The metropolitan, Avgustin, had the solution. A century later, it was to become the tactic of choice when Stalin’s young communists had a church to destroy. ‘I agree [to the demolition],’ the metropolitan wrote,

but only on condition that you undertake the work at night and that by morning they have not just demolished it but the site is completely cleared and everything removed so that there should be no indication left that a cathedral was ever there. I know Moscow: if you start knocking something down in the usual way you will not be able to stifle the rumours. You have to take them by surprise and then they all keep quiet.
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It was a shrewd, if not exactly democratic, view. Avgustin found, just as the Bolsheviks later would, that a building really could disappear from memory.

The Kremlin as a whole seemed quite complete without the old landmark. To judge by the surviving paintings, the citadel emerged from the age of repair with real elegance, though artists tended to paint out the rubbish-heaps and scaffolding. Most images from this era show the fortress rising white and gold above the city, although at one point the brickwork was actually painted a shocking blood-red.
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This was definitely a landscape that belonged to the rich and educated, to noblemen and ladies of the better sort. It is through the artists’ eyes that we glimpse the well-dressed crowds: the gentlemen with their top hats and shiny canes, the ladies in their bonnets, gloves and crinolines. They could be leading citizens of any European state, and there is little sense of Russia (let alone romantic Muscovy) about their world. What sets them apart is not their nation’s history but their present-day wealth. Horse-drawn carriages race past the convent gates while uniformed Kremlin guardsmen stand to attention, swords at their sides. The sense of exclusivity is emphasized by the long stretches of iron railing and the sentry-boxes with their bright diagonal stripes. A watercolour from the 1820s by Osip Bove shows the restored expanse of wall along Red Square, and also (a personal triumph, for he had fought to introduce them) the freshly planted lime-trees round the old ramparts.
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The fortress had become a place where the elite could promenade. They soon flocked there, sporting their lapdogs and their parasols.