Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (43 page)

In all, the restoration, which also involved architects like Ton and F. F. Rikhter, was almost as creative as a brand-new design. By indulging a fantasy, the artist and his allies were making a sort of fake (in this regard, Solntsev has been likened to Britain’s Augustus Pugin and France’s Eugène Viollet-le-Duc).
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But that fake was immensely influential, and it remains, for most, the closest they will ever get to a sense of the Muscovite past. Another outcome was the rediscovery – in many ways, the reinvention – of the Kremlin as a work of art. This coincided with a wider acceptance of native landscape, for by the 1850s even Russia’s aristocracy had begun to accept that the silver birches that grew everywhere on their estates could be as scenic as any cypress-grove in Italy.
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The Kremlin became a treasure-house for the resurgent culture. Russians were used to looking at classical and fine European art, but now they could take pride in every home-grown masterpiece. When the final book in Solntsev’s most extensive collection of watercolours, the six-volume
Antiquities of the Russian State,
appeared in 1853, it marked a watershed in art appreciation and in taste, and most of the objects it showed were treasures from the Kremlin Armoury. Here was the famous fur-trimmed Cap of Monomakh, but here, too, were the details of embroidered fabrics, the handles of swords, lamp-holders, coach-work, decorative saddlery. The colours were brilliant and clear, featuring red, gold, emerald and ultramarine. In Solntsev’s hands, each venerable piece had acquired a perfection so dazzling that it banished any lingering thought of cultural inferiority, let alone mildew.
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In reality, however, moth and fungus were making fresh inroads into the collection even as Solntsev worked. The culprit was the 1810 museum building itself. Egotov, fearing fires, had deliberately built it without stoves, and by the 1830s the pervasive damp looked set to destroy whatever the mice and Napoleon had overlooked. Such ravages were intolerable in the age of Russian nationalism, so Nicholas I approved a project for an entirely new museum. The site that was identified, beside the Borovitsky gates, allowed Konstantin Ton to build it as an annex to the Grand Palace.
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The new building shared the same style, the same solidity, and (like the palace) it occupied a site of unique archaeological significance. That site, sadly, was surveyed and excavated in haste, and if there had once been an ancient road or hermit’s cave underneath it, Moscow was never to find out. Nor would local antiquarians get the chance to explore the ruins of Godunov’s palace, the last major building to have stood there.
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Another disappointment came in 1851, when the staff in Ton’s new Armoury Chamber museum discovered that no provision had been made in it for conservation work. They were already feeling underpaid, but now the only space where they could clean, repair or study their objects was in a basement of the adjoining Grand Palace.
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If anything, when the museum was finished, the Kremlin felt more like the exclusive property of the Russian tsars than it had ever done. Experts who worked there often arrived to find the building locked without notice.
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As for the public, entrance was limited, mainly, to Muscovites and special, pre-vetted, guests. A fairly liberal system was introduced under Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II (ruled 1855–81), but from the 1880s the palace imposed firmer controls. Entry-tickets could be obtained only from the police administration, and the procedure would have made today’s restrictions appear light. In 1914, potential visitors had either to provide proof that they lived in Moscow or, if they were not locals, to apply in writing (to a separate office in a different building) two weeks in advance of any planned visit.
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The museum’s opening hours – 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. three days a week between September and May – limited visits even more. Despite all this, the Palace and Armoury together received an annual average of about a quarter of a million visitors in the last years of tsarism.
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For foreigners, the rules were different, and showed how closely Russia’s newly created nationalism was connected to the official Orthodox Church. When a selection of the Armoury’s treasures was earmarked for display at the Paris Exposition of 1867, the Russian authorities refused to allow the items to travel, pleading that sacred objects should not be treated as exhibits for the vulgar gaze.
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The Paris public had to be content with a set of drawings. It had been fine to sell some pieces of the same trove sixty years before, and it was not unusual to find an item mouldering in basement rooms, but foreigners, even curators and specialists, could not examine anything unless they made the effort to present themselves to the Moscow police.

For those who managed to procure their ticket, however, the Armoury offered glimpses of another world. It was a Romanov family collection, the private property of a royal dynasty, and that lent it an eclectic and unbalanced air. Indeed, it was not even quite complete, for in 1858 Alexander II ordered that some of the objects, selected silver plate and furniture, should be removed to furnish a museum-project of his own, the restored house of the Romanov boyars on nearby Varvarka street.
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Some other gaps were suspiciously like unsolved crimes: small gems, pocket-sized ones, were rarer than the massive, famous jewels that could never have been sold. Weapons and transport featured prominently (a whole room was devoted to ceremonial coaches), but there was little trace of any routine palace life, especially that of royal women. A room was set aside for Bazhenov’s extravagant model Kremlin, an object that was fast becoming the white elephant that it still remains, and beside it stood the older model of the palace at Kolomenskoe, a relic of Muscovy that now seemed closer to the nation’s heart. The most glamorous attractions were the celebrated gems, including the royal regalia. Two rooms held these – there was a special case just for the Cap of Monomakh – and visitors could also view the coronation robes. To these were added diplomatic gifts, including unique inlaid thrones from Isfahan, one made for Boris Godunov, the other for Alexei Mikhailovich, a carriage given by England’s King James I, and the finest collection of Tudor English silver in the world.
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Despite the new level of interest, the Kremlin was hardly a public institution and certainly not a museum. Its fate depended on decisions made at court, in St Petersburg, and on whatever budget the administration there could spare.
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Fortunately, three out of Russia’s five nineteenth-century emperors harboured a real fondness for Moscow, and even the reforming Alexander II, who was born in the Kremlin’s Nicholas Palace in 1818, referred to the city (which he did not like) as ‘my native land’.
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The years of ivy-covered neglect were coming to an end. ‘As Moscow is the heart of Russia,’ a guidebook of 1856 solemnly explained, ‘so the Kremlin is not only the heart and soul of our white-stone Moscow, but also the seed from which our Russian Tsarism has grown.’
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The piety was genuine, but it was fast becoming an anachronism. Europe was changing, and even white-stone Moscow would not stand aloof. Eighteen fifty-six was the year when Henry Bessemer’s new steel process promised to revolutionize manufacturing across the world. The tale of humanity itself was being rewritten. Just outside Düsseldorf, near Erkrath, some workers had just found parts of a skull that later formed the standard for Neanderthals. Three years later, in 1859, Charles Darwin was to publish his shattering book,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

However hard conservatives might try, there was no way to hold back an advance of progress on this scale. In the age of steam, a political system that was based on coercion and political repression, even one that was oiled by regular doses of Holy Russian sentiment, could only overheat and stall. The more thoughtful members of Russia’s political class had grasped this by the reign of Alexander I, and in 1855 the death of his obstructive successor, Nicholas I, opened the way to limited change. The greatest single measure of reform (whose fiftieth anniversary, in 1911, was one jubilee that the Romanovs chose to ignore) came six years later, in 1861. When he succeeded his father, Alexander II had made it clear that he intended to abolish the institution of serfdom. It was a reasonable, almost irresistible, decision, long-discussed. It was taken at a time when slavery was being challenged across the civilized world. Predictably, too, conservatives were appalled. In Russia’s case it looked as if their cause had been betrayed by the sovereign himself. ‘Woe to Russia,’ wrote one Moscow-based historian, ‘if it knocks this pillar away of its own accord and breaks the centuries-old bonds of reciprocal benefit.’
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If Karamzin had lived, he would have written much the same. ‘Serfs can be liberated,’ he had once quipped, ‘as soon as it is possible for wolves to be fully fed while sheep remain uninjured.’
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In fact, the emancipation manifesto was limited, complex and cautious, a far cry from the principled stand of anti-slavery campaigners in the English-speaking world. But the end of serfdom constituted an epic break with the past, and it was followed by a programme of important further change. In the next few years, Alexander II signed laws providing for limited local government, extended education provision and far-reaching legal reform, including jury trials. He might have gone yet further if the political mood had not been soured (to put it mildly) by an attempt on his life in the spring of 1866. Already depressed by the death of his eldest son, the heir-apparent Nikolai Aleksandrovich, the previous year, a shocked Alexander II now began to rely almost exclusively on a conservative clique of advisors.
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The next fifteen years were punctuated by explosions, shots and the ring of hammers on hangmen’s scaffolds. But this repressive war on terror proved futile, and in March 1881, despite the efforts of his spies, the emperor, now in his early sixties, was blown to pieces by a bomb laid for his carriage as it travelled through St Petersburg. It took him several hours to die, and the scene (especially the blood) haunted the shocked imaginations of his loyal subjects everywhere. The royal family itself could scarcely bear to speak of it.

Alexander II’s heir, Alexander III, never forgot that he owed his throne to his father’s agony. He was an uncompromising reactionary, and his reign was to be one long tale of arrests, forced emigration and penal exile, censorship, hypocrisy, and the pervasive use of informers. But it began with a coronation. The event was delayed until the spring of 1883, and the interval allowed the palace craftsmen to adapt the setting to new tastes. Since Peter the Great’s reign, the Faceted Palace (which had at times done service as a theatre) had been whitewashed inside, lined with fabric and hung with classical medallions.
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In preparation for his coronation feast, Alexander commissioned a group of icon-masters from Palekh to restore the interiors ‘to the old appearance that they had in ancient times’. The team, led by the Belousov brothers, toiled for months, working largely from Ushakov’s seventeenth-century drawings, and though the results lacked subtlety (they remind me of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s pastiche medievalism), the lines of old-time princes and boyars certainly evoked the saintly era of dynastic rule.
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The diners who gathered inside on the coronation afternoon sat among richly painted walls. In the centre of the room, they could admire the tiers of shelves that groaned, as in the distant past, with antique gold and silver from the Kremlin hoard. Outside, there were no Latinate triumphal gates, and even the lavish commemorative album from the occasion had an elaborately Russian, not classical, graphic design.
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The timing of the coronation coincided with the opening (at last) of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. As a monument to the redemptive power of the people’s sacrifice in 1812, Ton’s vast shrine might, in other circumstances, have seemed to challenge the Kremlin’s dominance of Moscow’s sky. It housed important relics from the war, and its walls bore a carved list of the names of the fallen. The building could accommodate 10,000 people, and its cupola, an unsung miracle of nineteenth-century engineering, was higher even than the landmark bell tower of Ivan the Great. The original plan for the cathedral’s gala opening was to have involved cannon, trumpets, and the premiere of T chaikovsky’s 1812 overture. But Alexander II’s assassination forced a delay, and even a rethinking of the symbolism. On 30 May 1883, as the new imperial family and the lines of ministers and priests processed from the Dormition Cathedral to Ton’s building and back, it was clear that, in this new age of reaction, the cathedral’s role would be to extend the dynasty’s imperious reach along the river, consuming Moscow’s public space in the service of autocracy.
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Years after his death, on 30 May 1912, a colossal statue of Alexander III was unveiled at the top of the cathedral steps. Nicholas II and his wife (in a delightful white toilette, complete with parasol) were there to watch, and so were all the priests and advisors, but as the monster loomed above the crowds, glaring at Moscow and the Kremlin from its massive throne, it looked as if the city had been conquered by a giant.
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