Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (47 page)

Witte did at least persuade the tsar to grant a constitution, and the declaration, in October 1905, brought the crowds out yet again, this time in celebration. But the ‘abscess’, in Nicholas’ phrase, had not been ‘lanced’.
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Extreme-right brutishness provoked the next outburst. On 18 October, the day after the reading of the constitution manifesto, right-wing vigilantes killed a leading Moscow socialist, Nikolai Bauman, sparking renewed conflict. That winter, as the city teetered on the brink of anarchy, there were yet more mass strikes, and barricades went up in the workers’ districts.
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The year ended with pitched battles on Moscow’s streets. Trepov and the cossacks had imposed order by late December, but the regime had lost moral authority. In the years to come, protest was silenced by arrest and the enthusiastic use of hanging, but in the workers’ districts there would be no toasts to the Kremlin.

From this point, it would be easy to look ahead for signs of the catastrophe to come. The revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky later called 1905 a ‘dress rehearsal’, but the streets of workers’ red flags that autumn did not lead in a straight line to Bolshevism’s own Jerusalem. Even in the nine years that were left before the First World War, there was time and space for the likes of Bartenev to make their maps, nostalgic and romantic, and for publishers to print (and sell) Vasnetsov’s paintings of the medieval Russian world.
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But the hour has come to take leave of nostalgic dreams. As the curtain begins to fall for ever on the tsars’ Kremlin, there is barely time to linger on the last ever coronation, which took place in 1896. The crowning of Nicholas II was an event that focused on the mystery of sovereignty, the sacred bond that joined the tsar and people.
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Its precedents reached back to a fantasy of Byzantium, ‘the ideal Christian state’, and through that to a world that shone with a much brighter light than humdrum Europe and its tedious middle class.
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The lucky guests who received the coronation albums where these sentiments appeared could remind themselves in advance about the continuities with coronations of the past. The books, in finest reinvented Russian style, were full of splendid pictures, including several of the previous two coronations, and the text included a vivid thousand-year history of the ceremony (not entirely inaccurate) to instil the required sense of awe. Each item of regalia was carefully described, each gesture analysed. The very weight of the volumes, and the luxurious paper inside, might well have been enough to make recipients catch their breath.

The press – the world’s press – joined the commentary, listing past tsars and noting the precedents for every detail of the pageantry to come. In Russia, a number of cheap histories were also printed to satisfy public demand. One such, Tokmakov’s
Historical Description of Every Coronation of the Russian Tsars, Emperors and Empresses,
reads like a literal record, despite the fact that almost every detail from before Peter the Great was still conjectural. There was even a portrait of Riurik, with dates, though no-one could be sure he had existed, let alone what he looked like (uncontroversially enough, the artist showed him dark-eyed, with moustache and beard).
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The other fixation was with continuity, lingering on the stories of dynastic tombs and the thrones of the Romanovs. As for the Dormition Cathedral, whose domes still leaked pending the Archaeological Society’s great repair, the coronation album described it as ‘modest in size but great in its historical significance and in its ordinances, the most precious heart of Russia, and of its first capital, Moscow’.
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Public excitement gathered pace, but Nicholas himself had little appetite for the coming display. As he wrote to his mother in the spring of 1896, the preparations were full of reminders of his father’s coronation and, thus, inevitably, of his recent illness and death. ‘Darling Mama,’ he confided on 27 April,

I believe we should regard all these difficult ceremonies in Moscow as a great ordeal sent by God, for at every step we shall have to repeat all we went through in the happy days thirteen years ago! One thought alone consoles me: that in the course of life we shall not have to go through the rite again.
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It was one of his few prescient comments, but it did not help much when the day arrived. The new emperor found the lengthy ceremonies tiring. The robes that had been sewn by armies of industrious nuns were heavy, and he worried, too, about his proud wife in her cumbrous gown. His compensation, as always, was the ‘sea of heads’, his people massed to show their love for him. Thousands crushed into the restricted precincts of Cathedral Square: invited dignitaries, uniformed guards, and representatives from every corner of the empire. As the Kremlin’s famous bells rang out, Nicholas could have imagined himself at the centre of a timeless pageant, holy and suffused with light, as if a medieval painting – though not the kind with bloodstained swords and torture-scenes – had sprung miraculously to life.

But the bright tableau was soon marred by the news of mass deaths at the people’s coronation party on Khodynka field. The day had not been meant to go this way. The idea had been to put on a traditional coronation feast, the ritual gift Muscovite tsars had always offered to their subjects. As London’s
Times
had noted (in its smuggest tone): ‘No less than five thousand poor people will be housed and fed during the stay of the Czar and the Czarina in Moscow, and on the day of the coronation there will be a grand dinner given, at which ten thousand poor people will be present.’
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But the feast laid on for Muscovites, the open-air coronation feast, had gone very wrong. At dawn, stampedes of revellers had surged towards the booths where food and coronation mementoes had been set out, and before the appalled gaze of the world’s journalists, the crowd had become a mass of bodies; wounded, trampled and dying. Some later blamed the panic on a rumour that there would not be enough food, and many later drew attention to the treacherous, uneven ground. As people fell, there was no hope of saving them. ‘Probably some 2,000 persons perished on the spot,’ wrote the London-based
Graphic,
‘while many of the 1,200 in hospital are not expected to survive.’ Many of the corpses were ‘so disfigured and stripped of clothing that identification was almost impossible’.
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While Moscow’s cemeteries filled with dead, however, the Kremlin glittered like a Christmas tree. It was traditional for lamps to burn at coronations (the illuminations were one thing that even Alexander III had not skimped on), but these dazzled the crowds, bathing the halls in artificial light for the benefit of invited guests and conscripting even passers-by to the festivity. The empress Alexandra had thrown the first switch, lighting the bell tower of Ivan the Great and then the Kremlin’s other main historic sites. ‘Like diamonds, rubies and emeralds among a mass of other precious stones,’ wrote one admiring chronicler, ‘Ivan the Great and the Kremlin towers stood out above the illuminated capital and its sea of lights.’
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The Russian national colours – red, blue and white – picked up the fabulous outlines against a background of low springtime clouds. The evenings that May were damp, the public mood sombre and pained, but through it all the fortress blazed above the huddled roofs like a child’s fantasy castle, a dream home for the prince and princess in a fairy-tale.

9

Acropolis

Conservatism was not the only cultural news in Nicholas II’s Russia. An urgent, vigorous demand for change had also found its voice during the nineteenth century. The outside world woke to the signals of this rather late. It even took its time to notice how creative the effects of restless energy could be. In May 1913, as every textbook lovingly records, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet
The Rite of Spring
opened in Paris, designed and performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s brilliant Ballets Russes. As sinuous woodwind solos drew them into a scene of abduction and sacrifice, an audience that included Maurice Ravel and Gertrude Stein, to say nothing of the dance critics of every newspaper from the
New York Times
to
Le Figaro,
recoiled in shock. Some later praised the pagan wildness on the stage, but many chose to be affronted by a spectacle of barbarism.
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If they had known their Vasnetsov, or studied recent Russian art, the critics might have been a little less surprised. Today, the production, though innovative as ballet, resembles nothing quite so much as a late-nineteenth-century essay in folklore and archaism.
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The menace it implied, moreover, was symptomatic of many other public debates in Russia, where conflicts were developing that would last far longer than the dance-writers’ outburst in the cultural press. In politics as in the arts, the empire had reached breaking-point.

An exhibition that opened in February 1914 brought some of the tensions to the surface, at least as far as painting was concerned. The Society of Lovers of the Arts on Bolshaya Dmitrovka had been decked out with jaunty yellow flags for the occasion, and although visitors were sparse, the artists themselves were enthusiastic. Several members of the group involved, which called itself the Knave of Diamonds, had worked in France, and one of them had persuaded Picasso to send a canvas to the show. There were also contributions by Georges Braque and Henri Le Fauconnier, but the bulk of the display was local work. Bright colours filled the air like unexpected music; Aristarkh Lentulov’s canvas of St Basil’s Cathedral, for instance, managed to be even more effervescent than the building itself, and his cubist Moscow positively blazed. Still, many critics failed to pick up on the vigour of it all. They noted that the group had a strong taste for
nature morte
(‘there are a lot of apples’), but complained that its more ambitious paintings failed the naturalism test. Some works really did defy all reason. One canvas, for instance, was covered with some greenish geometric shapes, in the centre of which the artist had added a lifelike lotto ticket. On checking the catalogue, it turned out that the subject was meant to be
A Lady in a Tram.
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Its artist, Kasimir Malevich, was a man who upset fellow-painters, let alone critics. ‘Creation,’ he was soon to write, ‘is present in pictures only where there is form which borrows nothing already created in nature.’
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Moscow rediscovered its vigorous imagination in the age of the avant-garde. The city hosted innovators of all kinds, from the composer Alexander Scriabin to the theatrical director Konstantin Stanislavsky. The architectural legacy of the time, preserved in the brick and curved wrought iron of Fedor Shekhtel’s mansions in the
style moderne,
still brings most visitors to a full stop, amazed to find pink walls and painted flowers in the streets near Patriarch’s Ponds. Discredited though they appear today, the political and social hopes of these decades were just as thrilling. Science, art and social fantasies combined: optimists dreamed of universal happiness, abundance, immortality. The same philosopher could write of folk crafts and space-travel to Mars, the same artist consider colour’s psychic resonances and a plan for self-propelled air flight. Even the Kremlin played a part, for one visionary, inspired by Russia’s spiritual path, proposed its domes and towers as the architectural prototype for a string of utopian communes.
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For him (and for countless others), the citadel’s iconic silhouette was not so much an heirloom as the pointer to a future in which Russia’s unique spirit could redeem the world. Almost anything seemed possible, and hope, unrealized and unexamined, seemed to unite the fantasists in common cause. Beneath the high, forbidding, very un-utopian walls of the real Kremlin, the energy of Russia’s silver age rolled out in rainbow colours as much as those percussive, shamanistic chords.

It helped that these were also times of economic boom. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Muscovite elite was almost entirely made up of families whose wealth derived from trade, industry and investment. The millionaire Tretyakovs and Ryabushinskys, the Morozovs and the Botkins had real political clout, and their people dominated the city’s governing chamber, the Duma.
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Many were imaginative public givers, and it was they who paid for the new concert-halls and art galleries and the experimental theatre where plays like Anton Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard
were premiered. Among their other plans was a scheme for an underground transport system, the metro, which engineers hoped to open in 1920.
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Technology like this allowed the city to expand in every plane. In 1916 alone, the tram network accounted for 405 million journeys, more than 300 for each citizen.
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Another new technology, the elevator, inspired a revolt against the constrictions of the ubiquitous faux-Byzantine building style. ‘With the beginning of the new century,’ wrote Boris Pasternak,

everything changed as if by magic. Moscow was suddenly gripped by the spirit of trade and commerce of the great capital cities … Before you knew it, there were gigantic brick buildings soaring skywards on every street. At that moment Moscow – and not, as hitherto, St Petersburg – gave birth to a new Russian architecture, that of a young, modern, vigorous metropolis.
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