Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (49 page)

For Grabar as for Benois and his friends, however, the priority was to preserve the treasures of the past. Other artists might have dreamed of shattering history altogether, transforming everything from poster-art to living-space, but Grabar was more interested in protecting the Kremlin and its contents.
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In this devoted enterprise, he was assisted by the numismatist V. K. Trutovsky, a leading light of the Moscow Archaeological Society, who went on to become the Armoury’s first curator in the new era.
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The Moscow authorities were intrigued by Grabar’s planned acropolis as well, but there was never any time or cash to sort things out. Like Petrograd, Moscow awaited the convocation of an elected Constituent Assembly, whose role would be to create a legal basis for the infant state, and meanwhile Russia as a whole was still at war. The hard-pressed city government, with few rubles to spare for building-maintenance (and none for more utopian schemes), devoted part of the summer of 1917 to selling off exotic plants from the palace hot-houses.
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By autumn, then, much had been said but nothing really decided, in which respect the Kremlin was no different from almost every other institution in the land. With hindsight, it is clear why Russia’s democratic revolution failed. Euphoria was wonderful, but it could not cover up the nation’s differences for long. The Provisional Government, unable to guide the country out of war and desperate for guns and bread, lurched back towards repression, increasing working hours, punishing strikers, and threatening the revolutionary left. Its commitment to property and to the bourgeoisie deprived it of the chance to begin land reform in the countryside (a major omission in an empire of peasants) and left it without appetite for a rebalancing of labour rights. By September, even the eight-hour day appeared too radical for this well-meaning but frail administration. Its conservatism could only help the parties of the left, including well-organized groups of Bolsheviks operating in the major cities and among conscripts in the army and fleet. More generally, the soviets, the councils that the people had elected for themselves, grew ever more confident, and, in political terms, more effective. They, and not the Provisional Government, spoke with democracy’s legitimate voice. The news from the front line grew blacker by the week. The people’s army had started to desert. In October 1917, as political leaders in the soviets prepared to meet for their Second Congress, an event quite independent of the tired Provisional Government, nothing but official purple ink could block their route to power.

The soviets had elected an assortment of delegates to their national meeting, and the Congress, itself a cubist patchwork of political parties, looked set to debate a full spectrum of hopes. The left predominated, but its parties did not speak with a single voice on anything from property rights to Russia’s obligation to go on fighting the war. To forestall what he considered to be time-wasting debate, the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, pre-empted the Congress (and usurped the people’s democratic rights) by seizing power on the eve of its official convocation, storming the Winter Palace in the name of the workers, soldiers and sailors while in fact staging a single-party coup. On 25 October 1917 old style – 7 November by the calendar his government later introduced – Lenin issued a manifesto that declared Russia to have passed into the people’s hands. His slogan, ‘All power to the soviets’, implied a broad-based workers’ administration. In fact, what was intended was a Bolshevik directorate, a dictatorship of the proletariat, with fuller details to be decided at some time in the future. As one of the participants conceded in old age, the Bolshevik elite, determined though it was to obtain power, ‘had only the vaguest notion’ about what to do with it afterwards.
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In the earliest days, Lenin’s party could scarcely even claim complete control of Petrograd. Before they could make any progress, Bolshevik supporters, organized (and almost always armed) into units called Military-Revolutionary Committees, faced the challenge of consolidating their rule. No city that they had to take was more important than Moscow.

The counter-revolution that awaited them in the old capital was led by the city government itself, and it recruited scores of volunteers – mainly military cadets – as soon as the news from Petrograd arrived. On the Bolshevik side were professional revolutionaries, workers (the so-called Red guards) and also a number of soldiers opposed to any continuation of the war. All were supplied with lethal quantities of arms; grenades and bullets had been disappearing from the factories since spring. The fighting was in earnest.
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As Russians shot at Russians, however, the city itself continued to operate. On one of the darkest days, Allan Monkhouse saw a performance of
The Cherry Orchard
at the Moscow Arts Theatre, though his journey home was interrupted by a sharp burst of machine-gun fire.
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Street urchins dared each other to dash past the bullets on the corner of Nikitskaya street; the careless risked a pointless death.
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Fierce battles were fought round the city Duma and the telegraph office, but the epicentre of the struggle was the Kremlin.

The Reds had occupied the citadel as soon as Lenin’s signal had reached them from Petrograd. The problems started when they could not hold it. A detachment of military cadets and anti-Bolshevik troops (often called ‘Junkers’ in later Soviet accounts) resorted to a simple ruse: their leader, Ryabtsev, marched up to the gates and told the occupying forces that their coup in Moscow had failed. The Bolshevik regiment in the Kremlin, like so many gullible defenders of the past, opened the Trinity gates, and Ryabtsev promptly stormed the citadel and threatened those inside with lynching. His men dug into the Small Nicholas Palace, took the remaining Reds hostage, and placed sentries at every gate. The gold reserve, according to some witnesses, remained untouched, but any weapons in the arsenal were quickly commandeered.
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It was obvious that the Bolshevik hold on Moscow would not be secure until the Kremlin was recaptured, but the methods that the Reds now used appalled almost everyone. Soon after Ryabtsev’s triumph, artillery based on the Sparrow Hills began to shell the venerable walls. It was as if the holiest site in the land were being desecrated; there were even rumours (incorrect) that St Basil’s lay in ruins. Russia had not managed to find the ammunition to win the European war, remarked a Kremlin priest, but the people did not seem to lack the means to shoot at one another.
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For a few hours the Bolsheviks ceased fire, horrified at the damage they might be causing, but the artillery commander, a Bolshevik professor of astronomy called Shternberg, eventually overruled his comrades’ protests and trained his guns at the fortress for a second time.
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When news of the shelling reached Petrograd, the new education commissar, Anatoly Lunacharsky, tendered his resignation in disgust. ‘My cup is full,’ he wrote. ‘The Kremlin, where are gathered the most important art treasures of Petrograd and of Moscow, is under artillery fire … I can bear no more.’
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In fact, the Junkers had surrendered that same day (and Lunacharsky promptly snatched his job back). The fighting had lasted almost a week, however, and hundreds of Muscovites had perished. In the palace yards behind the Kremlin walls, corpses now lay stiff in pools of blood. Moscow’s proletariat mourned the victims of counter-revolution; the bourgeoisie its fallen students and its vanished hopes. The dead cadets, who gave their lives, as one of the city’s conservative history professors lamented, ‘for god knows what’, were buried on 13 November (old style). There was a long funeral service in the city-centre Church of the Great Ascension, but afterwards it was difficult to find a graveyard whose owners were willing to accept the coffins, for the counter-revolution had become divided and afraid.
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The workers, however, were buried in some of Russia’s holiest soil, for their graves were dug at the base of the Kremlin walls. It was a site that only recently had seen a royal dais for the lines of soldiers going off to fight.
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This time, a stalwart of the revolution’s corps of artists, architect Pavel Malinovsky, was recruited to design the props and the memorial parade.
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The American journalist John Reed travelled to Moscow from his base in Petrograd to watch this funeral. On 10 November, he witnessed ‘a river of red banners’ as the city’s grieving people, choreographed by Malinovsky, streamed through Red Square in their thousands. The night before, Reed had picked his way along the darkened walls with a student guide, carefully following the sound of shovels to reach the site of the common graves. ‘We looked down’, he wrote, ‘into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge fires.’ One shift was not enough to finish a job on this scale, and as the journalist turned to leave, he saw a new group arrive, pick up the tools, and begin ‘digging, digging without a word’. That way, despite the snow and darkness, the pits would be finished by dawn, ready for the weeping lines of mourners and the red-draped coffins, the ‘wreaths of hideous artificial flowers’ and the sea of improvised red flags. The location alone confirmed the scale of change in everybody’s lives. As the student had explained to Reed, gesturing towards the piles of earth, ‘Here in this holy place, holiest of all Russia, we shall bury our most holy. Here where are the tombs of the Tsars, our Tsar – the People – shall sleep.’
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There were no priests beside this grave. At a specially convened meeting on 9 November, the church had condemned the interment of humble folk in sacred soil, though it offered to neutralize that blasphemy against the tsars and saints by organizing prayers and a procession. Its blessing was forbidden by Moscow’s revolutionary government. On 21 November, when church leaders nevertheless attempted to process to the grave and sprinkle holy water, they were met by Soviet bayonets.
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In years to come, however, the site became a new kind of religious symbol, a relic for the communists to tend. Its martyrs lent solemnity to all Red Square parades, their sacrifice transformed, like Christ’s, into a holy act. The new regime was laying claim to history, as keen to sink its hungry roots into the holy earth as any tsar. But though the site was historic enough, and hallowed over centuries by rituals like the Palm Sunday procession, Moscow’s workers might have noticed that the graves themselves were outside, not within, the Kremlin walls.
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As they attempted to consolidate national power, the Bolsheviks played down the destructive effects of their artillery. The Kremlin, they insisted, had not suffered very much in the battle for Moscow. Grabar, now working for the new regime, insisted that the damage was less regrettable than the previous decade’s heavy-handed restoration-work.
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The truth, however, was far less benign. Even the most starry-eyed of the new regime’s admirers had to admit, albeit privately, that the condition of the Kremlin was a national disgrace. Bolshevik artillery had shot out the main cupolas of the Dormition Cathedral and the walls of the Twelve Apostles Church. The two other historic cathedrals, the Annunciation and the Archangel Michael, were pock-marked, and there were bullet-holes and shell-damage in the walls of both monasteries and on the iconic bell tower of Ivan the Great. The Kremlin walls had been breached in several places, and several towers had almost collapsed. By a miracle (or so most people thought) the icon of St Nikola that hung above the Nikolsky gates had escaped, as it did in 1812, but the wall behind was cracked and charred. Inside the buildings, icons and books lay under piles of rubble. The arsenal had been plundered, as had the patriarch’s sacristy with its pearls and gold. Elsewhere, shards of glass, wood-splinters and gaudy fragments were all that remained of palace treasures and church furnishings.
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Despite a dizzying legislative schedule (and with no budget), Moscow’s newly empowered Bolsheviks enlisted protection for the wounded buildings and the treasure that they stored.
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For a few exciting days, Kasimir Malevich was given control of the art, but that was never going to work. The man who later called on the hungry to ‘burn Raphael in the name of the future’ was soon steered towards more suitable tasks. Grabar, assisted by a group of artists that included the cubist Knave Lentulov, was summoned to help, but progress really called for central government support.
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Eventually, a caretaker administration moved into the Cavalry Building, sailors and riflemen with good revolutionary credentials but no sensitivity when it came to antiques. Fortunately, most of the ordinary palace staff were still in post, guarding what was left of the imperial heritage, but it was unclear how and when they would be paid. Perhaps to compensate for that, some colluded in rackets, pilfering any portable objects and smuggling the remaining guns out of the arsenal.
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They soon taught their friends how to find the hidden passageway that had been built to service the coal-fired power-station near the Trinity gates.
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Barter and crime were emblematic of the times. As Russia’s formal economy ground to a halt, its banking and production paralysed, an unofficial market sprang up, exchanging rings and watches for food, weapons for train tickets, for coats for lumps of coal. Though diamonds could be bought on the meanest street, bread became almost unattainably expensive. Even a worthy like Grabar might have been tempted into some sort of illicit trade, for by the spring of 1918 the price of a loaf was soaring well above his daily pay.
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Later, the new government issued orders to nationalize the mansions of the wealthy, together with their contents, and that added a fresh tide of luxury goods, this time looted by semi-official mobs. In this bizarre economy, a brooch or necklace, once a treasure, might be sold for scraps of food, enough to sustain a body for a few hours. And in the short term, many gangs were interested more in vengeance than profit; no-one knows how much the angry mobs destroyed in the winter of 1917–18. The danger was that items of real artistic or historical significance to the nation might vanish altogether. Many did: a typical loss, stolen from the Kremlin itself, was a gold reliquary, or zion, dating from 1486, a rare example of medieval gold-work by Russia’s own master-craftsmen.
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