Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (50 page)

The answer was to put an irreproachable Bolshevik in charge, but Lenin’s team in Petrograd took several months to organize itself. In that time, there was hardly a museum in the land whose staff could be absolved entirely of pilfering. But as Russia’s Orthodox prepared to celebrate their Christmas, the resolutions finally began to flow, and on 5 January 1918, Lunacharsky turned to the Kremlin itself. His decree stated that ‘All structures within the territory of the Kremlin, artistic and historic monuments, regardless of their original ownership or the fact that they are used by specific departments or institutions, not excluding the churches, cathedrals and monasteries, constitute the property of the Republic.’
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The priority now was to save the People’s artistic heritage from the people themselves.

It was a classic test of new state power, and the Bolsheviks barely passed it. A new body, the People’s Commissariat for the Preservation of Historic and Artistic Monuments, was formed to prevent the activities that were threatening to destroy the nation’s inheritance, chief among which was simple vandalism. ‘The hatred that the Russian people feel towards the previous owners … should not be directed towards innocent objects,’ Lunacharsky ordered.
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The country mansions went on burning nonetheless, and looters gathered at the gates of the great palaces in town. The cherished plan to turn the Kremlin into a museum was going to have to wait. For now it had to re-enact its less glamorous role as a giant safe for Moscow’s valuables. Indeed, the Moscow branch of the new Monuments Commissariat was already known simply as the Kremlin Commission because so many crates of recovered loot were being stored inside the fortress. Its head, the man in charge of Moscow’s entire heritage, was Pavel Malinovsky.

For the forty-nine-year-old architect, the high point of whose work to date had been a summer mansion for a provincial flour-merchant by the name of Nikolai Bugrov, the new responsibilities were heady. For just under two years (until someone better-connected grabbed the job), Malinovsky was responsible for the contents of all Moscow’s museums and libraries, galleries, mansions, and the whole of the Kremlin. As everyone anticipated, he based himself in the citadel, though his presence there was not universally welcomed. A member of his team arrived for her first day at work to find the whole place deserted. Knock as she might at several doors, no-one would direct her to Malinovsky’s office (‘sabotage’, the commissar confided when they finally sat down).
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Although he was their only hope, Moscow’s conservative establishment, the art-experts and academics whom he had upstaged, regarded their new comrade as an interloper and busybody: ‘a repulsive, ugly little man who does not inspire trust’.
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Even more annoying, at least to any other self-appointed guardian of Russian culture, was the next addition to the staff in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building. Malinovsky’s deputy was to be a second-rate artist called Evgeny Oranovsky (‘a complete fool, and probably malicious as well’
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), and his task was to log and conserve Moscow’s treasures, including everything that Red guards brought to him.
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The point was to prevent destruction, export and black-market trade, and to that end no painting and no trinket was supposed to evade him. If citizens wished to keep objects of historic or artistic value in their homes, and even if the curators of established museums wished to retain their collections, they were now meant to apply for documents from Oranovsky’s hand. Unregistered valuables would all be liable to confiscation. Registration was invited at the Kremlin itself, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only, 12.30 to 2 p.m.
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‘Every day a new decree,’ a Muscovite scrawled on one of the city’s houses, ‘but still there is no bread.’ The decrees certainly abounded. At the same time, however, even officials seemed confused about the status of nationalized property, including anything that Moscow’s richest citizens might have left behind when they prepared to flee the country. In the confusion, mountains of jumbled objects cluttered Oranovsky’s little office every morning.
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Among the looted (‘conserved’) items on his list by early January 1918, many of them stacked in crates in the Kremlin’s Armoury Chamber, were European paintings, antiquities, and 30,000 books from the library of Aleksei Uvarov, the late founder of the Moscow Archaeological Society.
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In March the officer in charge of the Kremlin arsenal wrote to complain that so many things – including instruments from a local church orchestra and a batch of radio-telegraph equipment – had been brought there in error that there was no space left for his men to work.
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Oranovsky’s style of operating can be judged from his memoir. Searching the Grand Kremlin Palace in his first weeks, he and his men discovered a cache of valuables that the Provisional Government had moved to Moscow for safekeeping earlier in 1917. There was porcelain and there was gold, but there were also cases of fine wine, which, being Bolsheviks of the hard school, the men regarded as a form of temptation rather than treasure (or art) in liquid form. Oranovsky ordered the entire supply to be poured into the palace drains. As he wrote, not without pride, ‘The drunken aroma of those wines infused the palace for many a month.’
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And there were further bright spots in the dutiful hack artist’s life. The Armoury Museum’s curator, Trutovsky, was a consistent ally, and a Kremlin priest, Archimandrite Arsenii, facilitated some co-operation by the church. In February 1918, the aristocratic owner of the Kuskovo estate, a palace in stunningly landscaped grounds on the edge of Moscow, applied in person for his help in saving a collection of rare porcelain.
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More frequently, however, Oranovsky worked in an atmosphere of suppressed rage. Beyond the Kremlin, wealthy people knew him as the man who checked the contents of their private safes, helping himself (or the new state) to anything that could be classed as art before Lenin’s secret police seized the rest. Moscow’s remaining artistic elite – still reckoning itself to be the only possible custodians of art and books – detested him, and poked fun at his boorish manners and his fondness for dining off the palace china.
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No-one really wanted him to take their things. In the circumstances, there was something heroic in his zeal throughout that hungry winter, the long hours that he worked in those unheated rooms, his passion for ‘conserving’ treasures that the Bolsheviks might otherwise have sold for cash. He fought against the dealers and insulting crowds and even the police. Among the pieces that his men snatched from the latter in 1918 were two handguns set with diamonds, the property of the celebrated army commander General Brusilov.
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No-one felt like a hero on the bleaker days of that first winter, however. The monks and nuns, the archivists, the painters and the palace staff made tea, lit tiny stoves, and shivered in the undiscriminating cold. Though Moscow’s artists were still dreaming of their avant-garde acropolis, it took a strong faith, whether religious or political, to believe in a bright future for the Kremlin in the early months of 1918. The interiors were dim, even menacing, though loyal servants of the old regime attempted to protect the sacred rooms with locks. Churchmen made plans to bury their treasures, and rumours that they had already started taking some along a secret tunnel underneath the walls abounded. But it was the disorder that was most apparent. There were no corpses outside the palace windows now, but the rubble had not been cleared, and nor had the refuse that was piling up in the snow, attracting hooded crows and rats. Whenever there was a slight thaw, the gateways slithered into mud, and a lake collected in the square, reflecting the bell tower of Ivan the Great in frothing sludge. As one of Lenin’s aides later remarked, shamelessly shifting the blame, ‘Napoleon left the Kremlin in 1812 in no more littered, ruined and dirty a state than the gentlemen Junkers did [in 1917].’
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It was a winter when the Kremlin’s future could have taken many turns. There was still a lingering chance that it might have become a museum-park; it was fast turning into a fortified bank for the nation’s valuables in any case. But though its masters talked about repair, little was done, and the Kremlin could just as well have succumbed to another fire or crumbled into semi-ruin.
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It was not until four months after Lenin’s coup that its fate was settled. By then, a civil war was pressing on the Bolshevik elite. They needed a secure stronghold, and they also needed a more centrally located capital city from which to extend their territorial control. Moscow offered both, and it also had something more, for the place was lively with historic resonance, an asset that had rescued several fragile regimes of the past. Petrograd had served its turn as the cradle of proletarian revolution; Moscow was the mother of the Russian people’s lands.
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Privately, Lenin disliked the place, but there was little real choice.
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In February 1918, the Bolshevik government secretly agreed to move its capital back there.
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The relocation involved several hundred souls, including the entire membership of newly formed organs of government like the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, together with the most essential of the many staff who worked with them. At the centre of it all was Lenin himself, a figure now so precious that he was protected like the queen bee in a hive. The logistical anguish of moving an entire war-time government was as nothing compared with the anxiety for Lenin’s life. In the end, the relocation plan was kept secret, disinformation (including a denial that the government would ever move) was dropped into any listening ear, and even government personnel (including Lenin) were not told in advance exactly how and when they were to travel.
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To further distract would-be assassins, Lenin’s colleague, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, arranged for the members of the Central Executive Committee – politicians, soldiers and sailors – to make a decoy journey in railway-carriages requisitioned from the tsar’s own stock.
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The epic move, involving two entire trains, took place on a Sunday, 10 March, with much official bustling and cross-checking before the passengers could settle into the deep leather and the monogrammed moquette.

Travelling with his wife and sister in a less conspicuous train behind the other two, Lenin arrived in Moscow the following night. It is likely that he had always hoped to make the Kremlin his base in the city, and the Cheka, the agents of security and (later) terror, had duly placed it in a state of siege.
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From March 1918, access to the fortress was restricted to persons in possession of a pass, the coveted
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and these were issued only by the Kremlin commandant.
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A former sailor, Pavel Malkov, was given this job, working closely with the secret police in a role whose powers paralleled (and soon exceeded) those of Malinovsky in his art empire. Living conditions in the Kremlin remained squalid, however, and Lenin and his entourage arrived before the telephones and new guard-posts had been set up. Like many other top officials, the leader of the first proletarian revolution in the world spent a first night at the five-star National Hotel. His neighbours included other Bolshevik luminaries, and more had been accommodated in the nearby Hotel Metropole (splendid but shell-damaged) and in the rather less grand Hotel Lyuks.
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In the years to come, as government swelled and more and more officials, time-pressed and self-important, moved to the Bolshevik capital, former hotels and even former mansions would be used as top-grade government billets. Their china and linen, marked and crested, were distributed to ambitious provincials, many of whom had arrived in the capital with little more than a change of clothes.
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Accommodation soon became so scarce that people were grateful for a shared room, while an apartment was a real luxury. But every politician, however comfortable they found the erstwhile quarters of the bourgeoisie, eventually aspired to live inside the Kremlin. It towered over everything. When the great gates shut, as they were soon to do on all but those entrusted with the new elite’s official pass, the city almost disappeared from view; the Kremlin’s elevation minimized its ant-like striving and its small despairs. You were either in or you were definitely out.

Lenin asked to move in after just one night. His aides had planned to give him an apartment and offices in the Senate, but the suite would still take some weeks to prepare, and he was so impatient that a temporary set of two rooms had to be cleared in the Cavalry Building.
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This was a bad omen for Oranovsky and his staff. Their work (which also brought them into conflict with the well-connected art dealers who were raising cash for Lenin’s cause) was already under scrutiny, and now their space seemed set to disappear. But Lenin did not remain in his two cramped rooms for long. Later that year, as planned, the leader moved into more generous and permanent lodgings on the third floor of the Senate, a suite where he could have a library and where he and his wife, Nadezhda, kept a much-loved cat.
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Among the modern touches were an Erickson lift and an indoor toilet (Ideal Standard) in a heated room.
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But Lenin also craved the fresh night air, and in 1920 his Kremlin apartment was extended with the addition of a makeshift study on the roof, concealed within the folds of the great building. Here he liked to rest each evening, lulled by the stillness of a city paralysed by civil war. Eighty years later, the curator of Lenin’s Kremlin apartment museum was nostalgic for that rooftop space. It was a relic of the first heroic days, before a time came when the leaders could build anything they chose.
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