Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (54 page)

At first, too, the revolution brought some pickings for the conservationists. As Igor Grabar had perceived, the state’s determined seizure of the assets of the very rich was like an open invitation to explore their properties. Even the church could not exclude the expert teams. The only real requirement was a permit on the necessary form. Since he could almost print these for himself, Grabar found time in a packed official schedule to supervise the wholesale stripping of old plaster. What he was looking for was genuine Russian art, by which he meant the medieval stuff, and to find it he was ready to destroy almost anything that was not at least a hundred and fifty years old. Others also grasped this rare chance to explore. From 1923 to 1928, for instance, a team led by the architect Petr Baranovsky worked to unveil the long-lost mansion of the seventeenth-century magnate Vasily Golitsyn.
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They found it by chipping stucco from a squarish city-centre block, uncovering the old windows, and knocking down an ugly service extension. Apart from its obvious historical importance, the resulting structure was a rarity in a city that had lost so much of its heritage, and almost everyone was delighted.
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Even the secret police joined in, although for them the most important thing was to make sure that they had complete control of any secret passage that Golitsyn and Grand Duchess Sofiya might have built between the mansion’s cellars and the Kremlin.
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The transformation of the city, then, was not steered by some sinister cabal. At first, the whole thing even lacked a rational design. As some old structures were being resurrected, others were about to be torn down. The demolition started in 1922 with a nineteenth-century chapel dedicated to Alexander Nevsky, which someone in the futurist camp complained was blocking traffic in a city-centre street. The church was powerless to answer back, and Grabar, in his role as the city’s artistic consultant, did not protest, because the building was an ugly one. The chapel was quickly razed, a decision that opened the gates to a flood of similar plans.
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Grabar soon seemed almost elated. It was not just that he disliked virtually everything that had been constructed since the days of Konstantin Ton. He was also happy to approve the demolition of a treasured older building if he could salvage the materials for a more attractive or high-profile scheme.
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The iconoclasm of the 1920s was, for him, a straight case of win-win: a conciliatory attitude to the new regime helped keep him in his enviable job, while he could look forward to frequent bonuses in the form of recycled bricks for renovation projects of his own.
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By 1927, however, the pressure to accept whatever change the new regime required had started to make some other people in the conservation camp highly uncomfortable. That year, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent the demolition of the last of Moscow’s grand baroque triumphal arches, the so-called Red Gates. Some then joined a collective body,
Staraya Moskva
(Old Moscow), to protect the best-loved landmarks that remained. Petr Sytin, the author of several important histories of Moscow, was particularly fond of Peter the Great’s Sukharevka Tower, which he imagined as the focus of yet another new museum. Petr Baranovsky, who had led the work on Golitsyn’s mansion, devoted a good deal of precious time to the Kazan Cathedral, a much-altered seventeenth-century building on Red Square, restoring it with every care for the original design. Other architects worked just as scrupulously on the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery, whose main churches (now free of monks) were landmarks of Old Russian style. Like St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin walls themselves, these were the people’s basic heritage, and Moscow seemed impossible without them. But a turning-point was looming, and the catalyst was probably the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1927. Soon after that, the restoration workshops in Leningrad (the erstwhile Petrograd) were closed, leaving the old imperial capital to rot. Elsewhere, and even in Moscow, the pressure to ‘cleanse’ (that is, remove) religious buildings and imperial sites increased. And a worrying rumour had begun to spread to the effect that Lunacharsky, the conservation-minded Education Commissar, was about to fall.
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When Stalin announced his plans for drastic economic change, the advocates of cultural warfare were enthralled. The blueprint for the country’s transformation was a Five-Year Plan for industry and agriculture, launched in 1928. This envisaged an entirely new Soviet economy, a dream (or nightmare) of huge factories and power-plant, of tractors moving in formation over golden miles of wheat. Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of millions of private farms, followed by the state-led requisitioning of grain. The implications for anything old or faltering were obvious. An ideology that could justify the deaths of millions of peasants in the name of the future could hardly let its progress founder at the sight of ancient walls. The sound of dynamite reverberated through Moscow. It was a second revolution, the so-called ‘great break’ with the past, and five years later, victory was declared. The final plan for Moscow’s reconstruction (‘an attack upon the old’) was not approved until 1935, but by then the landscape had completely changed. ‘Old, feudal, noble, merchant and bourgeois Moscow grew and developed slowly,’ announced the journal
Class Struggle
in 1934. ‘But the victory of the proletariat has opened new pages of world-historical importance here … in the name of Stalin a new stage in the construction of the socialist capital has begun.’
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Among the losses was the Sukharevka Tower, which was demolished on the now-familiar pretext of improving traffic flows. In 1934, Baranovsky’s lovingly restored Kazan Cathedral was commandeered as a canteen for the men who were digging metro tunnels, and two years later it was destroyed completely, ostensibly to ease the path of vast Red Square parades.
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Even Golitsyn’s rediscovered palace was blown up, this time to make space for a monumental bank. At one point, at a planning meeting where models of city-centre buildings were being placed on a paper map, Stalin lifted the miniature St Basil’s from Red Square, briefly considering how things would look if it were gone.
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The church was spared, but Moscow lost hundreds of other historic buildings, as well as many of the winding central streets and leafy courtyards that had fed its village soul. At best, some civic monuments were mounted on rollers and relocated when the time came to widen a boulevard; the governor-general’s house on Tverskaya, originally built by Kazakov, was moved this way in 1937, as was the former English Club.
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But the result was an intimidating emptiness, as devoid of comfort and character as it was of shady trees. Stalin wanted space for all the tanks and marching troops; his heirs still live with the windswept results.

With or without the tanks, however, most religious monuments were doomed. In the outright war that economic transformation required from 1929, loyal citizens had to prove themselves actively anti-religious. ‘Dynamite’, one such class warrior announced, ‘has become a real ally in our uncompromising battle against Orthodoxy.’
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In six months during 1929 alone, four hundred religious buildings in Moscow were closed, including the last working church in the Novodevichy Monastery.
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In July 1929, one of Moscow’s most revered shrines, the Chapel of the Iberian Virgin, was demolished to ease large-scale access to Red Square. It was high time, the planners must have argued. This chapel blocked the free passage of crowds. But in secret, Moscow’s new rulers were also worried by its spell, which was so strong, even this late in the new age, that marching communists, red flags and all, were sometimes seen to cross themselves as they passed by.

Strong passions could be harnessed on all sides. Christians felt besieged and trampled, but the Bolshevik elite, taking decisions for their own half-secret purposes, tapped into a movement that was as genuine and deeply felt, in the cities at least, as that of the Orthodox believers in the other camp. In 1929, an ‘anti-Christmas’ demonstration in Moscow’s principal city-centre park attracted 100,000 participants. ‘Anti-Christmas’ and ‘anti-Easter’ marches in the next two years were similarly popular.
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Having endured decades of repression and even violence at the hands of the inquisitors of the old regime, the anti-clerical working class was euphoric. The atheists in its ranks might have been confused about some issues – they never quite got used to the finality of godless death – but they knew that they had finished with the priests and rote-learned prayers. Their cycling festivals, open-air picnics and banner-waving parades were certainly sponsored by the government, but the force of this revolution came from real Russian souls.
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It was not long before attention turned to the most grandiloquent religious building in Moscow, Konstantin Ton’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Even after 1917, the building was a focus for the fragmentary religious life that still endured. The famous choirs still sang there when they could, and until 1929 the faithful continued to queue at its great doors for evergreen branches and Christmas blessings. Unlike the Kremlin that it faced, however, this building was not really capable of reinvention, for no-one could believe for long that the cavernous interior, marble and all, would make a splendid workers’ club. In 1931, when the planners were looking for a site for their showpiece Palace of Soviets, the decision was taken to have it demolished. By this stage, the city’s countless Orthodox believers had learned to be cautious. Very few dared to protest. The ageing artist Apollinary Vasnetsov tried to defend Ton’s domineering structure (and the art inside), but his argument was based on heritage, not faith. ‘It is easy’, he wrote, ‘to demolish, but when a cultural and artistic monument has been destroyed without trace it will be too late to be sorry.’
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The Party newspaper,
Izvestiya,
refused to print Vasnetsov’s letter. This was the clearest signal that the demolition had been approved (if not instigated) at the highest level. The massive structure, seven decades in the planning, was gone within the next few weeks. As the secret policemen kept their usual officious watch, teams of workers stripped the cupolas of their gold leaf and copper sheets. Others strained to lower several heavy bells, and others yet removed the carvings and interior tiles. When all was ready and the site secure, the shell was blown up in a single night, leaving a ruin that took months to clear. The spoils were loaded on to fleets of horse-drawn carts (the Soviet dream of universal mechanization had yet to be realized) while an eager coterie of artists and designers collected like rapacious storks, some hoping to recycle the bell-metal for projects of their own, others to crate up and export the bronze doors and the carved statues. Despite the 1930s Great Depression, there were always cash buyers somewhere in the world.
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The cathedral’s disappearance changed the Moscow skyline completely. But as doubters had already started to mutter, the Bolsheviks were better at removing the city’s landmarks than agreeing about replacements. Fantastic plans, the more impossible the better, were always being laid. One was to build a soaring Commissariat for Heavy Industry on the site of the old trading rows (the GUM building); Ivan Leonidov’s sketches for that showed that he meant to upstage the Kremlin itself.
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Then came the Palace of Congresses, another future tallest building in the world, on the site of Ton’s lost cathedral. There was the giant bank for which Golitsyn’s mansion had been razed, and there were always plans for monumental factories. In every case, however, it was much easier to draw designs than to make a mad idea come true. The city, in reality, was not so much a clean slate as a rubble-pile, and the heaps of broken stone grew higher still in 1934, when the walls and gatehouse towers of Kitai-gorod were finally destroyed.
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‘A person who thought he knew Moscow would soon find that he did not know
this
Moscow,’ quipped humourists Il’f and Petrov.
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The city never quite made sense again, and even now there are strange gaps and ugly, oddly routed streets, leaving a visitor to wonder, in footsore despair, exactly what could have been in the planners’ minds.

The answer – or one answer – was that they were trying to create a modern city of concentric circles, the focal point of which would be the Kremlin, still its medieval self.
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But here the planners’ dreams gave way to the designs of a more powerful elite, for what happened in or near the fortress was never open for public debate. If Moscow’s citizens had been in charge, after all, the Kremlin might have turned into a vast museum, a park, or even the base for future missions to space. It might also have been reclaimed by some kind of religious faith, and even by militant atheists. For all its visionary glory, however, this was not a revolution that remained the people’s own. The Kremlin, like state power, was a resource that ultimately belonged to the very few. There had to be some editing, for the Kremlin was as much a text as any book, but in the end the new elite, Stalin’s own clique, taught the old walls to speak Bolshevik Russian. In their hands, the Kremlin became Red Russia’s fortress, the silhouette with five bright-lit electric stars that was, and probably remains, the world’s shorthand for Soviet power.