Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (55 page)

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Because of its importance as the nation’s citadel, the Kremlin’s architectural fate unfolded according to a set of unique rules. The Bolsheviks (at first it was Madame Trotskaya in person) began by dividing its buildings into four categories, depending on their historic or artistic value. In 1925, that initial scheme was modified to introduce the notion of utility, which freed up a good deal of space for the new government to use. The colonnade around the former monument to Alexander II (Category 3) was knocked down within weeks, and the site where Moscow’s young had strolled and flirted on their pre-war summer afternoons was turned into a gasoline depot.
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But under Trotskaya’s original scheme, the oldest churches and the two monasteries had been ring-fenced on the grounds of their historical significance (Category 1), so few expected that the first significant Kremlin building to disappear entirely should have been the little Church of Konstantin and Elena in the citadel’s south-eastern corner.
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This was demolished on the Executive Commission’s orders in 1928, ostensibly to enlarge the surrounding garden and make space for a new sports ground.

A year later, when there was still a lot of rubble and no sign of that sports ground, the director of the Lenin Library, a Bolshevik of long standing called Vladimir Nevsky, dared to protest about the loss of heritage, but his was an isolated voice.
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Less voluble was a petition by the Kremlin’s own recently appointed architectural director, D. P. Sukhov, who was already worried for his job.
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He and his comrades won a minor victory in the spring of 1928, when plans to demolish the gothic-style Church of St Catherine in the Ascension Monastery were set aside, along with a scheme to melt down most of the Kremlin bells.
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But the respite was a brief one. Just one year later, in April 1929, the news leaked out that both the Kremlin monasteries (Category 1) were doomed. No less an organ than the Party’s supreme council, the Politburo, dismissed a last-minute protest, by Lunacharsky, as ‘anti-communist in spirit and completely indecent in tone’.
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As if on cue, that July the Education Commissar was relieved of his duties. The site of the two monasteries was earmarked for a military training school.

The loss this time would be serious indeed. The Chudov Monastery, founded by Metropolitan (and saint) Aleksii in the days of Mongol rule, was one of Russia’s most important sites. Its oldest buildings were significant monuments; some of its icons (and the iconostasis in the monastery cathedral) were rare works of art, as were the frescoes and the carvings on the walls, and the grounds contained historic tombs, including that of Aleksii himself. In recent years, the crypt had also been used to accommodate the remains of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, though that was not, perhaps, the best card the conservators could play. More plausibly, defenders of the buildings could at least request that they be given time to draw and photograph interiors that very few had ever seen. The country’s leading conservation experts pleaded for the time to explore and to catalogue the precious space. Lenin, surely, had acknowledged what the buildings meant, for he had once approved a programme of repairs to rectify the shell damage of 1917. As architect Sukhov and his ally, the conservator-historian N. N. Pomerantsev, wrote to Mikhail Kalinin in 1929, it was also ironic, if not tragic, that ‘valuable monuments to our culture which survived material hardship in the early years of the revolution’ should disappear in what were meant to be enlightened times.
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The Ascension Monastery, the women’s convent, was just as important. For centuries, this great religious house had been the burial-place of Russia’s royal women. The first such lady to be buried there had been Dmitry Donskoi’s widow, Evdokiya, the monastery’s founder, and others included Ivan the Terrible’s much-loved first wife, his scheming mother Elena Glinskaya, and the grand old princess Sofiya Palaeologa. Because the royal coffins lay in massive stone sarcophagi, the trove was important from an archaeological point of view alone, for it included grave-goods, as well as carvings, fabrics, and the science to be scraped from centuries of dust. In the summer of 1929, members of the Kremlin’s restoration workshop (a body, sponsored by the Education Commissariat, that was itself heading for oblivion) raised the necessary cash, stocked up on graph paper, and prepared to survey the entire compound.
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Most of the gold and silver from the convent had been seized in 1922, but the iconostasis in the main cathedral still remained to be surveyed. In July, experts dismantled it for safekeeping. Meanwhile, the placing and condition of the royal coffins were quickly recorded before each was lifted for last-minute storage in one of the Archangel Cathedral’s crypts.
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The situation, at the very least, was awkward socially. Each morning, groups of men assembled by the monastery walls, perhaps holding a match to light each other’s cigarettes, perhaps sharing a topical joke. The photographs survive, and they show gaunt-faced figures in dusty boots, taking their short breaks in casual shirtsleeves. All were experts, and all had Kremlin passes and police clearance, but some had come to measure and sketch the monuments and others to make sure that the dynamite to blast them was correctly laid. The trust between the two may well have been a fragile thing. One morning, when their conservation and surveying work was far from finished, the art historians arrived for work to find that overnight the other gang had reduced their subjects, the old walls, to rubble.

There was no possible redress for this. Instead of wasting time on protest, the experts turned their attention to the frescoes in the Chudov Monastery’s sixteenth-century Cathedral of the Miracle of Archangel Michael, which was still standing. The head of Kremlin conservation had been warned that there were only weeks left to record all these, and in early December he asked a fellow-specialist, A. I. Anisimov, to chisel out and store some of the better examples. By now, the temperature outside had dropped. The old buildings were not heated, so conservation workers must have cursed as they hauled their gloves on and off, blowing on clumsy, painful fingers. All the same, on 17 December 1929 Anisimov still believed he had two more weeks – a short time for so delicate a task – when he, too, arrived to find that his site had been dynamited before dawn. For the rest of the winter, he went on picking through the rubble, determined to rescue any viable fragments while there was still time. Parts of this hoard are now preserved like gems in the Kremlin’s own museum.
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Vladimir Nevsky, of the Lenin Library, wrote to deplore the loss of two ‘establishments of importance to the architecture of Russia in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … which contained the work of Russian masters of the fifteenth century, amazing frescoes and ancient pieces of unimaginable perfection.’
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Both he and the unfortunate Anisimov were soon to end their days in one of Stalin’s camps.

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No one really believed the story that the Central Executive Committee needed the Kremlin’s monastery site for a military training school. Even in a modernizing age, few Moscow architects would touch the commission to build it, though finally the work was taken on by I. I. Rerberg, a man now better known for designing one of Moscow’s railway terminals.
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The resulting complex was impractical, and it was also hard to see what kind of military training could take place next to the Politburo’s meeting room.
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The school was soon closed and its building converted for use as offices, a canteen and, some years later, as a Kremlin theatre. The fact that Stalin and his aides were content to put up with all the noise and dust, meanwhile, suggests that what they really could not tolerate was the sight of monastery walls, even abandoned ones, for there were always other places for a school. But as they hoped, all trace of the religious houses disappeared. In 2007, a former Kremlin resident even assured me that no such buildings had ever existed. As he repeated, shrugging at my ignorance, ‘there never was a monastery in the Kremlin’.
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The Bolsheviks, clearly, had succeeded with him.

It was far easier to make a case for some remodelling of Ton’s Grand Kremlin Palace. The goal this time was to provide a better conference centre. Of course, the Palace of Soviets, on the site of the lost Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was supposed to be about to offer this, but that skyscraper was still in its planning stages (and would ultimately never get beyond them). Meanwhile, the Communist Party needed a hall large enough to seat several thousand delegates, together with facilities like lavatories and dining-rooms, and while the Bolshoi Theatre was a stop-gap, the Grand Palace in the Kremlin was a far more promising site. A team led by an architect called I. A. Ivanov-Shits began work there in 1932, and the brief was to complete the entire job in eighteen months, in time for the Communist Party’s Seventeenth Congress.
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The burly men with barrows and ungainly piles of tools moved in again, each one requiring prior clearance – on a daily basis – from security. Rudolf Peterson, who had replaced Pavel Malkov as Kremlin commandant, later remembered the exercise as a logistical nightmare.
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Few onlookers could really mourn the palace halls named for the Orders of St Andrew and St Alexander. Like so much else of recent date, the Grand Palace was opulent rather than tasteful. The gold leaf and the fake marble were quickly stripped, and the two massive rooms knocked into one. The resulting titanic space, to be known as the Sverdlov Hall after one of Lenin’s deceased aides, was then panelled in wood (Stalin’s favourite) and fitted with raked lines of seats without much protest from conservators. More ominous, however, was the threat to nearby sites, including some of the oldest on the Kremlin hill. The fifteenth-century Faceted Palace had served as a canteen for several years, but architects now eyed the nearby Red Stair, the last survivor (albeit a copy) of the canopied lines of steps that had once linked the first-floor royal terrace to Cathedral Square. In 1934 this relic was demolished to make way for a more comfortable dining-room and toilets. Meanwhile, there was the problem of the oldest building in Moscow, the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest. In 1932, this much-loved house of prayer was being used to display an exhibition of communist funeral wreaths, notably those of Lenin and Sverdlov.
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In the 1990s, the daughter of Aleksei Rykov, who had once lived nearby, told a researcher that her father believed the church’s fate was sealed because it darkened the windows of the flat that Stalin’s henchman, Lazar Kaganovich, inherited at the time of Rykov’s fall in 1932.
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Such trivial reasons, worthy of an emperor like Nicholas I, may well have played a part, but just as likely is the fact that Stalin’s court could hardly bear to leave a church alone. This one may well have been unique, a witness to the nation’s deepest past, but that weighed little in Soviet plans. The building was too close to the palace for comfort, and in an age of brilliant electric light, it smelled of candlewax, tsarism and mice.

The Saviour in the Forest came down on a spring night, possibly on 1 May 1933. Fireworks were handy things whenever real explosions needed to be masked. Although archival sources now confirm that the decision to remove the church was taken by the Politburo in September 1932, the details of the demolition job, which was almost certainly carried out by the secret police, remain obscure.
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Publicity was stifled, so the church’s loss was not noticed abroad. In 1955, two decades after it had vanished into dust, the art historian Arthur Voyce published a study of the Kremlin that included a section, with pictures, on its oldest building, which he wrongly thought to be extant.
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Even now, photographs of the demolition remain inaccessible, as does the fate of the original carved stone. The goal, in 1933, was not to doodle in history’s margins but to rewrite whole chapters at a time, erasing inconvenient pasts as if they had never happened. Even the church’s foundations were lost. In 2009, when I was taken on a tour of the Kremlin’s hidden chambers, my expert guide looked out across the palace yard and pursed her lips. Her verdict on the Soviet block that now stood on the old cathedral site was economical: ‘A pig-sty will always be a pig-sty.’

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The Kremlin’s rebranding was gathering pace. By 1937, on Stalin’s orders, the images of St Nicholas and the Saviour had vanished from their respective gatehouses. Only the proposal, by Stalin’s close friend Abel Enukidze, to paint the brick-red outer walls light grey caused the regime to pause. That idea was abandoned, but in 1935, following recommendations by Grabar, the double-headed eagles on the towers were finally removed.
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Their replacements, at first, were three huge metal-plated stars, each decorated with the Communist Party’s hammer and sickle, but though these had been set with semi-precious stones, the metal fittings soon corroded and the stars as a whole were too heavy. In 1937, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution, they were dismantled in their turn, to be replaced by the red stars that everybody knows today. Made of ruby-coloured glass and lit from inside by electric lamps, these substitutes, each more than ten feet across, provided just the right image. They were so solid that they outlasted the Soviet empire.
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The Kremlin had transcended its Muscovite past. Bleaker now, and heavily guarded, it was the perfect focal point for the windswept squares and granite-fronted boulevards of Stalin’s capital.