Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (70 page)

To visit is indeed to toy with history. ‘See the palace of the Romanov tsars,’ the guides near Red Square squawk through megaphones. ‘See the throne of Ivan the Terrible; see the jewels of the Russian emperors, the famous crown of Monomakh.’ A ticket, clearly, buys you heritage, and even possibly a glimpse of some forbidden world. Seduced by hope and promises, almost every tourist is likely to make the Kremlin a highlight of their stay in Moscow. Braving the inevitable guards, the majority enter through the Trinity Gate, walking across the dry moat (the bed of the lost Neglinnaya) from the Kutafia Tower. From there, they hasten to Cathedral Square. A short detour would have rewarded them with a view of the palace where the Stalins used to live, but the history that modern pilgrims seek is narrowly defined: like the nineteenth century’s official nationalism, it is orthodox and autocratic. In pursuit of it, almost all will soon be admiring the caskets of dead Riurikids, the iconostasis in the Annunciation Cathedral, and the space and colour in Fioravanti’s breathtaking Cathedral of the Dormition. A lucky few, armed with passports, will also tour the Grand Kremlin Palace. As they are ushered from one marble cavern to another, their guide will make sure they appreciate the effort that went into the dismantling, under Pavel Borodin, of Stalin’s 1934 congress hall. On my tour, we were shown a postcard of the Soviet space, dog-eared and dimly coloured; just the thing to make the recent renovation seem as dazzling and as true as possible.

On the upper levels of the palace, beyond the lions and some heavy doors, the gold and marble give way to rich reds and deep greens, the Terem Palace of Fedor Solntsev’s ambitious nineteenth-century vision. Back then, the idea was to create a fantasy of Muscovy based on exotic Russianness; today, the aim is to invoke the empire of the tsars. But now as then, the impression that the fortress is designed to make is a broadly soothing one. Whether they visit it for themselves or glimpse it on their television screens, the Kremlin reinforces Russians’ unexamined pride. People see what they expect to see, and the clean-cut buildings seem to prove that yet another time of troubles has been overcome, another firebird reborn.

Reams of gold leaf must have been unrolled in the process – the Annunciation Cathedral positively blazes with the stuff – while the modern stonework of the new Red Stair is almost indistinguishable, in its sparkling newness, from the brilliant walls of the restored palace next to it. Only a few will note the many ravaged chambers that are not on view, the damage done by neglect, upheaval and cynical state vandalism. In the Senate, the president’s library is sometimes shown to television-viewers as a show-case for efficient government, complete with Stalin’s famous globe. Only the museum staff (and guests like me, thanks to their care) can climb up to the crumbling former church, high above Cathedral Square, that houses the real researchers’ library, complete with crack-tiled bathroom, leaking tap and a sink stained brown by old tea leaves. The same curators are the only ones to see the bare wood and the whitewash in the padlocked palace churches. No-one else will get to hear that Russian history is difficult, contested, or fragmentary. Smooth stonework and familiar tropes create a mirror-like surface, so glassy that no awkward doubts can settle. It suits this state if citizens are contented and even half-asleep. Whatever still goes on behind the scenes, the tourist Kremlin is designed to be impressive but unchallenging; pompous, flawless, and ultimately just a little boring.

A new exhibition in the Ivan the Great bell tower brings this official line to vivid life. I was privileged to get a ticket, for visitor-numbers are ferociously restricted, and I saw it with just two other guests. The three of us were ushered into the base of the tower by a pair of guards, who quickly shut and locked the heavy door behind our backs. Armed with personal headphones, we then began our tour – our digital Kremlin experience – in the tiny, roundish ground-floor chamber. A projector here threw a succession of evocations of the medieval Kremlin over the whitewashed walls, and as the commentator spun the usual romantic line, lights also flashed on a series of fourteenth-century limestone blocks, the relics of Ivan Kalita’s time, that had been stationed in convenient niches. It was the start of a fairy-tale, the first of several beautifully documented chapters that took us up, floor after floor, each time revealing yet more splendours from the seamless and organic past. The high point (literally) was our visit to the famous bells, each one a witness to the Kremlin’s sumptuous, heroic history. We were encouraged to strike these to appreciate their tone (so resonant, so masculine), and then, still under the eyes of a guard, we had a chance to pause and admire the view.

The two young women who were with me (total strangers) did what many other tourists would do at this point and started taking pictures of each other. But I was keen to see everything else first, including the all-round view of Moscow. To the east, I gazed over Cathedral Square, while southwards, across the Moscow river, I could see the low-slung suburb that radiates from the spine of Great Horde Road. Luzhkov’s reincarnated cathedral loomed on the Moscow riverbank, and further on I could see at least three of Stalin’s massive ornate towers, including the vast complex of Moscow State University. But one direction was roped off. There was no access to the view towards the Kremlin’s presidential building. Even the unprepossessing administrative Block 14, which stands on the old Chudov Monastery site, is out of bounds for everyone who does not have a special pass. Visitors to today’s Kremlin are welcome to a portion-controlled helping of Russian history, but present-day politics, like any remnant of past failure or decay, are reserved for insiders. The cars that speed to Senate Square have blacked-out windows.

The cut and thrust of real politics, the compromises, corruption and deals, are hidden because everything depends on myth. Like many regimes of the past, today’s Russian government continues to shelter behind iconic Kremlin walls and the Kremlin’s mirror-smooth perfection. The lesson of these mighty buildings is that Russia has always been great. Its spirit shaped this fabulous fortress. Though Europe makes them fight to keep their country’s place as a world power, its people show such courage and tenacity that they cannot be vanquished from outside. Their only enemy is disorder within, and to defeat it – to preserve them from their own imperfect selves – they rightly welcome strong, pure-minded rulers; just the types, in fact, for whom this citadel was built. At this point in the tale, the idea dawns that it is Russia’s people, rather than their leaders, who are blamed for any history of tyranny. Nothing has changed, we might even muse, since the murky days when Riurik and his two brothers (at least according to old chronicles) were invited to rule the warring tribes round Novgorod because they could not live in peace without some outside help. As the Harvard historian Richard Pipes declared at a recent meeting of the elite Valdai club, an organization closely identified with the current leadership, the Russian people ‘want a strong ruler … Russia always needs a strong hand … the roots for this lie deeper than is usually understood.’
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On the surface, today’s Kremlin is like an essay on that general theme. The message it conveys is hypnotic, a repetition of the obvious and the familiar. As the obedient groups walk round, it takes a well-informed and imaginative visitor to picture the things that have vanished, such as the ghosts of ancient churches long demolished, the scorch-marks left by heavy guns, or the deep tracks, in now-buried mud, of horse-drawn carts sagging under the heavy rubble from the latest fire. The empty space where the
prikazy
used to be, or where once there were warrens for the slaves and palace rats, may yet suggest the shades of long-dead Muscovites, some wielding clubs, some armed with fists, their hearts set on plunder, justice, or the obstinate quest for a true tsar. A thoughtful visitor may picture the red flags, the crowds, the icy silence of the Stalin years. But only those who really know their history will protest, despite all the romance and gilded domes, that the state whose flag is flying here is yet another new invented thing, the choice of living individuals rather than timeless fate. Its creators are not among the milling crowds, whatever the extent of the Russian people’s exasperated collusion at different historical moments. The system is not even the product of some vaguely conceived collective being called the Kremlin. Ultimate responsibility, for better or worse, rests with specific people, and they have real names.

By looking at the Kremlin over centuries of time, I have seen how successive and very different regimes have used it – and changed it – in their effort to set down firm roots in cold northern soil. The journey has been thrilling, and has led from the medieval forest to a glittering eighteenth-century court and on through Lenin’s revolution to the secretive world of the black-belt president. Time after time, the fortress has witnessed the accession of new groups: new princes, new dynasties, and sometimes entirely new regimes. Few had unassailable claims to Russia’s throne, but before long, each had cast itself as the bearer of some form of divine will. The message was and remains a powerful one, but it has always been crafted by real people, not handed down in tablets of stone, and the rulers’ urgent purpose is always to stay in power. The Kremlin’s history is a tale of survival, and it is certainly an epic, but there is nothing inevitable about any of it. Today’s glorification of the Russian state, like that of previous regimes, is a deliberate and calculated choice, and real people can certainly be made to answer for it. This may not seem a cheerful conclusion, but in the end it might just be a liberating one.

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A tale that started with one icon now comes to a close with two. In 2010, the Russian press reported an exciting discovery. A pair of icons – the famous images of the Saviour and St Nikola that had once hung over the Kremlin’s gatehouse-towers – appeared to have survived the purge of Stalinist times. It had been thought for decades that the icons, one of which was believed to date from the early sixteenth century, had been obliterated in honour of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution in 1937. More than seven decades later, however, an Orthodox religious organization called the Foundation of St Andrew the First-Called launched a campaign to investigate the exterior brickwork in the hope of finding traces of the precious art. Backed by the Kremlin administration (including the head of state security, Evgeny Murov, as well as the Kremlin commandant and the director of the Kremlin museums), the Foundation’s experts started to explore the walls, under thick protective covering, in February 2010.

In April, they announced a triumph. The story went that the workmen who had been ordered to destroy the icons in the 1930s had in fact covered them up. They had done it so skilfully that the old paint could now be restored to pristine condition. The discovery suited the government perfectly. It was a story of how pious Russians had once risked their lives – at a time of all-pervasive terror – to save Moscow’s miracle-working images. In the age of Russia’s national rebirth, equally pious art experts were about to make the icons live again.
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While the relevant stretches of wall remained obscured behind their opaque sheets, the loyal press provided additional historical background. These icons, journalists reminded readers, had escaped fire and shelling in 1917. Newspapers reprinted a famous photograph that showed the features of Nikola in a penumbra of soot. And the story did not end in 1917. The images had endured both the French occupation and the fire of 1812, and almost exactly two centuries before that, they (or their predecessors) had survived the vandalism of Catholic Poles. No less a figure than Grabar had authenticated them in the 1920s. The pair were national treasures, heirlooms in a resurgent Russian state. By July 2010, the Saviour was on display, and when I visited again in 2012, a flawless St Nikola was gazing kindly from a niche not far from Stalin’s former office window.

Icons, in Russian spirituality, are like mirrors. The saint is glimpsed in reverse perspective, the light is refracted; only in prayer, not in profane existence, can a person engage with the holy being beyond the painted board. It seems to me entirely fitting, then, that these recovered icons should be staring outwards from the Kremlin walls. Though they proclaim Russia’s unbroken nationhood, they do not invite the crowd in the street to look beyond the surface, let alone argue. Not every Russian cares, and few have time, these days, to bow before an icon, let alone reflect about the meaning of the past. But the images, in all their factory-fresh perfection, create a certain atmosphere, adding an extra splash of colour to a message that will have been absorbed, whether consciously or not, by almost every passer-by. Experts who work in the Kremlin have assured me, somewhat awkwardly, that the icons are real, but it would scarcely matter, while the present regime rules, if both eventually turned out to be elaborate fakes. People will see what they are meant to see, and they believe because it suits them to, especially in a country where opposition is often dangerous. Less than a century ago, the grandparents of the Muscovites who are now crossing themselves beneath the rediscovered icons were burning equally prestigious ones in a fervour of the opposite belief. Whether its masters rule an effective or corrupt state, a progressive or reactionary one, whether it is a leader of the world or inward-looking and isolationist, the Kremlin is proclaimed to be as changeless as the icon-painter’s gold.

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