The regents were an unattractive group. Prominent among them was Ivan Vasilevich Shuisky, a representative of one of the most powerful families in Moscow and an inevitable choice for the regency council as the dying Vasily dictated his will. On her husband’s death, Elena Glinskaya took the first opportunity to add Ivan Ovchina Telepnev-Obolensky, a nobleman assumed by some to have been her lover. It was he whom later writers largely blamed for the murders of Vasily’s brothers, the royal uncles, a move intended to secure the regents’ undisputed power.16 In 1534, the older one was thrown into a Kremlin dungeon. In 1537, it was his younger brother’s turn. In both cases, since there were still taboos about spilling the blood of princes, the victims were starved to death; the younger brother, reputedly, behind a sort of iron gag. Mikhail Glinsky, the veteran council-member and uncle of the dowager princess, whom the dying Vasily had named as his sons’ main personal guardian, was also seized and imprisoned in 1534, perhaps in part because he criticized the other regents’ murderous plans.17 He too was then deliberately starved to death.18 Young Ivan and his brother Yury, a child who had been born deaf and was never taught to speak, were now as good as helpless in some very questionable hands.
If the regents ever planned to isolate the infant princes and remain in power for good, however, circumstances did not favour them. Elena died suddenly in 1538. She was not even thirty years old, and there were rumours that she had been poisoned.19 A group of archaeologists recently claimed to have found proof of this when they discovered toxic chemical salts in the remains of her corpse, but the compounds involved were widely used as a purgative in the sixteenth century, and even for arcane cosmetic purposes, so the cause of her last illness, or at least its author, still remains unclear. On her death, Prince Ivan Ovchina Telepnev-Obolensky was thrown into the prison where he was to die.20 That left two principal groups of contenders: the members of the Shuisky clan and their rivals, the Belskys. In the struggles to come, several members of each family were imprisoned and murdered. As each enjoyed brief seasons of ascendancy, two metropolitans in succession, Daniil and Yoasaf, were also forced from office.21 A government of the boyars had the potential to evolve, and aristocratic rule, perhaps with a monarch as figurehead, need not have been disastrous in the proper hands. But sixteenth-century Muscovite politics were simply not designed this way.
A letter attributed to Ivan himself describes the world he and his brother faced after their mother’s death.22 ‘When thus our subjects had achieved their desire,’ he wrote, ‘namely to have the kingdom without a ruler, they did not deem us, their sovereigns, worthy of any loving care, but themselves ran after wealth and glory … How many boyars and well-wishers of our father … did they massacre?’23 The tone is plaintive, a note that Ivan would continually strike in later life, but the facts of his youth suggest a more complicated story. The records of the Kremlin court read as if the boy were exercising sovereign rule almost from the beginning. Even the most ambitious magnate would have been wary of him, not least because the lad soon learned to play the Kremlin’s games himself. In 1543, at the age of thirteen, he almost certainly approved the murder of Andrei Mikhailovich Shuisky, who was thrown into the court kennels and ripped to pieces.24 The prince’s belief that his childhood was a time of culpable neglect may well explain some of his later conduct, but contemporary evidence suggests that he was no mere victim. Whatever the truth, however, one thing the internecine struggles of the prince’s long minority certainly damaged was the Kremlin’s international standing. As the future Ivan the Terrible approached adulthood, his prospects were so uncertain that no European princess could be found who was willing to marry him.25
* * *
The court – and the whole country – could well have been poised for yet another civil war. As boyars in the Kremlin weighed their chances, the only figure with the power to prevent disaster was the peevish, rather sickly prince; somehow this heir had to begin inspiring real awe. Just as it had in 1498, a coronation ceremony, combining sacred elements with plenty of old-fashioned pomp, seemed to promise a solution, and the recently appointed metropolitan, Makary, began to look for a suitable prototype. The rituals that had been created for Europe’s high renaissance kings offered a range of possible alternatives, but Orthodoxy could not borrow quite so openly from Papists and heretics. Makary turned instead to sixth-century Constantinople, whose empire’s government had been modelled (the priests said) on heaven itself.26 The plans were finally approved in detail at a joint meeting of the boyar and church councils in December 1546. With so much to be settled and financed, the Kremlin’s entire inner circle must have taken part, but Makary, who was also the young prince’s mentor and spiritual guardian, was the chief architect and impresario.
Ostensibly, the metropolitan’s aim was to install a prince who would unite his people. But the church leader also framed his argument in spiritual terms. Since the fall of Constantinople, he reminded the court, Orthodox believers had lost their first empire on earth, but this time Moscow had been spared. In consequence, its faithful people and their prince had special responsibilities in a world that was awaiting imminent apocalypse. No longer merely a grand prince, Ivan would be crowned an emperor on the model of Constantinople itself; he would be an absolute sovereign, or (in the noble, ancient, Russian word) a tsar. Numerous texts would guide his steps. ‘The Emperor in body be like all other,’ the sixth-century theorist Agapetus had explained, ‘yet in power of his office he is like God.’27 The Catholics might have their charters and their Roman law, but Russia’s master was to rule like a latter-day Solomon, and, in theory, he would answer to God alone. Whatever the reality of court life then or later, the only human voice that had divine permission to restrain him would be Makary’s own.28 Agapetus had insisted, after all, that the church remained a moral arbiter: ‘For though [the Emperor] be like God in face, yet for all that he is but dust.’29
The power of visual images, as Makary would have appreciated, is so vivid that it is hard to imagine the coronation today without remembering Sergei Eisenstein’s wonderfully theatrical staging of it, filmed in the early 1940s. In this version, an actor playing the young prince (and wearing startling false eyelashes) stands before a venerable metropolitan, the latter lean and bearded, ascetic but politically lightweight. From this old man the youth receives the sceptre and the cross, the jewelled collar and the fur-trimmed crown. Slowly, then, and with portentous majesty, the new tsar turns to face his people, and this is the cue for his first major speech. The actor’s script, with its call to national unity and greatness, would have struck chords with Russian audiences in Stalin’s time, but like much of the scene it is a 1940s propaganda fantasy. In January 1547, it was the metropolitan, and not Ivan, who made the most important speech, and much of it concerned biblical kings.30 The point was to make sure Ivan could wield his power at all, to neutralize the factions who remembered a weak boy. Significantly, too, since Eisenstein put several of them in his film, there were no foreigners inside the church. The entire coronation seemed so incidental to most Europeans at the time that it took two years for the news that Ivan had even been crowned a tsar to get as far as Poland.31
Ivan himself could not have missed a single message in the ritual that day. Even the date was loaded with significance, for 16 January coincided, in the Orthodox calendar, with the beginning of Christ’s ministry.32 It also recalled Vladimir’s original conversion of the Rus, and Ivan was to be crowned as Vladimir’s heir. Indeed, his line had been traced back, by the church scribes, to the mythic Riurikids and also (to make sure of a strong Christian and imperial lineage) to the emperors Constantine and Augustus of Rome. The story of Moscow’s royal family, the Daniilovichi, was spelled out in pedantic detail, and the combination of record and fable had the effect of placing Ivan at the end of an indisputably prestigious line.33 The legends were embodied in his very crown, the so-called Cap of Monomakh, a sable-edged and jewelled piece that had probably originated somewhere in Central Asia. In defiance of tha
t awkward fact, the church pronounced that it was Byzantine. This sort of trick – a way of claiming all the rights and honours that could be accorded to new rulers anywhere – showed no more disregard for history than was the norm elsewhere in Europe at the time, but older Muscovites could still remember when their state had been a Mongol fief. At Ivan’s coronation, among other things, it was asserting its young ruler’s right to be treated, inside his realm and beyond it, as an established sovereign lord.
Those were the hopes, at least, that January day. It was a season when no sunlight could have reached the Kremlin’s inner palace rooms, but all the same the fortress was transformed into a blaze of candlelight and gold. Even beyond its walls, the thin air must have carried overtones of hot beeswax and incense, and the spell-bound city, where winter snow could muffle less deliberate sounds, fell silent as the first of many bells began to clang, heaved into motion by a team of men.34 Meanwhile, Makary and a battery of priests stood ready in their full splendour. After the procession into the Dormition Cathedral from the palace steps, the court watched as the prince and cleric took their places in the hallowed space. ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords,’ Makary prayed, his hand on Ivan’s lowered head, ‘who by thy servant Samuel the prophet didst choose David and anoint him to be king over thy people Israel … look down from Thy sanctuary upon Thy faithful servant, Ivan.’35 If the new tsar had looked up, however, his eyes would have encountered those of a painted Creator, an image made by court artists, impassively declining to participate in any human schemes.
Ivan stepped into daylight as unnumbered bells renewed their peal. Meanwhile, in a gesture that would have raised eyebrows in old Constantinople (where coins were thrown out to the crowd), the new tsar was showered with silver by his younger brother Yury. Ivan then led his entourage to the Archangel Cathedral to pray at the graves of his ancestors. His route, which was carpeted in cloth of scarlet and gold, became another stretch of holy ground. At the banquet that followed in the Faceted Palace, the tsar held court for his nobles and the highest officers of the church. Seated alone, for none was worthy to join him that day, Ivan began his life as a crowned head of state by pouring wine, breaking bread, and tasting the muddy flesh of a swan. But Makary, also sitting in the hall, must have picked at his fish with secret pride. His ceremony had achieved its goal. The wily cleric had secured the future glory of his church.36 By giving Moscow the attributes of an empire, he hoped to become a patriarch in all but name. The tsar could be as splendid as he wished (and Ivan took the opportunity to have his title confirmed by the real patriarch, in Constantinople, as soon as he could37), but now there always had to be a place beside the throne for thinner, older men who could read Greek.
* * *
The coronation was followed, on 3 February, by a royal wedding. This, too, was a slightly desperate affair, for Ivan’s bride was not the daughter of a European monarch but Anastasia Romanovna Yureva-Zakharina, the niece of a boyar from the days of Vasily III. But the couple were well matched and clearly happy. It may have seemed, as spring approached in 1547, as if the glamour of a youthful court would dazzle Moscow into amiable warmth. And the season did turn out to be unusually mild. As a result, the city’s wooden buildings dried out fast, and by April the first of several fires had burned part of Kitai-gorod. A disaster of far greater proportions struck in June. On Midsummer’s Day, a fire that had started somewhere in the city’s wooden jumble swept up to the Kremlin walls. Twenty-four hours later, the flames had grown so fierce that they ignited the gunpowder stores in several of the defensive towers.
There was no hope for the buildings in this fire’s path. The flames consumed the churches in the palace precinct and the porch and strong-rooms that led to the Annunciation Cathedral. They tore through heavy storage chests and destroyed a range of ancient treasures in the palace undercroft. The fire also gutted the Annunciation Cathedral itself. Works of art, including a priceless iconostasis, were lost, and then the flames swept through the Treasury, engulfing irreplaceable court documents.38 The palaces that were not razed were scorched and scarred, their wooden detailing and gilt reduced to ash. Senior members of the court fled for their lives. The sixty-five-year-old Makary, who had stayed to rescue an icon painted by his miracle-working predecessor, the fourteenth-century metropolitan Peter, was lowered down the Kremlin walls at the end of a rope; the injuries he suffered in the process never fully healed.39 Beyond the citadel, the destruction was more terrible still. Shocked citizens eventually scraped more than 3,700 corpses from the ash, while many thousands – a majority of Muscovites – had been made homeless.
Even in a city used to fire, it was a catastrophe. With so many people on the streets, there was bound to be unrest, but the public response betrayed a level of political disquiet that no fire could have kindled by itself. As the flames cooled and the tsar himself called for a hunt for arsonists, Muscovites began to mutter that the disaster had been the work of a witch. Their fury – fuelled, no doubt, by the Glinskys’ enemies at court – settled on Anna Glinskaya, the mother of the late and still unpopular Elena.40 This sorceress, the people said, had torn the hearts out of human corpses and soaked them in water. She had bottled the resulting brew and, flying through the brief summer night, had sprinkled it over the wooden buildings of the capital; it was a well-known trick, the rumour went, that witches often used to summon flames.41 A mob gathered below the city walls, and eventually its leaders surged into the Kremlin and onwards to Cathedral Square, thrusting their way into the Dormition Cathedral during a celebration of matins and baying for Glinsky blood. Rough hands seized the tsar’s uncle, who had entered the building in search of sanctuary. Before the startled gaze of Makary himself, the citizens proceeded to stone their captive to death.
The tsar had taken refuge at his hunting lodge at Vorob’evo, on hills overlooking Moscow from the south-west, and from there, he had watched his city turn to ash. That experience was harrowing enough, but soon a human tide began to close in from the ruined streets, demanding that the court hand over Anna and the other infernal Glinskys, whom they believed to have brought ruin on them all. Ivan refused to sacrifice his grandmother, but in the days to come a number of less distinguished suspects were tortured, beheaded, impaled or thrown into the dying flames.42 The Moscow uprising had been brief, but Ivan had witnessed its fury with his own eyes, and, as he later said, this was a moment when ‘fear entered into my soul and trembling into my bones’.43 If the young man had ever liked Moscow, the events of his coronation year seemed calculated to change his mind.
The fire also forced the Kremlin to the top of Ivan’s political agenda. The damage was so extensive that rebuilding and redecoration had to start at once. Moscow had nurtured a pool of talented artists in the decades of the Kremlin’s reconstruction under Ivan III and Vasily III, but there could never be enough skilled men to deal with repairs on this scale. Masons, gilders and artists from as far away as Pskov and Novgorod were summoned to the capital. To save time and money, the tsar also ordered finished icons to be sent from Novgorod, Smolensk, Dmitrov and Zvenigorod. As the packages were opened in the Kremlin stores, the icon-painters, themselves from places far and wide, gathered to admire and compare the styles of several distinctive cultures. It was the inspiration for a kind of national art, and the Kremlin became its gallery and principal patron. From Ivan’s time, a set of buildings in its western corner, beyond the palace, was given over permanently to the insalubrious and often noisy work of carving and fine metalwork, gilding, and mixing paint. In time, new studios opened in the shadow of the Annunciation Cathedral. There was even a special chamber where artists could study the icons in the tsar’s collection that were not currently in use.44
The group that seized most eagerly upon the opportunities created by the fire was not composed of artists, however, but consisted of the ideologues of Muscovite state power. When they had recovered from their shock (and, in Makary’s case, from injuries), these people grabbed their chance to recreate the damaged pa
rts of the Kremlin as visual sermons on topics such as divine kingship, Christ-like government, and Moscow’s unbroken royal succession. The work was managed by a group at court that included a hitherto unknown priest from the Annunciation Cathedral, the monk Sylvester, who had come to Ivan’s notice at the time of the great fire. A team of gifted painters and craftsmen played its part, for this particular history-lesson called for art that was both eye-catching and sumptuous. But the guiding hand in the endeavour, as in so many others during Ivan’s first years on the throne, was Makary’s.
Under the metropolitan’s creative gaze, and no doubt also with Ivan’s blessing, the Kremlin was subjected to a comprehensive renovation programme that included murals, icons and carvings in wood and ivory.45 Particular attention was paid to the palace Cathedral of the Annunciation, where a new iconostasis was furnished with images that echoed the divine aspects of Ivan’s own destiny. An icon of his patron-saint, John the Forerunner (the Baptist), was particularly haunting, and showed the ascetic in profile as a gaunt, tormented figure, the ruined flesh contrasting with a burning spiritual energy. This image stood directly opposite the tsar’s own seat, reflecting his prayers back at him, and near it, other icons seemed to emphasize his part in defending the one true faith.46 An even greater masterpiece was the throne designed for Ivan’s place in the Dormition Cathedral, which told the story of the heirs of Monomakh, and of their close association with a noble court, in twelve carved bas-reliefs.47
Similar combinations of themes inspired the frescoes in Ivan’s main throne room, the Middle Golden Palace. Although these were subsequently lost when the palace was demolished, a record made in 1672 by Simon Ushakov has survived; as he contemplated the painted shapes, indeed, the Romanov court artist may himself have been inspired by them. His drawings show an anteroom that was decorated with figures such as David, Solomon and Jehosaphat, and a throne room that boasted a magnificent display of angels. Real figures also occupied important spaces, however, so Ivan held court in a hall where Andrei Bogoliubsky and Alexander Nevsky, his ancestors, were represented beside biblical scenes in a masterpiece of allegorical time-compression. Though princes from Moscow’s more humble days (including Daniil and Ivan Kalita) were not given the same prominence, Ivan’s father, Vasily III, who had been dead for less than twenty years, was represented in the same series of portraits as the holy Vladimir of Kiev, who had ruled, over five centuries before, in an entirely different place and culture. As if to emphasize the holiness of Kremlin government, the space was crowned by a majestic Christ.48 No foreign visitor remarked on the paintings – their eyes would have been fixed on living hosts – but the murals certainly drew comments from Russians. In the mid-sixteenth century, the worldliness of some of them seemed revolutionary. There were so many unfamiliar themes, in fact, that at least one prominent courtier, Ivan Viskovatyi, claimed that the paintings were blasphemous.49 A church council solemnly overturned his arguments in 1554. In future, no-one would object if icons served the needs of an ambitious Russian state.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 10