Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

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  The throne room of Ivan the Terrible no longer stands, but there are several descriptions of his Kremlin in its heyday. One of the most vivid was written by an Englishman. In 1553, an adventurer called Richard Chancellor was forced to seek shelter in a harbour on the White Sea when his ship, part of an expedition to find a north-east passage to China, ran into a storm. By a stroke of good fortune, the company survived, helped by astonished locals, and the English party was arrested and escorted under guard along the Dvina river and southwards to Moscow. Chancellor had ‘discovered’ the port of St Nicholas, near today’s Archangel, and he had also found a route that connected it to Ivan’s capital. Within a year, the English, true to form, were attempting to establish a monopoly on Russian trade, and regular delegations from the newly founded Muscovy Company in London began to beat a path to the Kremlin.

  It was the start of a long and troubled relationship. To ease the process, the queen of England sent Ivan a pair of lions, whose enclosure was set up by the Kremlin moat (the site became a menagerie when an elephant arrived in the capital a few years later).50 The human migrants of the time included several fortification engineers, who travelled from London in 1567 during an amiable period in diplomatic relations.51 But everything began with Chancellor’s first formal meeting with the tsar. It was an audience that took twelve days to organize. In that time, almost certainly, the Englishmen were watched and studied, for foreigners were always treated with suspicion; four years later, when Anthony Jenkinson arrived, his company was forced to suffer the same kind of wait. In both cases, the visitors soon felt that they had kicked their heels for long enough. As Chancellor remarked, his men had seen their fill of Ivan’s ‘very faire Castle, strong, and furnished with artillerie’ from the outside; they were more than ready to venture in.

  On the appointed day, they were woken early, for it was assumed that they would need time to prepare.52 Armed guards in coloured livery awaited them, and every move they made was watched. Their path probably took them through the Kremlin’s most prestigious entrance, the Frolov (later Saviour) gates. From there, on foot, the English party would have crossed Cathedral Square and mounted one of three sets of canopied steps to an upper terrace that served as the entrance to the recently repainted royal audience hall. Before them, on the far side of an antechamber thronged with courtiers, waited the tsar himself. ‘Our men began to wonder at the Majestie of the Emperor,’ Chancellor wrote.

  His seat was aloft, in a very royall throne, having on his head a diademe, or Crowne of golde, apparelled with a robe all of Goldsmiths worke, and in his hand hee held a Scepter garnished, and beset with precious stones: and besides all … there was a Majestie in his countenance proportionable with the excellencie of his estate: on one side of him stood his chiefe Secretarie, on the other side, the great Commander of silence, both of them arrayed also in cloth of gold: and then there sate the Counsel of one hundred and fiftie in number, all in like sort arrayed, and of great state.

  ‘So great a Majestie of Emperour, and of the place,’ he added, getting right to the point, ‘might well have amazed our men, and have dasht them out of countenance.’53

  This meeting was not quite the sum of Chancellor’s exposure to the court. After a formal conversation with the tsar, the English group presented its papers to Ivan’s ‘chiefe Secretarie’ and were ushered out to wait for two more hours. They understood why when they were escorted into another splendid room for dinner. ‘In the middes of the roome stood a mightie Cupboord upon a square foote,’ Chancellor marvelled.

  Upon this Cupboord was placed the Emperours plate, which was so much, that the very Cupboord it selfe was scant able to sustain the weight of it: the better part of all the vessels, and goblets, was made of very fine gold: and amongst the rest, there were four pots of very great bignesse, which did adorne the rest of the plate in great measure: for they were so high that [we] thought them at least five feet long.

  The dinner that followed was a protracted meal involving many toasts; a Danish visitor in similar circumstances claimed to have drunk sixty-five of them, though wine may well have ruined his arithmetic.54 A feast, with fleets of servants and theatrically dressed roast swans, was as much about political display as any formal audience, and in Chancellor’s case, at least, the show was a success. The court, the ritual, the sheer length of it all were impressive enough, and then there was the unmistakable charisma of wealth. The country outside was not unusually rich, but the Kremlin’s hoard of diplomatic gifts, of spoils from plundered Novgorod, and even of the treasure it could claim from taxing all those trading routes, was astounding. ‘This is true,’ concluded Chancellor, ‘that all the furniture of dishes, and drinking vessels, which were then for the use of a hundred ghests, was all of pure golde, and the tables were so laden with vesels of gold, that there was no roome for some to stand upon them.’

  All this was a far cry from the reception that had greeted Sofiya’s bridal entourage in 1472. The palaces Chancellor saw combined the elegance of Italy with Russia’s passion for hierarchies defined by space. The Englishman described them as ‘not of the neatest … and of lowe building’, but they were extensive, and occupied a large area to the north-west of Cathedral Square leading down to the Borovitsky gates.55 The main complex, consisting of a range of discreet but tightly packed buildings, was roughly U-shaped. The longer arm was where the royal women lived, screened from all uninvited male eyes. Across the line of palace roofs, just visible above the Kremlin walls, the other arm of the U was the Riverside Palace, whose picturesque name belied the fact that it contained the dungeon in which Ivan’s uncles had been starved to death not twenty years before. Near that was an impressive building mainly used for formal meetings and negotiations with foreign envoys. To the rear, behind the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest, were lodgings intended for privileged foreigners such as Fioravanti (and, briefly, the Venetian envoy Contarini), and the mansions that had once housed magnates such as the Khovrins. Here too lay several clutches of service buildings, including studios and workshops. The appearance of these had become so scruffy during the building work of the 1490s that a wall had been constructed to screen the whole lot from royal eyes.56

  The grandest chambers occupied the central portion of the U-shaped complex. Jutting forward into Cathedral Square, the largest of these was Pietro Solari’s 1491 masterpiece, the Faceted Palace, which was probably where Chancellor saw all the plate.57 Beyond it, the main line of buildings was punctuated by several sets of canopied steps leading up to the royal terraces (the ground floors were used for storage and included some workshops). These steps were major elements in their own right, and each had a distinct ceremonial role (one was kept for the use of infidels, for instance). The fact that they rose in grades turned out to be irresistibly expressive. It was a sign of favour to be able to place a foot on their lowest tread; only the highest-ranked climbed to the top. Once there, however, delegations such as Chancellor’s could expect to step into the Middle Golden Palace and a chamber that blazed with images of Moscow’s saints and heroic rulers. There were other reception halls – including one inside the Treasury – but Ivan received his most important foreign guests against a backdrop that insisted on his unique and God-given power.58 His sovereignty was supposed to be as timeless and as dazzling as the golden surface of an icon. And there was certainly a lot of gold; the splendour was so extravagant that it bordered on vulgarity.59

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  The Kremlin was not just a ceremonial space, however, and the stiff formality of its throne rooms was powerless to smother the constant restless jostling for advantage that went on almost everywhere else. At the very top, and especially among the boyars, government was based on personal contacts (Chancellor was struck by the fact that Ivan seemed to know each of his courtiers by name), but the fortress was a state in microcosm, and in Ivan’s time its social structure was evolving fast. The lowest tiers continued to be occupied by slaves and menials of various kinds. There
were hundreds of palace staff: the cooks and carters and the lads in uniform who served at feasts. There were numerous professional interpreters, and usually at least one foreigner who claimed to have medical expertise. But a new figure had entered the scene: the embryonic civil servant.60 Custom was often as influential as the written law, and in some parts of the realm there was no law of any kind. By the 1550s, however, despite the icons and the endless prayers, government was getting organized, records amassed, and that meant that the Kremlin had to find space for officials with the skills to manage it all.61

  By the time of Ivan’s coronation, top-ranking bureaucrats were almost as respected as boyars. Most feature in the historical records by name. Called d’yaki (the root is similar to the English deacon)62 they were important enough to attend royal audiences; the one who advised Ivan during Chancellor’s audience, ‘arrayed also in cloth of gold’, was probably the diplomatic expert (and critic of the palace frescoes), Ivan Viskovatyi.63 But the growing number of chancelleries – most of which were known in Russian as prikazy – also needed whole armies of ordinary clerks. Depending on the level of responsibility involved, the job offered a reasonable salary, and there were often opportunities for supplementing that with bribes. By the end of Ivan’s reign, the ancient system of administration, which had been based on literate slaves, had been replaced by the beginnings of a professional service.64

  Converging daily through the Nikolsky gates, the gowned, whey-faced officials at the bottom of the administrative heap worked in conditions that would horrify their modern counterparts. The rooms in which they laboured were barely furnished and poorly lit. If there were windows, they were small, and any light that entered would have had to pass through a film of mica or fish-bladders rather than glass. Meanwhile, the stoves and tallow candles that burned almost all the time would have made the atmosphere permanently sooty.65 In this unpromising environment, the clerks’ main tasks were to copy text and enter numbers, and if one account of their working-conditions is really true, that feat alone demanded physical contortions. Only the chief clerks had the luxury of desks or chairs; the rest spent long days squatting on the office floor. ‘All the underclerks held their inkpots, quills and paper in their left hands,’ a German adventurer called Heinrich von Staden, who spent three years in Ivan’s Russia, recalled in the 1570s. They had to copy documents by resting paper on their laps. The equipment used in the accounts department seemed even more primitive: ‘All affairs large and small were written in books once a year,’ von Staden remembered, ‘and in every chancellery plum or cherry stones were used for counting.’66 The system was surprisingly effective. Anyone who has watched a Russian cashier with an abacus, for instance, will understand how briskly the most complex calculations could be done.

  There was, of course, a hierarchy among the offices themselves. The most important were the Treasury and the Razryadnyi Prikaz, the Office of Military Affairs, set up in the 1550s to deal with all aspects of the army, from provisioning to service rosters and appointments.67 Then came the Chancellery for Foreign Affairs (Posol’skii Prikaz), whose best-known head in this era was Viskovatyi himself. Between them, these institutions employed scores of staff, and that is before such institutions as the Horse Chancellery, the Brigandage and the Post Chancelleries, and (later) the chancelleries for several newly conquered territories were added to the government roll. In the seventeenth century, there was even a prikaz to manage the affairs of the prikazy.68

  The Treasury remained apart, but by the 1560s most of the remaining chancelleries sprawled across a series of lowish wooden buildings that extended further down the south side of what became known as Ivanov Square, the space beyond the bell tower called Ivan the Great.69 It was a noisy, bustling place, where townsmen with petitions to their ruler rubbed shoulders with the gowned officials and the palace guards. Like many administrative centres in sixteenth-century Europe (think of an etching by Pieter Bruegel the Elder), the site was also used for public torture. Debtors, appropriately enough, were punished right outside the Treasury, a plum stone’s toss beneath the clerks’ window. The usual punishment for debt was pravezh, repeated beating on the shins with clubs: the victims’ screams would have jolted the steadiest of quills.70 For other crimes, justice amounted to a public flogging. If this was a theatre of torment, then routine government business was transacted in the dress circle.

  The real heart of power, however, stood aloof. Exclusive, secretive, inbred, the members of the privy council chose to gather deep within the complex of the palaces themselves, well out of earshot of the busy square.71 In theory, the tsar could select his own advisors, but choice was guided by unspoken rules, and the most important of these related to honour and official rank. D’yaki might be influential (and some served in the privy council by this time), but they were not to be confused with noblemen. The court at Moscow had developed round a small group of clans, and any that endured and had escaped disgrace still featured in its upper ranks. Whenever a high office needed to be filled, the ancient families expected to receive their call. And these jobs mattered, for though genealogy had an obvious role to play, it was service at the privy council level that paved the way to real power and a seat beside those marvellous displays of gold.

  The rank of boyar was the most coveted of all, traditionally limited to about a dozen individuals at a time, and for these few, court life was a ballet designed to make sure that they and their clans remained unchallenged at the pinnacle of power. Some managed to reside within the Kremlin walls, others in mansions on the streets nearby, but it was vital to be present at the heart of government and to be seen to be there. After that, all advantage was relative, but it was essential not to lose status or to allow another clan to become disproportionately strong. In extreme cases, courtiers whose ambition exceeded reasonable limits could find themselves forced into exile by a jealous coalition of their peers.72 The most infamous case of that kind had involved the boyar Ivan Yurevich Patrikeyev, first cousin to Ivan III and probably the most powerful man in the fifteenth-century Kremlin after Ivan himself. His very success was his downfall. In January 1499, Patrikeyev was arrested on suspicion of a plot against the crown. Among the other accused were two of his sons and his son-in-law, Semen Ivanovich Ryapolovsky. All four were sentenced to death; Ryapolovsky was publicly beheaded on the Moscow river ice.

  More usually, court politics was designed to prevent bloodshed, although the system also limited the sovereign’s freedom to make appointments on the basis of mere talent. Though everyone was obliged to serve the grand prince, each role at court was ranked, and senior members of the leading families demanded to be given the most important ones. Ambitions could be shattered if a man accepted any office that was lower than his due, but since it was impossible for everyone involved to determine (or even to remember) the finer details of the hierarchy, especially at the humbler end, the system generated numerous disputes. Even the positions allocated to the diners at state banquets involved precise distinctions; if a courtier had been careless enough to accept the wrong seat at the dinner for Chancellor, for instance, he would have woken to a demotion that could drag on for years. The mistake could also taint the prospects of his heirs, for status ran along bloodlines, and a family that lost serious rank might struggle ever to regain it. Among the system’s more sinister implications was the watchfulness it fostered within families, for since the dishonour of one affected every member of a clan, black sheep had to be penned – or sacrificed – at home.73

  Newcomers were a regular irritant. Their rank was based (like everybody’s) on the type of service that the prince had called them to perform. Since leading members of a rival court were best neutralized by bringing them to Moscow, providing them with lodgings and entrusting them with prominent roles, this meant that even refugee boyars from Lithuania had been known to jump straight to the top of the Kremlin hierarchy. As Moscow expanded, and more and more such outsiders arrived, resident families of longer standing began to insist that the deta
ils of each courtier’s precise place on the seniority ladder should be entered in a permanent, binding record. There could still be movement – people died – but any accidental or capricious variation had to be forestalled before the dishonour became indelible. In its developed form, emerging in the sixteenth century, this system, with its ledgers and its crossings-out, was called mestnichestvo, from the Russian word for place. What started as a way of managing an expanding multi-cultural court was soon inscribed in leather-bound volumes, and it would remain a feature of Kremlin life for a century to come.

  A politics based on families is also a politics of sex and motherhood, so Kremlin women generally led secluded lives. A careless marriage could disrupt the best-laid plans, for daughters were valuable only if they could be married to high-status heirs. Each time a royal boy needed a wife, therefore, there was an ugly contest and potentially a feud. The rivalry was so divisive that Moscow’s rulers were eventually obliged to bypass the unmarried daughters of their own court clans and look beyond the capital. Ivan the Terrible, who married more wives than Henry VIII, was a case in point. By the time he was looking for his third (and in the absence of a willing European princess) the practice of sending agents to the provinces to select a collection of healthy but obscure young women had more or less become the norm. The girls were brought to the palace, where they were questioned, examined and probably frightened half to death. One by one, they were then paraded before the tsar in a so-called bride show. The point was that whichever girl the sovereign chose, there was a chance of healthy heirs, and at the same time it was unlikely that any boyar family would gain disproportionately from the marriage.74