The system for procuring builders was based in the Kremlin itself. At the end of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, with Moscow a semi-ruin, a Buildings Chancellery (the prikaz kamennykh del) had been added to the list of central government offices. Its main task was to manage the supply of skilled workmen. There was nothing particularly new about the idea that a craftsman might be liable to call-up on the crown’s behalf, but the Buildings Chancellery made the system more official, and in Godunov’s time it was tested to its limits. Under his regency, the Kremlin came to act as patron, master, and even the administrator of a sort of national apprentice-scheme. The labourers, whose trades were handed down in families, were drawn from more than twenty provinces. They included stone-masons, bricklayers and the men who worked the ovens and the quarries, and at times of need the prikaz could send its officials out to summon all of them to Moscow. From there, the men could be deployed to any site the tsar’s officials had marked out for them, including cities in the provinces and new defensive forts. As a magnet for numerous grand projects, Moscow soon became accustomed to its builders’ shanty-town, a makeshift settlement, well outside the Kremlin, that swelled each spring and shut down only when the frosts set hard.31
No labourer was likely to be rich, and members of the building trades were barely paid enough to feed and clothe themselves. But they had one unusual advantage, for they were exempt from tax. This privilege (which they shared with other specialists, including the streltsy32) was intended to recognize the fact that they were summer-migrants, and could not farm the land like ordinary peasants. What it also meant, however, was that they could make easy profits if they worked in their spare time. They cultivated kitchen-gardens round their settlements and sold the food. They also set up private markets, traditional Russian trading rows, and these could undercut tax-paying local businesses. In Tula the builders sold pots, in Vladimir footwear; in Suzdal they were noted for fur coats. Many were also willing to mend shoes and sheepskins, paint icons, fix tools or make furniture. When local people needed services like these, they knew exactly where to look, for the ground around the builders’ settlements was always white with lime.33 That dust must have got into everything in the summer of 1586: Boris Godunov had commissioned a new defensive wall for Moscow.
The massive enterprise involved enclosing 1,300 acres of the city in nearly six miles of fortified masonry. There were to be at least twenty-seven functional towers and ten sets of gates, beginning with an imposing entrance at the crown of the road to Tver. The architect was Fedor Kon, whose first clients (like those of many Russian masons) had been the monasteries.34 But public works seem to have suited him. The peasants of the quarry-region, Myachkovo, were soon petitioning for help; the very bedrock of the meadows where their cattle grazed was disappearing on to builders’ carts, and the fields for miles around were hard and sour with limestone dust.35 When the new wall was finished, Moscow could boast three separate sets of fortifications – the Kremlin, Kitai-gorod, and Godunov’s so-called White City – as well as a system of earthworks that stretched for miles beyond. But Kon was not allowed to stop until he had completed yet more walls, this time of wood, so that the entire city was enclosed.36 The Kremlin’s glamour was renewed, for the successive walls, like Chinese boxes, gave it the allure of a secret treasure.37 In all, Moscow’s fortification was an historic achievement, but it was not the epic project of the age. That prize went to the fortress at Smolensk, a strategic border city on the banks of the Dnieper, which in its time was the largest construction site in the world.
Moscow had ruled Smolensk since 1514. The city was wealthy and colourful, and its former suzerain, Poland-Lithuania, had not stopped coveting the place. Godunov’s answer was to set about ringing it in four miles of sixteen-foot-thick walls, a scheme he again entrusted to Kon. At this point, Moscow’s brick Kremlin was a century old, and siege-technology and guns had both evolved apace. The new design had to be more massive than Moscow’s, less concerned with elegance, and sterner. The excavations for the fortification of Smolensk began in 1596, and from then until the project was completed in 1602, the Buildings Chancellery mobilized about ten thousand men. Between them, the labourers hefted at least a million loads of sand, while blacksmiths bashed out literally millions of nails. Like Fioravanti in Moscow, Kon built an on-site factory to make the bricks. His project called for 150 million of them, all of a regulation size; the ovens alone consumed such vast amounts of firewood that forests were cleared and the land left barren for miles around.38 The awestruck locals, meanwhile, were forced to provide tools for an army of workers. For seven summers in a row, the deep ravine through which the Dnieper flowed rang to the sound of hammers and the slap and clatter of the trays of brick. Centuries later, Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht both spent harsh months in Smolensk, and neither treated the place with respect, but the remnants of Kon’s walls endure, as obstinate as the sarsens of Stonehenge.
Whatever else he was doing, meanwhile, the regent Godunov always paid careful attention to the Kremlin. By the 1590s, his own palace there rivalled even Tsar Fedor’s, and he staffed it with retainers whose titles mirrored those of the real court.39 Across the square, he commissioned a team of the Kremlin’s best artists to repaint the interior of the Faceted Palace, a task that called for more than fifty skilful icon-masters and quantities of expensive paint.40 Years later, and before they were destroyed in a new round of improvements, the icon-painter Ushakov made careful drawings of these frescoes; he also added written notes. His records show that their artistic theme was the familiar genealogical fantasy: the Riurikids as heirs of Emperor Augustus. But one sequence was strikingly up to date. In it, Ushakov wrote, ‘the Autocrat of All Russia [Fedor] sits on the throne, the crown on his head studded with precious stones and pearls … On his right hand, next to his throne, stands the regent Boris Godunov.’41 There were other boyars in the picture – the line stretched out to right and left – but Godunov had been made to look the tallest and by far the most magnificent.
It was a point that needed almost constant emphasis. The terror of the previous reign had steeped the Kremlin in malice. Aside from the unfortunate new tsar, the pawn in one of its most dangerous games was Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, Dmitry, the child of Mariya Nagaya, his last wife. In 1584, not long after the old tsar’s death, the regents had exiled this infant, with his mother, to the city of Uglich, a move intended (at least ostensibly) to protect the fragile Tsar Fedor. Seven years later, when he was nine years old, Dmitry died in what was said to have been a freak accident. The enquiry that Godunov ordered into his death found no evidence of foul play, concluding instead that the child had cut his own throat while playing with a knife. Surprisingly, historians have tended to accept this tale, pointing out that Godunov had nothing to gain directly by killing Dmitry when Fedor was still alive and capable (perhaps with discreet help) of siring an heir.42 But people at the time were far less gullible. Many believed an account spread by Dmitry’s maternal relatives, the Nagois, who accused Godunov of attempting to poison the child before resorting to an assassin’s knife. This was the story that Isaac Massa heard some years later, and the proof was said to lie in another terrible fire – the devil’s work – that swept through Moscow two nights after the killing.43
In 1592, Irina bore Fedor a daughter, Feodosiya, but the infant’s death, in 1594, again raised doubts about the future of the Godunovs. Fresh rumours of Irina’s fall, and of her brother’s imminent arrest, were whispered round the crowded trading rows.44 In answer (or at least to reinforce a message that was being delivered on a more personal basis by the torturers that he had started to employ), Boris again began a round of building-work. The Kremlin was where power had to be defined, and so the site he chose was almost in the centre of it. The project was a new cathedral, and it was to be presented to the Ascension Convent as a pious gift in Godunov’s name. The endowment of a religious building was not especially ambitious on its own (many boyars had built them before). What
counted was that this one was the grave of Russia’s grand princesses.
The scale of any major building was meant to advertise its patron’s wealth, and there was nothing modest about Godunov’s proposed cathedral. As its walls and cupolas rose within their cage of wood, however, the more specific implications of the regent’s design-choice grew clear. His building paid an overt homage to the flamboyant Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, the tomb of Russia’s male tsars, which had dominated the southern entrance to the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square since 1508.45 It is unlikely that Boris chose the blueprint by accident. Instead, his building, as a mausoleum for Russia’s royal women and an assertion of the rights and status of the female line, deliberately echoed the striking appearance of the tsars’ own burial place.46 No woman had ever reigned alone in Muscovy (Elena Glinskaya had come close), but female sovereigns were not unknown in Europe, and Godunov had to believe that women mattered. After all, the one most closely linked to Russia’s throne was his own sister.
* * *
Tsar Fedor died in January 1598. He and Irina never had a son, and so his death marked the end of Moscow’s founding dynasty, the pure line of ‘true tsars’. In the first hours, Boris is said to have tried to persuade his sister to accept the crown, but her answer, wisely, was to exchange her royal robes for a nun’s habit and a life of prayer. Her brother followed her into the Novodevichy Convent, where he seemed determined to wait out the traditional forty days of deepest mourning. But ultimately the boyar’s ambition prevailed. On 21 February, when a crowd of Muscovite petitioners and priests assembled at the convent doors, Boris Godunov finally agreed to end the dangerous uncertainty and take the throne. He even (literally) sat on it, but though he was now Russia’s sovereign he made no swift move to be crowned. Instead, he forsook his beloved council chamber to nurture wider public acceptance and possibly to acquire a dash of military glamour. Boris spent part of the summer with his troops, ostensibly to stiffen their defence against Kazy-Girey.47 It was only in September 1598 that he was crowned a tsar, in the Dormition Cathedral, by his political ally, the brand-new Patriarch Yov.
‘The ceremony took place with a great show of splendour,’ Isaac Massa related. The spectacle eclipsed even Metropolitan Makary’s best efforts. The customary Russian symbols were, of course, evoked, but Moscow was now a patriarchate, and that meant that its tsar could claim the full imagined glory of Byzantium.48 ‘The crown’, wrote Massa,
was set upon [Boris’] head in the church of the Virgin by the Patriarch, surrounded by bishops and metropolitans, with all the prescribed ritual and a host of benedictions, together with the burning of incense. All along the road the tsar was to travel on the way from the churches to his palace at the crown of the fortress, they had spread out crimson cloth and covered it with gold; before the procession gold pieces were thrown down in handfuls, and the crowd fell upon them …
Money was not the only inducement on offer for this loyal mob during the eight-day celebration. ‘At various places in the fortress,’ Massa was told, ‘they had placed great barrels filled with mead and beer from which all could drink … The tsar ordered the distribution of triple wages to all those in the service of the state … The whole country was glad and rejoiced, and everyone praised God for having granted the empire such a master.’49
The rejoicing was not entirely misplaced. Boris was one of the most gifted men who ever sat on Russia’s throne. But he was also anxious to make certain of his right to rule. Some of his subjects could be bought with public works, others suborned with threats. Still, these were things a mere d’yak could have done. A tsar had to be seen in splendour, and that meant using the Kremlin. A crown was made, new jewels set, and Boris also accepted royal gifts, including regalia from Rudolf II’s workshops in the Habsburg lands and a splendid throne from Isfahan.50 But it was Ivan the Terrible’s Golden Palace, with all the drama of the court, that made the deepest impression. When Boris received the Polish ambassador, Lew Sapieha, in 1600, Jacques Margeret observed each detail. The boyar tsar, he wrote, was
seated on the imperial throne, the crown on his head, the sceptre in his hand, the golden orb before him. His son was seated next to him on his left. Seated on benches all around the chamber were the lords of the council and the okol’nichie [senior courtiers] wearing robes of very rich cloth of gold bordered with pearls, with tall hats of black fox on their heads. On each side of the emperor two young lords stood dressed in white velvet garments, bordered all around with ermine to the height of half a foot. Each wore a white tall hat on the head, with two long chains of enamelled gold criss-crossed around the neck [and over the chest]. Each of them held a costly battle-axe of Damascus steel on his shoulder, as if in readiness to let fly a blow, thus giving the impression of great majesty.51
The ritual and its setting were awe-inspiring, but Tsar Boris would have known of the constant plots and whispers out beyond the palace steps. Any boyar on the Russian throne was vulnerable, and a Godunov, still viewed by nobles with distaste, was at excessive risk. To protect himself, Boris created a network of informants and spies. His prisons filled, and several magnates felt the chill of imminent arrest. Servants were encouraged to inform on their masters, slaves on everyone in sight. The tsar himself grew increasingly reclusive, relying for information on the advice of his uncle, Semen Godunov, who ran the system of interrogations. Semen was no more than a torturer, and his cruelty further added to the number of the tsar’s enemies.52 For them, the Kremlin must have felt like a pit of snakes, but it was also the acknowledged centre of state and religious power. The opportunity to colonize it – to absorb two whole centuries of dynastic splendour into the Godunovs’ pedigree – became the boyar tsar’s obsession.
The drawing of Kremlenagrad dates from this time, and to be accurate it really should have featured carts and scaffolding and piles of bricks. As it is, the buildings that the map outlines include the tsar’s most daring project in its final form. In 1600, Godunov ordered that two extra tiers should be added to the bell tower on the east side of Cathedral Square. The height was so vertiginous that even the scaffolding was a challenge, but soon the masons had begun their work, hauling bricks and lime to levels that no builder in the Russian lands had climbed before. The finished tower, an extension of Bon Fryazin’s own so-called Ivan the Great, was nearly 270 feet high.53 It was visible for thirty miles, and for centuries it was to be the tallest building in Moscow, surpassing Ivan the Terrible’s Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat (St Basil’s) in height if not in bravado. Once he had made the famous tower his own, Boris ordered an inscription to be added. It was a proclamation to the world, and it is still there now, written on the uppermost tier in giant, gilded letters:
By the will of the Holy Trinity, by the command of the Great Lord, Tsar, and Grand Prince Boris Fedorovich, Autocrat of All Russia, and of his son, the Orthodox Great Lord Fedor Borisovich, Tsarevich and Prince of All Russia, this church was completed and gilded in the second year of their reign.
‘Boris hoped above all to appease the divine anger,’ Isaac Massa concluded.54 An observer from a different age might draw a parallel with twentieth-century cults of the leader’s personality, but Boris did not have such far-reaching designs. The object was not to become a god, but just to occupy a higher plane of existence, a place where envy and conspiracy were impotent. And Boris would have used his eminence in creative new ways. The tsar’s next projects included smart new buildings for the prikazy and playful battlements to top the walls that ran along the Kremlin’s outer moat. Joan Blaeu’s map shows both, but the most important structure of them all is missing, and was never built. It would have stood next to the enlarged Ivan the Great, which was intended to serve as its campanile. Its presence would have changed the Kremlin’s geography for all time, focusing it on a new site. Where Ivan III had turned to Italy, Boris sent to James I of England in search of engineers with skills that his own subjects lacked (successfully: two of the country’s most reputable builders arrived
in Moscow in 1604).55 The projected church was not to be like any other in the Kremlin. The tsar’s intention was to build it large enough to hold thousands of souls, filling the citadel with ordinary Muscovites and inviting the entire Orthodox world to worship at the high altar of Russian faith.
What Boris had in mind was a cathedral for Moscow the Jerusalem, the holy city. His plan was to call it the Holy of Holies, and experts think it was designed in the image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It would have been a place of pilgrimage, of majesty, and its completion would have set the seal on Godunov’s dynastic rule. The shrines that the Daniilovich princes had built, including the Dormition Cathedral, would have been relegated to the second rank. By the time of Boris’ death, in 1605, the new cathedral’s general design had been approved, and a troupe of workmen at the site had assembled heaps of stone, lime and timber.56 The tsar had also commissioned some opulent sculptures for the sanctuary. A reliquary was planned, a version of the Holy Sepulchre itself, and artists in the Kremlin workshops had created a pair of golden angels to stand guard at either end of it. The figures were life-sized, and one of them was said to have been placed in Godunov’s own coffin when – as people later liked to say – his restless spirit rose to walk the earth after his death.57
This, then, was high tide for Kremlenagrad, a moment full of possibility. When that tide turned, the fortress closed its iron locks. The huge cathedral vanished without trace. The Kremlin is a place whose past is usually hallowed, but the Holy of Holies, that witness to the optimistic grandeur of the Godunovs, is all but absent from its chronicles. Even Andrei Batalov, who not only leads the Kremlin’s architectural research effort but specializes in the age of Godunov, cannot be certain what it would have looked like if it had been built. Kremlenagrad appears in almost every guide to the Kremlin – the image is so well-known that readers tend to turn the page – but the real thing would have been terrifying at the best of times, and events were about to transform it, once again, into a theatre of the macabre.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 15