Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Even Gosiewski did not stay until the end. Before they quit the Kremlin in the spring of 1612, the hetman and his closest retinue removed the most valuable of the royal crowns, insignia and other precious items from the heyday of the Riurikids. The so-called Cap of Godunov, which blazed with two enormous Sri Lankan sapphires, was one of the occupiers’ most valuable prizes, but the mercenaries also took a crown intended for the first Dmitry and a gold staff decorated with jewels.101 The golden cap of Ivan Kalita vanished, too, and so did icons, crosses, gems and furs.102 Some of this booty found its way across the border – two jewel-encrusted objects of devotion, an icon and a reliquary, landed in Munich in 1614, where they remain in the Schatzkammer of the Residenz103 – but much was plundered by the cossack bands that preyed on any traveller who lingered on his journey west. And Russia was impoverished whoever took the gems. The looting of the Treasury was a primitive version of capital flight, and where the current generation has Swiss bank accounts, the thieves of 1612 buried any gold that they could not contrive to smuggle out. ‘Unbelievable wealth, in the form of gold, silver, precious stones, and other valuable things, was seized and sent to Poland,’ reported Olearius, and ‘for amusement the soldiers loaded large single pearls in their firearms and shot them in the air.’

  For several months after Gosiewski’s departure, the remnants of the garrison clung on. By the summer of 1612, most of Moscow had been taken in the name of Russia’s people, and only the Kremlin and Kitai-gorod remained in boyar and Polish control. Cut off from almost every regular supply, the Kremlin mutated from army slum to charnel-house. In September the first soldiers began to starve. A foreign merchant who visited the Cathedral of the Dormition discovered a sack full of human heads and legs in a shallow grave near the walls. Beyond the Kremlin, starving Muscovites stopped venturing out, for there were rumours that hungry Polish troops stalked the suburbs at night in search of succulent meat; the Kremlin itself became a symbol of dread. Behind its walls, the mercenaries fought over the bones of dead comrades, took shots at crows, and duelled for the corpses of the rats.104 From 3,000, the garrison had shrunk to roughly 1,500 men. It took till October for the liberators to break through, and by that time the citadel was little better than a morgue.

  No sacred site was undespoiled.105 As they counted their dead, people were unlikely to mourn the precious manuscripts and books that had been burned, the history that they had lost for ever.106 An outsider might even have thought that this was a good time for Russian patriots to start afresh. The people had rescued their country from destruction, the tsars were dead, and now a new sort of elite, perhaps some form of parliament, could plan a better, more enlightened future for everyone. But though the Russian people had indeed acquired a voice, the impulse of the time turned out to be conservative. The nation was still at war on many fronts (the Swedes and Poles each held substantial chunks of Russian territory), the Kremlin was a gaping ruin, and the old elite, the great boyars, had failed everyone. But for all that, the past – in foggy, tinted, and romantic form – seemed safer than divisive and untried alternatives. Of all the things that had been taken or destroyed in 1612, after all, it was not Godunov’s sapphire crown, let alone the piles of plate, that people mourned. The loss that really rankled, as Russians prepared to build the Kremlin and their government anew, was Ivan the Terrible’s cruel staff, the one that had been carved from the magical horn of a unicorn.107

  5

  Eternal Moscow

  Four decades after the Troubles ended, a Syrian priest arrived in Moscow on the coat-tails of his father, the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch. He is known to Europeans as Paul of Aleppo, and his travels made a writer of him. Paul’s charm was that he noticed things: the pearls and beading on a bishop’s cope, the rancid smell of raw meat on a tribesman’s breath. In our age of political correctness, you can read him for the grumpiness alone. As his visit to Russia dragged on, young Paul was nearly felled on several occasions by the strictness of his hosts’ religious fasts. The stench of Russia’s unwashed monks disgusted him. He found the interminable holy rituals exhausting too, and seldom seemed to end a day without complaining of his aching legs and back. And then there was the cruel, the intolerable cold; the poor Syrian’s ‘hands and feet and nose were nearly bitten off’ by that on several occasions. The first of these, in early January 1655, was the result of an outdoor ceremony to mark the Feast of Epiphany. At the end of it, predictably, Paul and his father ‘were so much affected by the cold, that we were unable to perform mass in the Cathedral’.

  The ordeal took place around a platform on the Moscow river ice. From the first lines, the Syrian’s description has an eerily familiar ring. Each January, he wrote,

  they construct a large inclosure of paling on this [Moscow] river, for it flows near the Imperial Palace; and the Patriarch goes forth with the Heads of Clergy and of the Convents, and the whole of the inferior clergy, in their robes, two and two, in grand procession to … the Water-gate. The Emperor follows them with his Great Officers of State, on foot, and wearing his crown; but at the moment they begin the Prayer, he uncovers his head, and remains until the conclusion, thus exposed to the dreadful severity of the cold.

  It happened that in January 1655 the tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov (ruled 1645–76), was not in Moscow, but in any other year he would have waited for his icy dose of river water while the court stood by and watched. Thereafter, by custom, ‘his majesty returns to his palace on his royal sledge, which is covered inside with red velvet, and is studded on the outside with gold and silver nails. The caparison of the horses is made of sable furs.’1

  A century after the first Englishmen witnessed it, here was the Muscovite Epiphany ritual again. Here, too, were all the velvet and the gold, the courtiers, the splendid priests. The contrast with the Kremlin of just forty-three years previously could scarcely have been more extreme. In 1612, the idea of a royal sledge, and even of a royal backside to sit down in it, would have seemed almost ludicrous. There had been no tsar then, and it was far from certain that the Treasury still ran to a passable crown, let alone the gorgeous robes that courtiers had worn in other times. As the Syrians prepared to meet the sovereign in his Kremlin court in 1655, however, they laboured through the same long preparations as had Jenkinson and Chancellor a century before. They, too, were ushered into the Kremlin’s awe-inspiring hall, where the tsar presided over a court of ‘grandees … in dresses loaded with gold, pearls, and precious-stones’. Aleksei’s crown, ‘resembling a high calpack’, was ‘covered with large pearls and the most precious gems’, and his yellow brocade cape was fringed with so much gold and lace and coloured stone ‘as to dazzle the sight’.2 A feast awaited in the Faceted Palace. ‘The august Emperor was sitting in the centre,’ his guest noted, ‘at a large table entirely covered with silver.’3

  For anyone who knew the recent history, this scene may well have appeared strange enough, but Moscow’s air of timelessness was even more incongruous when set against the turmoil to the west. The English took things to extremes in their experiment with revolution, but by Paul of Aleppo’s time the challenges to traditional authority were surfacing in almost every corner of Europe. Thanks to the likes of Galileo and Descartes, indeed, even the universe was threatening to break out of the frame that religion had made for it. The first half of the seventeenth century was a time of adventure. It was the era of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower, of the Dutch in Connecticut and the first scholars at Harvard. Explorers ventured north to Baffin Bay and south and eastwards to Tasmania; back home, in London and Paris, attempts were made (with mixed success) to sell the public a new drink called coffee. Most crucially of all, the science of war grew ever more sophisticated, mainly because the European world was almost always under arms. The guns that craftsmen made became more accurate, and battle-formations grew ever more deadly. Soldiers were trained as professionals, drill and discipline refined. The pace of change promised to make early modern Europe richer and more powerful than any
other region on the planet. In this exhilarating context, the Russian court looked almost cataleptic.

  The point, however, is that the illusion generated by the Kremlin was a deliberate contrivance. Like the regalia and golden robes, the ceremonies that Paul described were replicas. The luxury of standing still had not been open to Russia at the beginning of the seventeenth century because it had no stable ground on which to stand. The old regime had disappeared, the old landscape was wrecked. Perhaps in part because of that, the ruling families longed for nothing more than the imagined ease of their grandfathers’ day. The civil war that had ended in 1612 had never been a revolution, after all, and the new tsar’s accession was not a coup. As the smoke above the Kremlin cleared at the end of 1612, there was no sense, at court or beyond it, that fresh ideas could possibly be better than remembered pieties.4 If anything, the trials of war had reinforced the widespread yearning for a golden age, a time when the True Tsar had sat in splendour on his throne.

  The elite appeared to hold this line throughout the next half-century. As Russia’s government regrouped, the leading role was played, at first, by the ancient ruling caste. A fragile order was restored, and the heirs of the old nobility (and even some surviving members from the previous age) clutched at the symbols, prayers and relics of the past in a bid to shore up their pre-eminence. The tsar – once they had found their man – was meant to guarantee stability; the church, which Hermogen had cast in a heroic mould, would then oblige with all the settings and the bells.5 Throughout, another element of continuity was provided by officials that the government employed. In 1613, more than half the staff of the country’s prikazy, far from all of whom were noble, had been working in offices of some kind (not always in Moscow) since Godunov’s time, and clerical jobs themselves were more or less hereditary.6 There were no schools in the Muscovite state, let alone professional academies, so fathers trained their sons for the limited pool of posts. The country had been shattered and the Treasury was bare, yet here again was repetition, the memory of things as they were surely meant to be.

  Once the new tsar had been named, setting a reactionary seal on the Russian nation’s fate, the system in the Kremlin became rigid to the point of near-paralysis. Half-fearing that the people would denounce it if they glimpsed weakness or doubt, the court closed ranks. Priests returned to intone the ancient prayers at length, insisting on the perfection of Russia’s faith. The practice of mestnichestvo, or rule by precedence, was reinstated in its full glory. But while the elite of both church and state hoped to hold on to their power and wealth by this rejection of unwelcome change, the world could not be kept at bay for ever. The success of Moscow’s innovative neighbours was a constant reproach and also a threat. Inevitably, the Kremlin faced a distasteful, destabilizing choice. It could continue to cover itself in the moth-eaten glories of the past, thereby avoiding any return to the destructive uproar of the Time of Troubles, or it could engage with Europe, whatever the risks, and thus retain a place in it. The price of either course seemed far too high.

  The occupants of the seventeenth-century Kremlin opted for a compromise. Instead of taking risks of any kind, they chose the cobweb mantle of nostalgia. Its dusty cloth was like a uniform for some, while for others it was fast becoming a sort of disguise, but either way, it was already very old. Each time a patch was added – a set of hastily drafted laws, a desperate attempt to bring the army up to date – the last authentic strands grew weaker still. The fabric could never have held indefinitely, and at the end of the seventeenth century it fell away completely to reveal a Kremlin primed to host its own version of absolutism, the innovative European form of monarchy embodied by the French Sun King, Louis XIV.7 With new names in the royal chamber, a new army commanded by alien generals, and new cultural influences flowing in from its own fast-expanding territories, this incarnation of the Moscow fortress was a far cry indeed from the longed-for glory days of Ivan the Terrible and his fantastic golden court.

  A nation’s collective dreams are powerful, however, and if, one sleepless night, some d’yak had thought to check whether the illusion of eternal Muscovite dynastic splendour still looked convincing to the crowds beyond the Kremlin walls, he need have done no more than filch Paul of Aleppo’s travel notes. It would have been no problem, back in 1655, to have found a civil servant who could translate from the Arabic. Page after page would have confirmed that the court’s version of sacred continuity was still vivid enough to mesmerize the world. ‘The origin of this Imperial Family of Muscovy is believed, by persons who examine the truth of history, to have been from Rome,’ Paul of Aleppo had written. ‘Observe how this august race, from that age until now, has been preserved in uninterrupted succession!’8 However much the Kremlin changed, that chorus echoed underneath its walls for decades – centuries – to come.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1612–13, the mere thought of securing the succession might have chilled a Russian’s bones. All the same, the country had to find a new sovereign, and the only hope of future unity was to consult a range of influential people, which meant convening an Assembly of the Land. It was called in November 1612 in the names of Russia’s two main noble liberators, the princes Pozharsky and Dmitry Trubetskoi (the citizen Kuzma Minin, Pozharsky’s ally and backer, carried no real official weight). Weeks after the scheduled opening date, in January 1613, hundreds of delegates converged upon the ruined Kremlin to deliberate. Along the way, their sledges had skimmed over forlorn graves, the snowy whiteness broken only by the wheeling parliaments of crows. The towns and villages the travellers passed were half-abandoned, and the households that remained all had bleak tales to tell. At the end of it all, Moscow could offer them little cheer. Burned, hungry and pitted with cannonballs, the city was desolate. As they assembled in the only space that could be patched up fast enough to hold them all – a chamber in the Kremlin’s Riverside Palace – the delegates’ mood was dour. These gentry, priests and loyal cossacks had paid a terrible price to secure Russia’s future; now they picked their way through rubble. Even the quarters where they slept were semi-derelict. Since there was little shelter to be found outside the walls, many made do with unheated rooms in what was left of the Kremlin’s old palaces and mansions.

  The assembly’s principal business was the election of a tsar. No-one considered parliamentary rule (the idea was shocking enough, thirty years later, in England), but Russian politics had shifted all the same. The task of electing a sovereign was momentous in itself, but there was also a sense that Russia’s people ought to shoulder some responsibility for making sure that any future government was just.9 The front runner for the throne, at first, was Prince Pozharsky, whom many saw as the nation’s ultimate saviour, but his humble blood ruled him out in the eyes of the old clans. Their choices included Wladislaw, Sigismund, and at least one member of the Habsburg dynasty, but speakers from less noble ranks declared all foreigners disqualified.10 The patrician warrior Dmitry Trubetskoi looked better, but he turned out to have identified himself too closely with the tainted, pro-Polish boyars. Before long, the delegates started to look for the candidate who divided them the least, the most innocuous if not the most splendid. Their hopes eventually settled on a sixteen-year-old, the son of Filaret Romanov. His formidable father, who would have been a much more impressive contender, had been taken captive by the Poles in 1610 and had yet to return to Moscow. Without his protection, young Mikhail Romanov had the merit of appearing to be an entirely harmless (but blue-blooded) lamb.

  Once the assembly had made its choice, a delegation went to Kostroma, the provincial city where Mikhail and his mother had lately taken refuge. They found a pale lad, indecisive and probably terrified. It was an inauspicious start, and Mikhail Romanov did not change much even after he was crowned. He ruled from 1613 until 1645, but there were always other voices in command. At first, these belonged to his maternal relatives, but then his father was released from Poland. In 1619, Filaret Romanov was installed as Patriarch, an offic
e he had sought for years, and from that day until his death in 1633 the older man at last achieved his dream of Kremlin power.11 Indeed, the title that Mikhail conferred on him, ‘great sovereign’, implying as it did a higher status than the tsar’s, was a reflection of reality. Father and son were unequal in every possible respect. Where Filaret was strong and physically impressive, Mikhail was feeble, ‘afflicted even when young with weak legs and a tic in the left eye’, as Isaac Massa noted. ‘He himself cannot write,’ the Dutchman added, ‘and I am not sure that he can read.’12 The best that can be said was that he seemed to be gentle, at least from a distance. He was ‘a lover of peace and amity with all Christian kings’, his son’s English doctor, Samuel Collins, later wrote, ‘kind to strangers, and very religious’.13

  The kindness, however, was conditional. Mikhail came to the throne of a country still at war with several foreign armies and also with itself. He owed his position – he owed his country – to groups of common citizens (such as the cossacks who had fought to oust the Poles), but his court had no intention of sharing power or dividing wealth. Few of the peasants who had helped to liberate Russia grew rich. Few even escaped the toils of serfdom. And in turn, because the country remained tense, the members of the court existed in a state of permanent suspicion. Trained in the schools of Godunov and Shuisky, their reflex was to repress all dissent. Most citizens accepted the idea of a new tsar, but any doubters were soon silenced, in the darkest prisons, by the percussive crack of their own bones. The new version of history was not imposed gently. Even the fact that young Mikhail had been elected was suppressed in favour of a trumped-up fable of divine grace.14 It did not do to question this. Indeed, it would not do to question the Romanov tsars at any time to come. ‘The Emperor has spies in every corner,’ Dr Collins observed in the 1660s. ‘Nothing is done or said at any feast, publick meeting, burial or wedding but he knows it.’ And the Kremlin was jealous of its own secrets. ‘’Tis death,’ the doctor continued, ‘for anyone to reveal what is spoken in the Czar’s pallace … No-one dare speak a word what passes in their Court.’15