Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The arch itself praised earthly power. It also liberated the victorious tsar from Kremlin geography, Jerusalem and all, for now he could stage his triumphal celebrations anywhere – he just needed a decent space – and he could fill the whole city with noise. By day, there were drums, cannon and trumpets as the festivities continued on his chosen site. By night, Muscovites heard the crack of fireworks. ‘If you would please a Russian with music,’ Dr Collins had written years before, in Peter’s father’s reign,

  get a consort of Billingsgate nightingales, which joined with a flight of screech owls, a nest of jackdaws, a pack of hungry wolves, seven hogs on a windy day, and as many cats with their co-rivals, and let them sing lachrymae, and that will ravish a pair of Russian luggs, better than all the music in Italy.14

  The secretary of the Habsburg mission in Muscovy in the 1690s, Johann Korb, was hardly kinder. ‘The sound of Russian music in general is so displeasing to the ear that it is … calculated to sadden than to rouse to martial daring,’ he wrote. But Russians knew how to be loud: ‘Their chief instruments are fifes and kettle drums.’15 The Azov celebration added day-long peals of the Kremlin bells, the stamp and flare of horses on parade, barking dogs, and endless ranks of marching boots. Aside from the destructive roar of flames, it must have been the brashest sound Moscow had heard for decades.

  When the last firework had shrunk to ash, the noise subsided round the Kremlin for a time. But life was different out at Preobrazhenskoe, and certainly in the fabulous mansions of the nearby German quarter. It was there, and mainly in the palace of the Swiss-born soldier Franz Lefort, that Peter first heard European music, the strings and woodwind from another world. Even the loudest instruments were drowned, however, by the irregular explosions of ear-splitting masculine laughter that always seemed to accompany them. Peter established a parodic court, the ‘All-Jesting and Most Drunken Assembly’, and its amusements were scandalous. In 1699, Korb reported a party in Lefort’s mansion that included ‘a sham Patriarch and a complete set of scenic clergy dedicated to Bacchus’. Peter’s former tutor, Nikita Zotov, was

  decked with a mitre, and went stark naked, to betoken lasciviousness to the lookers-on. Cupid and Venus were the insignia on his crozier, lest there should be any mistake about what flock he was the pastor of. The remaining rout of Bacchanalians came after him, some carrying great bowls full of wine, others mead, others again beer and brandy.

  The church had called tobacco ‘Devil’s incense’, but Peter loved the stuff. Korb noted that his revellers were provided with ‘great dishes of dried tobacco leaves, with which, when ignited, they went to the remotest corners of the palace, exhaling those most delectable odours and most pleasant incense to Bacchus from their smutty jaws’.16

  Traditionalists, of course, were horrified. It was not change itself (which even the blessed Tsar Aleksei had embraced in his later years), but Peter’s pandemonium that shook the walls. In the rich candle-light inside the Kremlin, bearded shadows bent and merged, their whispers lost in the deep velvet and the swelling prayers. This was Russia, after all, and people had been flogged for lesser outrages than Peter’s. But that was just the point. Peter’s court broke the old rules on purpose. Each member of it, whether he had been born a prince or the son of a baker, was there by Peter’s grace and favour. Where formerly the tsar’s elite had been called to attend ceremonies in the cathedrals and palace halls, this one required its members to join in drunken games. There was no other way to stay close to the sovereign. And Peter could dictate and change the terms at will; his followers walked a fine line between devotion and blind terror almost every time he raised a cup.17 No-one could ever feel completely safe. Nikita Zotov, the naked ‘Prince-Pope’ in Korb’s shocked memoir, was later forced, as an old man, to undertake a humiliating mock-wedding for an audience of guests wearing grotesque masks and accompanied by groups of performing bears. There was even a joke orchestra, whose members blew on pipes and hooters and banged the palace plates.18

  The opposition, drawn from conservatives, disgruntled streltsy and die-hard supporters of Sofiya, grew and began to develop plans. But first came a surprising interlude. In March 1697, Peter left Russia altogether. No tsar had travelled abroad since the era of the Golden Horde, but this one was not bound by precedents like that. He gathered a collection of about two hundred young nobles, put Franz Lefort and two of Moscow’s own best diplomats in overall charge, and set off for Europe under the assumed name of Peter Mikhailov (which fooled no-one). In part, the Grand Embassy was a fact-finding tour, a chance to learn at first hand about ships, science and European manners. For Peter Mikhailov, it was also another so-called game, and he spent weeks in Dutch and English shipyards, often living as a common seaman. But Russia’s unconventional sovereign was also careful to pay his diplomatic dues, and his delegation spent time at William III’s Kensington Palace (the tsar actually lived in Deptford), and also in Habsburg Vienna. Peter was still at the Austrian court when he learned that Moscow’s German quarter and his throne had been the targets of a streltsy putsch. By the time the news reached him in the summer of 1698, the worst was over. His loyal generals, including Aleksei Semenovich Shein, the hero of Azov, had taken charge of the military situation at once. The bacchanalian ‘Prince-Caesar’, Fedor Romodanovsky, in his capacity as Peter’s deputy and secret-police chief, had already begun the hunt for conspirators. Still, it was time to return home.

  The tsar abandoned his foreign adventure at once. He rode directly to Moscow, completing the journey in four weeks, and reached the Kremlin at night. According to Korb, Peter slipped into the fortress unannounced, ‘taking advantage of the shades of night’, to see his ‘darling little son, kissed him thrice, and leaving many other pledges of endearment, returned to his wooden dwelling [Preobrazhenskoe], flying the sight of his wife, whom he dislikes with a loathing of old date’.19 Evdokiya Lopukhina, the wife in question, was innocent of any conspiracy, but her conservative manner and uncongenial extended family left Peter cold. By now, too, the tsar was deeply involved with his German mistress, Anna Mons, a resident of his beloved foreign suburb. Until the following spring, when Peter forced Evdokiya to take the veil, the Kremlin, with its stifling terema, was the best place in which to abandon her.

  September was the start of old Russia’s New Year and Peter planned to make it unforgettable. He had scarcely dismounted in the yard of his suburban palace when he called for barbers. Archaic Russia had stood up to the new reign for the last time. On 26 August 1698, when Moscow’s elite flocked to make its ritual prostrations to the tsar at Preobrazhenskoe, Peter’s strange campaign began. He wanted his subjects to look – and think – more like the Europeans he had just been visiting. The first beards to come off were those of Romodanovsky and Shein, but Peter’s gaze lingered for longer on the doubters and opponents in the throng. As the new year dawned, a pale-chinned Shein put on a massive feast. ‘A crowd of Boyars, scribes, and military officers, almost incredible, were assembled there,’ Korb recorded. ‘And among them were several common sailors, with whom the Czar repeatedly mixed, divided apples, and even honoured one of them by calling him brother. A salvo of twenty-five guns marked each toast.’20 Forced laughter also echoed round the hall. By dawn, hundreds of faces had been exposed by the barber’s blade.

  The streltsy were next on Peter’s list. The announcement was made at Preobrazhenskoe, but its reverberations echoed everywhere. ‘Around my royal city,’ Peter wrote, ‘I will have gibbets and gallows set upon the walls and ramparts, and each and every one of the [rebels] I will put to a direful death.’21 In fact, the inquisitors had already begun their work, torturing the streltsy in batches of thirty. The object was to find out who had put the soldiers up to their revolt, but torture also showed the world who was the boss. ‘Scourged most savagely with the cat,’ Korb reported, ‘if that had not the effect of breaking their stubborn silence, fire was applied to their backs, all gory and streaming, in order that, by slowly roasting the skin and tender flesh, the
sharp pangs might penetrate through the very marrow of their bones.’22

  The ultimate quarry was none other than Sofiya. Peter had assumed her guilt from the outset, imagining her to have been the instigator of the plot to remove him, and much of the torture was aimed at nailing the case against her. Predictably, the inquisitors achieved their goal, and the former regent was sentenced to spend the rest of her life as a nun in the New Convent of the Virgin. This compound, like the Kremlin, was a quiet and exclusive place in normal times, but no walls could keep out the bitter sounds of Peter’s vengeance from the streets beyond. Once he had finished his enquiries, the tsar ordered the streltsy settlement, on the south bank of the Moscow river, to be razed and burned. At the same time, his hatchet-men began their work. Many streltsy were hanged, some broken on the wheel, and a number beheaded. Peter himself played executioner at times, for he delighted in the thud and splatter of an axe. Romodanovsky, Lefort and several other noblemen joined him, for the torture and the killing, like barbering and drunken feasts, were treated as another test of loyalty.

  The scenes of butchery were enacted every day, including Sundays. In all, 1,182 streltsy were executed, some at Preobrazhenskoe and some beneath the Kremlin walls. As Peter had ordained, the broken bodies were displayed on gibbets and the severed heads were speared on pikes. Some were strung up for Sofiya to contemplate through the small windows of her convent cell. But many were skewered on iron hooks along the Kremlin walls. At dawn, the air vibrated with the wing-beats and the squabbles of the feasting crows. There was a saying in Moscow for many years to come: ‘Wherever there’s a battlement, there’s [the head of] a strelets.’23

  On 19 December 1699, the people of Russia received an order to celebrate the next New Year on the unaccustomed date of 1 January. There were to be fireworks and festivities and the artillery were to blast away on Red Square for an entire week. ‘As a gesture of merriment’, the tsar instructed, citizens were to wish each other a happy new year whether they liked it or not, and everyone was urged to decorate their homes with festive trees like pine or spruce. The wealthiest were ordered to open their houses and offer hospitality to all.24 The great reformer had embarked on a headlong race to learn from Europe. Four days later came an order telling nobles how to dress, insisting on short (scandalous) ‘Hungarian’ coats, with tailors’ dummies placed on display so that his subjects could see exactly what their tsar required.25 Although the Kremlin remained a segregated and conservative environment, the pampered and secluded women of the old elite would soon be bullied into giving up their veils. The bitterest opposition came from those who adhered to the Old Belief. In their eyes, Peter was at best a changeling (a ‘German’) and at worst the creature of the Antichrist.26 The heavy clomping of his foreign boots, the pious murmured knowingly, was nothing other than the devil’s own hoof-beat.27

  * * *

  Not all Peter’s reforms hit Russia out of the blue. The church had been in turmoil since the days of Filaret. The tsar’s impatience with clerical meddling (he had dismissed the patriarch’s attempt to save the streltsy in 169828) reflected a broader eighteenth-century consensus that religion should be confined to its own, rapidly shrinking, spiritual sphere.29 And the point of many other changes was the need for military reform. Ivan the Terrible’s reign, and the succeeding century of trouble and revolt, had stalled all possibility that Russia might become a modern European state. Thereafter, reformers had been thwarted by their colleagues’ fear, and often also by a lack of money. But Russia could not stand up to the Europeans if it did not regroup and rearm. Merely to hold on to Ukraine (and Peter always wanted more), the tsar needed to bring his armies, and the fiscal arrangements that supported them, into line with those of powers that confronted Russia across the Dnieper and the Don. Peter’s radicalism certainly offended and shocked some of the Muscovite elite, but their own collective sense of purpose had become so weak that they could not agree to resist him.

  The style and scale of change effectively amounted to a revolution. Classical references – to Bacchus, to Victory, to Jupiter – are so familiar that it is hard to imagine the shock of their appearance in late-seventeenth-century Russia. Up to that point, few Russian nobles had set foot abroad, and almost none had the least idea about classical art or poetry. Those who listened to their priests would have considered statues (whether clothed or not) to be idolatrous. As for the mass of Russia’s people, the citizens who bowed and crossed themselves whenever they walked past a church, Rome and all its heresies were abhorrent. But in the early eighteenth century, an entire pantheon of antique deities, centuries of classical art, and bewildering multitudes of figurative statuary, much of it in celebration of the female nude, burst into Orthodox Russia with the suddenness of an invading horde. As Lindsey Hughes, Peter’s British biographer, perceptively observed, no-one outside the court elite could even understand the references. When a clerk was cataloguing recent acquisitions to Peter’s Armoury collection in 1701, he listed a silver globe, on top of which were seated ‘two men: one large one in a hat, with wings on his hat and his feet’.30 He clearly had no idea that the figure in question was Mercury.

  New buildings changed the feel of Moscow on an even grander scale. First came the Sukharev Tower, which Peter commissioned in the 1690s. Originally a gatehouse on the road that he had ridden to the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery, this became a landmark as imposing as the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower. From 1701, its third floor housed Peter’s new School of Mathematics and Navigation, while its upper chambers were used as an astronomical observatory.31 Another tower (at just under 266 feet, briefly one of Moscow’s tallest) belonged to a church on the city estate of Peter’s favourite, a courtier of humble origins called Alexander Menshikov. Until it was reshaped by lightning, its narrow spire prefigured those of the future St Petersburg. Peter himself ordered transformations on the margins of Red Square, first by removing (yet again) the hazardous impromptu market that spilled into it and then, in 1699, by constructing an imposing three-storey pharmacy, part of a wider campaign against folk remedies and general peasant ignorance.32 As the ever-caustic Korb observed, not all were pleased. ‘Formerly the people used to live to a great and reverend age, using nothing except simples,’ the Habsburg diplomat recalled. ‘Now they die in a more costly fashion, and, as some complain, much earlier.’33

  In the midst of all this rebuilding, in June 1701, the Kremlin was all but consumed by a particularly devastating fire. The flames swept through the whole fortress, destroying every wooden mansion and gutting even the stone ones. For years to come, some palace buildings were left without roofs, doors or windows. Many offices of the prikazy, including the prestigious Foreign Affairs Chancellery, were burned to the ground, and though rebuilding began in 1703, not all were restored. Large numbers of officials were left to improvise accommodation or to move out in search of better premises in Kitai-gorod and the White City.34

  But Peter viewed the devastation as an opportunity. Almost at once, he ordered the most severely affected site, a large triangle near the Nikolsky gates, to be cleared, and in January 1702, Kremlin staff began to record the arrival of ‘all manner of supplies’ for an enormous new building.35 The proposed arsenal was to be Peter’s landmark in the Kremlin. An engraving by Adriaan Schoenebeck shows an entrance flanked by classical columns and pediments, Roman gods, and a fearsome double-headed Russian eagle. Beneath the eagle, twenty-six crests, representing Russia’s expanding list of provinces, were added after consultation with the Foreign Affairs prikaz.36 The local masons protested when a Saxon, Christopher Conrad, was hired to oversee the work, and more recriminations followed in the winter of 1713, when the half-completed roof caved in.37 It was another ten years before the scaffolding came down, but by that time there was no resisting the imported European style.

  The new brand of classicism was an awkward fit inside the Kremlin, and the truth was that a tsar who wanted wide streets and straight building-lines could never have lived in comfort in the venerable
fort. Peter yearned to find a place for his own version of Moscow’s German quarter, a suburb so neat that an Italian visitor thought the houses ‘looked like caskets’.38 The tsar imagined nights spent in the mixed (and raucous) company he had kept with Franz Lefort, days passed in the style of the court he had seen in Habsburg Vienna. From that perspective, the Kremlin was no better than a nagging maiden aunt who stubbornly refused to die (but whose riches were too precious to renounce entirely). When he rejected the constraints of the old place, Peter broke the mould of Muscovite politics. Soon, he would start presenting himself as Peter I, dropping the formal patronymic favoured by his predecessors. No longer tied to genealogy, no longer servant to the ancient sites and sacred rituals, he could determine for himself where power was to be exercised, what symbols it would develop, and also how to use the Kremlin spaces whose disposition had prescribed, for centuries, the rituals of his forefathers.39