Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  9

  Acropolis

  Conservatism was not the only cultural news in Nicholas II’s Russia. An urgent, vigorous demand for change had also found its voice during the nineteenth century. The outside world woke to the signals of this rather late. It even took its time to notice how creative the effects of restless energy could be. In May 1913, as every textbook lovingly records, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring opened in Paris, designed and performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s brilliant Ballets Russes. As sinuous woodwind solos drew them into a scene of abduction and sacrifice, an audience that included Maurice Ravel and Gertrude Stein, to say nothing of the dance critics of every newspaper from the New York Times to Le Figaro, recoiled in shock. Some later praised the pagan wildness on the stage, but many chose to be affronted by a spectacle of barbarism.1 If they had known their Vasnetsov, or studied recent Russian art, the critics might have been a little less surprised. Today, the production, though innovative as ballet, resembles nothing quite so much as a late-nineteenth-century essay in folklore and archaism.2 The menace it implied, moreover, was symptomatic of many other public debates in Russia, where conflicts were developing that would last far longer than the dance-writers’ outburst in the cultural press. In politics as in the arts, the empire had reached breaking-point.

  An exhibition that opened in February 1914 brought some of the tensions to the surface, at least as far as painting was concerned. The Society of Lovers of the Arts on Bolshaya Dmitrovka had been decked out with jaunty yellow flags for the occasion, and although visitors were sparse, the artists themselves were enthusiastic. Several members of the group involved, which called itself the Knave of Diamonds, had worked in France, and one of them had persuaded Picasso to send a canvas to the show. There were also contributions by Georges Braque and Henri Le Fauconnier, but the bulk of the display was local work. Bright colours filled the air like unexpected music; Aristarkh Lentulov’s canvas of St Basil’s Cathedral, for instance, managed to be even more effervescent than the building itself, and his cubist Moscow positively blazed. Still, many critics failed to pick up on the vigour of it all. They noted that the group had a strong taste for nature morte (‘there are a lot of apples’), but complained that its more ambitious paintings failed the naturalism test. Some works really did defy all reason. One canvas, for instance, was covered with some greenish geometric shapes, in the centre of which the artist had added a lifelike lotto ticket. On checking the catalogue, it turned out that the subject was meant to be A Lady in a Tram.3 Its artist, Kasimir Malevich, was a man who upset fellow-painters, let alone critics. ‘Creation,’ he was soon to write, ‘is present in pictures only where there is form which borrows nothing already created in nature.’4

  Moscow rediscovered its vigorous imagination in the age of the avant-garde. The city hosted innovators of all kinds, from the composer Alexander Scriabin to the theatrical director Konstantin Stanislavsky. The architectural legacy of the time, preserved in the brick and curved wrought iron of Fedor Shekhtel’s mansions in the style moderne, still brings most visitors to a full stop, amazed to find pink walls and painted flowers in the streets near Patriarch’s Ponds. Discredited though they appear today, the political and social hopes of these decades were just as thrilling. Science, art and social fantasies combined: optimists dreamed of universal happiness, abundance, immortality. The same philosopher could write of folk crafts and space-travel to Mars, the same artist consider colour’s psychic resonances and a plan for self-propelled air flight. Even the Kremlin played a part, for one visionary, inspired by Russia’s spiritual path, proposed its domes and towers as the architectural prototype for a string of utopian communes.5 For him (and for countless others), the citadel’s iconic silhouette was not so much an heirloom as the pointer to a future in which Russia’s unique spirit could redeem the world. Almost anything seemed possible, and hope, unrealized and unexamined, seemed to unite the fantasists in common cause. Beneath the high, forbidding, very un-utopian walls of the real Kremlin, the energy of Russia’s silver age rolled out in rainbow colours as much as those percussive, shamanistic chords.

  It helped that these were also times of economic boom. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Muscovite elite was almost entirely made up of families whose wealth derived from trade, industry and investment. The millionaire Tretyakovs and Ryabushinskys, the Morozovs and the Botkins had real political clout, and their people dominated the city’s governing chamber, the Duma.6 Many were imaginative public givers, and it was they who paid for the new concert-halls and art galleries and the experimental theatre where plays like Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard were premiered. Among their other plans was a scheme for an underground transport system, the metro, which engineers hoped to open in 1920.7 Technology like this allowed the city to expand in every plane. In 1916 alone, the tram network accounted for 405 million journeys, more than 300 for each citizen.8 Another new technology, the elevator, inspired a revolt against the constrictions of the ubiquitous faux-Byzantine building style. ‘With the beginning of the new century,’ wrote Boris Pasternak,

  everything changed as if by magic. Moscow was suddenly gripped by the spirit of trade and commerce of the great capital cities … Before you knew it, there were gigantic brick buildings soaring skywards on every street. At that moment Moscow – and not, as hitherto, St Petersburg – gave birth to a new Russian architecture, that of a young, modern, vigorous metropolis.9

  The fruits of the city’s rapidly expanding growth were not equally shared. The hatreds of 1905, repressed and silenced by police, smouldered like embers waiting for a draught. In places they were kept alive by groups of revolutionaries, and notably by Marxist activists of various types, some of them aligned with larger, illegal, parties. Injustice helped write their agenda, and it gave them a potential constituency of millions. The poor, of course, had little power themselves, a fact that also helped explain the neglect and degradation of the districts where they were condemned to live. In Moscow alone, a chronic shortage of housing obliged them to pack into basements and barracks, renting beds for periods of hours and sharing bugs along with their political ideas. Not surprisingly, the city had one of the highest death-rates in Europe.10 The prime causes were soaring levels of infant mortality and a general lack of clean water and sewers, but it also mattered that labour legislation was almost unknown, industrial accidents routine, and that the city suffered from a perpetual lack of hospital beds.11 The gap between rich and poor was flagrant, provocative and growing.

  And then, without a thought for art or bread, Russia entered Europe’s war. ‘Let the unity of the Tsar and His people become yet stronger,’ Nicholas II declared in his manifesto. ‘Let Russia rise as one person.’12 Like those of every other European nation, his subjects drank deep on such rhetoric, forgetting other troubles for one final, fervent season. Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot on 28 June 1914. On 23 July, Serbia received an Austrian ultimatum threatening punitive war. The Serbs appealed for Russian help, and St Petersburg, dreaming of Slavic brotherhood and Balkan influence, responded. Russia’s general mobilization began on 30 July. In August, Moscow put out its national flags, began collections for the war effort, and cheered each new batch of recruits as they marched past the Kremlin walls.

  The citadel had lately seemed irrelevant to Moscow’s modern businessmen. Real life had focused on the banks, the trading rows, the restaurants and theatre stalls. But the war gave the Kremlin a renewed importance; a practical role to equal its ceremonial one. Safe from enemy machine-guns, it found its place as the repository of Russia’s crown jewels and the bulk of the nation’s gold bullion. A special strongroom was prepared to house the treasures of imperial St Petersburg and also the state gold-reserves of vulnerable allies like Romania.13 Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s status as an imperial palace, the property of the tsars, allowed the Romanovs to put it to a novel use. In 1914, the empress Alexandra ordered that a hospital for officers should be created somewhere on the Kremlin hi
ll. The concession to mere citizens was a serious one, implying profanation of the consecrated ground, but the idea was to emphasize the sacred nature of this war. There was also something intimate, a direct personal link, in a hospital that bore the empress’s name. Fifty beds were envisaged, though a contingency was proposed ‘should all of these be occupied’.14 As the first casualties arrived, the empress requested that she be informed of each officer’s name and the details of his wounds. The impression that these men were almost family could only have been reinforced at Easter 1915 (and again in 1916) when each of the patients in the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna hospital received a personal gift, a small china egg, hand-decorated with the imperial coat of arms.15

  What started as a noble act, however, soon became absurd. Russia’s war was a disaster. The troops were brave – their courage in the face of death was legendary – but they were not prepared to fight this bitter war. In the first year alone, their losses were about four million men.16 The soldiers fell to better-equipped and better-led opponents, to poor transport networks on their own side, and to the ebbing of morale. If the empress had taken the time to read the reports on ‘her’ officers, she would have been alarmed at the details of shell-wounds, head injuries and amputations. The Kremlin hospital began its life in the spirit of Marie Antoinette’s toy farm in eighteenth-century Versailles, complete with snowy palace linen on the beds, but it ended in chaos and squalor. The plight of the casualties was desperate, their numbers overwhelming. Distracted by problems at court, the empress lost interest, leaving the enterprise to Moscow’s city government.17 Poignantly, the establishment of Alexandra’s Kremlin hospital had displaced a little-visited and rather drab museum, a collection dedicated to Moscow’s war of 1812.

  * * *

  The Russian revolution of 1917 changed the Kremlin’s reputation fundamentally, for ever linking it with the red flag. The opening events in that drama, however, took place in St Petersburg, whose German-sounding name had been changed, on the outbreak of war, to the more Slavonic Petrograd. That bracing rebaptism aside, the city’s patriotic enthusiasm had evaporated as rapidly as Moscow’s after 1914. From national politicians in the Imperial Duma to the factory workers who supplied the troops, the ranks of those who had lost faith in Nicholas II seemed to swell by the day. The tsar had taken personal command of the armed forces in September 1915, a move that doomed the war effort and then the monarchy itself. Once he was giving orders at the front, every new defeat appeared to be his fault, while back at home his government lurched from crisis to crisis under the doubtful leadership of a succession of unpopular ministers and his foreign-born consort, ‘the German woman’, Empress Alexandra.

  The centuries-old institution of tsarism was not broken in battle, however, but by a poor supply of bread. There had been hunger in the capital for months, largely because of failures in the transport system. But the catalyst was an unexpected change. On International Women’s Day, 23 February 1917, the crowds were ready to forget their troubles for a moment and join peaceful marches in the name of equal rights. The demonstrators were surprised to meet no credible resistance from the tsar’s cossacks. That absence of repression, combined with real grievances about their food and freedom, encouraged larger crowds to turn out in the next two days, and soon the city-centre streets were more or less in the protesters’ hands. On 25 February, a fatal intervention by Nicholas II turned this turbulence into a revolution. From his headquarters at the front, the tsar unwisely ordered the chief of the Petrograd Military District to ‘put down the disorders by tomorrow’. Bloodshed ensued, exactly as in 1905, but this time many garrison troops, including large numbers of teenage conscripts, were starting to become as disaffected as the crowds.18 Almost overnight, thousands joined Petrograd’s workers in denouncing the tsar’s brutality and manifest injustice. As the instruments of state control dissolved under the people’s very eyes, old fears and prohibitions seemed to melt. In early March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Romanov tsar, was forced to abdicate.19

  Rapid negotiations followed, as a result of which the Imperial Duma stepped aside to make way for a new Provisional Government. Besuited politicians, already yesterday’s men, chiselled away at its legal details while the people who had forced the pace – the lanky boys and tired women, the soldiers and the dissident police – gathered for stormy, jubilant meetings, passing ambitious resolutions about everyone’s freedom and rights. Many formed self-governing councils, or soviets, at their places of work. These also spent their days and nights in ardent, impromptu debate. However hungry everyone remained, the mood in the city was optimistic, even celebratory. No-one imagined how hard the road ahead was likely to be. Even the war seemed winnable. Russia had become a republic.

  Moscow followed the imperial capital’s lead with little protest. At one point, its police had been preparing to resist all change, but when the news of Nicholas’ abdication reached the city, the old order fell apart like a moth-eaten curtain. A British businessman, Allan Monk-house, turned up at the factory that he managed to find the engines strangely silent. When he asked a group of workers what had happened, they replied ‘in chorus, and in one word, “Freedom.”’20 The squares outside were already filling. ‘The majority of the crowd consisted of people who that morning had been praying for the good health of the imperial family,’ a Moscow worker, Eduard Dune, would later write. ‘But today there was a festival on the streets … I scented that atmosphere of joy, when everyone you meet seems close to you, your flesh and blood, when people look at one another with eyes full of love.’21 By afternoon, the prisons had been opened and the victims of tsarist repression were free. Quick-witted entrepreneurs piled their stalls with lengths of red calico ribbon; the stock was cleared in minutes, and eager revellers started tearing the strips into smaller shreds so that all could wear the revolution’s badge.22 Even the crack troops who had been sent to quell the carnival ended up marching into town with red scraps tied to their bayonets, cheerfully singing the ‘Marseillaise’.

  The liberation of Moscow did not involve the royal family, most of whom were still in Petrograd, but the Romanovs’ citadel and residence could not remain untouched for long. Less than four days after the tsar had gone, Moscow had a new city government, complete with brand new rubber stamps and an impressive supply of headed paper. The decrees rolled out like ticker-tape, establishing committees, approving freedoms, and outlining new rights. It did not take long for the Kremlin to appear on an agenda. As a former royal property, it was no longer owned by any dynasty or clique. Instead, the new administration annexed it in the name of democratic Moscow, dismissing the palace employees, as stooges of the fallen tsar, in the same breath.23 As far as the revolutionaries were concerned, that was the job done for the coming months.

  The decree that claimed the Kremlin on behalf of Moscow was meant to be another blow for freedom, but like so much in these dramatic weeks it was ill-conceived. The great walled complex was not so easy to reform. For one thing, there was all that treasure, huge repositories of gold. The streets outside the citadel were thronged with people, there were firearms and former prisoners about, and the maligned palace staff were quick to point out that no-one was as qualified as they to take care of the fortress and the valuables inside. The new administration drew back, and soon Prince Odoevsky-Maslov, who had managed to keep his post of Kremlin superintendent (and his Kremlin residence), was giving orders of his own. Whatever Moscow’s government might think, the prince made clear that no item of palace property was to be handed out, even to the city’s military officials, without his written approval. He also stipulated, with icy confidence, that any object that had disappeared in the first hours of revolution (the list included many of the palace horses) should be returned at once.24

  The Kremlin’s humbler staff were also making plans. In April 1917, they formed a union. Its demands included fair pay, job security and, movingly, the right that palace servants should not be known as lackeys. Their salaries had not been raised since
1902, retainers wrote, and were also much lower than those of their counterparts in Petrograd. It would be good to put that injustice to rights, but in the short term most were keenest to protect their pensions and to hold on to their rooms. At a time of rent-inflation and social uncertainty, even a basement in an old building was an asset.25 Odoevsky-Maslov tried to find the instigators of the new union, but there is no record of disciplinary action.26 That spring, after all, he needed every available pair of hands to defend the old place, a purpose that was also best served if its routines stayed intact. The calls for higher pay and guaranteed retirement echoed into empty air, but the staff dug into their small flats, found floor space for their homeless friends and relatives, and waited to see what would happen next.

  For Moscow’s artists, however, these were forward-thinking times. In April, a meeting to discuss their role in the new state was so over-subscribed that it had to be held in a building usually reserved for the popular Solomon’s Circus.27 Three thousand people came to share their views about democracy and art, discussing everything from theatre and music to the future of books. Malevich and his visionary rival, Vladimir Tatlin, were both present, as were some members of the Knave of Diamonds group (notably Petr Konchalovsky), but so – in rather different clothes – were figures like the millionaire collector Sergei Shchukin (for whom Matisse had just painted a version of La Danse) and the curator of the Tretyakov Gallery, Igor Grabar, celebrated author of a recently published history of Russian art.