Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The argument involved such major players that Lenin was forced to adjudicate personally. He made a few enquiries and discovered to his horror that the use of the royal apartments as emergency residences had resulted in ‘samovars being placed under eighteenth-century Gobelins [tapestries] and baby-clothes being dried over Augsburg tables’.99 It was a fire-hazard at the very least. Stalin was not permitted to annex the gracious rooms, and other colonists were soon moved out. From Stalin’s point of view, however, the story did not end in defeat. In 1921, when he returned from the civil war’s southern front, the leader rewarded him with apartment No. 1 in the so-called Poteshnyi Corpus, part of Aleksei Mikhailovich’s crumbling Poteshnyi Palace. It was a large flat, grand enough for the servants and children to have their own rooms, but its place in Lenin’s affections, its status as he signed it off to Stalin, can be judged from the fact that the previous occupant had been a woman very close to Lenin’s heart: his alleged mistress, the beautiful Inessa Armand.100

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  ‘Around the city, many talked of orgies in the Kremlin,’ a Red guard wrote in his memoir of these years. He was not talking about sex (that would come later), but about the greatest issue in most people’s lives at the time: food. ‘The Russian intelligentsia,’ he went on, ‘knowing that the treasures of generations of Russian tsars were preserved [in the Kremlin], assumed the Bolsheviks must be stuffing their faces.’101 At a time when the whole country was starving, such rumours were not only natural but damaging. Beyond the Kremlin walls, in a land of failed harvests and abandoned farms, the average Muscovite was eating a mere 1,700 calories a day by 1918, close to starvation rations.102 Any guaranteed supply, however simple, was a luxury. Hot meals were one of the perks of Kremlin life. But it was a far cry from the bacchanalia of later Soviet times. Junior Kremlin staff had only the most basic food, and even the elite ate modestly at first. ‘Instead of fresh meat,’ Trotsky wrote, ‘they served corned beef. The flour and the barley had sand in them. Only the red Ket caviare was plentiful, because its export had ceased.’103

  Austerity, however, did not last for long. It took just months for a hierarchy to form behind the Kremlin walls, for ‘higher’ staff to lord it over ‘lower’ ones and for almost everyone to start living better than the lesser mortals in the world outside. The excuse was that busy public servants should not waste their time on practicalities, but the effect was an inflation of luxury. Under the soviets, the people themselves were supposed to be the new tsar, but in this respect at least their leaders were content to act on their behalf. The rumours of privilege that were circulating in Moscow by 1920 had become so poisonous that Lenin created a special commission to investigate and report.

  Its findings painted a picture of self-righteous and growing excess. The bulk of Kremlin staff ate in the Central Executive Committee canteen, where each person was allowed just over 100 grams (roughly 4 ounces) of meat or fish at a sitting. There were also rations for bread, vegetables, rice, butter and sugar, none of which was orgiastic by any measure. What really might have sparked a riot was the list of items set aside for the elite. Ministers in the Council of People’s Commissars were thought to need 300 grams (12 ounces) of meat or fish at every meal, twice the other staff’s generous ration of rice or macaroni, and four times the regular amount of bread.104 No later document would ever show that these amounts had been officially reduced.105 Instead, the privileges multiplied. Elite families who found life in the Kremlin inconvenient, for instance, could soon take a generous hamper (and servants) to their country homes. By the early 1920s, the out-of-town mansions of former millionaires, most famously that of an oil magnate called Zubalov, had been assigned to Russia’s Stalins and Dzerzhinskys. From 1918, when he went there to recuperate from bullet-wounds, Lenin himself spent increasing amounts of time at Gorky, taking the air in a mansion that had lately belonged to a General and Mrs Reinbot.106

  The country houses on the estate at Zubalovo provided the setting for many of the parties and the fragrant summer days that Kremlin children of the 1930s later recalled in their memoirs. Even in Lenin’s time, the provision for what were euphemistically known as state rest-homes was generous. ‘We’ll spend gold on this,’ Lenin had promised in May 1918, ‘but the rest-homes will only be model ones if we can show that they have the best doctors and administrators, and not the usual Soviet bunglers and oafs.’107 The leader also wanted a secret transport connection between any retreat-complex and the Kremlin, but for the present his charmed elite made do with a small fleet of cars. You might have found them if you had walked past the Cavalry Building, behind the so-called ‘children’s wing’ of the palace, and through a stuccoed arch. The garages were ramshackle buildings, reeking of petrol-soaked rags, and they included a yard for lorries, armoured cars and other big mechanical beasts. A neglected corner behind them provided Malkov with the quiet spot he needed in 1918 when he received the order to shoot Lenin’s would-be assassin, Fanya Kaplan, an execution that he tried to disguise by running the engines of several lorries before he opened fire. It was also somewhere around here that he poured petrol over her remains and burned them.108 Nearby, meanwhile, in readiness for the Kremlin’s new masters, there gleamed a row of Packards, a Rolls-Royce, and, until it was taken from Lenin’s chauffeur at gunpoint in March 1918, at least one of the tsar’s own favourite Delaunay-Belleville limousines.109

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  The cars were kept inside the walls because the Kremlin’s latest tenants were afraid of everything from theft to kidnap and assassination. These fears were fully justified. When the government moved in in March 1918, the worst period of the civil war had barely started; in the months to come there would be fighting on the Don, in the Urals, Siberia, Ukraine, and even close to Moscow. Trotsky helped to take the Soviet people out of Europe’s war, but that decision, too, proved controversial. The treaty with Germany, signed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, provided for the surrender of some of the Russian empire’s richest land (in Poland, the Baltic and Ukraine), and it was also a betrayal of existing alliances. At the same time, the new regime’s social programme was earning it enemies in every wealthy street closer to home. The hapless population, caught in the middle once again, fought sometimes for its land or kin, sometimes for Lenin’s promises, and probably most of all for sheer survival. Supported, on and off, by the British, the Americans, and even the French, an ill-assorted collection of monarchists, nationalists, local patriots and anarchists aligned themselves against the Reds. At one dark moment, in the early summer of 1918, the crisis grew so threatening that Lenin ordered the pre-emptive murder of the entire royal family, who had been imprisoned in a mansion in the Ural town of Ekaterinburg. His officers promptly complied. Moscow’s own emergency came in 1919, when the White general, Anton Denikin, closed in from Tula and Orel, forcing the new capital to prepare for a siege.110 Hostilities continued into 1921, wrecking a land and a generation already harrowed by world war.

  The struggle for Russia’s future saw the burning of whole villages, the massacre of children; it witnessed every imaginable cruelty from mutilation to cannibalism. The conflict took the art of murder to extremes, impressive even to a people reared on tales of medieval saints. But violence was not the only tribulation that the citizens of the new Soviet state were now about to face. The First World War bequeathed an influenza epidemic, and Russians, like everyone else, died in their tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the mass movement of refugees provided easy routes for the spread of other scourges, including dysentery, typhus and cholera (two disinfection chambers were introduced to decontaminate visitors to the Kremlin111). No-one can be sure how many citizens of Lenin’s new republic died, for records were impossible to keep, but it is thought that between nine and fourteen million perished in the years 1917–21.112 A further two or three million fled, some to Europe, others to China. For those who remained, the future looked bleak. Moscow itself had emptied, its population falling by about 50 per cent. The survivors were thin and hollow-eyed, watchi
ng events with caution, confused and afraid.

  The new regime could not survive without these people’s physical support, their labour and their combat skills. But it also needed something that was even more unlikely in the circumstances: revolutionary true belief. Lenin’s ambition, after all, was nothing less than the remaking of the world. Military victory was crucial to his cause, and the Red Army, masterminded by Trotsky, fought an effective if at times desperate campaign to defeat all forms of organized counter-revolution in the field. Behind the lines, however, and certainly in Moscow, it was the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky’s so-called Extraordinary Commission, that was the more conspicuous instrument of the new age. More war-like than secret police, more ruthless than most armies, its tools included terror, intimidation and butchery on a gruesome scale. In August 1918, prompted by the successful assassination of a leading Petrograd Bolshevik and the attempt on Lenin’s life in Moscow, it unleashed a programme of wholesale execution. The bodies, thousands of them, were often left exactly where they fell. The idea was to teach survivors how to think, and as cultural revolutions go, it was a textbook case. The victims included entrepreneurs and priests, White-guardists, even shopkeepers. In the late summer of 1918, the sunlight glittered every morning over teeming clouds of blowflies.

  Whatever else bullets could do, however, they were not enough to win most people’s hearts. And this was a problem, for the Bolsheviks were not mere thugs. On paper – and in some places in fact – they were a government of visionaries, and this was where Russia’s creative artists were supposed to help. The optimists in the art world had been jubilant in 1917, seeing the revolution as their chance to follow long-held fantasies and remake human life. It took them some years to realize that their new patron was a traditionalist at heart, that Lenin’s dreams were rusty things, not headed for the stars. Space-ships and cubist paintings were beside the point. As everyone discovered in the end, Marxism saw progress as a single one-way track, along which the world’s people juddered forwards, stage by stage, like the travellers in an old bus with stubborn gears. The artists’ only real job was to get the grumbling passengers to stick to the right route. To that end, their first task was to create a new canon of saints and fallen heroes, communist-style, for this was thought to be the best way to inspire a superstitious, doubting populace. Like the courtiers of almost every old-time tsar, in other words, the servants of this revolutionary government were asked to find a way of turning Russian history to practical use.

  The ‘feudal’ Kremlin, bastion and symbol of the former age, was obviously a good place to start, as was Red Square as well as almost all central Moscow. These sites were ones where history could be reinterpreted on a serious scale. The work began in November 1917 with the martyrs’ requiem around the Kremlin graves, and it continued when the first red flag was hoisted on the Senate roof. Covetous eyes were no doubt squinting up at the tsars’ double-headed eagles even then, for they presided all too visibly above the proletarian citadel, but first there were more obvious targets to consider. In April 1918, a decree from the Central Executive Committee, approved by Lunacharsky, ordered that monuments thought lacking in artistic merit – equestrian statues of recent tsars being a case in point – should be removed without delay. In their place, new works, designed to glorify the values and heroes of the revolution, were to be planned and erected with all possible speed. The commissars announced a series of artistic competitions, which, it was hoped, would attract a new kind of entrant, not the usual self-perpetuating circle of bourgeois aesthetes. It was also hoped (indeed it was decreed) that the contestants would restrict themselves to cheap materials. The winning designers, whatever their background (and with luck it would be proletarian), would receive the funding to create the first iconic symbols of the new, popular, past.113

  Predictably, demolition was by far the simplest part of the enterprise. At the end of April 1918, Lenin came upon a group of lads from the Kremlin garrison labouring over something heavy. The story goes that they had taken the initiative to remove the cross from Vasnetsov’s neo-Russian monument to the murdered Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. The entire structure was soon gone, and Lenin talked of replacing it with a memorial to the grand duke’s assassin, Kalyaev.114 Other tsarist carbuncles, including the statues of Alexander III (beside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour) and Alexander II (in the Kremlin), followed the duke’s cross into a cart, though someone managed to make off with all the metal from the latter, probably with help from members of the Kremlin guard.115 But the task of making new things was perplexing. Revolutionary art was meant to be iconoclastic, and in the spirit of the times the people themselves were given the task of selecting the winning entries in the competition for new monuments. But the artistic instincts of some workers and most peasants were conservative. The road that led to all those dreary busts of men with beards – Marx, Lenin, even Spartacus and T chaikovsky – began with that contradiction.

  Lenin’s own tastes, in sculpture as in so much else, were those of a provincial schoolmaster. In consultation with a young architect, N. D. Vinogradov, he compiled a list of the historical figures whose busts he wished to see on Russia’s plinths, and he also demanded that instructive inscriptions and bas-reliefs should be fitted to prominent buildings, starting with the Kremlin. It was Lenin, too, who requested that a large statue of Tolstoy be erected opposite the main doors of the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral.116 Today, such monuments – and, of course, similar statues of Lenin himself – are the very stereotype of Soviet art, but the early 1920s in fact brimmed with far more exciting, even shocking, schemes. From Lentulov and Malevich to Vladimir Tatlin, the innovators longed to do their work. The proletarian poet Mikhail Gerasimov tried at one point to represent the Kremlin as a giant dynamo, electrifying the nation’s soul with a new kind of magnetic energy.117 Lenin was left fuming in his room. No-one seemed able to produce a bust of Karl Marx when he wanted one.118

  The most immediate pressure in 1918 came from the revolutionary calendar, for the workers’ carnival, the first great festival of the world’s first ever proletarian revolution, was due to be observed on 1 May. Moscow had been the capital for just three months, but Lenin was always sensitive to crowd propaganda, and that meant a Red Square parade. The Kremlin had to show a revolutionary face. To design the pageant, the Bolsheviks hired two famous brothers, the artists Leonid and Victor Vesnin. Money was promised, leave secured, and Pavel Malkov scoured the city for strings of bunting. By late April, the carpenters were putting up the scaffolding and building a stage. There were boxes of flags and yards of rope everywhere. The basement workshops near the Kremlin walls were cleaned, and groups of women turned up every day, their faces set on business.

  The women’s job was to sew together enormous sheets of red fabric, the aim of which became clear when the sun rose on the festival morning. Remarkably, the Kremlin’s round Kutafia Tower had been entirely wrapped in the red cloth. A double row of red flags led from it to the Trinity Tower behind, creating a scarlet corridor into the Kremlin itself. Evergreen garlands promised spring and natural abundance, while fiery banners proclaimed the freedom of labour and the victory of the Soviet republic. But the mournful theme of sacrifice was kept in mind. The martyrs’ graves beside the Kremlin wall were turfed for the occasion and heaped with fresh flowers. Every group, as it marched past, lowered its flag or banner in respect, and black flags lined the Kremlin walls behind the mounds of earth. In August, when the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower and clock were being repaired, a mechanic reset the famous bells. For years to come, they played a brisk, loud rendering of the ‘Internationale’ at 6 a.m., but at 9 a.m. and again at 3 p.m., whenever the new government required, they also played a funeral march.119

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  Just days after that May parade, a memorable religious service took place in the Kremlin. For centuries, Muscovites of a certain class had converged on the Dormition Cathedral for the greatest festival in Orthodox religion, the Christian celebration of eternal li
fe. For centuries, too, a procession of the cross, joined by hundreds of the faithful, had brought the Easter message to the streets with icons, chanted prayers and lines of priests. It was a feast more sacred and probably even better loved than western Europe’s Christmas, and in 1918 it fell just after the Bolshevik May Day. That coincidence may have helped persuade Lenin to issue a special permit for the Dormition Cathedral to be opened for the usual service and procession.120 Oranovsky, with his responsibility for Kremlin treasures of all kinds, remembered the episode as the most stressful of his life, the Latvian riflemen standing a tense guard as the great bells rang and the crowds filed in. The Kremlin would not see another Easter like it for seven decades.121 There would be no repeating all that bustle, not with the leaders’ lives at stake, to say nothing of the gold and sacred art. A request to hold a smaller procession in November 1918 was refused, by Malkov, on the pretext that the church’s erstwhile property in the Kremlin was being catalogued.122

  Outside the Kremlin, meanwhile, the contest for Russia itself grew ever more bitter. The church was fast becoming the Bolsheviks’ only major rival for the nation’s soul. In 1917, before the Bolshevik coup, it had been possible for lay people to hold utopian and Orthodox ideas simultaneously, to celebrate May Day and Easter in the same spirit of hope. Even pioneers like Tatlin had Orthodox roots, and many of the avant-garde had found their greatest inspiration in old icons. Lenin’s party refused these divided loyalties. It is likely that it killed at least 9,000 priests, mainly in 1918; as Lenin remarked, ‘the more representatives of the reactionary … priesthood that we can shoot … the better’.123 And saints themselves were seldom better off. In the spring of 1918, a group of devotees, alarmed by the Kremlin’s closure, asked to take charge of the remains of Metropolitan Aleksii, the founder of the Chudov Monastery, and to remove the coffin for safer keeping elsewhere.124 It was a modestly worded request, framed to spare the leader any inconvenience. The believers’ point was that Aleksii’s body, like those of other Kremlin saints, had to be tended, for the holy man was truly present, uncorrupted even by the scourge of death. A note in Lenin’s hand instructed his aide to reject the request. Instead, the coffin was to be opened at once and the contents examined in the presence of witnesses.125 The arrangements took a little while, but in 1919 a group of ‘scientific’ Bolsheviks unwrapped and exposed Aleksii’s remains as part of a nationwide campaign against the cult of the pre-revolutionary saints.126