Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  The Saviour in the Forest came down on a spring night, possibly on 1 May 1933. Fireworks were handy things whenever real explosions needed to be masked. Although archival sources now confirm that the decision to remove the church was taken by the Politburo in September 1932, the details of the demolition job, which was almost certainly carried out by the secret police, remain obscure.44 Publicity was stifled, so the church’s loss was not noticed abroad. In 1955, two decades after it had vanished into dust, the art historian Arthur Voyce published a study of the Kremlin that included a section, with pictures, on its oldest building, which he wrongly thought to be extant.45 Even now, photographs of the demolition remain inaccessible, as does the fate of the original carved stone. The goal, in 1933, was not to doodle in history’s margins but to rewrite whole chapters at a time, erasing inconvenient pasts as if they had never happened. Even the church’s foundations were lost. In 2009, when I was taken on a tour of the Kremlin’s hidden chambers, my expert guide looked out across the palace yard and pursed her lips. Her verdict on the Soviet block that now stood on the old cathedral site was economical: ‘A pig-sty will always be a pig-sty.’

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  The Kremlin’s rebranding was gathering pace. By 1937, on Stalin’s orders, the images of St Nicholas and the Saviour had vanished from their respective gatehouses. Only the proposal, by Stalin’s close friend Abel Enukidze, to paint the brick-red outer walls light grey caused the regime to pause. That idea was abandoned, but in 1935, following recommendations by Grabar, the double-headed eagles on the towers were finally removed.46 Their replacements, at first, were three huge metal-plated stars, each decorated with the Communist Party’s hammer and sickle, but though these had been set with semi-precious stones, the metal fittings soon corroded and the stars as a whole were too heavy. In 1937, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution, they were dismantled in their turn, to be replaced by the red stars that everybody knows today. Made of ruby-coloured glass and lit from inside by electric lamps, these substitutes, each more than ten feet across, provided just the right image. They were so solid that they outlasted the Soviet empire.47 The Kremlin had transcended its Muscovite past. Bleaker now, and heavily guarded, it was the perfect focal point for the windswept squares and granite-fronted boulevards of Stalin’s capital.

  Inside, however, there were still some corners of the citadel that the reformers did not try to improve. Even Stalin did not raise a hammer to the Dormition Cathedral, though objects from its treasury continued disappearing to fund state projects.48 As the place where every ruler had been crowned since Ivan the Terrible, it must have held a special magic, not least for Stalin himself. The Annunciation and Archangel cathedrals endured, too, though their frescoes and icons suffered badly from the damp that descended as soon as they were locked in 1918. In 1938, a group of experts from the Kremlin’s Armoury Museum pronounced these buildings ‘chaotic, dirty and disorderly’. It was a shock, twenty years into the new age, to find the costly chandeliers in a heap on the tile floor, while ecclesiastical treasures that should have been stored in a museum were stacked like jumble in a couple of cupboards.49 But though the curators’ concerns were genuine, they could do little to remedy the situation. Their museum had troubles of its own.

  Before her husband’s fall, Natalya Trotskaya had managed to preserve the Armoury Chamber as a state museum, but it had not become the public attraction she envisaged. At best, a few groups visited each month, always pre-booked and often from the higher ranks of the trade unions and government. A foreigner who visited on a tour in the 1930s was surprised to see his Russian guide looking enviously at an ancient Baedeker he was carrying in his pocket. It turned out that the Russian, a local man, had never set foot in the Kremlin before, still less read anything reliable about its past.50 Until the war, however, when Moscow faced bombardment and potential invasion, the Armoury Museum was not entirely closed. Its main problem was to fend off government scavengers, most of whom viewed treasure as hard currency in crude bulk form.51 First came Pomgol, the committee for relieving the famine of 1921. From 1928, it was the turn of the Finance Commissariat (Narkomfin), whose need for currency increased with every step towards industrialization and inter-war rearmament. It did not matter what an object in the great collection meant. The point was to get it abroad, and icons, pearl-encrusted robes, jewels and Fabergé eggs were all fair game. Outside Moscow, the nation’s remaining monasteries were also closing one by one, and treasure from their strongrooms turned up in the Kremlin for cataloguing (and pre-export triage) almost every week. By 1929, the museum’s director, Dmitry Ivanov, could stand no further strain. His health in ruins, he retired. By this time, many of his better staff had also left their posts.52

  Ivanov’s successor was a true son of the new regime. By this stage, jobs in the workers’ paradise were being assigned on the basis of a candidate’s social origin rather than any relevant professional experience.53 The one employer in the land – the state – made sure that workers ‘from the bench’ were promoted to directorships, to boards of educational and scientific management, and, in the Kremlin’s case, to curate a museum of priceless art. Sergei Monakhitin, brought to the Kremlin from the Borets armaments factory in 1929, aimed to liquidate the museum’s ‘patriarchal’ heritage, an exercise that involved acceding to the industrializers’ regular demands for gold.54 In 1930, the year of the Sixteenth Party Congress, he also agreed to devote an exhibition to defence, arranging objects in his now-empty vitrines to illustrate steel refinement and weapons manufacture. The Marxist scheme of historical progress dictated themes for later exhibitions, which often featured stages in the development of the means of production. It turned out that there was almost nothing in the museum’s collection that could show what life was like for working-class Slavs in the so-called feudal era, so models had to be made and landscapes painted to create the right sort of mood. Fakes, in other words, replaced the real treasures the museum had lost.

  It was a futile, even tragic, labour. While employees packed up the real pride of the museum, now just so much silver and gold, their bosses replaced it with exhibits that had nothing to do with the site, its history, or any lived reality on earth. And their compliance did not even save them from arrest. In December 1934, Stalin’s comrade, Sergei Kirov, was murdered in his Leningrad office by a killer who had managed to equip himself with a valid pass to the city’s Party headquarters as well as a loaded gun. Stalin concluded that security should be tightened everywhere. His entourage, the real elite, were each assigned a full-time detail of bodyguards, and also obliged to adopt precautions that ranged from spy-devices for their cars to secret codes for almost everything.55 A purge of Kremlin staff was inevitable, and Monakhitin’s team was not exempt.56 The Armoury Museum director himself was replaced by Kupriyan Maslov, a former Red Army commander with twelve years’ experience in the security organs.57 Other museum staff disappeared into the stronghold of Moscow’s secret police, the Lubyanka, and many of the rest resigned and fled before the same fate could befall them. By 1936 the Armoury Museum was barely functioning.

  For all that, the new director wanted the place to look successful, and to present a bright face to the world. In April 1936, when any Muscovite who wanted a new suit could expect to stand in a six-hour queue, Maslov decreed that his staff should be ‘dressed in clean clothes’, and that they should be ‘neat and courteous in their relations with one another and with visitors’. He reasoned that anyone, however hungry, could force a smile, but to make sure of the grooming and attire he also fitted out a staff wardrobe, from which, at the first sign of a visitor, the more sartorially challenged of his staff could snatch something respectable. This wardrobe could have gone into an exhibition about Soviet life in its own right, for it contained the whole range of scarce but locally produced ties and shoes, hats, shirts, clean collars and even pairs of ladies’ stockings.58 By the beginning of 1939, however, there was almost no-one around to wear the stuff. The museum had only two
guides left.59

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  The Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union assembled in the reappointed Kremlin Palace in January 1934. There were almost two thousand delegates, and they came from every republic and region in the Soviet empire. For two weeks, they listened to a lot of rambling speeches and pre-scripted, tedious debates. The room was always over-hot and the speakers, who often held forth for three or four hours at a stretch, were not always audible towards the back, but the tone of the gathering was so euphoric that it was later dubbed the ‘Congress of Victors’. In private, however, at least one bystander rechristened it ‘the Congress of the Victor’.60 Josef Stalin’s primacy within the Party elite had been established at the end of 1929, when the state-controlled press had celebrated his fiftieth birthday (though actually it was his fifty-first61) by launching what was later called the ‘cult of personality’. He had defeated every rival by his relentless version of politics. By the time of the meeting in 1934, Trotsky had fled, but all the others trooped up to the speakers’ platform to sing Stalin’s praises. They ranged from Zinoviev and Kamenev (Lenin’s one-time aides) to Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky (a trio recently accused of resistance to Stalin’s more excessive economic plans), and they were all veterans of struggle, politics, and civil war. Within five years, all were dead, and over half the delegates who had cheered them on had also been arrested or shot.

  One key to Stalin’s seemingly uncanny power was the network of spies and thugs who reported to him alone.62 Since Ivan III, if not before, every regime in the Kremlin had placed an unhealthy emphasis on systems of control, on locks and spy-holes, guards and hidden passageways, but Stalin’s was an extreme case. The system he inherited on Lenin’s death had been preoccupied with secrecy. There were ciphers and codes for almost all government work, and information about anything from social unrest to the real state of the nation’s economic life was classified.63 The value placed on all of this was made plain in 1922, when a leading Bolshevik offered a reward of a hundred million rubles for the return of a briefcase containing secret documents and an encryption code.64 Inside the Kremlin through the civil war, the country’s leaders used a system of field telephones, which was considered more secure than a conventional exchange until new secret lines could be installed in 1923.65 But the Cheka, and its successors, the GPU and the NKVD, spied on them all, and beyond them a further, yet more inner group, Stalin’s personal network, reported directly to his office on everything from the economy to local gossip and the foibles of the Kremlin commandant. Technology soon played a part – the Kremlin was riddled with ducting, passageways and secret bugs66 – but diligent interrogation, hours of reading, and a menu of low-level crime on the state’s own behalf (break-ins and blackmail, for a start67) formed the system’s backbone. ‘You could not even sneeze,’ a former Kremlin aide remarked, ‘without the GPU knowing it.’68

  Although he lived in the Kremlin, Stalin’s office was originally located in the Central Committee’s building on nearby Old Square, where bureaucrats worked with the Party’s personnel and other operational records. His move to more secure quarters was prompted by an alleged attempt on his life. In 1931, he and the Secret Department of the Central Committee took over a suite of offices in the corner of the Senate Building (now rechristened ‘Kremlin Corpus No. 1’), close to the Nikolsky gates. Stalin’s new sanctum, a pair of rooms, was austere, smoke-filled, and equipped with books, maps, a globe and portraits of Lenin and Kutuzov.69 To reach it (if you had the right papers) you climbed a short flight of carpetless steps from the courtyard and crossed a guard-filled anteroom. Beyond, along an impressive stretch of corridor (‘like a museum’, one witness recalled70), there were several offices, the largest of which was a reception-room in which Stalin’s private staff would be at work. Until his death in 1935, Ivan Tovstukha was the leader’s right-hand man. Thereafter, the job passed to Alexander Poskrebyshev, the head of the Central Committee’s Secret Department and co-ordinator of everything from Stalin’s diary of appointments to classified intelligence reports.71 No-one entered Stalin’s room without speaking to Poskrebyshev, and no-one spoke to Poskrebyshev without a nod from Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s chief bodyguard. As well as making use of secrets, Stalin exploited fully the power of awe.

  His other trump card, often, was straight material largesse. The Muscovite state of the first Romanovs had operated by granting privileges (as opposed to respecting rights), and this court used a similar technique.72 In the 1930s, the shops were empty and private trade all but extinct, so goods and services were parcelled out, rather than purchased openly, and individuals had no consumer choice. Even ordinary employees, including factory workers and labourers, received small parcels of food as well as pay each week. Party members, the elite, could expect a whole range of other benefits, graded to reflect minute variations in status. Some went on holiday to Black Sea spas, others cut open tins of caviare, but privilege of any kind was proof of civic worth, and its withdrawal was often the harbinger of disgrace and possible arrest. In the shadow of the Gulag in the 1930s, a length of quality cloth or pair of boots was more than merely scarce and precious. Its arrival was a real relief. When you unpacked your precious box, a reward for the toils of Party membership, a complimentary tin of fish was as good as a government reprieve.

  The little treats were important at congress-time. It was an honour anyway for the provincials to visit Moscow, let alone the Kremlin itself, but there were other signs that proved the worth of Party men. In June 1930, for instance, each delegate to the Sixteenth Congress was issued with a set of tokens that they could exchange for goods. The list would have done justice to the seventeenth-century Muscovite court. On opening the envelope, no doubt bearing an official stamp in violet ink, each would have found that he could buy three bars of rationed soap (two of household quality, one marginally less rough), 800 grams (13⁄4 pounds) each of meat and cheese, a kilogram (just over 2 pounds) of salami and supplies of tinned food, sugar and cigarettes. Delegates were also to be fitted out with a rubberized raincoat each, the fabric for a suit, two sets of underwear and a pair of shoes. As a cynic noted in his private diary, the Party men who gave their ‘stormy applause’ to speeches about the country’s ‘economic achievements’ would all have had in mind their private glee, just hours before, as they unpacked a precious lump of soap back in their hostel room.73 It might have been humiliating to queue with all the rest, and even to accept the feudal-style largesse, but no-one was about to lose the parcels – sausage, rainproof coat and all – by hesitating later when they were required to vote. This was the congress that triumphantly agreed to meet the targets of the nation’s economic Five Year Plan in four years.

  In such a system, it was also natural that the elite should have the best. The Kremlin was more exclusive than any club. First, in the early 1920s, came the shop (unimaginatively called ‘Kremlin’), located on the first floor of the former kitchen block, where merchandise could not be viewed, still less purchased, by anyone who did not have a special pass. The closed store turned out to be such a good idea that it was copied, with diminishing levels of opulence, by every public body from the secret police to larger factories and mines.74 To protect the privacy of Kremlin shoppers (especially when the premises moved out to GUM), the windows of the elite store were masked with giant posters of the champions of the world’s hungry and oppressed, Lenin and Marx.75 Next came the private clinics, private spas, and the private canteen. Lydia Shatunovskaya, who lived above the Kremlin canteen in the 1920s, recalled that it was always busy. In the early evening, as another witness, Sergei Dmitrievsky, confirmed, it was as if Moscow’s entire political class was there. The food was traditional and Russian, with home-baked bread and little pies, milk, kvass, and endless cups of tea, but the prices, as Shatunovskaya observed, were ‘practically symbolic’. While Moscow went hungry and the peasants starved, Kremlin diners lingered noisily over greasy soup and cucumbers, their conversation – in this secure place – al
ways turning to the people at the top.76 But hygiene here was little different from the general public norm. It is perversely gratifying to learn that almost every member of this hypocritical elite was ill with something almost all the time.77

  Though rumours of the closed shops and the private spas built up the charisma of power, it was vital, in the workers’ state, that the truth remained veiled. No-one was supposed to flaunt their wealth, and no-one could, for nothing was really secure, and the state could take everything away as quickly as it had given it. Even senior politicians and administrators had to petition the head of the Central Executive Commission, Abel Enukidze, for favours such as apartment repairs, sick leave, and the cash and permits for their holidays.78 There were no special, ostentatious robes for Stalin’s incarnation of the Kremlin court, either. ‘The tablecloths are clean,’ Dmitrievsky wrote, ‘but the atmosphere is domestic.’ He doubted that there were more than three dinner-jackets anywhere in the fortress in the 1920s, and Lunacharsky (‘the dandy’) was the only person who wore one regularly. The head of protocol at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, a man called Florinsky, once tried to make the right impression by travelling to meet a foreign visitor in a borrowed top hat. When a group of boys caught sight of him in a street near the Kremlin they started to cheer, skipping beside his car and shouting: ‘The circus has come, the circus has come!’79