Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin
Page 45
Within the limits of a straitened budget and distorting ideology, however, the Kremlin staff entered an age of opportunity at last. Igor Grabar died in 1960. The generation that came after him was almost entirely Soviet-educated, but culture was as valued by this younger intellectual elite as it had been by their fathers. Fresh teams of employees worked doggedly, producing careful papers, debating origins and authorship and analysing ancient paint. There were collective publishing ventures, but the high points were the formal conferences, interminable and stiflingly prestigious. Abroad, the discoveries that Soviet researchers made were often overlooked (or dismissed on the grounds of bias), but volumes in the Kremlin library are witness to the heroism of its many expert staff. They analysed fragments of sculpture, reconstructed frescoes, and traced the early shapes of the great cathedrals.32 With tiny budgets, and often in the teeth of interference from the commandant and political elite, they pursued real scholarship.33 They even struggled with diplomacy, and in 1979, the first joint exhibition in fifty years toured outside Russia, a show collected to display the sheer profusion of the Kremlin’s cultural wealth. It included sixteenth-century reliquaries and a gilded copy of the Gospels from 1568, a copy of the Cap of Monomakh, and icons dating from the middle of the twelfth century. ‘Treasures from the Kremlin’ was supported, notwithstanding the Cold War, by New York’s Metropolitan Museum.34
The post-war years were also a boom time for Soviet archaeologists, with opportunities to dig in war-damaged regions like Novgorod, Pskov and Kiev, but while academic knowledge of these places grew apace, the buried history of the Moscow Kremlin remained mysterious. It had been near-impossible to dig in Stalin’s day: subterranean work was reserved for the secret police. Khrushchev was less concerned with security, but his very openness presented Moscow’s specialists with a new problem. There might now be a real chance of access, and even of state funds, but no-one could agree who was to have the privilege of digging in the Kremlin first.35
The answer, unexpectedly, came from the underground public lavatories outside the gates. Their pit was still being excavated in the summer of 1956 when the archaeologist Mikhail Rabinovich, a man known for his expeditions to Novgorod, paid his first visit to the newly opened Kremlin. Many years later, he still remembered the horror he felt when greeted at the ticket-holders’ entrance by a yawning hole in the ground. The iron bucket of a giant digger was scooping at the earth, and each enormous gulp bore off the record of six hundred years. Rabinovich wasted no time, demanding access to a telephone against the clank and rumble of the huge machines. After several calls he found the right man. The Kremlin commandant, Aleksandr Vedenin, turned out to be a cultured person with an interest in history. The digger’s engines were switched off.36
It was a sudden, and an unexpected, debut. Rabinovich assembled a team, co-opted an eminent colleague called Nikolai Voronin, and began to dig. That year, the two men mapped the brick embankments of the old Neglinnaya, but there were greater finds to come. Although they seemed fated to work in the shadow of enormous cranes, the team would be the first to excavate the west and south-west portions of the Kremlin using modern surveying techniques. It was always a last-minute scramble, a case of glimpses snatched before another vast construction scheme began. Summer after summer, the archaeologists had to race against impatient site-managers with deadlines of their own to meet, and a good deal of the work was done in haste by inexperienced volunteers. In 1963, however, two years after the last of these expeditions, Voronin and Rabinovich published their findings, the first really new material on the Kremlin’s early history to appear in print since Sytin’s reports in the 1930s.37
The technology and time available were so limited that Rabinovich and Voronin could often do no more than confirm nineteenth-century theories. The usual ideological pressures were also there, for even at this time it did not pay to deviate from the official line. For all that, the pair were able to add important details about the Kremlin’s original topography, the design and layout of early fortifications, and the thousand-year-long patterns of settlement. They also located the foundations of the tsaritsa’s chambers (built for Natalya Naryshkina at the end of the seventeenth century), remnants of the old prikazy, and traces of Boris Godunov’s palace. The Kremlin, they discovered, had the deepest of urban roots. A fort and then a trading-post, it had never been just an agricultural settlement. For a good communist, for whom the peasants always were the lowest and most boorish social tier, there was a snobbish comfort in that kind of news.
In the wake of Voronin and Rabinovich, the Kremlin’s first official archaeologist, N. S. Sheliapina, was appointed in 1967. The authorities also agreed to fund an exhibition of archaeological finds, although the site they chose was an uninviting crypt under the Annunciation Cathedral. The show, which still exists today, was suspended for years when the building was closed for repair after 1979.38 But those who missed it at the time (and still miss it now, for tickets are not easily obtained) could console themselves with the idea that it was probably a dull affair. There was certainly little enough to attract the masses in the exhibition’s cheaply produced official catalogue. Fragments of bronze and shards of coloured glass were meat and drink to the professionals, but even educated members of the public might have struggled with the dim, brownish displays. If history really began with Marx and Lenin, after all, it was not clear what a person was to make of a half-rotted seventeenth-century musketeer’s boot.39 The people’s history in Soviet times was simpler, firmer, brightly coloured; authentic tissue from the past was out of place.
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Despite the tourists and the research teams, the Kremlin remained primarily government territory. It was a conundrum, for the old idea of a museum-reserve had not entirely disappeared. When Stalin died, no-one knew quite how his successors would decide to deal with the place. The case for letting the curators take over was strong, not least because the politicians of the 1950s still knew every recent Kremlin ghost by name. What stopped them from deserting the old place on this occasion was not so much its symbolic value as its practical utility. By 1953, the citadel was a tyrant’s dream, defended by its own picked guards and furnished with enough military hardware to wage a medium-sized war.40 Its warren of state-rooms and offices was ramshackle, but all were securely bugged, and then there were those bunkers and communications networks underground.41 At a time when other Russians had to queue to make phone calls, the Kremlin had its own telephone and wireless system (located next to the Senate). Cutting-edge technology (because of their distinctive ring, the leaders’ phones were called ‘cuckoos’) connected its occupants with each other if not directly with the world.42 The network, which relied, after the Cold War ended, on communications and encryption equipment imported from Britain (and developed in laboratories at Malvern), was the pride of the political elite, whose hierarchy was partly based on levels of access to it.43
To leave all that untenanted would have been profligate, but Khrushchev did consider the idea. He toyed with a plan to move parts of the government away from central Moscow and up to the breezier south-west. Stalin had chosen this district for his vast post-war university complex, and there was an enclosed estate of elite housing nearby, offering every comfort in domestic terms. For a moment, it was tempting to think of moving the government there, too. Khrushchev stuck with the Kremlin in the end, but true to his peasant origins he tried to make the fortress more home-like by planting part of it with an orchard. The apple trees sounded bucolic, but the project called for hundreds of tons of quality topsoil. Khrushchev, like the Romanov tsars of old, incurred enormous costs on his regime’s behalf, though in his case it was a fleet of khaki trucks, not buckets, that brought the earth up to the fort.44
Having settled on his headquarters, Khrushchev turned his mind to the surrounding view. Stalin’s plan for Moscow had envisaged the creation of a ring of landmark towers, conceived as modern successors to the fortified monasteries that had circled the city in Muscovite times.45 The p
roject was delayed by the outbreak of war, and in the end, only seven skyscrapers out of the projected eight had been built (the university was one of them). Their gothic shapes, tiered and spired like hypertrophic versions of the Kremlin’s own Saviour Tower, still loom out of the urban smog like evil trolls. Each one was meant to be unique: solid, massive and spacious. No expense was spared on the marble detail, the lifts, the heating, or the crystal chandeliers. They were Stalinist palaces, and in Khrushchev’s eyes that made them elitist and oppressive, grotesque white elephants in a city with a housing crisis. They were too solid to demolish, but in 1955 the Communist Party officially registered its aesthetic disapproval, and Leonid Polyakov, the leading light of Moscow’s civic architecture after 1945, was forced to hand back the Stalin Prize that he had won for the design of one recently completed example, the Leningradskaya Hotel.46
Other flagship projects were scrapped at the planning stage. The scheme for a pantheon to contain the remains of dead leaders (this was to face the Kremlin on Red Square) was dropped within months of Stalin’s death. Then there was the projected Palace of Soviets, the giant that was scheduled to take the place of Ton’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Its architect, Boris Iofan, did some more work on the plans in 1953, but then, abruptly, they were shelved. Khrushchev had found a new use for the site, and by 1960 it had been excavated, lined and flooded to provide the city with a heated open-air swimming-pool.47 For the next thirty years, that solved the problem of the giant hole, and it also chimed with Khrushchev’s populism, his determination to house, feed and educate the socialist masses. These were the years when Muscovites expected to ‘catch up and overtake America’, and plenty, health and happiness beckoned to all. The people swam (as long as they turned up equipped with regulation rubber hats), and soupy water lapped and steamed in place of communism’s greatest ever monument.
Khrushchev was never coy about his ambition. He was a leader who loved to dazzle on his Kremlin stage. A reception for the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, held in Ton’s Grand Palace in 1962, would have been unimaginable a decade before. As a British guest recalled:
There were dishes of cold roast fillet of beef so tender and moist that the meat dissolved like snowflakes on the tongue; sturgeon from the Volga, smoked and fresh; Pacific salmon; Kamchatka crabs; silver cups the size of a giant’s thimble containing a mixture of mushrooms and sour cream or a fricassee of wild birds; and in bowls pressed into crushed ice pungent red salmon roe and caviar from the Caspian, the fat grains glittering in colours from almost yellow to darkest grey.48
Between the linen-covered tables milled a crowd of ‘big Russians in suits’ and – almost scandalously – foreigners, all craning, over the delicious food, for any glimpse of their host. The space, in fact, had started feeling just a little cramped. In 1954, a mere five years after China’s communist revolution, Khrushchev had visited Beijing, where the comrades entertained him in a massive conference and banqueting hall. Not to be outdone, the Soviet leader began to dream of a palace of his own. Quickly rejecting yet another site on the Lenin Hills, he took the decision to build in the Kremlin.49 ‘Khrushchev wasn’t such a dullard,’ a spiteful Molotov later recalled. ‘He was culturally deprived.’50
What Khrushchev had in mind had to be large enough for every kind of meeting, including gala congresses with vast applauding crowds. When not required for politics, it could be equipped as a theatre: a larger, better, brighter venue for Soviet opera and ballet. The idea – and the budget – grew apace. Again pursuing a personal dream, the Soviet leader appointed his own favourite architect, M. V. Posokhin, the man who had just built him a holiday retreat at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. Posokhin agreed (of course) to design, engineer and complete the entire building in time for the Party Congress of 1962. For two years, working day and night, his men drilled, dug and hammered. At one point, to bypass the need for time-consuming calculations, soldiers were asked to march heavily on the top floor, testing the structure of the balcony.51 When Muscovites complained about the views that the building would block, Khrushchev told them to look from the other side. He backed off only when protesters started to inveigh against the demolition of parts of the Kremlin wall, dropping that aspect of the scheme but retaining – and enlarging – almost all the rest.52 The Palace of Congresses, a stark colossus faced with glass and gleaming stone, remains the most unloved large building on the Kremlin hill, but though some have proposed that it should go (like the nearby Rossiya Hotel, which was demolished in 2006), most Russian intellectuals agree today, quite rightly, that it stands as witness to the spirit of its age.53
Predictably, Khrushchev’s building earned the usual range of plaudits at the time. Professor Nikolai Kolli, veteran designer of underground stations, pronounced that ‘the palace not only fulfils all the multiple functional requirements laid on it, but also represents a new height on the route to the formation of a socialist architecture’.54 Without a trace of irony, Khrushchev praised the unimaginative, brutal lump as fit to grace a site ‘linked with the activities of the great Lenin’. Posokhin himself liked to call it ‘tactful’ and ‘laconic’, though its 6,000-seat meeting hall and the rooftop banqueting space for another two and a half thousand could scarcely be described as minimalist.55 The best that could be said was that Posokhin did not build above the main Kremlin roof-line, but to achieve that small degree of tact he had to drive deep into the historic soil. Egotov’s nineteenth-century Armoury Museum and several older palace buildings disappeared in the process, but the most serious damage was well below ground. As conservation experts later discovered, the reckless excavation had disturbed groundwater drainage patterns under the Dormition Cathedral and some parts of the Kremlin wall. The bill for putting all that right exceeded 500 million rubles, or roughly six times the building’s own original cost.56
‘The space was formed after the removal of a few service buildings, not very important from the point of view of their architectural or artistic quality and without historical interest,’ Posokhin wrote in 1974. ‘Among them the only one to be preserved was a part of the Cavalry Corpus facing Communist street. On the second floor of this Lenin had his first Moscow apartment when he lived and worked here in March–April 1917.’57 An engineer who had been involved in the construction of the new palace recently took me on a tour. He was no longer proud of it, he said, but he would make no apology. In the Leninist spirit, he still remembered the opening night, the ticket-only, all-exclusive celebration of socialism’s latest monument. His mother was especially impressed by her visit to the bathrooms. These, like the dressing-rooms for dancers and the ultra-modern air-conditioning machines, were located in the basement. Unlike the lavatories outside the Kremlin gates, however, the underground facilities here were faced with marble, the doors had locks, and the paper came on real rolls, not from the grudging hands of an attendant by the door. Even the soap was free, and it was smooth, just like the stuff that delegates used to receive in Stalin’s time.
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It was, in part, Khrushchev’s ebullience that ruined him. By 1964, the Soviet leader had been likened to a pig, a clown and a chatterbox. What he had not entirely grasped was that the post-war and post-Stalin Soviet Union yearned for quiet; the system worked best when people felt safe. In his impulsive, well-intentioned way, Khrushchev had violated several unwritten rules. The elite could not forgive him for suggesting that officials should serve for limited, fixed terms, a move that threatened countless networks and congenial private worlds. For the mass, the miners, farmers and factory engineers, his crime was that he did not cure the hardship and uncertainty of their material lives. Receptions at the Kremlin excited the criticism that he and Prime Minister Bulganin were ‘drinking away the nation’s wealth’. ‘Khrushchev has opened the door to everyone and is treating everyone to dinner,’ a Russian muttered in 1958, ‘although we workers have nothing to eat.’58
In Stalin’s time, such opposition would have been repressed before it even formed. On
e of the greatest testimonials to Khrushchev’s term in power, ironically, was the bloodless manner in which it came to an end. In October 1964, a small group, headed by Leonid Brezhnev and his political cronies Aleksei Kosygin, Mikhail Suslov and Nikolai Podgorny, met in the Kremlin while the leader was away on holiday and engineered his involuntary but entirely comfortable retirement. By the time Khrushchev’s plane touched down in Moscow, it was all over. The seventy-year-old ex-leader disappeared from public view, and other creatures from the Kremlin depths surfaced at last, effortlessly colonizing the vacated offices and bent on introducing more consensual reform.
One of the first things that they promised was ‘stability of cadres’, which meant jobs for the boys (and jobs for life). To create such an extensive and resilient fabric of power, they deliberately separated the two strands of Soviet politics, the interlocking tendrils of the Communist Party and the state. Since Lenin’s time, the two had overlapped: the government and ministries on one hand and the ‘guiding’ organs of the Party on the other, leading, shadowing, and duplicating them. Each branch of government or board of economic managers contained a Party cell, and the Party in turn had secretaries of its own to oversee each element of government. In practice, it was the Party that really called the shots, not least because it was assumed to have responsibility for strategy: as communists, its members knew the true shape of the future. Khrushchev had presumed to head both Party and State, but his successors (at first) resolved to appoint separate leaders to each. The Party leader’s mantle, in this arcane system, fell on the shoulders of its General Secretary, the fifty-eight-year-old Leonid Brezhnev, a loyal bureaucrat from the Dnieper valley in Ukraine.