Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  29. Istoriia Moskvy v shesti tomakh, vol. 3, p. 47.

  30. Martin, Romantics, p. 58.

  31. For a thoughtful introduction, see A. M. Martin, ‘Russia and the legacy of 1812’, in CHR, vol. 2, esp. p. 148.

  32. For an overview of political thought in the period, see Nicholas V. Riasanovky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th edn (New York and Oxford, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 323–8.

  33. Shchenkov, Pamiatniki, p. 43.

  34. Istoriia Moskvy v shesti tomakh, vol. 3, p. 25.

  35. RGADA, 197/1/39, 25; on Olenin’s interventions in 1806–7, see Irina Bogatskaia’s essay in Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past (Leiden and Boston, Mass., 2010), pp. 63–4.

  36. S. P. Bartenev, Moskovskii kreml’ v starinu i teper’, 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1912 and 1918), vol. 1, p. 82; on Valuev, see Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XVI, pp. 208–18.

  37. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 2, pp. 385–6.

  38. The tower was the Gerbovaia bashnia. Among the other buildings demolished were the Trinity podvor’e and part of the Poteshnyi dvorets. See S. de Bartenev, Le Grand Palais du Kremlin et ses neuf églises (Moscow, 1912), p. 19; Bartenev, Moskovskii kreml’, vol. 1, pp. 81–4; Shchenkov, Pamiatniki, p. 44.

  39. F. F. Vigel’, cited in Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 2, p. 386. The main fountain used to play where the Krasnaia Presnia metro station now stands. On the clearance and its effects, see also Posokhin, Pamiatniki arkhitektury Moskvy, pp. 146–8.

  40. Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London, 2005), pp. 78–84.

  41. Cited in Daria Olivier, The Burning of Moscow 1812 (London, 1966), p. 33.

  42. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 1, p. 214. Ségur believed the Russians had set the Smolensk fire.

  43. General Armand de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, With Napoleon in Russia, from the Original Memoirs as edited by Jean Hanoteau; abridged with an introduction by George Libaire (Mineola, NY, 2005), p. 77.

  44. Zamoyski, 1812, pp. 220–21.

  45. S. V. Bakhrushin, Moskva v 1812 (Moscow, 1913), p. 13, citing M. A. Volkova.

  46. Bakhrushin, Moskva, p. 33.

  47. N. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh sovremennikov 1812–1815 gg. (1882; repr. Moscow, 2006), p. 123.

  48. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, p. 122 (doc. 119).

  49. Bakhrushin, Moskva, p. 12.

  50. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 1, pp. 330–33; Zamoyski, 1812, p. 288.

  51. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 127.

  52. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, p. 133.

  53. M. P. Fabricius, Kreml’ v Moskve: ocherki i kartiny proshlogo i nastoiashchago (Moscow, 1883), p. 172; Konstantin Mikhailov, Unichtozhennyi Kreml’ (Moscow, 2007), p. 95.

  54. Olivier, Burning of Moscow, p. 23.

  55. Cited in Caulaincourt, Napoleon in Russia, p. 127.

  56. Georges Lecointe de Laveau, Moscou, avant et après l’incendie (Paris, 1814), p. 111.

  57. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, pp. 3–4, 27.

  58. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 34.

  59. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 37; Caulaincourt, Napoleon in Russia, p. 112 (on the clocks).

  60. Cited in Kathleen Berton Murrell, Moscow: An Architectural History (London, 1977), p. 151.

  61. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, pp. 40–42.

  62. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 40.

  63. Olivier, Burning of Moscow, pp. 61–5; Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, pp. 45–6.

  64. One famous (though fictional) prisoner, whose story and encounters reflect later Russian perceptions of these events, was Pierre Bezuhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

  65. Martin, ‘Legacy of 1812’, p. 148.

  66. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, p. 252; Lecointe, Moscou, p. 116; Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 50.

  67. Murrell, Moscow, p. 152.

  68. Fabricius, Kreml’, p. 180.

  69. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 85.

  70. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, pp. 169–70.

  71. Bakhrushin, Moskva, p. 27; Murrell, Moscow, p. 153.

  72. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 119; Fabricius, Kreml’, p. 184; Lecointe, Moscou, p. 135.

  73. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 119.

  74. Ségur, Expedition to Russia, vol. 2, p. 122.

  75. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 30.

  76. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 25.

  77. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 115.

  78. Bakhrushin, Moskva, p. 36.

  79. The figures testifying to this appear in Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 34.

  80. Martin, Romantics, p. 142; P.-P. de Ségur, Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, trans. J. David (New York, 2008), p. 92; translator’s note.

  81. For details, see Rostopchin’s letter of 27 October 1812 to Viazmitinov and Balashov, reprinted in Russkii arkhiv, 3, 1 (1881), p. 222.

  82. Martin, Romantics, p. 136.

  83. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, p. 253.

  84. Dubrovin, Otechestvennaia voina v pis’makh, pp. 314–17, citing Avgustin’s letter of 12 November 1812.

  85. L. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London, 1982), p. 1314.

  86. Population figures from Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 33; on planning, see Albert J. Schmidt, ‘The restoration of Moscow after 1812’, Slavic Review, 40 (Spring 1981), pp. 37–48.

  87. Fabricius, Kreml’, p. 186.

  88. Schmidt, Architecture and Planning, p. 153; Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, pp. 125–6.

  89. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 64.

  90. Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, repr. with an intro. by George F. Kennan (New York, 1989), p. 405.

  91. Slavina, Ton, p. 93.

  92. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 175.

  93. Shchenkov, Pamiatniki, p. 62, citing RGIA, 471/1/292.

  94. On gothic reconstructions, see Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture and the West (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2007), p. 326, and for the Catherine Church, see also Mikhailov, Unichtozhennyi, p. 177. For the Filaret Tower, see Shchenkov, Pamiatniki, p. 65.

  95. Cited in Zabelin, Istoriia goroda Moskvy, p. 217.

  96. The red paint was applied in 1827. See N. A. Skvortsov, Arkheologiia i topografiia Moskvy: kurs lektsii (Moscow, 1913), p. 103. The walls, but not the towers, were also lime-washed several times between 1818 and 1849.

  97. Bove’s painting is reproduced in G. I. Vedernikova, ed., Oblik staroi Moskvy (Moscow, 1997), p. 79. The lime-trees were his own idea, and formed part of his landscaped garden project. Other contemporary images are reproduced in the same volume, and also, among others, in E. Ducamp, ed., Imperial Moscow: The Moscow Kremlin in Watercolour (Paris, 1994).

  98. Martin, ‘Legacy of 1812’, p. 150.

  99. On memorial plans, see Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 165.

  100. Quarenghi’s entry, for instance, was almost entirely based on the Pantheon, complete with portico and open dome. See E. Kirichenko, Khram Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve (Moscow, 1992), p. 19.

  101. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki, vol. 3, p. 166; Martin, ‘Legacy of 1812’, p. 149. It was moved to its current site, near the Lobnoe mesto, in 1825.

  102. On this, see Richard Wortman’s essay in Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia, pp. 22–3. The helmet had, in fact, been fashioned in the seventeenth century for Mikhail Romanov.

  103. Vitberg’s cathedral is explored in detail in Kirichenko, Khram Khrista, pp. 28–37.

  104. Custine, Empire of the Czar, pp. 136–7.

  105. Custine, Empire of the Czar, p. 157.

  106. R. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), p. 26.

  107. Custine, Empir
e of the Czar, pp. 165 and 171.

  108. Snegirev’s diaries give a vivid, if stuffy, picture of this social circle. See Dnevnik Ivana Mikhailovicha Snegireva, vol 1, 1822–1852 (Moscow, 1904).

  109. Custine, Empire of the Czar, pp. 392–5, 410.

  110. Custine, Empire of the Czar, p. 184.

  111. Custine, Empire of the Czar, p. 426.

  112. Mikhail Bykovsky’s lecture of 1834, cited in Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture, p. 326.

  113. Cited in Bartenev, Grand Palais, pp. 20–22.

  114. Biographical notes from Slavina, Ton, p. 205.

  115. Brumfield, Russian Architecture, p 398; Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture, p. 328.

  116. On the style, see Slavina, Ton, p. 102.

  117. RGADA, 1239/22/27, especially l. 35; on the railwaymen, see ibid., l. 11.

  118. The bundles of these, including accounts as well as detailed daily reports, are in RGADA, 1239/22/dd. 3–69.

  119. Bartenev, Grand Palais, p. 25.

  120. Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, St Petersburg and Moscow: A Visit to the Court of the Czar, cited in Lawrence Kelly, ed., Moscow: A Traveller’s Companion (London, 1983), p. 128.

  121. Slavina, Ton, pp. 166–7; Bartenev, Grand Palais, p. 25.

  122. Bartenev, Grand Palais, p. 26.

  123. Bartenev, Grand Palais, p. 26.

  124. I. Snegirev, Moskva: Podrobnoe istoricheskoe i arkheologicheskoe opisanie goroda, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1875), pp. 23–5; for drawings, see N. D. Izvekov, Tserkov vo imia Rozhdestva Sv. Ioanna Predtechi v Moskovskom Kremle (Moscow, 1913).

  125. See Snegirev, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 65; Zabelin, Istoriia goroda Moskvy, p. 64.

  126. Zabelin, Istoriia goroda Moskvy, pp. 64–5.

  127. Zabelin, Istoriia goroda Moskvy, pp. 66–7.

  128. Custine, Empire of the Czar, p. 429.

  8 NOSTALGIA

  1. For a bracing commentary from a different angle, see Richard Taruskin’s remarks in his Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), p. 46.

  2. A. G. Mazour, ‘Modern Russian historiography’, JMH, 9, 2 (June 1937), pp. 169–202.

  3. For a brief overview and context, see Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation (London, 2001), pp. 344–52.

  4. One turning-point was Europe’s revolutionary year of 1848. See I. Snegirev, Dnevnik Ivana Mikhailovicha Snegireva, vol. 1, 1822–1852 (Moscow, 1904), p. 406.

  5. The most famous expert in this field, Vladimir Dal (1801–72) was later one of Lenin’s favourite authors.

  6. S. Romaniuk, Moskva: Vokrug Kremlia i Kitai-goroda. Putevoditel’ (Moscow, 2008), p. 52; on others, see, for example, the diaries of Ivan Snegirev, who frequently thanks his patrons for saving manuscripts by buying them.

  7. The gallery’s own guidebook supplies the basic facts. See V. Rodionov, ed., The Tretyakov Gallery, 4th edn (St Petersburg, 2006), pp. 4–10.

  8. This theme has been explored extensively by Richard Wortman. See, for example, ‘Moscow and St Petersburg: The problem of a political center in tsarist Russia, 1881–1914’, in S. Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, Pa., 1985), pp. 260–62.

  9. The Letters of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Marie. Being the confidential correspondence between Nicholas II, last of the Tsars, and his mother, Dowager Empress Mariya Fedorovna, ed. Edward J. Bing (London, 1937), pp. 143–4 (letter dated 5 April 1900).

  10. This egg, one of the very few to have remained in Russia without interruption, is kept in the Kremlin museums.

  11. Both quotations from Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1995), vol. 1, p. 352.

  12. The other two major national events of the era were the bicentenary of the Battle of Poltava in 1909 and the centenary of the national sacrifice at Borodino in 1912.

  13. Richard Wortman also gives an excellent account of this. See his ‘“Invisible Threads”: the historical imagery of the Romanov tercentenary’, Russian History, 16, 2–4 (1989), pp. 389–408.

  14. Imp. Mosk. arkheologicheskii inst., Vystavka drevne-russkogo iskusstva ustroennaia v 1913 godu v oznamenovanie chestovaniia 300-letiia tsarstvovaniia Doma Romanovykh (Moscow, 1913), p. 13.

  15. See, for example, I. E. Zabelin, Dnevniki i zapisnye knizhki (repr. Moscow, 2001), p. 215.

  16. See Istoriia Moskvy s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, vol. 3 (Moscow, 2000), pp. 17–21; S. O. Shmidt, ed., Moskva: Entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1997), p. 28.

  17. For an insider’s view of this colourful world, see V. A. Giliarovskii, Moskva i Moskvichi (Moscow, 1968).

  18. Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London, 2002), pp. 30, 244.

  19. The Museum of the History of Moscow has a fine collection, and photographs of some of them are reproduced in G. I. Vedernikova, Oblik Staroi Moskvy: XVII–nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1997), esp. pp. 200–225.

  20. On Argamakov and his era, see M. K. Pavlovich, ‘Proekt muzeefikatsii serediny XVIII veka: oruzheinaia palata i A. M. Argamakov’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XVI, pp. 202–7.

  21. There is a discussion of the ewer, complete with photograph, in S. Orlenko, ‘O rukomoinom pribore v posol’skom obychae XVI–XVII vekov’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XX, pp. 81–97.

  22. He reorganized the Armoury staff in 1805. See A. P. Petukhova, ‘P. S. Valuev i oruzheinaia palata’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XVI, pp. 210–11.

  23. On Olenin, see V. Faibisovich, Aleksei Nikolaevich Olenin: Opyt nauchnoi biografii (St Petersburg, 2006).

  24. Comments on this are offered separately by I. A. Rodimtseva and A. P. Petukhova in Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XIV, pp. 7 and 14.

  25. Petukhova, ‘Valuev’, p. 213.

  26. A. P. Petukhova, ‘Muzei v kremle kak gosudarstvennoe uchrezhdenie’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XIV, pp. 13–15.

  27. Petukhova, ‘Valuev’, p. 216, citing the report by I. P. Polivanov.

  28. See F. G. Solntsev, ‘Moia zhizn”, Russkaia starina, 5 (1876).

  29. Solntsev, ‘Moia zhizn”, p. 634.

  30. See Anne Odom, ‘The politics of porcelain’, in At the Tsar’s Table: Russian Imperial Porcelain from the Raymond F. Piper Collection (Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2001). See also G. V. Aksenova, Russkii stil’: Genii Fedora Solntseva (Moscow, 2009), esp. pp. 37–8.

  31. Wendy Salmond and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ‘Fedor Solntsev and crafting the image of a Russian national past: the context’, in Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting the Image of a Russian National Past (Leiden and Boston, 2010), p. 13.

  32. A. S. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2002), p. 89.

  33. Shchenkov, Pamiatniki, pp. 105–6; Wendy Salmond, Russia Imagined, 1825–1925: The Art and Impact of Fedor Solntsev, catalogue for an exhibition at the New York Public Library (New York, 2006); see also Aida Nasibova, The Faceted Chamber in the Moscow Kremlin (Leningrad, 1981), p. 13.

  34. Essays on that theme by J. Robert Wright and Lauren M. O’Connell respectively are included in Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia.

  35. For commentary, see Rosamund Bartlett, ‘Russian culture: 1801–1917’, in CHR, vol. 2, p. 98.

  36. Although only 600 copies were produced, and fewer still survive, the entire collection can be seen by consulting the New York Public Library’s online digital gallery.

  37. Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XIV, pp. 7–8 and 31–3; V. K. Trutovskii, Oruzheinaia palata (Moscow, 1914), p. 8.

  38. Trutovskii, Oruzheinaia palata, p. 8.

  39. For the cramped space, see E. I. Smirnova, ‘Oruzheinaia palata. 19 vek’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XIV, p. 40; on the conditions and complaints of Armoury staff in 1861, see RGADA 1605/1/5957.

  40. For an incidence of this in 1874, see Zabelin, Dnevniki, p. 111.

&n
bsp; 41. Trutovskii, Oruzheinaia palata, p. 11.

  42. Visitor numbers for the period to the 1990s are discussed by L. I. Donetskaia and L. I. Kondrashova, ‘Iz istorii prosvetitel’skoi deiatel’nosti v Moskovskom Kremle’, Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. XIV, pp. 299–309; the nineteenth century is covered on p. 300.

  43. The relevant report is RGADA 1605/1/5962.

  44. Lindsey Hughes, The Romanovs: Ruling Russia, 1613–1917 (London and New York, 2009), p. 183.

  45. Trutovskii, Oruzheinaia palata, pp. 13–14. On the English silver, see Natalya Abramova and Irina Zagarodnaya, Britannia and Muscovy: English Silver at the Court of the Tsars (London, 2006).

  46. The hardship felt by Kremlin staff in 1861 is set out in RGADA 1605/1/5957, which clearly shows that Moscow’s palace personnel received smaller cuts from the overall imperial cake than St Petersburg’s.

  47. Hughes, Romanovs, p. 183.

  48. M. Zakharov, Putevoditel’ po Moskve i ukazatel’ eia dostoprimechatel’nosti (Moscow, 1856), p. 15. Similar sentiments were ubiquitous in later nineteenth-century guides. See, for example, I. Kondrat’ev, Sedaia starina Moskvy (1893, repr. Moscow, 2006), p. 3.

  49. Ivan Snegirev, Dnevnik Ivana Mikhailovicha Snegireva, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1905), p. 63.

  50. Cited in J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1971), p. 570.

  51. For commentary, see Larisa Zakharova, ‘The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?’, in CHR, vol. 2, esp. p. 610.

  52. It appeared in this guise at the coronation of Nicholas I, for example, and also later in the century. See Aksenova, Russkii stil’, pp. 19 and 31 (engravings from 1826 and 1851).

  53. Zabelin, Dnevniki, pp. 91–2; Nasibova, Faceted Chamber, pp. 12–13.

  54. Opisanie sviashchennogo koronovaniia ikh imperatorskikh velichestv Gosudaria imperatora Aleksandra Tret’ego i Gosudaryni imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny vseia Rossii (St Petersburg, 1883), especially pp. 43–6.

  55. On the opening, see E. Kirichenko, Khram Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve (Moscow, 1992), pp. 140–45. See also Kathleen Berton Murrell, Moscow: An Architectural History (London, 1977), p. 170, which takes the usual view about the cathedral’s disproportionate size, and T. Slavina, Konstantin Ton (Leningrad, 1989), pp. 112–15, which is more sympathetic (at least to Ton).