"Red Square" (1998) by Masabikh Akhunov
Book Details
Catherine Merridale
RED FORTRESS
The secret heart of Russia's history
528pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 1 84614 037 2
A country in need of strong leadership, and a leader in need of a fortress
MARSHALL POE
Old Russian proverbs almost never mention the Moscow Kremlin. Russian poets and writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries pay it greater attention, but it is scarcely a principal preoccupation. According to at least one poll, even modern Russians don't find the fortress very impressive. What examination of the proverbs, poets and polls do reveal, however, is that Russians care a lot about the city of Moscow itself. For Russians, then, Moscow is the nation's symbolic centre, not the massive citadel at its heart. Interestingly, for Westerners it is the other way around: Moscow is just a city, while the Kremlin is an obsession.
The man most responsible for turning the Moscow Kremlin into a synonym for the Russian political elite and a symbol of Russian tyranny was Walter Duranty, the controversial Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. Beginning in 1927, he began to use "the Kremlin" as a stand-in for the Bolshevik leadership in his numerous and widely read articles. Duranty's invention quickly gained a life of its own in the Stalin era. A fortress seemed like a perfect metaphor for the belligerent, secretive Soviet regime. A Times article of 1929 informed its readers that "Secrecy Surrounds Red Rulers in Kremlin; Publicity Stops at the Walls of the Fortress". Even after Stalin died, the Western press routinely described the Kremlin as inscrutable, ominous, enigmatic, mysterious, impenetrable and unpredictable. During the Cold War, there was even a science of "Kremlinology". Those times have passed, but Western interest in – and fear of – the Kremlin lives on in the Putin era. It's easy to see why. The despotic tsars ruled from the Kremlin (or most of them did). The ruthless Bolsheviks ruled from the Kremlin (some of the time). And now Vladimir Putin rules from the Kremlin. Must it always hold Russia in thrall?
Catherine Merridale tells us that she wrote Red Fortress: The secret heart of Russia's history with just this question in mind. Her book is, first and foremost, a history of the Moscow Kremlin. But it is also, she tells us at the start, "very much about the Kremlin now". The Kremlin now, she says, is peddling a self-serving line about Russian history, namely that Russia needs a strong leader and always has. In historical circles, this theory is called the "statist interpretation", and Merridale doesn't buy it. According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory – in various guises, at various times – simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their autocratic power. Ivan the Terrible did it, Nicholas I did it, Stalin did it, and now, she claims, Putin is doing it.
This premiss is the weakest part of what is otherwise one of the best popular histories of Russia in any language. Not only is it unnecessary but it causes Merridale to make a promise she cannot keep. Nowhere do we find a sustained argument against the statist interpretation of Russian history. Merridale does indeed point out that successive tsars, general secretaries, and now a couple of presidents have made the case that Russia needs and has always needed a strong hand to prosper. The trouble is that these statements, as self-serving as they might seem, in no way invalidate the statist interpretation. Like many Western scholars, Merridale never seems to consider the possibility that these successive tsars and presidents might just be right. We in the West have no trouble speaking about "democratic cultures" that resist authoritarianism, yet we cannot seem to bring ourselves to accept that there are "authoritarian cultures" that resist democratization.
"As the rotten Soviet empire fell apart in the autumn of 1991, there was no reason to accept that Russians were in some way doomed to perpetual tyranny", Merridale writes. In fact, there are two very good reasons why Russia should have ended up with some version of Putinist authoritarianism: 500 years of almost unbroken autocracy and a marked popular preference for the strong hand. And there is a certain irony in using a book about the Kremlin to argue against the statist interpretation. Part of the reason Duranty (who shared Russians' popular preference) began calling the Bolshevik leadership "the Kremlin" is that he wanted to suggest continuity across the revolutionary divide.
Happily, Merridale confines her half-hearted attempts to overthrow the statist interpretation mainly to the first and last chapters of the book. For the rest, she shows not that the Kremlin has always been a great symbol, but rather that the Kremlin has always been a great fact. Ever present, it becomes in her hands the narrative thread that knits together the disjointed story of Russia and the Russians. As a literary device, this works marvellously. The reader is always reading about the Kremlin – the central character – and at the same time learning about Russia. Merridale's stories flow naturally, she has a superb eye for detail and the telling fact, and she is not afraid to tell us just what she thinks. She scoffs, rejoices, derides, ridicules, raises up and dresses down. She can be harsh, as when she calls the landmark Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in 1997, a "vast, expensive fake", but her sharp opinions are part of what makes Red Fortress so entertaining. She does not hesitate to fill in the blanks if the blanks need filling. In setting scenes, she describes sights, smells and sounds that are recorded in no source. But her inventions – really, inferences – are plausible and cause no harm to the basic truths she is trying to relate.
Merridale is also a good historian. She has read much of the literature on the lengthy stretches of time the book covers, and she seems to have read most of it carefully. Russian history is full of myths, and Merridale avoids almost all of them. She tells the improbable story of how an impoverished, isolated and backward principality – Moscow – came to rule much of Eurasia. This is not the story the mythmakers want told. Their tale is one of predestination and heroic deeds: the Muscovites are the heirs to Kieven Rus'; the Muscovites defeat the Golden Horde; the Muscovites "gather the Russian lands"; Moscow emerges as the "Third Rome". That's all nonsense, more or less, and Merridale knows it. Her story is the story of Russia, not the story Russian nationalists want to imagine is the story of Russia.
She does not, of course, get everything just right. In describing the seventeenth century, she writes "Once the new tsar had been named [Mikhail Romanov], setting a reactionary seal on the Russian nation's fate, the system in the Kremlin became rigid to the point of near-paralysis". Any historian of seventeenth-century Russia would confirm that this is at the very least an exaggeration. The reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in particular saw reforms that anticipated those of his son Peter the Great. Interestingly, Merridale quotes just such a historian: "The seventeenth century was an epoch marked by changes so radical that the very principles by which Russian culture defined itself were transformed". This, too, strikes me as an exaggeration, but the main point remains: the system of the Kremlin was not rigid to the point of near-paralysis in the decades preceding the reign of Peter the Great.
Peter's reign presents Merridale with a serious challenge. Recall that she wants to argue that Russian rulers were forever inventing pedigrees that proved Russia needed a strong hand. Peter didn't do that. Instead, he skewered all the old Muscovite pedigrees and adopted a new, supposedly timeless classical iconography. More importantly, he moved Russia's capital from the Moscow Kremlin to St Petersburg. Merridale acknowledges these discontinuities, but still tries – in vain, I think – to argue that the Kremlin and the old ways remained important as legitimizing devices during the two centuries in which the capital was in the north. Her primary evidence for this argument seems to be that Peter and his successors always held coronations in the Moscow Kremlin rather than in St Petersburg. True, but the character of those coronations belies her point. The first of them involved Peter capriciously picking and installing a Lithuanian laundress christened Marta Skavronka as his replacement on the Russian throne – so clearly, he was not too concerned about legitimizing his actions with reference to an imagined past.
And he may not even have cared all that much for the Kremlin. As Merridale shows in one of her most fascinating sections, it was Peter who started the long process of turning the Kremlin into a semi-museum. He threw many of the residents of the Kremlin out and ordered his lackeys to inventory the fortress's treasures. In 1718, he put some of the imperial goodies on display. Later he ordered that an entrance fee be levied. Evidently, it wasn't high enough, because the Kremlin fell into disrepair. By the time Catherine the Great came to the throne, it was disintegrating. She disliked Moscow, but still tried to repair the fortress, to no effect. The near complete destruction of Moscow in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion presented an opportunity for a near fresh start. The centre of Moscow was given the Haussmann treatment before Haussmann, and the Kremlin was cleaned up as well. The Kremlin Grand Palace (1849) was built inside, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (1883) outside. Thousands of people visited the Kremlin Armoury Museum and the State Historical Museum each year. The Kremlin remained a tsarist residence, though it was well on its way to becoming a site of national memory and ceremony, a Louvre with high walls.
After the Provisional Government took power in early 1917, Moscow's artistic community sought to complete the process of Louvre-ization. They proposed turning the Kremlin into "the heart of a vast super-museum", which might well have happened if the Bolsheviks hadn't seized control in November 1917. Merridale's account of the Revolution begins badly: we read, alas, about the "storming" of the Winter Palace when in fact there was no storming at all. But it ends very well: with a vivid description of the fighting in Moscow and the shelling of the Kremlin by the Bolsheviks.
Merridale knows, of course, that the key moment for all that followed was Lenin's decision in February 1918, to move the Soviet government from Petrograd to the Moscow Kremlin. Had he not taken that decision, the Kremlin might have ended up as a historical-artistic theme park rather than a frightening symbol of Soviet power. It is odd, then, that Merridale gets the reasons for Lenin's decision wrong. She says that in the midst of the Civil War he needed a "secure stronghold", a "more centrally located capital", and a place "lively with historic resonance". It is well established that Lenin relocated because the rapidly advancing German forces were a mere 100 miles from Petrograd and the Bolsheviks had no way of stopping them. Moscow was the obvious place to go.
Lenin was utterly indifferent to "historic resonance", as Merridale herself shows. Once he and his henchmen moved into the Kremlin, they launched a campaign that ejected or shot its clergy, looted or destroyed much of its art, and razed many of its buildings. This part of Red Fortress makes for gripping but sad reading. Merridale skilfully takes us through the process by which the Bolsheviks destroyed one sacred building after another. The Kremlin's architecture suffered, but so did its people: the Kremlin staff were purged in 1935.
Just as the process of Bolshevization was complete, the Bolsheviks moved out. In 1920 there had been 2,000 people living in the Kremlin; by the outbreak of the Second World War, only a skeleton guard remained. Stalin preferred his dacha, the party leaders had apartments in new buildings, and only the caretakers remained. The state offices, of course, were still within the Kremlin walls. But, after Stalin died, the party leadership soured on the place: too many bodies, too many ghosts. Khrushchev considered moving the government to another part of Moscow. Brezhnev actually quit the Kremlin altogether, moving his offices to the Central Committee building on Old Square. With the bigwigs gone, the Kremlin's "magic scent of power . . . evaporated".
It came back, first under Gorbachev and then under Yeltsin, both of whom set themselves up in the Kremlin. That Gorbachev would do this is no surprise; he saw himself as the man who would not only save the Soviet Union, but help it realize its true socialist potential. That man could only rule from the USSR's historic power-centre, the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin is another matter. Why would Russia's first President enter the heart of (now discredited) Soviet authority? He did, after all, have other options. Merridale's answer is subtle and compelling. Yeltsin knew that the Kremlin was the symbol of political power in the USSR, and that he needed it to legitimize his tenuous hold on "Russia", whatever that was. More practically, he knew that the Kremlin was a very defensible fortress. His enemies were still out there, and they were well armed. Those sturdy walls might save him.
Catherine Merridale closes by explaining how the Putin regime "set out to harness the aura of the red fortress" in order to legitimize its authoritarian rule. The examples she gives show no such thing. Rather, they show that the Putin regime wants Russians to be proud of their past. There is no doubt, however, that Vladimir Putin believes Russia needs a strong hand. "For Russians," Putin once wrote, "a strong state is not an anomaly . . . but the source and guarantor of order." He does not need to "harness the aura of the red fortress" to convince Russians that a strong state is needed. Most of them already believe it.
No comments:
Post a Comment