Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin
Catherine Merridale
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 1250056144
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Kremlin is the heart of the Russian state, its very name a byword for enduring power. From Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin, generations of Russian leaders have sought to use the Kremlin to legitimize their vision of statehood. To this day, its red stars and golden crosses blazing side by side, the Kremlin fulfills a centuries-old role: linking the country's present to its distant past and proclaiming the eternal continuity of the Russian state.
Drawing on a dazzling array of sources from unseen archives and rare collections, renowned historian Catherine Merridale traces the full history of this enigmatic compound of palaces and cathedrals, whose blood-red walls have witnessed more than eight hundred years of political drama and extraordinary violence. And with the Kremlin as a unique lens, Red Fortress brings into focus the evolution of Russia's culture and the meaning of its politics.
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their lives, as one of the city’s conservative history professors lamented, ‘for god knows what’, were buried on 13 November (old style). There was a long funeral service in the city-centre Church of the Great Ascension, but afterwards it was difficult to find a graveyard whose owners were willing to accept the coffins, for the counter-revolution had become divided and afraid.41 The workers, however, were buried in some of Russia’s holiest soil, for their graves were dug at the base of the
moving in formation over golden miles of wheat. Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of millions of private farms, followed by the state-led requisitioning of grain. The implications for anything old or faltering were obvious. An ideology that could justify the deaths of millions of peasants in the name of the future could hardly let its progress founder at the sight of ancient walls. The sound of dynamite reverberated through Moscow. It was a second revolution, the so-called ‘great break’
because they were built ‘by Russian masters in 1637’ (no mention of poor John Taler), but the only other fragments of the past are military trophies. It is particularly striking that the entire book contains no image whatsoever of a Kremlin church.149 A chastened Petr Sytin, lost for words in his own right, could only quote Stalin. ‘Moscow’, he wrote, ‘is the model for every capital in the world.’150 At the heart of it, the newly painted red fortress floated like a bizarre toy above the asphalt
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
research site. In the Kremlin, a visitor will see what she is meant to see. Locked doors are waiting even for the most persistent guest. To write this book, I had to travel well beyond that tower reading-room. The trail has taken me to Italy (home of the architects who designed the renaissance fort) and to libraries in the United States and Great Britain. When written records would not do, I have tracked down expert witnesses. Among the first people I interviewed were some of the politicians and