Among the Russians(13)

I debouched thankfully into Red Square. Flanked on one side by St Basil’s cathedral, on the other by the liver-red spires of the History Museum, it is, in some. ways, surprising—not regular at all, but sloping down erratically towards the Moscow river in a shining, grey-cobbled flood. Close to its centre, the mausoleum where Lenin lies embalmed attracted the most dedicated queue of all, winding many thousands long into obscurity; and opposite me, dominating the whole square in ancient foreboding, reared the walls of the Kremlin—a blank Russian face stubbled with irregular towers. In these brick battlements of a stoneless land, only the clock-crowned and star-topped Redeemer’s Gate gave a narrow glimpse inside, flanked by policemen and by traffic lights perpetually red.

The Kremlin is the troubled heart of Russia. From across the brown flood of the Moscow river, its buildings emerge like a paradigm of her past. In front, the walls loom formidable and secret, staked out with prison-like towers and gateways. Although built by Italian architects in the fourteenth century, their size and archaism seem profoundly Russian, while within them, cushioned on a sombre cloud of trees, rise the multiple buildings of this schizophrenic land—the nineteenth century hulk of the Great Kremlin Palace with its endless stretch of windows, the classical Praesidium, the modern Palace of Congresses. But from the very midst of these, flowering on slender white necks of swan beauty, a golden cluster of Byzantine domes lifts its crosses to the sky. Nothing could be more moving and articulate as an architectural symbol of the country. The rationalism and balance of the West stand cheek-by-jowl with Byzantium; golden crosses shine among red flags and stars; and around them all, in ramparts and machicolated bastions, curls the disruptive genius of Russia’s own dim forest world.

Even as I walked inside the Kremlin walls (open since 1958), I imagined some contagion crawling between Byzantine cathedrals and modern government palaces. It was as if the paranoid ghosts of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible were shaking hands across the centuries. The Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Council of Ministers, the Palace of Congresses—impenetrable spans of marble or glass threaded by black ministerial cars—all seemed subtly infected by the Cathedral Square nearby, abandoned now except for tourists, but exuding an old dogma and opportunism.

Cathedral Square was once the soul of Moscow. And Moscow, as early as the fourteenth century, had the semblance of a capital. Although little more than a stockaded town at the junction of the Moscow river and the Neglinnaya (a tributary long since gone underground) it was the Vatican of Russia, seat of her metropolitan archbishops and premier princedom of the land. For some three hundred years its Grand Dukes bent before the Mongol whirlwind from the east and at the end of the fifteenth century, when the threat receded, the Muscovite tsar Ivan the Great was left lord of a united Russia and stood alone as spiritual and linear descendant of a now vanished Byzantium. Battlements of white limestone had long ago replaced the oak palisades of the Kremlin, and these in turn had crumbled away beneath today’s circlet of brick. Pale stone cathedrals erupted in its centre, and city walls whorled outwards from its core. It was from this mediaeval Moscow—a glimmer of oriental domes sunk in a landlocked plain—that Peter the Great transferred the capital northward in 1712. And it was away again from West-orientated Leningrad, with its clear northern light, that the post-Revolutionary leaders reverted to the mother-city, as if transferring the seat of national consciousness from the head to the womb. Where Leningrad is surrounded by baroque palaces, Moscow is ringed with moated monasteries. The backdrop of Leningrad is the Baltic Sea, a grey eye on Europe; that of Moscow is the umbilical hinterland of Asia, a world gazing on itself.

As you walk over the crinkled pink flagstones of Cathedral Square, the air grows foggy with imagined incense, and with the shades of those terrible elder tsars. Ringed by their draughty forests at the antipodes of Christendom, their reigns black with superstition and chaos, these sixteenth and early seventeenth century tyrants come down to us in a light eerily magnified and intense. Ivan the Terrible, Fyodor I, Boris Godunov, the False Dmitry—they process across the inner eye in a queue of ruthless autocrats or vacuous simpletons: religious, half-savage, melancholy-mad. Around their great square the white-stoned cathedrals lift in a ghostly choir. A four-tiered belfry, raised by successive tsars to 250 feet, towers in the sky with whole carillons of multi-toned bells. In the Cathedral of the Assumption, where the patriarchs and metropolitans lie buried, the tsars were crowned with a filigreed and sable-trimmed diadem which suggested Tartar khans rather than Christian kings.

But they inhabited these cathedrals with familiar ease. The two-hour morning liturgy broke over them like the waves of some benedictory ocean, while they deliberated with their councillors in the nave. This was their natural and exotic habitat. In its softly-domed interiors, among a liana jungle of hanging lamps and blazing copses of candles, their most secular and atrocious decisions took on the sanctity of gospel. All around them the God-focused eyes of the saints stared from frescoed walls or brooded in icons stubbled with uncut jewels, while metropolitans and bishops processed back and forth in a shimmer of Persian silks, and the incense rolled from the censers like celestial cannon-shot. Drenched in this soothing mist, the business of state continued in a dream or nightmare. Proscriptions, higher taxes, public works—all were sanctified in the stupefying fragrance. Momentarily, perhaps, as the tsar clasped in his jewelled hands the flower-shaped chalice of the Host, a decision to attack Poland or eliminate a too-successful boyar hung unconcluded in the bluish air. Then the cup’s enormous calyx spilt into his mouth the absolving blood of Christ.