Everyone born in Moscow knows that Red Square is a repository of Russian historical memory, the altar of the motherland and, in general, the center of the universe. Its architecture has served as the backdrop for many a historical drama, ranging from the tragic to the comedic, from the uplifting to the depressing.
Yet sometimes it seems that, over the years, the image of Russia’s main square has blurred, and that for most observers it has become just a postcard: beautiful and beloved, but stripped of its erstwhile grandeur. This change is reflected in the recent uses to which Red Square has been put: as a concert venue, a skating rink, and an advertising billboard. It has reached the point where the idea of removing the revered Soviet necropolis – eternal resting place of Vladimir Lenin – is being seriously debated, since it gets in the way of various holiday celebrations. This is a good time to explore the hidden meanings and symbols that abound throughout Red Square and its architectural monuments, and to consider what kind of treatment it deserves.
The first recorded name for the site on which Red Square stands is Pozhar (Fire). In the thirteenth century, a settlement sprung up on level ground separated from the Kremlin by a small ravine. Whenever enemies approached the city, it was set ablaze to prevent hostile forces from using its houses and fences as cover.
As the two other sides of the site were protected by rivers, this more vulnerable side was the site of frequent battles. Even before the settlement was established, beginning in 1177, a series of competing principalities, including Ryazan and Tver, fought local forces here, as did Tatars and Lithuanians somewhat later.
In 1382, at Spassky Gate, a heroic deed was performed by the first Muscovite commoner to be mentioned in recorded history: the aptly named “Adam” felled a Horde prince with a well-aimed shot.
In short, what is now Red Square started out as a field of Russian military glory – something that is now completely forgotten.
In the fifteenth century, a market took root on the eastern end of the present square. Italian builders completed the present Kremlin walls in 1492, but the very next year a fire that started in the Kremlin jumped the wall and burned down the settlement. After that, the Grand Prince decreed a building-free zone extending 109 sazhens (250 meters) from the Kremlin. But that still didn’t make Pozhar a square.
In 1508, a giant, 36-meter-wide moat began to be constructed along the walls. It occupied nearly half of the present area of the square and was delineated by a low, crenelated wall. In the early nineteenth century the moat was filled in, but if you look closely, you can still see it: the paving stones on the western side of the square sag slightly, as they were laid over land that had been recently filled in, whereas near the Spassky and Nikolsky Gates the pavement is slightly elevated, betraying the ancient bridges that once spanned the moat.
The remaining area of Pozhar was filled with the temporary wooden huts and shops of the city’s main market. In the late sixteenth century, a giant row of stone stalls stretched along the entire length of the moat, from Nikolskaya Street to Moskvoretskaya Street. In the east, it abutted the Merchants’ Court (Gostiny Dvor), where foreign merchants sold their wares. This shopping complex was like a separate city, with intersecting lanes covered by a vaulted stone ceiling with openings to let in light. It was rebuilt several times, and finally demolished in the late nineteenth century. The present GUM, built in 1893, preserved the floor plan of lanes crossing at right angles – nine instead of the original fifteen – and added a transparent dome overhead.
Thus did the former Pozhar became Torg (Market), a trading crossroads with links to every corner of the world. Such commercial centers always act as magnets for all manner of activity, and soon taverns and execution scaffolds, whores and prayer services became part of the bustle. And magnificent foreign embassies entered the Kremlin from here, too, exclusively through the Spassky Gate.
The Ambassadors’ Court was located on Ilyinka Street, where representatives of foreign states prepared to be received at the Tsar’s Palace. As they entered the Kremlin they were greeted by the famous Tsar Cannon, set atop an imposing base. It essentially performed the same function as the Bulava missile does at today’s military parades: thankfully it has never been fired, but we have it, and people should never forget that we do. Beyond the thick walls of the cannon’s base and in its line of fire stood taverns that were said to be among the most violent in the city.
In front of the gun platform, in the late sixteenth century, a stone podium called Calvary (Lobnoye Mesto) was built. It was used to announce the tsar’s decrees and as a place for official ceremonies, not for executions, as is commonly believed. The prevalence of this misconception explains the presence of the stone plaque reading: “There were never any executions here.” The message still has not gotten through. There is the simpleminded folk belief that this was a place where “foreheads were chopped off” and a more sophisticated etymological misconception (Calvary derives from the Latin for skulls and skulls relate to foreheads). In fact, the toponymic Lob in this case predates Moscow: a round terrace overlooking the low bank of the Moscow River has been there since time immemorial.
For executions, which the square also saw in abundance over the years, special scaffolds were constructed. The infamous massacre of the boyars by Ivan the Terrible took place here on July 25, 1570, and it was one of the most horrific episodes in the city’s history. Then, in March 1611, while putting down a nascent uprising, the Poles cut down so many people that there was no place to set foot in the entire square. During the Streltsy uprising, the rebels turned the Spassky Gate, the main entrance to the Kremlin, into a place of carnage, raising despised noblemen on their pikes, then cutting them to pieces and literally stomping them into the mud.
All this happened a long time ago, but it bears remembering when one goes ice skating or attends a pop concert on the square: this is a place of long and bitter memory. The Soviet-era sign “No Smoking on Red Square” is a token of that respect.
St. Basil's.
In the mid-sixteenth century, this crossroads witnessed what would certainly become the main event in the history of the square and a milestone in the history of Russia: the construction of the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat, better known as St. Basil’s Cathedral. It is a perfect embodiment of the mythical Russian spirit, the symbol of all that is Russia and of Russia’s magic. It is so unlike anything that previously existed in church architecture that specially trained professionals still lose sleep and sanity in search of a correct interpretation of its complex, hidden symbolism.
The cathedral’s builder, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, was himself terribly complicated. “A man of strange reasoning,” is how contemporaries described him. This description could mean a lot of things, but there can be no doubt that Ivan Vasilyevich was one of the most intelligent, educated and talented men of his time. He was a gifted writer, a composer of spiritual chants, and co-creator of one of the greatest monuments of the era, the Cathedral of the Intercession.
The architects Barma and Postnik raised an unprecedented building, a nine-church structure, which went against their patron’s original wishes. Ivan wanted eight churches, which was already extremely daring. The eight churches surround the ninth, central church, which contradicted the Orthodox canon.[1] Tradition was broken in order to create a strictly centric building, which was consistent with the advanced notions of the Italian Renaissance of the time.
Foreigners have not always appreciated the significance of this extraordinary monument. In his account of an 1839 trip through Russia, the French travel writer Astolphe de Custine puts his lack of understanding on full display: “Those who come to worship God in this candy box are not Christians.” And later: “A fruit platter, a Delft bowl filled of pineapples, each of which has a cross sticking out of it, or a colossal mountain of crystals, do not yet make for an architectural monument.”
Even today, many people share his view. The author has had to argue with foreign colleagues who say, “We understand that it is dear to you, but you are a trained architect; you should be able to see that this is the death of art.”
But this is not the right way to look at it. St. Basil’s is not architecture for the sake of art, but an expression of paschal joy, celebration and breaking of the fast. Anatoly Mariengof put it well: “I admire Barma and Postnik’s invention. Who else could think of standing an Italian harlequin on its head in the middle of Moscow?”
In the twentieth century, a patriotic view became firmly established that the unusual form of the cathedral had been borrowed from Russian wooden architecture – even though almost no Medieval wooden temples had survived to that point and we knew next to nothing about them. But today critics are no longer afraid to admit that, in fact, those ubiquitous foreigners did indeed contribute to the design of our most important national symbol. Is such an admission upsetting for Russian patriots? Not in the least: they take pride in the fact that our capital was not cut off from the world, but was integrated early on into the mainstream of European culture.
The origins of St. Basil’s remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps its architects, whom the chronicle clearly identifies as Russian craftsmen, worked with some forgotten foreigner who happened to be in Russia at the time, or perhaps they themselves had honed their architectural skills at some European university. After all, only a casual observer could possibly believe that the cathedral was a wild improvisation, without a well-thought out design for the façade and the back. In fact, the floor plan was traced with a meticulous compass following a profound logic. And, in addition to the overarching idea of a symmetrical structure, there are certain technical features of the building, such as the flat brick ceiling of the western porch, that could only have been imported from Europe.
Nevertheless, the Cathedral of the Intercession was unique both here and abroad. As befits a true masterpiece, St. Basil’s is akin to a supernova explosion – utterly unique. Perhaps the extraordinary uniqueness of the church stems from the fact that its architecture is used to express a figurative, almost literary concept.
Strictly speaking, any church is an allegory, a symbolic image of the Kingdom of Heaven. But the creators of St. Basil’s went a step further, creating not so much an image as an actual model of the Russian Paradise, on the strictly observed scale of one to Infinity. The central dome stands for the Firmament, the towers over the chapels for cathedrals and lesser churches. The Western Tower, representing the Entry into Jerusalem, is decorated with stylized embrasures – a city gate. The corner triangles on the chapels represent the roofs of its terems. The irrepressible joy of Easter infuses every detail; after all, it’s Paradise.
The cathedral completely changed the image of the prosaic Torg. The main cathedral of the city was magnificent from the outside but on the inside it was cramped and uncomfortable. It had been so conceived, said commentators, because this church was the altar of the Fatherland, whereas the actual church was the open space around the main gate of the Kremlin, which by then had finally acquired the name Red Square.[2] The most important rituals and ceremonies took place here, with Lobnoye Mesto playing the role of the solea, while the sacraments were performed in the cathedral, which was a complex of nine separate churches.
At first glance, there is a striking discrepancy between the incredibly festive aspect of the cathedral and what we know of Ivan the Terrible’s era. How can we reconcile all this joy with his tyranny, with the atrocities of the oprichnina? (See article, page 19) It is not really difficult. The frightening ruler whom we’re used to seeing as a hooked-nosed, wild-eyed old man was once young and handsome. He was also wise, talented and successful, and married to a beautiful wife whom he adored. The cathedral was built to celebrate the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan. The icon dedicated to that event shows the triumphant tsar walking amid the Heavenly Host, alongside his illustrious ancestors, princes and warriors.
But in 1560, the year the cathedral was completed, the young tsaritsa suddenly died. Soviet archaeologists have since confirmed the tsar’s version of events: her bones contain traces of lead and mercury; she really was poisoned by one of her attendants. From that moment on, Ivan Vasilyevich’s suspicious nature took over, and the second half of his reign began, complete with the oprichnina and other horrors.
The architecture of that era became austere and functional, and the joyful theme introduced by Barma and Postnik would not be developed for another seven decades, when, reborn after the Time of Troubles, the country once again began to enjoy life and Russian cities flowered with ornate churches as festive as the unique cathedral on Red Square.
The main monument of this revival stands directly opposite the cathedral. Spasskaya (Savior’s) Tower is the square’s festive focal point.[3] It is a most versatile symbol of Russia, populist and statist and solemn and joyful all at once. A stone plaque above the archway of Spassky Gate records its origins under Ivan III, but only for those who read Latin. A Russian inscription was placed on the backside of the tower, stating that “in the summer of 6999 [1491] this guard tower was constructed on the order of Ivan Vasilyevich, Autocrat of All the Russias, by Pietro Antonio Solario of Mediolanum,” i.e., Milan. At the time, it was just a square base supporting a wooden tower.
Placing the names of a Russian prince and an Italian architect side by side signified that the city the tower guarded was truly the Third Rome – a Russian vision given form by Roman masters. The fact that the Russian inscription was placed on the inner side of the tower was also significant: the city was on this side and the world on the other. For all of its distrust of the clever foreigners, Moscow was becoming the capital of a new European power. Hence the Latin.
Kazan Cathedral, torn down by the Soviets in 1936, it was rebuilt in 1990-93. (The original was built in 1625.)
In 1605, False Dmitry entered Moscow through this Spassky Gate. Barely eleven months later, when he failed to live up to the people’s expectations, the impostor’s body was dragged back out of the city through the same aperture, and the Time of Troubles began. Its main result was not just the utter devastation of the economy, but the collapse of the state, and the extinction of the ruling dynasty.
The renovation of the main gate leading into the Kremlin, the symbol of the State and of its revival, became a question not so much of urban development as of national will and politics. The first ruler of the new Romanov dynasty ascended the throne in 1613, but the rebuilding of the tower began only in 1624. It was the first major postwar commission by the sovereign. Even the Kazan Cathedral on the opposite side of Red Square, considered the main monument of the Liberation from the Poles, was built in stone a decade later, in 1634.
With Moscow still in ruins, Tsar Mikhail made a decision that might at first glance seem to express a strange ordering of priorities. He invited the foreign master Christopher Galloway to install a clock on the tower and top it with a structure of unprecedented splendor. The history of the Russian State had been interrupted by the Troubles. Now that it was again moving forward, a clock was obviously needed to mark its progress. And the tower over the gate had to be not just any old tower but the greatest in the world, because we not only had survived the devastation, but we had far-reaching plans for the future: the launch of Yuri Gagarin into orbit and other amazing achievements still lay ahead.
Galloway, who oversaw the entire project, was a Scot. The architecture of the superstructure contains some Gothic elements, such as decorative corner turrets connected to the main tower by flying buttresses. A similar building technique had been used in the Town Hall in Brussels, built in 1455. And yet, the tower turned out to be a completely unique masterpiece at the crossroads of cultures. Just like St. Basil’s, it borrowed much from Europe, yet it was original and thoroughly Russian. Galloway was probably responsible for its engineering excellence, but his Russian associate, Bazhen Ogurtsov, one of the founders of the seventeenth century ornate Russian style, can probably take full credit for the Russian aesthetic with which it is imbued.
The clock that Galloway installed was peculiar even by European standards. It had an immobile hand (with an image of the sun) and a rotating face. When fellow Brits asked him why he had chosen that design, Christopher responded with a brilliant aphorism: “Since Russians behave differently from all other peoples, that which they produce should be made accordingly.”
Thus, during the two different periods when Spasskaya Tower was built, Moscow eagerly welcomed foreign masters and sought to learn from Europe. Appropriately enough, the seventeenth century road to the Foreign Settlement (Nemetskaya Sloboda) began at this gate, and it could be thought of as a path to enlightened Europe.
Equally significant was the fact that, with the advent of Soviet rule, Spasskaya Gate was shut and remains shut to this day, having been opened to the common folk only briefly during Khrushchev’s Thaw.[4] Last summer, Russians were thrilled to hear that the President not only proposed rebuilding the Kremlin monasteries, but also promised to finally re-open Spasskaya Gate. So far, these proposals have resulted only in the fact that tourists entering the Kremlin through the Trinity Gate are now ushered out through a door cut in the wall next to Spasskaya Tower. This allowed tours of the Kremlin and Red Square to be conveniently combined, but it had nothing to do with the opening of the Spassky Gate.
The Savior painted over the gate[5] holds an open book inscribed with the words, “I am the door.”
Alas, Moscow’s main door remains shut.
In the seventeenth century, the theme of colorful Easter joy, introduced into Russian architecture by St. Basil’s, received global acceptance. The cathedral became the model of an ideal city, which had an enormous impact on the image of Moscow in the new century, when the city began to sprout dozens of tall bell towers. This theme received its ultimate embodiment in the project to build stone superstructures atop all the Kremlin guard towers, implemented in 1672-86. It was a highly complex project, costly and wildly impractical, as well as extremely image-conscious and indescribably beautiful. Only the Nikolskiye Vorota, or St. Nicholas Gate, the other Red Square gate into the Kremlin, remained unfinished. That gate was also special. The icon of St. Nicholas, a saint particularly revered by the people, had been placed over that gate, and it was the beginning of the Holy Road, the path from Moscow to the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra. It is also through this gate that Pozharsky and Minin burst through to liberate the Kremlin from the Poles in 1612.
It is not known why the St. Nicholas Gate was left unfinished. It was certainly not due to a shortage of funds or ideas. The current neo-Gothic tower dates from the early nineteenth century, and, in spite of its fairly grotesque form, it successfully complements the eclectic collection of buildings on the square.
The History Museum.
The History Museum, built in 1881, was less successful. The building is huge, heavy and dark. But its saving grace is the elegance of its twin-tower silhouette.[6] It was an attempt to create a none-too-authentic, but ideologically correct and officious image of the country’s history. In order to build this manifesto of historicism, the Zemstvo offices had been cynically demolished, destroying a magnificent baroque monument of the Petrine era, reminiscent of a town hall of a European city and decorated with Russian tiles and delicate white stone carving. And even the ponderous matryoshka doll that was built in its place was never completely finished. The initial plan called for the façade to be decorated with tiles like its predecessor. But it could have been much worse: one version of the project proposed building the museum along the Kremlin wall – atop Red Square.
Of course, there are many aspects of Red Square that might have turned out differently. If we put together all the unrealized projects for Red Square, from Ukhtomsky’s to Melnikov’s, we get a huge and strange – or, rather, totally crazy – city. Its wildest, most extraordinary sights might have been provided by some of the entrants in the 1924 nationwide competition to design Lenin’s Mausoleum. Naturally, many of those plans were drawn to gigantism, in order to be worthy of the Great Leader.
“The whole of the Kremlin must take a back seat and become its backdrop, just as the history of the tsars gave way to the history of working people,” the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky said, insisting on a “colossal statue of Lenin, calling the proletariat to the final struggle against capitalism.” At the time, Mayakovsky’s opinion counted for quite a lot. There were also smaller, charmingly innocent proposals in the shape of pyramids, lighthouses and Orthodox churches crowned with five-point stars. Such proposals help us appreciate the disaster Red Square avoided thanks to the brilliantly simple solution devised by Alexei Shchusev.
It was a remarkable achievement to build a structure in the middle of Red Square that not only did not clash with but actually unified its disparate elements, each built in different eras. The Mausoleum balanced out the compositional triangle of the two gate towers of the Kremlin and the central arches of GUM, while also emphasizing the centrally located, but more humble, Senate Tower. Without debating the ambiguous purpose of the building, it must be said that, in purely artistic terms, it was an irreproachable solution.
No wonder the Mausoleum is often called “the best product of Soviet architecture.” On one hand, it was almost an improvisation, on the other a carefully calculated decision. On the night of January 22, 1924, Academician Shchusev was awakened by a call from the Kremlin informing him of Lenin’s death. By daylight, he had sketched the first version of an urgently needed temporary monument to the deceased leader. At first he thought of the giant steps as a pedestal for a statue, but by morning he realized that the step-structure was enough in itself. Remarkably, the small, ascetic, yet solemn structure was the first solution to come to his mind, but it turned out to be the right one. Two temporary mausoleums and several nationwide competitions followed. Shchusev and other sages, including Boris Iofan, Lev Rudnev and even Fyodor Schechtel, spent several years puzzling over different options, but found nothing more appropriate.
The Mausoleum.
Shchusev managed to integrate the Mausoleum into Red Square without disrupting its composition and even to complement it. The square acquired its current form after the fire of 1812, but it was not structurally balanced. Before the Revolution, it was seen more as a broad passage from the History Museum to St. Basil’s. The Mausoleum was placed near the wall, emphasizing the primacy of the Kremlin, and at the same time fixing the center of the square. It gathered space around it, yet without competing with the existing focal points or grabbing attention.
But Red Square’s greatest achievement in the twentieth century was the fact that it survived at all. Construction plans for the Ministry of Heavy Industry called for the demolition of its outer boundary along with the entirety of Kitai Gorod. It has been said that even St. Basil’s was slated for destruction, yet there is no documentary evidence for this. Perhaps even the Bolsheviks, forged from pure steel though they were, had the common sense to understand that this was not the kind of foe they ought to take on – the Russian sky might well fall, burying everyone beneath its shattered pieces. Thank God, these perils were averted, and Kazan Cathedral and the Iversky Gate, both demolished in the 1930s, were resurrected at the end of the twentieth century.
The conventional belief that the Bolsheviks turned Red Square, once a place of joyous folk festivities, into a cemetery, is false. A cemetery has existed there since at least the sixteenth century. Along with the wooden churches erected along the moat in honor of military victories large and small (memories of the battles that took place in what would later become downtown Moscow were, perhaps, fresher then), there were cemeteries in which paupers were buried during times of pestilence and famine. Their bones still lie beneath the cobblestones.
Nevertheless, talk has been regularly rekindled that the main Soviet necropolis, the Mausoleum, as well as the more than 200 graves located behind it, both in and alongside the Kremlin wall, undermine the healthy aura of the square. Three times in the course of 2014 the press raised the issue of demolishing Lenin’s Mausoleum – yes, demolishing it outright, not shutting it down. Leaders of the Orthodox community proposed building a cathedral dedicated to the Virgin on its site.
President Vladimir Putin responded: “It’s an interesting idea, it’s worth considering.”
The square is now the site of public concerts.
Rehearsing for a military parade on Red Square.
Then came the bizarre saga of the French Suitcase: “The Kremlin demands that the Suitcase be removed. The Suitcase demands that the Kremlin be removed.” The episode triggered calls to rid Red Square of “something even more pernicious: the Mausoleum.” Finally, the mass destruction of Lenin monuments in Ukraine produced a new wave of complaints such as: “It’s high time Lenin was cremated or at least tossed out. We lost Finland because of him.”[7]
Meanwhile, there have been rumors that the entire necropolis would be moved. The new location has even been named: the new Federal Memorial Military Cemetery in Mytishchi (or, rather, in the Mytishchi region, “north of the village of Sgonniki”).
This sort of thing has happened before. False Dmitry’s body was dug up and burned and Boris Godunov’s tomb has been moved twice. Do we really want to continue this ancient tradition? As long as we go on playing this game, the past will never become the past and the future will never arrive.
You can’t change history, no matter how tragic it was. You can only make sure that you do not forget it and that you learn its lessons. This, in turn, gives rise to a simple conclusion: the only indisputable role Red Square can play today is as a museum. If you agree, there is nothing to argue about and all we can do is to look at it in wonder. RL
[1] A tenth church was later built over the grave of Vasily the Blessed, the “holy fool” after whom the church came to be named.
[2] The word “red” connoted beauty.
[3] Originally, the tower was known as Frolovskaya, named for the Kremlin Church of Frol and Lavr, which no longer exists.
[4] Under the tsars, all could pass through the gate, but they had to doff their hat and dismount from their horse.
[5] The tower is named for the Savior Not Made of Human Hands icon that originally hung on the inside of the gate; the Smolensky Savior icon again hangs on the outside of the gate.
[6] Appropriately perhaps, the building’s architect was one Vladimir Osipovich Sherwood.
[7] See Russian Life Jan/Feb 2014 for coverage of the suitcase episode, and Nov/Dec 2014 regarding the toppling of monuments.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
