Dimitry Troubetskoy stood on the watchtower on the southern wall of the Kremlin. He took a deep breath and let the chilly October air enter his lungs. The sun had set early today, but Dimitry could see the full moon reflected off the empty bottle of Vodka next to the soldier on the Eastern Wall. Moskva river flowed joyously below him. The river resonated with his feelings. Tonight, Dimitry Troubetskoy was a happy man. Moskva was now a free city. He had played a decisive role in defeating the Polish forces who had occupied the Kremlin. The siege had lasted long, and it seemed like it would never end. But, Dimitry had managed to capture the provisions the Poles had, resulting in a famine and surrender.
He looked at the sky and bowed his head. His eyelids drew together and listened to the gentle rhythm of the river. It comforted him to know that the river played with her children and was not trampled upon by outsiders.
Four hundred years later, as I entered the Kremlin complex, I thought I felt Dimitry Troubetskoy’s presence. His watchful eyes lingered over, examined and deemed me harmless. I was allowed to enter the hallowed grounds which Dimitry Troubetskoy and Dimitry Pozharsky had wrested back from the occupying Polish forces.
The Moscow Kremlin is a fort and as the root of the word (Latin “fortis” meaning strong”) indicates, was built to strongly defend the people and territory it represented. Although artifacts and historical records indicate that fortifications in the region existed in some form as early as the 11th century, the cornerstone of the Kremlin, as a stone fortress, was laid by Dimitry Donskoi. The fortress was completed in 1367 and Moscow withstood two sieges by Algirdas of Lithuania and a siege by Khan Tokhtamysh. These successes, among others, helped Donskoi double the territory of the Principality of Moscow. He also challenged the domination of the Mongols and retook most of Russia from them.
The Kremlin sits in Moscow, an irregular triangle 2235 meters long, somewhat like a gigantic brick-red set square out of a school-going kid’s geometry box. But the walls weren’t always red. The first stone Kremlin, which replaced the wooden fortress, was built of white limestone in 1366-68. It was so iconic that even after the fortress was reconstructed in 1495, the walls continued to be painted white until as late as the 19th Century. Moscow itself was called “белокаменной” or “white stoned”.
Throughout its lifetime, the Kremlin has been a microcosm of Russia, in the sense that what happened to the Kremlin indicated to what was happening in Russian politics.
With the construction of cathedrals and palaces, the Kremlin began to serve as the residence of the Tsars. When the last Tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Feodor Ivanovitch died in 1598, he left a vacuum on the throne and the beginning of a phase that in Russian history is known as the Time of Troubles (Смутное время). This period reached a climax with the occupation of the Kremlin by the Polish forces from 1610-12. It was only with the liberation of the Kremlin by Dimitry Pozharsky and Dimitry Troubetskoy that the troubled times ended and the rule of the Romanov dynasty started.
If you were a time-traveler fascinated about Russian history and went back 300 years in time to Moscow, to meet the greatest Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, you would be disappointed. Because, by this time, the Kremlin and Moscow had lost their importance as the seat of power to the newly built city of St.Petersburg.
The Kremlin would still be used for coronation ceremonies, but that would be the limit of its political importance. Like most things in history, Peter the Great has an Indian connection, but that’s a separate post for another day.
When Napoleon invaded Russia, he moved in to capture Moscow, which had already been abandoned by the Russian population on the orders of the Governor Rostopchin. Napoleon and his forces occupied the Kremlin. Towards the end of his largely fruitless siege, Napoleon ordered the Kremlin blown up. But as luck would have it, most of the fuses were damaged by rain and a large portion of the Kremlin survived the damage.
During his reign, Nicholas I had some of the Italian designed churches and palaces torn down and rebuilt by the architect Konstantin Thon. The demolished Kremlin Armoury was also rebuilt in 1851.
After the Russian Revolution, the Kremlin once again became the seat of power, as Lenin made it his residence. Stalin removed all the relics of the Tsarist regime and so, the two headed eagles on the top of the towers were replaced with pentagonal ruby stars.
During the Second World War, Moscow faced heavy bombing, but the Kremlin was barely affected. The walls had been painted (Russians prefer to say “masked”) with doors and windows to resemble houses. The green towers were painted over and there were temporary wooden structures to resemble roofs of houses. The iconic Kremlin stars (each weighing a ton) were covered and crosses over the domes of churches were removed. All of Kremlin was made to resemble a civilian settlement and thus, escaped the bombing.
After the war, the Kremlin continued to be closed to foreign tourists. It took Nikita Khruschev’s efforts to de-Stalinize most of Russia’s internal and external policies. Along with that, the Kremlin was also opened to foreign visitors in 1955. The Thaw, (Оттепель) as it was called, took its name from a sensational Ilya Ehrenburg novel.
This trend of de-Stalinization continued to the extent that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union the letters “CCCR”, meaning “USSR” that adorned the façade of the Grand Kremlin Palace were replaced with the two-headed eagle that appears on the Russian coat-of-arms.
The Kremlin has continued to be the seat of the government of Russia. Its walls have played host to successive Presidents, being more hospitable to some, than to others. The Kremlin is an inalienable part of Russian identity now, in that it is used as an umbrella term to refer to the highest offices of the country. In fact, even the official website of the President of Russia is kremlin.ru.
As I entered the Kremlin for the first time, I felt all this history wash over me. I felt that I was invited to see the last one thousand years of Russian political life as the net of history had captured it.
Hopefully, this is just the first in a short series of posts on the Kremlin. In subsequent posts, I intend to talk about the individual monuments inside the Kremlin. Stay tuned.
