The Kremlins

Although The Kremlin in Moscow is world famous, there are at least five others and we have visited the one in Moscow and the one in Kazan, so I thought I would put them together.

As we all now know, thanks to the Football World Cup, Kremlin means fortress. But these are on a scale unrelated in the rest of the world (I believe).

If I say that it takes several hours to get round, even at the speed of our guides who do rather rush through their spiel without thinking about us wanting to look and appreciate what we are visiting. The Moscow Kremlin within its walls has the armoury museum with the carriages, regalia and costumes of the Tsars and the fabulous collection of jewellery and Faberge eggs; there are the offices of the President (Whitehall & Westminster for example); the official palace where the President receives state guests and gives functions; there is Cathedral Square with three important churches and two others, no less important but more discreet; the Italianate palace of the Patriarch and the great campanile; there are extensive and beautiful gardens and finally The Presidents’ dwelling, As well as the Communist Party Conference Hall built in the 1950s and the new armoury built after the defeat of Napoleon to house the cannons and other trophies of the war.

Of course, I keep talking about this as part of post-tzarist Russia, but these were the private dwellings and offices of all the Tzars and princes from the 1400s onwards. And though the buildings date from a later period, the area would have been seen by those rulers and their servants up until the destruction of the Romanovs. They would all have been christened, crowned and (until Peter the Great) buried in Moscow. Peter the Great moved his capital to St Petersburg and since then all the Tzars and their families have been buried in the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul. Though coronation right up to Nicholas II took place in the Moscow Kremlin cathedral called the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, a hugely important festival in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, marking the moment when Mary “fell asleep” and ascended into heaven and was subsequently crowned, her coronation is also celebrated.

The Cathedral of the Annunciation Kazan Kremlin

The Kremlin in Kazan was mostly built as it is now, at the time of Ivan the Terrible. It is very similar, though the walls are still painted white (apparently this was true also of the Moscow Kremlin wall). It has two major gateways and several administrative buildings as well as a cathedral and a mosque. The mosque in fairly new and part of a programme of interfaith that began in Kazan, at least, in 2005. It was built on the site of a 14th century mosque destroyed at some point in the Comminist era.

Churches and cathedrals dedicated to Mary, and there are many, have blue domes.

This is just one of the cathedrals in the Moscow Kremlin, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Yes, I know it has not got blue domes, but nevertheless! Then there is the campanile. The bells are rung if the Patriarch is saying Mass, and on certain feast days and at the coronation of the Tzar.

It may not be clear, but this is all the campanile building

One of the principle disadvantages of following a guide in these circumstances is that they have a timetable and a spiel which they have mastered and WILL deliver no matter what.

So, in Kazan for example, we were whisked past the memorial to the heroes of the Second World War with the briefest on nods to the young people who were mounting guard. They were practising for May 9th which is Victory Day in Russia. This may seem odd, since fighting was still continuing in Europe right through June and onwards but many European countries, especially in the East celebrate the capitulation of the Germans on May 9th.

Further on there was a rehearsal with singing and some ceremony with red balloons which we were also rushed past. But it was not in the script…

But finally one thing that definitely should have been in the script was a beautiful wrought iron gate in a strange seven storey tower which seemed to have no purpose and about which there is a provably inaccurate myth about Ivan the Terrible, which our guide shared at length and then rushed us on our way. Just around the side of the tower from we were standing was the gateway. The wrought iron is gilded, the centre was a large circle, split down the middle by the two leaves of the gate. On the right hand side was a golden crescent moon and on the left half of a golden blazing sun. You need to take my word for how beautiful it is, as we were rushed past it too much of a hurry and much lower down to take a photograph.

This is the leaning tower of Kazan (not my inadequate photography)

The buildings in the Kazan Kremlin are as numerous but nothing like as glamorous as the ones in Moscow, and indeed some of the Tzars never came here after the defeat of the Tartars by Ivan the Terrible.

One of the office blocks in the Kazan Kremlin

After the Kremlin and a quick tour of the city we were taken to the “Old Town” which turned out to be newly refurbished Tartar dwellings. Typically, we preferred the one that had not been tarted up.

Warsaw to Moscow

We are in Yekaterinberg and have access to wifi again. So I will run through the last few days in several posts in order not to overwhelm you with everything at once! A feeling that I am beginning to appreciate as we dash through the cities one by one, looking, learning and listening to the various guides.

We were on a night train to Moscow. We stood for a very long time on Warsaw station before leaving, and then we were the wrong end of the platform for carriages at the other end of an exceedingly long train, so it was rush, rush at the last minute with all our luggage. We all made it in the end, but how ridiculous!

The train was super comfortable, six to a compartment with hot and cold drinks all on trolleys to our seats. No food oddly, but we had stocked up on Warsaw station with (of all things) baguettes from Paul, the oh so familiar ubiquity of food chains the world over. Toilets and showers with hot water available for our convenience and eventually a bed with sheets and pillowcases. What luxury.

However, one cannot, and should not forget those other passengers on Polish railways seventy odd years ago, whose destination was, as then, unknown and who were packed into cattle trucks with no regard to humanity, no food or water and in terrible heat and distress. If this is morbid, it seems to me that you cannot leave Warsaw without this thought, at least to start with we must have been on the self same tracks. Terrible times, thankfully over but not forgotten.

We arrived in Moscow at around midday but unusually had time to ourselves once checked in to the exceedingly glamorous Four Seasons hotel, where we were offered water or tea or coffee in the lounge. It was not until later that it became apparent that only the water was complimentary. Tea, black with milk cost 800 doubles and coffee cost 400. One passenger refused to pay at the end, pointing out that if water was complimentary and tea and coffee offered in the same breath, guests were entitled to assume it was all the same. Such chutzpah!

Corin and I chose to go off on a Hop on Hop off bus tour. Although we could do it for free the next day, this seemed to us a good start. The Four Seasons is on Red Square but this was pretty much closed off because of preparation for Victory Day (of which more later). We picked up our bus in Theatre Square, which is self explanatory and on one side is the home of The Bolshoi..

The bus takes you past all the obvious sites, St Basil’s Cathedral, the famous shopping centre – GUM and past many interesting streets until you come suddenly to Lubyanka Square with its infamous prison.

Then we wound our way passed the river (Moskva) and past the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer which was built in 1812 in thankfulness at the defeat of Napoleon. There are so many churches and cathedrals with golden domes everywhere. It is slightly overwhelming. There are three in the Kremlin alone, and one with silver domes as well. St Basil’s stands out with its fantastic coloured onion domes and Turk’s head domes. It does not actually lean over – that is just my photograph.

At the time of Catherine the Great, The Kremlin was encircled by two other defensive walls, these would have been earth embankments topped with a wooden palisade, these have now gone and they are now circular roads, they must have been enormous, today these are six lane highways, and the inner one is two lanes in either direction with a lovely park of lime trees, benches and paths – and statues – between the two lanes of traffic. The statues are to Pushkin and Gorky among others.

The architecture is varied, mostly dating from the time after the defeat of Napoleon, because while he was holed up in The Kremlin waiting for Alexander I to sign a treaty, Moscow’s wooden buildings burnt furiously to smoke him out. It did, but in October 1812 winter came early and violently, and Napoleon’s retreat was a catastrophe.

Then there was Stalin’s neo-classical period, followed by Khrushev’s utilitarianism and now exceedingly modern buildings are going up everywhere.

This is the street in which GUM takes up the whole of the other side

The HQ of the civil service

This is the private dwelling of The President

These are just a few examples. The top five windows at the end of this building comprised Lenin’s apartment, Stalin preferred the ground floor and Putin does not live there at all, but out in the countryside to the west of Moscow.

This is one tiny corner of the Communist Party Conference Hall built by Khruschev

I am ending this here. Enough already!

Two recommendations from Canada

My friends rather despair of recommending books for me to read, as they are either on my TBR (currently waiting for the addition of the Booker Longlist novels) or I have already read them, so it is a welcome treat to have a reliable source in Canada for interesting and rewarding novels.

 

Two very different books. One a rather fabulously romantic love story with a sad ending and the other an equally absorbing story set against the background of the Russian Revolution, which was in its own way also a romantic love story but of a very different calibre.

The two main characters in The Lonely Hearts Hotel are orphans who end up in the same orphanage. Pierrot and Rose. The children are kept apart as far as possible, but the attraction is insurmountable in spite of the efforts of a vicious nun, Sister Eloïse. Set in Montreal, Canada the two children survive what amounts to terrible abuse and deprivation, and eventually leave –  Pierrot as the protégé of an elderly widower and Rose as a childcare nurse, at which point their trajectory unravels. Living parallel lives and yet longing for each other, the circus that is their separate existence finally swings them, trapeze-like, together again.

Heather O’Neill paints a vivid world, full of coincidence and drama, with an edge of sadness and misery. But this is not to say that this is not a joyous book, it teeters on the brink, all the time, of tears but is also full of passion and delight.

Pierrot very much reminded me of Jude, a character in A Little Life, the mental and emotional damage is so gross, and yet he is a fine young man, if warped by his experiences.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a very different book, the arch-aristocratic Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club and Master of the Hunt is arraigned before a court and his punishment is internal exile, not to Siberia but to the Hotel Metropol. It is not until he returns to the hotel, not to his suite of rooms but to the attic, that the full horror of his situation strikes.

In spite of the fact that the hero is not permitted to leave the hotel premises, Amor Towles brings all of Russia to his feet. The retinue of staff from kitchen to cloakroom, the various guests and Nina, the child that befriends, him all contribute to the many layers that this story brings to the reader. Friendship, loyalty, love and the occasional adventure; Hotel Metropol offers them all.

This is Stalin’s Russia, but a life confined to a small room is not enough to stop Alexander from learning what is happening outside the revolving doors, for those doors bring the world to him. And when Stalin dies – it is Alexander, now a respected waiter, who watches and listens as the heads roll and new people rise, like cream, to the top. Though unlike cream, there has been a bloodbath…

Thrust from extreme luxury to a small attic room, Alexander survives. In fact, possibly because of house arrest, he is spared other more terrible consequences of his background; as poet and bon viveur he lived on though not in the style to which he was accustomed while his contemporaries variously vanished, committed suicide or were killed by the State.

This novel is an absolute marvel. Everything you need in the way of interest, excitement and suspense.

An Ice-Axe in Mexico

With his epic new novel The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura [translated by Anna Kushner] has woven a tale of complicated loyalties, obedience and love at the time of Communism. The reader is caught in the tentacles of history, many of the characters are historical: The Exile, The Grave Digger of the Revolution, The Assassin and many others; a few who are based on historical characters have more than one identity, as does the killer and then there are the fictional characters, the narrator, Ivan and his pupil/amanuensis Daniel and finally the author himself.

It is no secret that here we are dealing with the death of Trotsky. Written about twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when some of the more revealing papers became available and the excesses of Communism became common knowledge, this masterpiece of writing covers the lives of several people: Iván Cárdenas Maturell, Lev Davidovich Trotsky and Ramón Mercader del Rio all feature in this novel, as do their masters, wives, lovers and friends. The first one is the narrator, the latter two are historical.

The construction of the novel follows each character chronologically, but this means that something that has taken place in the section on Trotsky, has not yet taken place in the life of his assassin, until that is – his narrative catches up. Furthermore, the narrator is telling this from the point of view of hearsay, some 37 years after the main event: 20 August 1940, the day the assassin struck Trotsky on the head with an ice axe.

The reader needs a grasp of the background, but it does not a require a comprehensive knowledge of the time to fully appreciate the depth and mastery of this novel. More background knowledge obviously enhances the experience, but without labouring every point, Leonardo Padura gives enough historical perspective to fill in any gaps.

One should not beat about the bush: Trotsky rose to power on the bloody corpses of many Russians – Mensheviks, striking miners, mutinying soldiers and sailors of the Komosol and also his opponents, but he did it at a time when the Revolution was on a knife edge; he fell ignominiously from power with the rise of the Great Helmsman, the Georgian Man from the Mountains – Josef Stalin. But the deaths than ensued were not merely political or mistakes (though there were many of those) but revenge killings.

How many more was Stalin going to kill? Natalia asked him [Trotsky] one night as they drank coffee in their room, and he offered his response to her: as long as there remained one Bolshevik with the memory of the past, the henchmen would have work. The war to the death was no longer against the opposition but against history. To do it right, Stalin had to kill all those who knew Lenin, and those who knew Lev Davidovich, and, of course, those who knew Stalin…He had to silence all those who had been witnesses to his failures, to the genocide of the collectivization, of the murdering madness of his work camps…and then he would still have to remove from the world those who had helped annihilate the opposition, the past, history, and also annoying witnesses…

The novel covers one of the most turbulent periods of the twentieth century. The Spanish Civil War had just begun, aided by Russia for the time being, Fascism was on the rise in Italy and Germany, the Reign of Terror was in full swing in Stalinist Russia – the show trials and denunciations went on from the beginning of the 1930s through to the beginning of the Second World War; one of Stalin’s most controversial political decisions (the pact with Hitler) arose from the necessity of buying some time because Stalin had just ordered the execution of 136 top ranking members of his military command plus a number of others implicated through his paranoia about conspiracy. Stalin literally had no one to lead the army.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky, the Exile, is already on his way at the beginning of the book, banned from returning to Russia and eventually stripped of his citizenship, he is convicted many times in absentia, we follow him and Natalia Sedova, his wife, on their wretched journey through Turkey, France, Norway and finally to Mexico, where in spite of political opposition he is welcomed by the Prime Minister Lázaro Cárdenas, and allowed to live with Diego Rivero and Frida Kahlo at La Casa Azul.

The man selected to assassinate Trotsky came from the Republican side in the Spanish War, plucked more or less at random, Ramón Mercader del Rio is retrained and brainwashed to become a merciless killer, a Belgian called Jacques Mornard; a killer whose background cannot be linked in any way to Russia. In the novel he has many names and many disguises, that he actually survived is a testament to the efficacy of his brainwashing and his will, since after the assassination he spent 28 years in a Mexican jail. His mentor: Kotov, Grigoliev, Andrew Roberts, Leonid and a host of other personalities remains a strong, subtle and ambiguous character throughout the narrative. We follow their twin narratives all the way back to Russia, even beyond the Stalin era when they are permitted to meet again.

The narrator and his amanuensis live in Cuba, and how he came into possession of this complex and thrilling story is an engrossing part of the novel.

But this is more than an historical novel. It is a lament, a lament for the lost ideal; for the lies and distortions of a system that should have benefited the people and ended up oppressing them; an anguished cry for lost illusions. It is also a cry for Cuba, a country so insulated from the outside world, so controlled from Moscow that the death of Trotsky barely figured in the national consciousness, indeed the narrator barely even knew who Trotsky was. This is a complex, intriguing, multi-layered stew of politics and the human condition, full of contradictions and love; especially of borzois, the elegant and fierce Russian wolfhound. It is spiced with the heat of Cuba, the passion of Spain and the cold-heartedness of Stalin.

Have you met Koralev?

Maybe you are hanging out with Kolya and meeting Koralev is rather low down on your list of priorities?  Or if you have no idea what I am talking about that means you are not reading William Ryan.  Big mistake!

William Ryan has begun a thrilling series of novels set in Russia during the 1930s. Inspector Alexei Koralev, a detective in the Criminal Investigation Department, is based in Moscow; not to be confused with the NKVD or the Chekists.  In difficult circumstances he solves a devious and complicated plot aimed at exporting precious religious items from Russia; to prevent this (or not, as the case maybe) several horrific murders have taken place – Koralev, at great risk to himself, and with a determined and practical mind sets out to solve the mystery surrounding these events, in The Holy Thief he gets closer and closer to the truth…but suddenly is taken off the case, not that this stops him.  Assistance, of a kind, comes from Kolya, Chief Authority of Moscow Thieves – a clandestine and subtly attractive underground network, so called The Thieves, of ex-convicts covered in telling tattoos that operate in Stalin’s Moscow, the tattoos tell their own story and the more you have…

In the second book of the series, Koralev has to go to Odessa where a beautiful and accomplished young woman has been murdered.  By this time, Koralev has established his credentials as a discreet and honest Militiaman, not the norm evidently!  In The Bloody Meadow, the dead woman is Maria Lenskaya, production assistant on the film of this title but with connections in the higher echelons of political life, and a string of other lovers with vested interests that lie anywhere but in solving the mystery.  Koralev is the man to sort out this mess, with help from an unexpected quarter…

Be warned – The Darkening Field is just the same book for an American audience, The Bloody Meadow was deemed to be a too unpleasant a title, Meadow too fey, and Bloody too well, bloody!  Wimps!

Why these books are so fascinating is because Mr William Ryan knows his background, and little by little we get a picture of what it must have been like living through the early (between the wars) Stalinist era.  With hindsight we can see where this all is going, but in the books there are only the vaguest hints of the catastrophe that befell the people of Russia as gradually the State took control.  The 1930s are only the beginning of the 5-year-plan: collectivization has begun in earnest, but most of the country are unaware of the devasting effect on the grain producing areas, Ukraine among them – the export of grain from Odessa is mentioned in passing and not in a complimentary manner, but the effect that it has on the population (we now know that millions starved to death) is not expounded – because AT THE TIME very, very few people knew the truth.  The same goes for an area that Koralev calls The Zone, we know this area as The Gulag, and we get from Koralev the nagging anxiety, a constant undercurrent, that if he fails in his endeavours not only will he disappear into The Zone, but it will affect his estranged wife and young son, Yuri.  In fact, at the very end of the second book he finds out just how much his superior, Rodinov, knows about his background and his small family and it is not a piece of information that fills him with any joy.

Not only are these thrilling detective novels, but also they are filled with fascinating insights into life in Moscow and in Odessa.  There is a lovely moment when Koralev walks down the famous steps of Odessa harbour and thinks about the film Battleship Potemkin, made in 1925, these and similar moments are precious and delightful.

Mr Ryan has assured me that The Twelfth Department, the tird book in this series, comes out in May 2013 so you have got plenty of time to catch up – what are you waiting for?