The result of all this is the usual Russian story: however much you battle for sovereignty, you simply strengthen the authorities. Perhaps all the Kremlin was after was the strengthening of the authorities, and this striving for sovereignty was a mere ideological smokescreen to give the appearance of legitimacy? But this has the reverse effect: the more power the Kremlin holds, the less sovereignty Russia has. In the end we could have the situation where power lies just in the Kremlin, the Forbidden City, the emperor’s palace – and the country will be left to the dictates of fate. Such a situation has already occurred in Russian history. In December 1565, Ivan the Terrible left with his court, treasury, icons and tsarist regalia for the village of Kolomenskoye, and from there for the settlement of Alexandrovsk, about one hundred kilometres from Moscow. Here he founded the Oprichnina, a state within a state. In reality, the Tsar took with him his authority, leaving Russia at the mercy of the Tatars and then his own oprichniki. And when he died, the Polish-Lithuanian forces took over, as a result of which the country’s sovereignty was lost for many years, right up to the Zemsky Sobor of 1613, when the House of Romanov came to the throne.[43]
Sovereignty is not the tsar’s wagon train laden with icons or the president’s cortège; it is not Russian special forces, spetsnaz, in Crimea, nor military bases in the Arctic, nor a parade of Topol-M ballistic missiles on Red Square, nor a defile of ships on Navy Day in St Petersburg. It is the constant work of the authorities to improve the country, to integrate it into the wider world and have the rest of the world acknowledge this. And in this sense, the Siemens case is a warning sign for Russia: you can take over territory, clear it of undesirables, stuff it with weaponry and hold a military parade; but without turbines and international recognition, sovereignty doesn’t work. At the end of the day, Crimea ends up as that hole in the cheese which Stephen Krasner wrote about in his book.
PART II: THE WAR FOR SYMBOLS
THE STATE’S GAME RESERVE
I remember well my school-leaving ‘do’. It was in Moscow in June, in the early 1980s. My classmates and I were standing on the bank of the river, opposite where they have since built Moscow-City.[1] Back then it was a run-down industrial area, with a few small factories, warehouses and chimneys. Behind them, some distance away, you could see Stalin’s ‘wedding cakes’.[2] We were gazing on this huge, sleeping city. The early dawn had begun to creep over this vast expanse. Everything had already been said; all the promises had been made; everything had been drunk; we stood and watched in silence as the morning broke on our new life.
Suddenly one of the girls said, ‘Let’s go to Red Square!’ We looked at her in bewilderment, as if she had just appeared from another planet. In fact, she had come from another planet, because she had lived in Canada for many years, being the daughter of the Soviet Ambassador, and she had returned simply to finish her schooling. And she was the only one who had got the idea into her head at this significant moment in our lives to go to Red Square; to stand in the shadow of the towers of state, alongside Lenin’s Mausoleum and the tombs of the Bolsheviks. We stayed where we were, on the bank of the river, listening to the dawn chorus.
I really love Moscow. I love its boulevards, and the little alleys that lead off from the streets around Nikitsky Square; the sound of music coming from the open windows of the Conservatory; the old houses in the Bauman Street District, and the monasteries along the Yauza River. But I can’t bring myself to love Red Square and the Kremlin. Maybe I can enjoy the picture-postcard view you get from a distance, from the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge; but I don’t want to go there simply to marvel at the beauty, or for a bit of peace or to feel the history.
The poet, Osip Mandelstam, wrote: ‘The earth is nowhere as round as on Red Square’.[3] The enormous size and the slope of the square make it suitable for parades and processions, for state executions and state funerals. Its proportions are right for intercontinental ballistic missiles, but not for people. It tries to be part of the city – all of these ‘stalls’ in the GUM shopping arcade with their sky-high prices, the popular ice-rinks put up by the Bosco company each winter and the concerts with military bands. But you’ll hardly find any Muscovites there, just crowds of people from out of town, policemen, foreigners and actors dressed up as Lenin and Stalin, who pose for photographs with the visitors. There is nothing in this space designed for people: no cosy park with benches; no little alleyways like in Prague Castle; no cathedrals to pop into even if you don’t have any special reason, just to light a candle and stand in front of the icon. The whole Kremlin is simply the embodiment of the state, the raison d’état. It is not a space for the individual, for the people or for a memoriaclass="underline" it is a space for power.
As a result, Red Square evokes the uncomfortable feeling that nothing is on a human scale. Lenin’s restless corpse lies there; the shadows of the Streltsy, executed in 1698, are still alive;[4] and the corridors of the Kremlin, so many witnesses say, are stalked by the ghosts of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. You can even smell the smoke of ‘Herzegovina Flor’, Stalin’s favourite tobacco. The Spassky (or Saviour) Gates were once open for everyone. Before the Revolution, the people would pray to the icon of the Saviour, then pass through these gates into the Kremlin; having obtained their free ticket, they could then wander freely everywhere. But under Stalin the gates became the symbol of the inaccessibility of the Kremlin. Having taken over the Kremlin in March 1918, the Bolsheviks did everything to destroy its historical memory.[5] More than half the buildings inside its walls were demolished, including the Monasteries of the Miracles and of the Ascension and the Smaller Nikolaev Palace. The Kremlin was sterilized, all signs of history or humanity were done away with; it was made suitable only for the state. That is why it is so frightening to stand there on winter nights, caught in the glare of the spotlights and the icy wind of history.
There are two types of towns or cities. There’s the market town, which grew up in the Middle Ages as a counter to royal power and where institutions were formed such as guilds, communal authorities and an independent third estate, which represented the ‘citizen’ (a word derived from ‘city’, originally meaning someone who dwelt in a town or a city). Then there’s the fortress town, which arose in the shadow of power, is controlled by, and serves, the state. Moscow grew up around a fortress constructed at the confluence of the rivers Moskva and Neglinka and was always of the second type; just a trading quarter in the shadow of the Kremlin. The whole planning of the city, its radial structure, pulls everything into the centre. The rings of Moscow, like the Garden and the Boulevard rings, were in fact walls built as a defence against the external enemy.
43
The
1
Moscow-City is the business district of the Russian capital, where the skyscrapers have gone up since the collapse of the USSR. The name was chosen as a direct reference to ‘the City of London’, the British capital’s business district.
2
Stalin ordered the building of seven imposing skyscrapers of similar design, nicknamed ‘wedding cakes’, including Moscow State University, the Ukraina Hotel and the Foreign Ministry. In the post-Soviet period an eighth has been built.
3
A line from the untitled poem, which begins, ‘Now I am dead in my grave with my lips moving’. http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/library/Mandelstam_Poems_Ilya-Bernstein.pdf. ‘The Poems of Osip Mandelstam’, trans Ilya Bernstein (EPC Digital Edition, 2014, p. 40).
4
Peter the Great brutally put down a rebellion by his soldiers known as the
5
Within a few months of the Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the Russian capital back to Moscow from Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg, later Leningrad; now once again St Petersburg).