Beating Belinda Carlisle by 500 Years

Yesterday, finding myself with nothing on my teaching schedule, I decided the time was ripe to go tour the Kremlin. I figured this was probably the best opportunity I was likely to have to do so for some time, because my day was free, because my passport was temporarily back in my possession (which I thought would make getting past the Moscow police easier), and because I knew the Kremlin was open.

I decided to take an organized tour, as I wanted to know more of the significance of what I was seeing than my Rough Guide was able to supply. So I joined the Capital Tours group for 1400 roubles (about $60 American).

My tour guide was evidence enough of how Russia has changed in recent years. During the course of the tour, he fielded questions from an American tourist who repeatedly asked about such sensitive topics as Medvedev's relationship to Putin. My guide was openly disdainful not just of Lenin and Stalin (relatively safe topics to be disdainful of these days), but of Putin himself. He said he had no fear whatsoever of reprisals for his criticisms of Putin. That says a lot; sixty years ago, someone saying equally critical things about Stalin would have been shipped off to Siberia, or possibly even shot. Even in Gorbachev's time, penalties would have been inflicted on an Intourist guide who stepped out of line.

After leading us through Red Square and the Alexander Gardens (which form the rear border of the Kremlin), the guide led us into the Kremlin proper. Before he did so, however, he pointed out what must be the earliest example of Russian rewriting of history. Visible in one part of the Kremlin's rear walls is a grotto in which a fake "Roman ruin" was constructed not long after the defeat of Napoleon. The reason for this fake ruin was to reinforce Moscow's claim to be the "Third Rome" (after Rome itself and Constantinople).

Upon entering the Kremlin, the first site a visitor sees is, unfortunately, a hideous glass box Krushchev constructed as a venue for Party Congresses. Amidst the medieval and neoclassical glories of the Kremlin, this monstrosity is wholly out of place. I could imagine it in Lincoln Center; where it is, it is just an annoyance.

The tour focused mainly on the two main cathedrals in the Kremlin complex, the Cathedral of the Assumption and the Cathedral of the Archangel. Both of these cathedrals played important parts in tsarist times. The former was the site of coronations, while the latter served as the burial place of the tsars until Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg.

I doubt there are words in English adequate to describing the sublime beauty of the Cathedral of the Assumption. The interior of the cathedral is gilt painted over with frescoes. One notices the gold everywhere, which is doubtless the intended effect. My guide told me that, in ancient Russian art, gold was seen as the color of heaven. It is for this reason that, in traditional icon painting, only halos are painted in gold. But the Cathedral of the Assumption is meant to give the viewer the feeling of being not on earth but in heaven. The intent was to reinforce for visitors a correspondence between the rule of Ivan III (predecessor to Ivan the Terrible) and the kingdom of heaven. 500 years before Belinda Carlisle, the Russian tsars had already discovered that heaven is a place on earth.

More on the Kremlin in a later posting; work beckons.