A WEEK IN THE KREMLIN

NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Gorky

For a couple of weeks in the spring of 2014, I got to stay in the Kremlin. I informed many people I knew of this situation, hoping I would receive post addressed to me in said citadel, but nobody bothered to do so. The Kremlin in question was not, obviously, in Moscow, but in Nizhny Novgorod, a large industrial city which was known for several decades as Gorky, after its most famous son, Maxim. This was only the nom de plume of Alexei Peshkov, whose memoirs about a working-class childhood in the city make clear the reason why he chose to rename himself; Gorky means Bitter. The city’s new/old name was replaced in 1990 with the original, translatable as Lower Newtown, to differentiate it from Veliky Novgorod, Great Newtown, a much more famous and well-preserved historic city, once centre of a republican city-state. Lower Newtown is the last really big city going directly east from Moscow to the Urals, and the fifth largest city in the Russian Federation. It is, on any of today’s definitions of “Europe”, within the continent, though some earlier definitions that drew that shifting border along the Volga would have it just in Asia, with the city centre on a ridge at the confluence of the Volga and the river Oka. It is also unadulteratedly Russian; not an enlightened, ruthlessly planned “window on the world” like St Petersburg, not a megalopolitan multicultural city like Moscow, not a basically Soviet foundation like the Federation’s third and fourth largest cities, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg – and unlike other “Russian” cities in this book, it has never been in any other country. “Russia is not Europe” might be a standard declaration of Central European liberals, and if that is so, we should be able to find out here what some of those non-European features are.

The very use in English of the Russian word “Kremlin” is exoticising – in function and plan, there’s not a great deal here that should stop you using phrases like “Castle” or “Citadel”, because that’s all a Kremlin is. There is one in every historic Russian city, like there is one in most British historic cities – a walled city of stone to defend a town against attacks by foreign armies and raiders, or to enforce a conquest. The Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin was begun in the fourteenth century, and what is there now is an early-sixteenth-century design by the Italian architect Pietro Francesco, when the walled city had to be reinforced during a war with the Tatar Khanate of nearby Kazan.

So far, so straightforward for late-medieval Europe, right down to the hiring of an Italian for complex matters such as architecture and planning. The Moscow Kremlin’s (also Italian-designed) towers are, however, notoriously exotic in their shape, something often ascribed to the influence of the Tatars; the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is a bit more squat and lumbering, but there is also something in the design here that you wouldn’t find in Western Europe. The Kremlin bridges the divide between Nizhny Novgorod’s strongly defined “Upper” and “Lower” towns, with its redbrick walls mounting a steep incline. Some of the towers that mark its gates, particularly the heavy, decorative Demetrius Gate, are free fantasies, part military, part Florentine, part Islamic, topped by a triangular copper peak – but this is actually auto-exoticisation. They look as alluring as they do because they were reconstructed in the late nineteenth century in the “neo-Russian” style; the Demetrius Gate, for example, was remodelled to become an art museum. Within these walls, little more survives from pre-revolutionary Russia than the small, seventeenth-century Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel. Unlike the Moscow Kremlin, which was meticulously preserved – the revolutionary Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, threatened to resign when he heard that parts of the Kremlin had been damaged in the fighting in the city in Moscow 1917 – the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is a citadel of the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow, enclosing an administrative centre of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, inherited, but not significantly added to, by the oligarchic, statist capitalism of the Russian Federation.

Demetrius Gate

Kremlin walls leading to the Lower Town

Despite its historic significance, Nizhny Novgorod was never on the Soviet tourist itinerary, never on the tours of the “Golden Ring” of Muscovite citadels organised by Intourist, never with a Progress Publishers Guidebook translated into the major world languages. That’s largely because it became an industrial city in the late nineteenth century, and became even more of one in the USSR, with the motor manufacturing industry concentrated here – the Soviet Detroit, or more appositely, Turin. It became a “closed city” under Stalin due to the amount of military engineering here. Sakharov was famously exiled to Gorky from Moscow. Being exiled to Gorky sounded terrifying to non-Russian ears, but in terms of relative distance, it’s roughly the equivalent of being sent to Coventry. All this may be one reason why the Soviets were so careless with this Kremlin – no tourists were meant to be here anyway, and preserving it all for the people of Gorky was hardly a priority. There were tourist cities and there were industrial cities, and only the great metropolises like Leningrad, Moscow and Kyiv were allowed to be both. Well into the Russian interior, Gorky was a place foreigners weren’t even allowed into unless they had special dispensation. A certain paranoia evidently lingers. The English editor of the notably Russia-friendly website The Calvert Journal was deported from Nizhny Novgorod in 2016; he was there for the same reason I was, lecturing at Arsenal, an art gallery built into the Kremlin’s old arms store, with guest rooms to sleep in above. It was a memorable place to stay. One night, kept awake by cars screeching to a halt outside the Kremlin wall and chants of “ROSS-I-YA! ROSS-IYA!” – this during the dirty war with Ukraine over Donbas – it was a relief to find that the reason for the patriotic celebration was simply victory in the ice hockey championship.

First to go, when the Kremlin was redeveloped by the Bolsheviks, was the nineteenth-century Transfiguration Cathedral, replaced by the House of the Soviets, a Constructivist local government HQ, completed in 1931. It is a rare pleasure to find a building of the Soviet avant-garde within such a citadel of ancient Russian power, their rationalist, technocratic Year Zero forcefully asserted on the ruins of backwards, superstitious, autocratic Muscovy. It is mounted on a ridge, sheltered by pine trees, a grey-rendered concrete building, using one of the abstract pin-wheel plans that the Constructivists favoured. A ribbon-windowed, curved volume marks the entrance, hauled up on thin pilotis borrowed from Le Corbusier. In its clarity and confidence, it is as radical as any European or American building of the time. Few of the later additions to the Kremlin are as exciting – lumpy official architecture of the 1950s and 1970s dominates.

The House of the Soviets in the Kremlin

There is also an excellent Art Museum in the Kremlin, with a first-rate collection of the abstract painting that immediately preceded and for a while, succeeded the October Revolution, with major work by Malevich, Popova and others; so sure are the people who work here that nobody would want to visit this room that, when we did so, we found one staff member had spread herself out on the floor, painting flowers and bunnies. Hostility to modernism, which stamped its concrete and glass on the Transfiguration Cathedral’s golden domes, is obviously still the norm. The gallery markets itself on its collection of work by the turn-of-the-century painter Boris Kustodiev, and a room full of his ripe, colourful paintings of merchants and their zaftig wives in pretty, exotic cityscapes is the museum’s main attraction. However, at the other end of the Kremlin, the Great Patriotic War memorial’s eternal flame features interesting etched figures in the “severe style” of the Khrushchev era, expressive and modern. Gorky was far from the front, but was still bombed by the Luftwaffe; the Kremlin suffered major damage. From the war memorial, you have a magnificent view of two rivers: the Oka, which has industry and housing clinging to its banks, and the Volga, which has been left untouched, with marsh and steppe visible as far as the eye can see.

Eternal Flame of the Thaw

The Upper Town is a regular Russian-Soviet city. The pedestrianised Bolshaya Pokrovskaya street features good examples of twentieth-century architecture from most eras; some art nouveau, some Stalinist classicism, some very mild Constructivism, and the State Bank, whose tented roof and cantilevered steps are again in the neo-Russian style, from the nation-building era when everywhere in Europe had to accentuate its local vernacular, after centuries of international classicism (it is also politically promiscuous, with the Tsarist eagle on the main gable, and a gold globe with the hammer and sickle on top of the tower). The late-Soviet era experimented in a similar vein – the Academic Puppet Theatre features a 1980s entrance façade slotted across the side wall of an earlier classical palazzo, with a spiky roof and a relief sculpture of pipers and puppets under an abstracted old Russian skyline; next to it, the all-glass, international modernist Technical Museum is capped by a colourful mosaic of folksy cockerels, suns and lions. More official structures, such as the red sandstone classicism of the local KGB – now FSB, with no major change in function – or the early 1930s “Postconstructivism” of the post office, where classical details fill in the modernist lines, are drab by comparison with these goofy, enjoyable games with the local style.

The Puppet Theatre

Old Russia

Walk a little further into the side streets, and you’ll find – as in Chișinău – that you’re still in a town of tiny, one-storey wooden houses. Given that they’re less drastically dilapidated and mostly cared for as a historic townscape, they’re somewhat less distressing. One is well-kept as one of several Maxim Gorky House Museums, several are falling apart rather elegantly, one contains a sex shop, its sign rudely placed alongside the exposed logs of the structure. This sudden fall into seediness is especially noticeable given that Bolshaya Pokrovskaya itself is an affluent, modern street of sushi bars, department stores and cafes, with only the preserved façade of the Sverdlov family shop left as a nod to the past – and that’s because of the family’s favourite son, Iakov, the Bolshevik leader who ordered the killing of the Tsar and his family in 1918. At the end of the pedestrianised street is a green square with a giant statue of Gorky, sculpted by Vera Mukhina – tall, gaunt and defiant – and the only Metro station in the older part of the city, on the east side of the Oka. It had just been opened when I visited – until then, the Gorky Metro built in the 1980s and abandoned in the 1990s only served the industrial, western side.

The recommended means of getting to the Lower Town is not via the Metro – it isn’t covered at all – but via the Chkalov Steps which lead from the Kremlin to the Volga. These are one of the sights of the city, built between 1943 and 1949, partly by German prisoners of war, and at enormous expense even for the time. They begin with a statue of the titular Chkalov, local boy and transatlantic aviator, then descend in three curved, sweeping flights, with each level marked by obelisks and benches, for those exhausted by the climb. It is three times the height of the Potemkin Steps in Odessa, which must make it one of the tallest public stairways in Europe. At the end, you can see nothing but the steppe on the other side, but turn left, and you’re in the pretty, well-preserved Lower Town. Some of what it has – such as the River Station – is typical Soviet fare, but the streets are delicate and classical, like a miniature St Petersburg. There is a hipster bar which serves fresh fish and whose staff seemed very pleased to encounter foreigners. The churches are what really makes the Lower Town memorable, and so completely unlike anything west of Brest.

There are two in particular that showcase Russian architecture in all its strangeness and exoticism – the Assumption Church, with five gold onion domes, and the fabulous Stroganov Church, founded by local merchants at the end of the seventeenth century. This was in a style often called “Naryshkin Baroque”, but it doesn’t resemble the faithful Italian-style Baroque of, say, Poland in the same period. Russian architects plundered Baroque’s rich details and added them to the clusters of onion domes that defined Russian sacred architecture. The twisted, whipped domes themselves, on the Stroganov Church, are amazing confections, faceted, multicoloured and fruity, with the highest dome inset with gold nuggets. The provenance of these romantic skylines – ushered in with St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow – is speculative, with claims that the idea came from Tatar mosques; no matter how much Russian architecture was designed by Italian architects, it looks distinctly, inescapably “other”. Whether this joyful architectural originality denotes a substantially different civilisation to that of its Western neighbours is deeply questionable – a serf in Poland and a serf in Russia was a serf either way, whether their masters’ architects directly copied Italian designs for their churches, or came up with their own style. Already, when the Stroganov Church was built, Peter the Great was on his way back from Deptford to found a city on the Baltic modelled on Amsterdam. The persistence of this more piquant style is sign of backwardness and insularity or of confidence, of refusing to copy and replicate, depending on your view.

The Chkalov Steps

Russian Baroque

When you cross the bridge to the other side of the city, the side with a Metro and factories and the main railway station, and turn back to look at the skyline, you’ll get a shock. As expected, there’s all those polychromatic bulbs and onions below and the Kremlin above, straight from a Kustodiev painting – but on the highest ridge, a single, standardised square tower of flats has been placed, as some sort of deliberate insult to townscape. The main monuments, when you’ve crossed the bridge, are another “neo-Russian” complex of the late nineteenth century, the sprawling Nizhny Novgorod Trade Fair; a huge square with a concrete hotel and a colossal Lenin monument, one of at least half a dozen in the city; a yellow neo-Russian church; and the Moscow railway station, connected to the Moskovskaya Metro station. Below is a clone of the Moscow Metro, with a classical hall and trains taking a leisurely journey out to Avtozavod, the district where Gorky’s industrial might is, or was, concentrated.¹

Constructivist corner

Directly in front of the station is the last sight we’ll see in the city, Revolution Square. Here, unlike in most of the Upper and Lower Town, you can examine some architecture of contemporary Russian capitalism. McDonalds is housed in a 1990s Postmodernist building, erected especially. Nizhny Novgorod had a respected “school” of Postmodernist architects, and their approach here involves a slightly lumbering approach to form, borrowed from the bulges and curves of the “neo-Russian” idiom, but with little non-structural devices and features pulled away from the building and emphasised, an “advertising-architecture” – the golden arches are mounted on a little plinth, ceremonially. As commercial architecture, it is more lively than either the lumbering classicism of the Soviet GUM department store or the Norman Foster-style glass blandness of the Republic shopping mall, on the other side of this extremely mis-named square. The McDonalds tries to complete a small “traditional” shopping street, ending in the dynamic corners of another Constructivist building, housing a bingo hall, but the effect is futile, as the street is sliced in half by a flyover. The dilapidated high-rise headquarters of the Metro, opposite, seem like a lot of office space to run a single line; the car is king round here, Motorcity USSR. Within the station, you can be dazzled by a mosaic of war and revolution, filling every inch of each of its walls. In the roof is an outsized chandelier and a suspended ceiling, and these, I’m told, were the sole contribution to the city’s public infrastructure of one-time governor, the liberal playboy and later, assassination victim Boris Nemtsov. In a straight line east from here, the next big city is Kazan, and you are in the Republic of Tatarstan.

Postmodernist corner

Railway Station, showcasing chandelier

The Kazan Kremlin