The Kremlin: ‘Its history, like the history of Russia itself, has been written and rewritten.’ Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/ EPAYou never forget your first view of the Kremlin, the crenellated walls towering over the river, the golden domes of the cathedrals, Red Square on its flank, the exotic fantasy of St Basil's Cathedral. More than any other great complex of buildings, except perhaps Peking's Forbidden City, the Kremlin radiates the will to power, to domination, to empire, and to mystery.
It is full of ghosts, too, the ghosts of those who lived or worked or suffered violent deaths there, the ghosts of the musketeers whom Peter the Great butchered on its walls, of the underlings whom Stalin sent to their deaths in the nearby Lubyanka cellars. You can still feel their terror as you walk late at night along the empty corridors in the old Senate building towards the office where the Georgian tyrant worked.
Moscow's Kremlin – the word means "fortress", and Moscow was far from the only Russian city to have one – began life nine centuries ago as an obscure wooden fort on a hill by a river in an almost impenetrable forest far away from what most Europeans then thought of as civilisation. Thanks to the ruthlessness, energy and sheer good fortune of its rulers, it evolved from the muddy centre of an insignificant princedom to become the capital of a mighty state. Peter the Great moved the government to his new capital of St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea. But the Kremlin never lost its symbolic force and never ceased to provide the stage for coronations and other national celebrations. And in 1918, the ancient fortress once again became the seat of power when the Bolsheviks set up their shop there. In April 1989, it saw the beginning of a new revolution when Gorbachev's almost democratically elected assembly met there, and propelled Russia into a kind of unruly open politics unseen for 70 years. It was the object of Yeltsin's ambition when he boasted that he would soon return to "our Kremlin" as Gorbachev's successor. And it is still the backdrop to the confected ceremonies of Putin's Russia, with their pastiche 18th-century uniforms and their nostalgia for an imperial past.
Sometimes, indeed, it seems as if the Kremlin were not merely the stage, but almost the main protagonist in a drama where human actors had little more than walk-on parts. Its history, like the history of Russia itself, has been written and rewritten to reflect the passing requirements of whoever happened to be ruling the country at the time – tsar, commissar, democrat or Strong Man. Rebuilt after even the worst catastrophes – Napoleon's failed attempt to blow it to pieces, the bitter revolutionary battles of 1918 – it epitomises Russia's ability to survive, to recreate itself from disaster, come what may. After the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, when the Russian state effectively ceased to exist, and again after the Soviet collapse four centuries later, the ceremonies of the Orthodox church were celebrated once again in the Kremlin cathedrals in a haze of gold, incense and glorious singing as a comforting symbol of continuity with a rose-tinted past.
It is this histrionic and partly manufactured role that Catherine Merridale describes in The Red Fortress. As in her earlier books on Russian attitudes to death and war, she combines impeccable scholarship with a deep feeling for the humanity of the people she writes about. Her style is accurate, spare, direct and warm-hearted, about as far from the academy as you can get. And she has done the work, ferreted around in the most unlikely archives, been to the most improbable places, and talked to people for whom other scholars might not have mustered the time, the energy, or perhaps even the interest. The Red Fortress is much more than just another book about the Kremlin. It is a brilliant meditation on Russian history and the myths with which the Russians have sought to console themselves, all centred on a place which for all of us – foreigners and Russians alike – has come to stand for a people, a state and a whole country.
