end of the seventeenth centuries.
The culminating monument in the rebuilding of the Kremlin is the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, begun in 1505, like the Archangel Cathedral, and completed in 1508. Virtually nothing is known of its architect, Bon Friazin, who had no other recorded structure in Moscow. Yet he was clearly a brilliant engineer, for his bell tower-60 meters high, in two tiers-withstood the fires and other disasters that periodically devastated much of the Kremlin. The tower, whose height was increased by an additional 21 meters during the reign of Boris Godunov, rests on solid brick walls that are 5 meters thick at the base and 2.5 meters on the second tier.
The most significant seventeenth-century addition to the Kremlin was the Church of the Twelve Apostles, commissioned by Patriarch Nikon as part of the Patriarchal Palace in the Kremlin. This large church was originally dedicated to the Apostle Philip, in implicit homage to the Metropolitan Philip, who had achieved martyrdom for his opposition to the terror of Ivan IV.
During the first part of the eighteenth century, Russia’s rulers were preoccupied with the building of St. Petersburg. But in the reign of Catherine the Great, the Kremlin once again became the object of autocratic attention. Although little came of Catherine’s desire to rebuild the Kremlin in a neoclassical style, she commissioned Matvei Kazakov to design one of the most important state buildings of her reign: the Senate, or high court, in the Kremlin. To create a triangular four-storied building, Kazakov masterfully exploited a large but awkward lot wedged in the northeast corner of the Kremlin. The great rotunda in its center provided the main assembly space for the deliberations of the Senate. To this day the rotunda is visible over the center of the east Kremlin wall.
During the nineteenth century, Nicholas I initiated the rebuilding of the Great Kremlin Palace (1839-1849), which had been severely damaged in the 1812 occupation. In his design the architect Konstantin Ton created an imposing facade for the Kremlin above the Moscow River and provided a stylistic link with the Terem Palace, the Faceted Chambers, and the Annunciation Cathedral within the Kremlin. Ton also designed the adjacent building of the Armory (1844-1851), whose historicist style reflected its function as a museum for some of Russia’s most sacred historical relics.
With the transfer of the Soviet capital to Moscow in 1918, the Kremlin once again became the seat of power in Russia. That proved a mixed blessing, however, as some of its venerable monuments, such as the Church of the Savior in the Woods, the Ascension Convent, and the Chudov Monastery, were destroyed in order to clear space for government buildings. Only after the death of
KREMLINOLOGY
Josef Stalin was the Kremlin opened once again to tourists. The most noticeable Soviet addition to the ensemble was the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1959-1961, designed by Mikhail Posokhin and others). It has the appearance of a modern concert hall (one of its uses), whose marble-clad rectangular outline is marked by narrow pylons and multi-storied shafts of plate glass. The one virtue of its bland appearance is the lack of conflict with the historic buildings of the Kremlin, which remain the most important cultural shrine in Russia. See also: ARCHITECTURE; ARMORY; CATHEDRAL OF THE ARCHANGEL; CATHEDRAL OF THE DORMITION; MOSCOW; RED SQUARE
Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, George Heard. (1983). The Art and Architecture of Russia. New York: Penguin Books.
Close analysis of the tense power struggles among the Soviet leadership. A term coined during the last days of the Stalin regime with the onset of the Cold War.
Usually more than just a study of contending personalities, or a “who-whom” (who is doing what to whom), Kremlinology was an indispensable analysis of Soviet policy alternatives and their implications for the West. It also turned out to be a point of departure for any serious political history, inevitably connected to the ideas that drove the Soviet regime and in the end determined its fate. Western intelligence experts, academics, and journalists all made contributions to this pursuit. Attention was often focused on “protocol evidence,” such as the order in which leaders’ names might appear on various official lists, or the way they were grouped around the leader in photographs. However, since factional rivalry was usually expressed in ideological pronouncements and debates, the most widely respected practitioners of Kremli-nology were emigr? writers who had direct experience of the ways of the Soviet communists. The most famous of these was the Menshevik Boris Nikolayevsky. Initially Kremlinologists centered on quarrels among Josef Stalin’s subordinates in order to get an idea of his policy alternatives and turns. After Stalin’s death, Kremlinology mapped out the succession struggle that occasioned the rise of Nikita Khrushchev. It was again useful in understanding the politics of the Gorbachev reform era and the destruction of Soviet power.
The domestic and foreign policy issues were debated in the ideological language of the first great Soviet succession struggle in the 1920s that brought Stalin from obscurity to supreme power. After his defeat and exile, Leon Trotsky explained Stalin’s rise to the Western public as the victory of a narrow insular national Communism, according to the slogan “socialism in one country,” over his own internationalist idea of “permanent revolution.” Materials from three Trotsky archives in the West later showed these extreme positions to have been less crucial to Stalin’s ascent than his complex maneuvers for a centrist position between right and left factions. Trotsky continued to analyze Soviet politics during the Great Purge of 1936-1938 in his Byulleten oppozitsy (Bulletin of the Opposition). This was matched by the commentary of the well-connected Moscow correspondents of the Menshevik Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist Courier).
For various reasons, the ?migr? writings had to be read with caution. Often they were employed to establish a position in the debate over the Russian Question: What is the nature of the Soviet regime, and has it betrayed the revolution? In 1936 Niko-layevsky published the Letter of an Old Bolshevik, presumably the confessions of Nikolai Bukharin interviewed in Paris. It contained important information indicating the origins of Stalin’s purges in a 1932 dispute over the anti-Stalin platform document of Mikhail Ryutin. However, the Letter was dramatized and embellished by Nikolayevsky’s gleanings from other sources. Some historians later rejected it as spurious and even denied the existence of a Ryutin Program. But during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign the full text was published, reading quite as Nikolayevsky had described it.
In Stalin’s last days, Nikolayevsky tried to interpret the antagonism between Leningrad chief Andrei Zhdanov and Stalin’s prot?g? Georgy Malenkov by linking Zhdanov to Tito and the Yugoslav Communists and Malenkov to Mao and the Chinese. Later studies bore this out. The rise of Khrushchev as successor to Stalin was charted by Boris Meiss-ner, Myron Rush, Wolfgang Leonhard, and Robert Conquest. Michel Tatu described Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 and the central role played by Mikhail Suslov, the ideological secretary.
KRITZMAN, LEV NATANOVICH
Suslov loomed large in Soviet politics from this point until his death at the end of the Brezhnev regime in 1982. The ideological post was the center of gravity for a regime of collective leadership under the rubric of “stabilization of cadres.” That Suslov died a few months before Brezhnev in 1982 meant he could not oversee the succession in the interests of the Kremlin gerontocracy. The result was a thorough housecleaning by Yuri Andropov in his brief tenure. An even more thorough shakeup by Mikhail Gorbachev followed. This would have been unlikely had Suslov lived.
In defense of the Suslov pattern of collective leadership, the Politburo tried its best to shore up Yegor Ligachev in the ideological post as a limit on Gorbachev. But Gorbachev managed to destroy all the party’s fetters on his power by 1989, just as he lost the East European bloc. After that, he behaved like a conscious student of Soviet succession and proclaimed himself a centrist, balancing between the radical Boris Yeltsin and the weakened consolidation faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The last stand of the latter was the attempted putsch of August 1991, the failure of which left Gorbachev alone with a vengeful Yeltsin.
Commentary on the Yeltsin leadership of post-Soviet Russia echoed some themes of Kremlinology, especially in analysis of the power of the Yeltsin group (“The Family”) and its relation to well-heeled post-Soviet tycoons (“The Oligarchs”). However, power in the Kremlin could no longer be read in Communist ideological language and had to be studied as with any other state. Kremlinology, or analysis of Soviet power struggles, nevertheless retains its value for political historians who can take note of a recurrent programmatic alternance between a leftist Leningrad tendency and a rightist Moscow line. The centrist who defeated the others by timely turns was able to
