The Kremlin Today.

(by Sayler O.M. from "Russia White or Red". Little, Brown and Company, Boston.1919)

What would the Kremlin think of Russia today if all its storied brick and stone, all the bones of its saints and its patriarchs and its Tsars could rise up and give voice to the verdict of the past on the present? Would they understand how the commission and the permission of a great mesh of wrong and injustice woven through the centries had warped the souls of men and brought them into selfish and deadly conflict? And understanding, would they hold their tongues in shame and in penitence, saying, as few among the living will say, that it is not for man to judge? Or would they persist in the pride by which they had lived and turn back untouched with pity to the dreams of their vanished pomp and glory?

Whatever the buried and guilty past of the Kremlin thinks of the present, the present still reveres the Kremlin and its sacred memories, still stands in a kind of awe before its imperial relics. "There is nothing above Moscow except the Kremlin," runs an old proverb, "and nothing above the Kremlin except Heaven." The peasant soldier returning home through Matushka Moskva, Little Mother Moscow, stands before its red-brick battlements, disillisioned by the passing of the legend and the fact of the Little Father, but still impressed by the magnificence which that legend fashioned for itself while it endured.

Nowhere, except perhaps in the Forbidden City in Peking, did empire build for the living and the dead more magnificently. Palace and temple, tomb and shrine and palace, are grouped here in mute and perpetual record of Russia's patriarchal and feudal past. The Kremlin is the citadel not alone of Moscow but of all Russia. Blot from existence all the other cities and towns and all the archives of the far-flung realm, and the Kremlin will tell the whole fascinating story of Russia. In it are wrapped up all her aspirations, temporal and spiritual. The Kremlin is Russia in microcosm.

Occupaying a hill one hundred and thirty feet above the Moscow River, the Kremlin is not only the highest but the most central point in the city. Its area is roughly triangular in shape and it is circumscribed by a brick wall, a mile and a quarter in length and sixty-five feet high, with nineteen towers and five gates. Its architectural inhabitants include nine or ten churches or cathedrals, five palaces, a convent, a monastery, the courts of justice, the synodal treasury, the arsenal, barracks, stables, and monument to Tsar Alexander II.

And yet, with all these structures, the Kremlin is not crowded. There are open spaces for parade and drill and splendid perspectives down ample avenues. From any point on the opposite bank of the river, the golden domes and the massive contour of each building can be individually distinguished. As you walk along, the sky line changes, but the panorama is always perfect, as if the whole had been planned at a stroke by a master imagination instead of by the patient accretions of the centuries. The wonder of the Kremlin is the wonder of the slow-growing cathedrals of western Europe, but on a far vaster scale.

A volume as large as a history of Russia would be required to tell the complete story of the Kremlin. The vague and ancient realm of Rus became tangible and powerful only with the rise of Moscow in 1156 a.d., from the wooded hill where the Kremlin now stands. And the Kremlin rose with Moscow. The Kremlin was Moscow until the spreading city burst the bounds of its mud walls and left it as citadel and refuge in times of danger. Numerous Tatar invasions broke their force on its palisades.

Dynasties rose and fell in its royal halls, and the patriarchs and metropolitans of its cathedrals extended their sway over three fifths of the continent of Europe and two fifths of that of Asia. Twice it fell before the Western invader, - once to the Poles when they seized it in the Time of Troubles in 1611-1612, and once to the exhausted hosts of Napoleon's Grand Army. But twice it was regained and restored, just as the Russian nation was restored. Likewise, the individual structures by the aid of the indomitable Russian spirit have defied the ravages of time and invasion and fire.

Even with the removal of the seat of imperial power to St. Petersburg two centuries ago, the Kremlin and Moscow still remained the ritual and spiritual head of Russia. Here the Tsars were crowned and married and buried and the high churchmen were consecrated. The palaces, the largest of which was erected as late as 1838-1849 by Nicholas I, were occupied or neglected, according to the personal whims of the several rules. But the churches never for a day yielded their supremacy to the newer, more spacious, and more costly Cathedrals of Kazan and St. Isaac's in Petersburg.

Today, the Kremlin seems to stand hesitant at the birth of a new era. Its sacred edifices continue their normal functions so far as that is possible in the constrained life of the present hour. But the imperial structures, for the first time since they were erected, have ceased to have practical significance. Like the relics of imperial China and other fallen empires, they seem doomed to the lot of museums and monuments to a departed age.

As museums, the palaces and the galleries and all the imperial precincts have been jealously guarded by the Bolsheviki. You have to show a pass, properly countersighned, for which you stand hours in line at the Soviet headquarters in Skobelieff Square, before you are permitted to enter the more cherished corners of the Kremlin. On many days the pass is required even for the mere entrance within the outer walls.

We who love the venerable monuments of Russia's storied past readily join with many Russians who deeply deplore the wanton bombardment during the Bolshevik Revolution of the churches and the shrines which make the Kremlin the sacred heart of Holy Russia. But we must not forget that from the days when the populace of Moscow sought shelter within its mud walls from the Tatar torch, the Kremlin has also been a fortress, the citadel of the community and of all Russia.

Today, it is still the last line of defense and the first of attack, and it will continue to be o, no matter what class or what party holds the power. With all its grievous wounds, the Kremlin today is probably less hopelessly scarred than it was in the successive Tatar invasions or by the desecration of Napoleon. The buildings on its outskirts, like the Cathedral of Vassily Blazheny and the shrine of the Iberial Virgin at the entrance to the Red Square, are the only scratched by passing bullets.

No unless it be Uspensky, which rests its weight on massive timbers placed under the domes while experts examine its condition. The punishment of a weekís bombardment was scattered by poor aim and careless firing. It is almost a miracle that some badly directed shell did not explode in the arsenal and wipe the entire Kremlin and half the city off the map.

The future of the Kremlin depends altogether on the further course of the Revolution. If Russia White rides back into power through Admiral Koltchak or some other dictator, the Kremlin may be restored as the seat of imperial power. After two hundred years of absence in Peterís city, the political center of the nation has been brought back to Moscow, and whoever rules Moscow rulers Russia. If Russia Red consolidates its position, retains its control and temper its practical programme to meet the conditions of a less violent world, or if a middle group comes to the fore, the Kremlin is likely to continue its present dual function of museum and religious capital.

Throughout my days in Moscow, I failed emotionally to reconcile the vanished Russia, recorded in the red brick and white stone of the Kremlin with the hot and passionate Russia of today. Intellectually, the explanation of the connection is easy and inevitable enough, but my feelings refused to admit it. Whenever my footsteps carried me within sight of its domes and spires and battlements, all the rest of Moscow became unreal. And when I roamed the depleted shops along Kuznetsky Most, or listened to an orator haranguing a crowd on the boulevards, the Kremlin in turn withdrew into the land of illusion. I suppose it is because the folly and the injustice and the cruelty of men die out of the stones they have erected, and in their stead only the imagination and the inspiration of the builders live on to speak their message to succeeding generations.

Map - Russia in 1919