The Kremlin – and snow

I’m now at the airport. As if to mock my words of yesterday evening, it snowed during the night and Moscow is now covered in a fine coating of snow – it suits the city. Our exhausted hosts laid on one last treat for us this morning – a guided tour to the Kremlin. Where to begin? Those – so familiar – red walls were until recently whitewashed regularly. Old paintings show Moscow as a white city. Now, they are ‘redwashed’ regularly. And when I first gazed up at them, their design looked familiar. And so it should have done; they were designed by Italian military architects. They even showed the Russians how to build special brick kilns (a light brick technology until then unknown to them). No wonder they looked familiar. You can see exactly the same designs in Bologna, Verona, Ferrara, and so on. Now; here’s a game for those of you who have never been to the Kremlin. Think; what is the image you have in your mind? Those enigmatic red walls, right? And what else?
Maybe a hint of a mysterious cupola or two? But that’s about it, I would imagine. Well, once upon a time all Muscovites lived within the walls of the Kremlin. Now, nobody does (Stalin was the last leader to have lived there), but the place is to this day littered with palaces and churches (four palaces and four cathedrals, to be precise). Imagine! Back in the most revolutionary days of Lenin and the darkest days of Stalin, they lived and worked in a citadel of palaces and churches (okay, Stalin couldn’t resist pulling down a few bits and pieces but most survived and, anyway, Napolean did far more damage). When the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918, Lenin very deliberately decided that he would have his headquarters in this historical Russian dynastic stronghold. Boris Yeltsin just as deliberately decided to continue the tradition. There is powerful subliminal symbolism at work in the fact that Vladimir Putin does not now have his seat in the Kremlin but in the decidedly modern White House; clearly, he relinquished more than the Presidency to Dmitry Medvedev in 2008.