Book Reviews

Catherine Merridale. RED FORTRESS: HISTORY AND ILLUSION IN THE KREMLIN. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Reviewed by Gary Guadagnolo

In her latest tour de force, Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin, historian Catherine Merridale delivers a fast-paced and meticulously researched biography of the Kremlin, the large fortifcation in the center of Moscow that has long served as the nucleus of Russia’s military and political power. Binding together Merridale’s narrative, which begins with the founding of the Kremlin in the twelfh century and extends to the present day, are each successive regime’s attempts to use the fortress to establish and maintain its authority. Merridale argues that the Kremlin is much more than a cluster of defensive, ecclesiastical, and administrative buildings surrounded by red walls. It is also a place of wealth, myth, ritual, and prestige that refects and reinforces the ideology of its inhabitants. From its inception the Kremlin served as a military compound, though the people who constructed Moscow’s frst wooden fort in the twelfh century could not have imagined the underground lairs and transportation systems that would be built to withstand a nuclear attack centuries later. Te frst bricks of the fortress that still stands today were laid in the last two decades of the ffeenth century during the reign of Ivan III (r. 1462-1505). Under his rule, Moscow’s territory and riches expanded apace with the spiritual authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. His massive construction drive strengthened Kremlin fortifcations and led to the erection of new palaces and cathedrals. When some of the more ambitious projects stalled, Ivan III recruited the Italian Aristotele Fioravanti to come to Moscow as the Kremlin’s chief engineer and architect. Merridale lingers over the many connections between the Kremlin and European specialists, of which Fioravanti was just the frst. In one of her most engaging historiographical interventions, Merridale extracts the Kremlin from the clutches of Russian nationalists, connecting the fort to its many foreign roots, including German cannon-founders, Persian smiths, an exceptional Scot clockmaker, and a slew of Italian master-builders, without whose expertise the fortress could not have been built. 293 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Merridale is at her best when she teases out the story behind an idealized Kremlin. Such is the case in her reading of Kremlenagrad, an intricate map drawn around 1600 and published later in the seventeenth century, which shows the Kremlin in fawless condition. Its clean and orderly lines mask the turmoil surrounding the reigns of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547-84) and Boris Godunov (r. 1585-98) and the ensuing Time of Troubles (1598-1613). Fire, famine, terror, and foreign occupation ravaged the Kremlin and the city of Moscow. By the time Mikhail Romanov (r. 1613-45) was elected as tsar, the Kremlin, as well as the rest of the country, lay in ruins, far from the picturesque Kremlenagrad. Merridale casts a similarly critical eye on Te Tree of the State of Muscovy, an icon made in 1668 by Simon Ushakov. Te icon features Peter, the leader of the early fourteenth-century Russian Orthodox Church, and the grand prince Ivan I (r. 1325-41) planting a tree in a pristine, red-bricked Kremlin. Te leaves of the tree depict a continuous line of rulers leading to Aleksei Romanov (r. 1645-76), son of Mikhail, and tsar at the time of the icon’s creation. Merridale sees this as a typical rewriting of Russian history, legitimizing the Romanov dynasty with a worthy political and religious pedigree while ignoring centuries of dynastic struggle and civil war. Merridale describes Romanov rule as “novelty disguised as heritage,” in that the tsars sought to portray their dynasty as eternal and divinely appointed, akin to past Russian monarchs. Tis happened in part through an ambitious Kremlin building campaign in the seventeenth century, which again opened the country to innovation from outsiders. Te Kremlin’s foreign coterie had untold infuence on Peter the Great (r. 1696-1725), who in 1711 moved the capital of the Russian Empire from Moscow to the newly founded St. Petersburg as part of a Europeanization campaign. Te Kremlin, though largely abandoned, remained an important symbol of Romanov continuity and was still used for all coronations. In spite of a succession of near-death blows, such as a plague outbreak in 1771 and the burning of the city during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, the fortress endured as the heart of Russia. During the golden age of Russian culture in the nineteenth century, specialists working in the felds of history, archaeology, architecture, and folklore glorifed the Kremlin as the premier icon of Russian national identity. Merridale provocatively contrasts their ongoing preservation work

294 Book Reviews in the Kremlin with the growing social discontent among the country’s workers and peasants, which erupted in 1905 with the assassination in the Kremlin of the ultraconservative Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Te ensuing 1905 Revolution, First World War, and February and October Revolutions of 1917 refected the contradictions and challenges of Russia’s modernization, with the Romanov dynasty ultimately falling to a new dictatorship of the proletariat led by Vladimir Lenin’s (r. 1917-24) Bolshevik Party. Merridale does not dwell too long on the twentieth century, which gives the Soviet period a much more balanced feel in the longue durée of Russian history. She accounts for Lenin’s decision to move the Russian capital back to Moscow in 1918 and the havoc Bolsheviks wreaked on the Kremlin’s many architectural and artistic masterpieces, either destroying them as emblems of the old regime or stripping them for parts to sell in order to keep the government afoat. Inevitably, the Party began constructing symbols and rituals in the Kremlin to support its rule. Joseph Stalin (r. 1924-53) “taught the old walls to speak Bolshevik Russian,” lighting up the Kremlin with its now-iconic fve red stars. Troughout the Soviet era, the Kremlin projected a future of socialist equality and splendor in the midst of crippling economic stagnation and material want. In concluding her narrative, Merridale focuses on the transfer of the Kremlin from Mikhail Gorbachev (r. 1985-91) to Boris Yeltsin (r. 1991-99) and his Russian Federation. Merridale has little love for the current set of Kremlin occupants, who thinly veil their own despotism with democratic language. She interprets the “surprise discoveries” in 2010 of two sixteenth- century icons in the walls of the Kremlin, apparently saved from destruction in 1937 by faithful Russians opponents to Stalin’s campaign against the Orthodox Church, as nothing more than a stunt to whip up devotion for the ruling party among “half-asleep” citizens. Some may be turned of by overt criticisms of Vladimir Putin’s (r. 1999-present) “sovereign democracy,” but Merridale remains consistent in her message that autocratic rule in Russia is neither inevitable nor timeless, but rather rooted in the decisions of individuals who can be held accountable. Tis much-needed biography of the Kremlin, which spans the entirety of Russian history in a much more efective and engaging manner than most textbooks, will be of great interest to a range of audiences. Merridale,

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who gained access to the Kremlin’s own libraries for this project, scoured additional depositories in Russia, the UK, the US, and Italy, accumulating a prodigious number of primary and secondary material. Specialists will be eager to mine her endnotes, which use these sources to address some of the most fractious historiographical debates in the feld. Merridale also interviewed a number of the Kremlin’s past and present caretakers, whose anecdotes and gossip enliven the text even more. Cumulatively, she does not shy away from the complexities of the Kremlin, encouraging her reader to appreciate the mysteries of the red fortress while resisting the temptation to be blinded by its gold.

Michael Reynolds. SHATTERING EMPIRES: THE CLASH AND COLLAPSE OF THE OTTOMAN AND RUSSIAN EMPIRES, 19 0 8 -19 19 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Reviewed by Stephen Riegg

Te centennial of World War I ofers an apt moment to reconsider that confagration of total war in Europe and beyond. If western audiences are most familiar with the story of uneasy alliances and trench warfare on the Western Front, Michael Reynolds’s monograph reminds us of the Great War’s toll on the borderlands region of Ottoman Turkey and Russia. In this revised doctoral dissertation, Reynolds, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, places the two crumbling empires into the international—or, to use the nomenclature on which he insists, interstate—context. Marshaling evidence from a wide array of ofcial and private correspondence, state decrees, and memoirs, culled from Turkish and Russian diplomatic archives, Reynolds contends that it is this interstate dynamic that holds the key to understanding the nearly simultaneous fall of the two neighboring empires. Reynolds argues that exogenous forces, such as rivalry between states, rather than such endogenous causes as ethnonationalism, precipitated the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires. He posits that a state’s “horizontal” ties to other polities are ofen more important for

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