Red Square and the Kremlin, Moscow

Red Square, with its crenelated Kremlin Wall, red-brick State Historical Museum, and colored “onion” domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, is one of the most recognizable symbols of a capital and a country in the world. Bordering the southwest side of Red Square, the Kremlin stands at the heart of Moscow. Just off Red Square are other important buildings Lotte Jacobi photographed, such as the Bolshoi Theater and the Hotel Metropol. However, one wonders if the Soviet government allowed visitors such as Jacobi to photograph freely in Red Square itself, for her few surviving photographs of the area, despite her having spent almost three months in Moscow, are oblique or distant views.

Red Square

Important Russian monuments frame the monumental Red Square, a vast 800,000 sq. ft. rectangle on what was once the main market square. The battlement wall of the Kremlin, to the southwest, faces toward Lenin’s Mausoleum (1930), where the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin, the first head of Soviet Russia, has been on public view since he died in 1924. Across from the Mausoleum to the northeast are the huge shopping arcades, known as GUM (Glavny universalny magazin, or Main Department Store), with the original part of the structure dating back to the 1890s. (Under Stalin, GUM housed the administration for his First Five-Year Plan.) To the northwest stands the State Historical Museum (1872), and the most dramatic building, Saint Basil's Cathedral, provides a dramatic anchor on the southeast. The “red” in the square’s name is said to derive from an Old Russian word meaning “beautiful”—“red” and “beautiful” were the same word: thus, “Krasnaya Ploshad" (Red Square) means "beautiful square," which indeed it is (Voyce 93). Red Square has continued to be integral to historic events in Russia in modern times. No one can forget the military parades, revived by Vladmir Putin in the 2000s, with Saint Basil's Cathedral's colors as a backdrop.

The Kremlin

The word “kremlin” means “fortress in a city” (in Russia, there are a number of kremlins, with a small “k”); “Kremlin” also refers to the seat of government of Russia, and in Jacobi’s time, of the USSR. The Kremlin was built on one of the “Seven Hills” of Moscow in the mid-12^th century, but habitation on the site goes back to at least the 2^nd century BCE when Finnic peoples had settled there. It has retained its original medieval significance throughout the ages as the center of both religious and political power in Russia. In the Soviet era, when Lenin and Stalin renounced the Russian Orthodox Church, the Kremlin became a political and economic center rooted in a new belief system, socialism (Clark 82).

The Kremlin is an elaborate architectural complex with a number of different building types. Roughly the shape of a triangle, the fortified city was strategically located on a hill between the Moskva River and the Neglinnaya River, though the latter now runs underground. There are three cathedrals, two churches, and twenty towers, the most notable of which is the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, said to be the located at the exact center of Moscow. There are five palaces, one of which is the home of the head of the government. In addition, there are government administration buildings and an armory.

Saint Basil’s Cathedral

On the southeastern side of Red Square stands the most unique and recognizable building located there: Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Originally called the Church of the Intercession and Protective Veil of Mary, Mother of God, on the Moat, the church commemorates the conquest of the city Kazan by Ivan IV (1530-1584) during the Russo-Kazan War and was completed in 1561. A later name change to Saint Basil’s Cathedral honors a local saint who is claimed to have been “idiotic for Christ’s sake,” which was a common form of religious reverence in Russia at the time (Voyce 98).

Lotte Jacobi, Saint Basil's Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow, January 1933

Saint Basil’s is a unique building in its style and plan: a central church surrounded by eight chapels, colorful onion-shaped domes, and a flamboyant decorative scheme. The unusual style appears to be a combination of elements from vernacular wooden churches from northern Russia, as well as Byzantine architecture. It is not certain who Ivan’s architects were. Some scholars believe there were two: Ivan Barma and Postnik Yakovlev, while others think it was an Italian architect. As one legend goes, an Italian architect designed the church, but he was then blinded by Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV) to prevent him from replicating such beauty. In another version of this sad tale, the tsar asked the architect if he could replicate his grandiose project and build an even more beautiful church. When the architect answered that he could, the tsar had him beheaded so that St. Basil’s could remain a cathedral with no equal (Voyce 99).

It is incontestable that Saint Basil’s Cathedral is the most famous building in all of Russia. It is very striking, as it must also have been in the 1930s when Lotte Jacobi visited Moscow. Even in her black-and-white photograph (only one of her photographs of it is known to survive), she was able to capture a sense of the polychromy and riotous detail of its unusual architecture. She switched to her large format camera in her attempt to create a high-quality negative (although the image is slightly out of focus), perhaps with the hope of selling it for publication. With its bright colors, weirdly-shaped cupolas, decorative swirls, and interior frescoes, Saint Basil’s seems to be, as Michael S. Flier writes, "a quintessential example of Eastern exotism. . .straight out of the Arabian Nights” (42).

Soviet Iconography

Red Square and the Kremlin are closely linked to Stalin and Soviet-era iconography in the modern imaginary. Once a symbol of Moscow as the Third Rome, the image of the Kremlin took on a different meaning after the revolution. As Katerina Clark has discussed in an analysis of Stalin-era propaganda and imagery, a single tower of the Kremlin is symbolic not only of the government, but it also serves as a beacon, like the Tower of Babel, or the spire of a cathedral. Images of Stalin writing in his study with the tower visible out the window show the way in which he seemed to be connected to a higher power (Clark 88-92). With the construction of Lenin's tomb to the east on Red Square, Lenin was likewise turned into a god with his own apotheosis and cult (Purves-Stewart 79).

Over the centuries, the Kremlin and Saint Basil's Cathedral came under threat on a few occasions, such as under Napoleon's destruction orders in 1812 and during the October Revolution in 1917. Saint Basil’s was also set to be demolished in the reconstruction of the "new Moscow" under Stalin (Çiçek 1993) Thankfully, some kind of intercession did protect it so that it could survive to this day, to our great enjoyment. Red Square, the Kremlin, and Saint Basil’s Cathedral became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1990.

Contributors: Laura Bruno, Eleanor Hight

Works Cited:

Çiçek, Anil. “Moscow: More Than a Capital: The Central Place of Moscow in Cultural History.” International Journal of Russian Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2013, pp. 163-186.

Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Flier, Michael S. “Church of the Intercession on the Moat / St. Basil’s Cathedral.” In Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, Eds., Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 42–46, https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300145175-010.

Offord, Derek. “Nation-Building and Nationalism in Karamzin's History of the Russian State.” Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, vol. 3, no. 1, BRILL, 2010, pp. 1–50, https://doi.org/10.1163/221023810X534342.

Purves-Stewart, James. A Physician's Tour in Soviet Russia. Taylor and Francis, 2017, pp. 75-129, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112190.

"A Unique Russian Icon: Moscow's Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed." The Epoch Times, Apr 28, 2021. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/newspapers/unique-russian-icon-moscows-cathedral-st-basil/docview/2522854133/se-2?accountid=11311.

Voyce, Arthur. The Moscow Kremlin: Its History, Architecture, and Art Treasures. University of California Press, 1954.

Zhukova, Ol'ga A. “Nikolai Karamzin's Philosophy of History in Russia's Intellectual Culture.” Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 55, no. 6, Routledge, 2017, pp. 381–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2017.1409496.