Grand Kremlin Palace

The historian Sergei Bartenev traced the palace buildings of the Moscow Kremlin to the middle of the twelfth century, when small wooden chambers between the church of the Nativity of John the Baptist and the site of the present Borovitsky Gates served the princes as a temporary residence. In the thirteenth century, once Moscow had become the centre of a principality of its own, the grand-princely court was shifted east to the ground where the church of the Saviour on Bor was raised. Ivan Kalita (1328–1341) enlarged the court, put up a stone cathedral where the wooden Saviour church had stood, and moved to it the monastery from the village of Danilovo. Under Dmitry Donskoy (1363–1389) and his son Vasily Dmitrievich (1390–1425) the palace was already richly appointed: the roof of the embankment terem was gilded, and the first clock known in Rus was set up in the yard.

The palace of Ivan III, raised at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century by Italian architects, took in the Faceted, Middle Golden, Embankment and Dining chambers. Boris Godunov added the Reserve Palace early in the seventeenth century, the Terems and the Heraldic Gates went up under Mikhail Fyodorovich, and the palace of the Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna followed in the second half of the same century. The transfer of the capital to St Petersburg in 1712 stripped the Kremlin buildings of their standing: Moscow branches of the government departments took over part of the rooms, while the rest decayed and burned more than once. Elizabeth Petrovna then settled on a new Winter Palace within the Kremlin to house the court during its visits to Moscow. Most of the older ensemble was kept, but the Middle Golden and Embankment chambers were demolished and a stone Baroque range was raised on their undercroft under Bartolomeo Rastrelli; that range was rebuilt more than once, and its condition remained unsatisfactory.

In the reign of Catherine II the Kremlin palace was judged not to match the greatness of the empire, though the fortress as a whole was regarded as a historic monument, and a decree of 1759 ordered its walls and towers preserved. Nine years later V. I. Bazhenov proposed a palace whose plan called for the demolition of a number of fifteenth- to seventeenth-century buildings without regard for their historical significance, occupying the whole riverside ground down to the banks of the Moskva. Under his direction the dilapidated Grain and Money yards, Godunov's Reserve Palace, all the monastic metochions save the Trinity, the building of the Prikazy and the Armoury gallery of 1764 were pulled down. The new palace was ceremonially laid on 1 June 1773, but soon after building began the south wall of the Archangel Cathedral cracked and its foundation started to settle; large-scale construction was judged inexpedient, and the works were suspended by 1775. A year afterwards the walls and towers began to be restored under the architect M. F. Kazakov, and the Archangel Cathedral was strengthened with buttresses.

The Kremlin Winter Palace burned during the French occupation of Moscow in 1812 and was restored in the forms of classicism by 1817 by A. N. Bakarev and I. T. Tamansky, working to a project prepared by V. P. Stasov, who six years later added a further storey to the ensemble. A large restoration followed in 1836 under the architect Fyodor Richter, but the layout still failed to answer the needs of the time. Nicholas I told the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, then staying in the city: "I want to bring the architecture of these old buildings closer to the present day. The palace is too cramped and has become inconvenient for me." The complex was also reckoned a fire risk, since the wooden beams of Stasov's added storey touched the chimney flues. After the fire of 1837 in the Winter Palace at St Petersburg, Nicholas I instructed Konstantin Thon to design a Kremlin residence that would meet the fire regulations in force and carry non-combustible structures of cast iron and iron. The old Elizabethan palace on the site was dismantled along with the seventeenth-century Stable Yard, the Baroque palace designed by Rastrelli and the sixteenth-century church of St John the Baptist, built to a design by Aloisio the New in place of the first church ever raised in Moscow. The new building was conceived as answering to the status of a coronation palace rather than a residence.

An imperial order of 5 March 1838 directed that the work begin that spring and be finished in four years, both the principal building and all those belonging to it, and a stone cut with the date 30 June 1838 was laid on the line of the planned plinth. Something over six million roubles was expected to be spent, with a further million allowed if the roof trusses were made of iron; almost twelve million went on it in the end, and the works ran until 1849. Thon was chief architect, with Pyotr Gerasimov and Nikolai Shokhin assisting; Fyodor Richter was appointed in 1843 to stand in for him on general questions and to take charge of the interiors, Fyodor Solntsev was chief artist, and Baron Lev Bode directed the building. Work began in 1839, at the same time as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and digging the foundation pit near the cathedral of the Saviour on Bor uncovered the remains of a cemetery fenced with oak posts. Thon used wide-span lightened brick vaults and metal roof trusses, and the palace became the first building in the Russian Empire with a frame of that kind; cement and concrete were used alongside traditional materials, and a system of calorifer heating was installed under engineer-general N. A. Amosov. In 1842 the palace was joined by a passage to the Annunciation Cathedral.

A smaller tsar's residence, the Nikolaevsky Palace, already stood in the Kremlin, and the new complex took the name of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Its consecration took place at Easter, on 3 April 1849, before Nicholas I and members of his family; the procession opened with a service of prayer by Metropolitan Filaret, after which, at the emperor's command, four palace grenadiers fixed to the wall of one of the halls a board bearing the name of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Those who had worked on the building received the medal "For the Construction of the Kremlin Palace", and Bode was promoted over eighty-one men senior to him, two ministers among them, and made president of the Moscow Palace Office. Most contemporaries took to the complex and remarked that it sat well among the buildings around it, but not everyone agreed: the historian Alexander Turgenev regretted "the breaking of the monuments of the ancient Russian Kremlin", Fyodor Dostoevsky compared the ensemble to an enormous chest set on its side on Borovitsky Hill, and Custine held that it would "spoil the appearance of the ancient sacred fortress". Restoration of the older ranges taken into the complex went on while the palace was being built, and the work in the Terem Palace was done without the necessary historical study: the artist T. A. Kiselyov painted the walls and vaults to designs by Gerasimov and Solntsev, substantially altering the character of the Terems, and later researchers judged that the restoration did not meet the standards of their own day. The ensemble was only finally complete in 1851, when the Armoury museum building and the Apartments adjoining it to the north were finished and linked to the main complex by a passage.

Military symbolism was in demand in architecture while the palace was going up, and by Nicholas I's conception the complex was to be a monument to the country's military achievements and to the Russian soldiery. The state halls were named after the patron saints of the military orders of the Russian Empire, which stood for the immovability of imperial power.

The Georgievsky hall is the first and the largest of the state rooms, named for the Order of St George the Victorious, approved by Catherine II in 1769 and the highest military decoration of the Russian Empire. By the emperor's order marble plaques were set up listing the regiments, crews and batteries that had received the St George colours, and the names of every holder of the order were engraved on the walls; civil ranks and representatives of the Moscow nobility gathered here during celebrations. The Alexandrovsky hall occupies the site of the Embankment, or Ambassadors', chamber, which existed from the reign of Ivan III until the old palace was raised under Elizabeth Petrovna, and carries the name of the Order of St Alexander Nevsky, established by Catherine I in 1725; on Bartenev's evidence, "honoured ladies of the city" assembled there at ceremonies.

The Vladimirsky hall took the ground of the former Postelnoye porch and was named for the Order of St Vladimir, instituted by Catherine II in 1782. By Nicholas I's personal order the throne room, the Andreyevsky hall, was dedicated to the Order of St Andrew the First-Called, which Peter the Great established in 1698: only the emperor might sit there, and military ranks gathered in it at ceremonies. The coronations of Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II were held within its walls, and at the end of the nineteenth century the pedestal was replaced by three seats for the Emperor Nicholas II and the Empresses Alexandra Feodorovna and Maria Feodorovna. The adjoining Kavalergardsky hall held the guard of honour that stood while the emperor was in the palace, the sovereign's personal guard being traditionally made up of Circassians. The Ekaterininsky hall served as the throne room of the Russian empresses and was named for the Order of St Catherine, established in 1714, and dames of the order and ladies of the court assembled there during ceremonies.

Electric light was used to illuminate the palace during the coronation festivities of 1883, fed from a temporary power station put up on the Raushskaya embankment with cables run across to the Kremlin. Regular external and internal electric lighting was begun only in April 1895, from a palace power station in the Alexander Garden, and within a year lifting machinery had been installed and signalling run to some of the rooms. Between 1900 and 1902 the palace was connected to the city sewerage system, at an estimated cost of about forty thousand roubles. During the Russo-Japanese War a sewing workshop was set up in the palace rooms, where goods were made and packed before being sent to the front. In 1913 the palace held the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the house of Romanov, the last nationwide festival of tsarist Russia.

During the shelling of the Kremlin in the autumn of 1917 a shell struck the Verkhospassky cathedral, part of the Grand Kremlin Palace, destroying a corner of the building faced with tiles that could not be restored, though the ensemble suffered less than other Kremlin buildings. When the Soviet government moved to Moscow a year later the rooms within the fortress were divided up. On 19 March 1918 the People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, telegraphed the Council of People's Commissars: "In the opinion of artists, scholars and of my colleagues and myself, I would ask that the Kremlin palace not be turned into the residence of the government." The state rooms and the private imperial apartments were nonetheless taken over by the government residence and by living quarters for its members, their families and the staff who served them, and the director of the Armoury reported that "samovars were set up under eighteenth-century tapestries, and children's nappies were dried on Augsburg tables". Settlement was halted in part because valuables evacuated between 1914 and 1917 from the Hermitage and the palaces of Petrograd, Livadia and Belovezhskaya Pushcha were stored within the walls and needed a strengthened guard. Most of the flats were cleared in the 1930s, but the last residents of the ensemble were Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov, who moved out in 1957 and 1962. Despite the tenants, the palace was opened for guided visits on 26 January 1919 and more than five thousand people came in the first six weeks; in 1925 the mantle that covered the imperial thrones was handed to the commission department of GUM.

For the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party in 1934 it was decided to rebuild the palace for administrative purposes. The Red Porch was taken down, a dining room for the delegates was raised between the Faceted Chamber and the Annunciation Cathedral, and to clear ground for a guest annexe the church of the Saviour on Bor, founded in 1330 and the burial place of the Moscow princesses until the Ascension Convent was built, was demolished. On the facade the arms of the USSR were set up where five white-stone double-headed eagles had been, with the letters of the abbreviation at either side; before 1917 those eagles had carried above them the arms of Moscow, St Petersburg, Kazan, Astrakhan, Poland and Tavrida. In 1933 and 1934, to a design by I. A. Ivanov-Schitz, the Andreyevsky and Alexandrovsky halls were merged into a Hall of Sessions for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, museum staff managing to save part of the decoration and to carry out the Andreyevsky hall's panel, painted in oils on canvas. The brick vaults, the columns supporting them and the wall between the two halls were dismantled, after which cracks opened in the facade and a massive balcony was built out to the middle of the hall to prevent a collapse. In 1939 a marble statue of Lenin by S. D. Merkulov was set up on the former place of the imperial thrones. The rectangular hall proved ill-suited to parliamentary work, since the far seats lay a long way from the rostrum.

The cathedrals with their gilded domes and the Grand Kremlin Palace were easily made out from the air, and after the German invasion it was decided to disguise the palace roof with paint; the guard was strengthened, camouflage work began on 26 June 1941 and blackout drills were held. The complex was damaged in the bombing of Moscow all the same. A hundred-kilogram bomb burst at one of the entrances, blowing out the windows of the Ekaterininsky hall and the Private Half, breaking an entrance door and damaging an electrical cable, and in the first bombardment of the Kremlin, on 22 July 1941, a high-explosive bomb charged with ammonal pierced the roof and vaults of the Georgievsky hall; the quarter-tonne device did not explode and broke apart on striking the floor, destroying about four square metres of parquet and cracking the vault of the floor below. Incendiary thermite bombs fell on the site repeatedly and were made safe by the garrison of the fortress, and one that had failed to go off was found in the palace attic. Ceremonial meetings with foreign delegations were held in the palace during the war, seventeen of them within the walls of the Ekaterininsky hall, attended among others by the Chinese diplomat Soong Ziwen and General Dwight Eisenhower. On 25 June 1945 a reception was given in honour of those who had taken part in the Victory Parade, with almost three thousand guests invited, more than two thousand of them servicemen; Stalin's toast "To the Russian People!" belongs to that reception.

The Hall of Sessions was fully re-equipped only in 1968, six years after the congresses of the Communist Party had been moved to the Palace of Congresses, and from 1970 the sittings of the Supreme Soviet went there too; the First Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR met in the Hall of Sessions in 1990. Other rooms carried the official calendar in the meantime: foreign ambassadors presented their credentials in the Ekaterininsky hall until 1970, orders and government awards were given out to figures in science and culture in the halls of the state and private halves, and the palace repeatedly housed international congresses and the congresses of the unions of writers, artists, composers, architects and film workers, while the Vladimirsky hall had been used for the signing of treaties between the USSR and foreign states from 1918. Restoration of the historic fabric began again in 1968, when the original colouring of the facades of the three upper storeys of the Terems was recovered on the evidence of test probes under the architect I. P. Ruben, and the marble walls of the grand staircase were restored over several months.

The Soviet arms were taken down from the facade in 1992. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the Kremlin become the residence of the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin ordered the historic appearance of the chambers restored in 1993, and a thorough reconstruction was carried out between 1994 and 1999. The Andreyevsky and Alexandrovsky halls were rebuilt in their earlier form from surviving drawings, with lost elements of the decoration recreated from sketches and photographs, and the tsar's place was restored with the thrones of Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna and Maria Feodorovna. Between the spring of 1997 and 1998 the presidium room added in 1933 and 1934 was demolished, the historic bas-reliefs were put back on the facade, and in 1998 metal double-headed eagles and the arms of the Tsardoms were installed. By some accounts the reconstruction cost as much as 350 million US dollars, and the ground-floor rooms were restored again in 2008. The Grand Kremlin Palace is a working residence of the President of Russia and houses the residences of the president and of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus; the presidential inauguration takes place in the Andreyevsky hall, which also serves for sessions of the State Council and meetings with foreign ambassadors, the Georgievsky hall serves state and diplomatic receptions and official ceremonies, and international treaties are signed in the Vladimirsky hall. As of 2018 the Ekaterininsky hall was not included in the visitor route, being used for the president's meetings and negotiations with foreign delegations. Guided visits run in the time free of official events, on applications from organisations addressed to the head of the Commandant's Office of the Moscow Kremlin, and take in the Faceted Chamber, the rooms of the Terem Palace, the Private Half of their imperial majesties and the ceremonial order halls, but not the emperor's study or the Golden Tsaritsyna Chamber. The ensemble, more than seven hundred rooms of the fourteenth to twentieth centuries in all, is registered as a federal cultural heritage site of Russia.