Red Fortress, Merridale - B

                                                This interesting book ties together the history of Russia with that of the Kremlin, along with the famous fortress's role in the Russian national psyche.  The 47-acre fort atop a hill in Moscow was first enclosed in a stone wall six and-a-half centuries ago.  As the Lords Of All The Rus consolidated power when the Mongols finally drifted away, they also began to construct a sophisticated fortress at the Kremlin.   The reign of terror that was the rule of Ivan The Terrible was succeeded by a Time of Troubles so severe that " in 1611, the state of Muscovy ceased to exist.  The capital was occupied by foreign troops. Smolensk had fallen to the Poles. Novgorod was in Swedish hands."  Stability began to take hold in 1613 with the Romanov ascension and their assertion of a Russian style of absolutism.  In the 17th century, Russia expanded her borders east to the Pacific and west into the heart of Europe as Russia became a European state.  Exposure to modernizing Europe through trade, diplomacy and culture led to a collision with the old ways of the Russians.  The young Tsar Peter would literally smash Russian society in his attempt to modernize the state.   The following century was an interlude for Moscow and the Kremlin ; the hierarchy and influence of the church were diminished as Russia's capital moved to Peter's spectacular new city on the banks of the Neva.  "By mid-century, the Kremlin was decaying into Russia's Fontainbleu, the poor relation to St. Petersburg's Versailles."  After its partial destruction by the French in 1812, the Kremlin received a massive forty-year overhaul and started to become a symbol of the state, and in the second half of the century, Moscow itself came to represent the culture and tradition of Russia, while 'Peter' was it's European face. Moscow and the Kremlin were restored to their primacy when the Bolsheviks moved their capital in Feb. of 1918. The Kremlin became both the house of government and the home of the nation's leaders. Over the centuries, the Kremlin was home to churches, cathedrals, icons, religiously-themed buildings, arches and monuments.  The Soviets stripped the fort of all religious decorations and destroyed or altered most of the offending buildings.  Stalin's death led to archaeological research and even tourism in the Kremlin.   Under his successors, it remained and still remains  the center of the Soviet, then Russian, state, and symbol of the country.