In late 1993, after he defeated the parliamentary opposition, Yeltsin swung to support of the Red Square plan, which resembled reburials in certain other post-communist states.58 He removed Sentry Post No. 1, the goose-stepping police honor guard, from the crypt on October 5 (in 1997, it was reinstated at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on another side of the Kremlin), closed the adjacent Lenin Museum, and decided in principle to move Lenin and the others to the graveyard of the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow—the very place Yeltsin would be buried in 2007. In the coming months, he had a section surveyed at Novodevichii, corresponded through his aide Georgii Satarov with family members, and commissioned public opinion polls. The relatives of foreigners buried in the square—including the only American, the Harvard man and revolutionary John Reed, interred there in 1920—were also approached. Distracted by other problems, though, Yeltsin mothballed the plan. He contented himself for the moment with small acts of de-Leninization—taking down a two-ton Lenin statue in the Kremlin garden and carting Lenin’s office in Building No. 1 to Gorki, a Moscow exurb.59
With Lenin, 1917, and the building of communism no longer befitting sources of legitimacy, Yeltsin reinstated what he thought the best alternative—imagery of pre-Soviet Russia. On November 30, 1993, he gave official standing to a coat of arms featuring the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and Muscovy. The white, blue, and red Russian flag, originally brought in by Peter the Great as the empire’s trade banner but flown by the Romanovs as the state flag from 1883 to 1917, had been in use again from August 1991; a Yeltsin decree made it official on December 11, 1993. The white on top was said to stand for peace and purity, the blue in the middle for steadiness and honor, and the red at the bottom for love and generosity. That same day Yeltsin instituted the “Patriotic Song” by Mikhail Glinka (1804–57) as national anthem, replacing the “Hymn of the USSR” dating from 1944.60 Beginning with Hero of the Soviet Union, which was replaced by Hero of the Russian Federation in March 1992, he Russified most Soviet awards and medals. Over the years, he also created new honors and brought back some tsarist-period blazonry. By the end of the 1990s, the Russian Federation had as many state awards as the USSR had had. The recommendations were “my favorite documents.”61
The Kremlin fortress, venerated by Yeltsin as a monument to Russian statehood, received special attention. In late 1992 his office had Boris Ioganson’s socialist realist Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol, which had hung over the main staircase of the Grand Kremlin Palace since the 1950s, taken down. It was replaced by a panoramic painting of medieval Russian warriors under Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod fighting on ice against the Teutonic Knights in 1242. The title of the canvas, by Sergei Prisekin, is Whosoever Shall Come to Us with the Sword Shall Perish by the Sword.62 This was but a foretaste: Undeterred by economic stringency, Yeltsin authorized the spending of a king’s ransom on reconditioning the main edifices of state on the Kremlin squares.63 There is a tale making the rounds that he came to the decision after a fireplace in the Green Sitting Room of the Grand Palace disgorged smoke during Bill Clinton’s first presidential visit in January 1994.64 But Yeltsin had signed the first directive about renovations in March 1993, and the project, once started, went on for most of his two terms.
The Red Staircase, which had led into the Faceted Chamber of the Grand Palace, and from whose steps the tsars addressed the people of Moscow on Cathedral Square, was the first piece to be fixed. Stalin had pulled down the staircase in the 1930s and constructed a canteen there. With Patriarch Aleksii, Yeltsin unveiled the replica in September 1994, saying it showed the way to Russians to bring back objects “buried under the former totalitarian regime.” Between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1996, the neoclassic Building No. 1, built by Matvei Kazakov for the Senate in the 1770s and 1780s, was remodeled and modernized. The coordinator of the project, Pavel Borodin, reports that the president pushed for what he thought of as a “stateish” (derzhavnoye) look modeled on masterworks of pre-Soviet Russian architecture and especially on Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg:
Boris Nikolayevich played an enormous role in the reconstruction. Do not forget that Yeltsin is a builder and understands a thing or two about such matters….
The president knew what he wanted. We presented him many times with every possible interior, photograph, and suggestion about the reconstruction. He would look at them quietly, and then often he would grin and force us to come up with new ones. When it was September [1994] and we were seeing him for the sixteenth or seventeenth time, he said, “Come on, Pal Palych [Pavel Pavlovich], get your team together and go to St. Petersburg, look at Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo, the Yusupov mansion, the Hermitage, everything they have. Do some sketches, some outlines, a film, look for yourself. Look at what Russian culture really is, at what being a power and being a state is all about. Then bring the whole thing back to me.”
Another month of work passed. When we brought him materials for the twenty-first time, he exclaimed, “This is what Russia needs, now go ahead and do it.” And the work began on December 1.65
His wife, among others, questioned whether the country could afford the reconstruction. But Yeltsin was undaunted. “The country had no money when the Kremlin was built,” he said. Someone had to restore it to its former beauty, “and it might as well be me.” Russians and foreigners, he let on to Borodin, would be swept up by what was done. “For Boris Nikolayevich this was only a plus: people will remember it two hundred years from now.”66
Yeltsin was given interim housing in Building No. 14. When he moved back into Building No. 1, new statues by Anatolii Bichukov of four miscellaneous Russian monarchs—the empire builder Peter the Great, the enlightened despot Catherine the Great, the martinet Nicholas I, and the manumitter of the serfs, Alexander II—sat in niches in the walls of the ceremonial office, also called the Oval Hall. There he received guests and foreign leaders under an almond-shaped cupola, with Peter behind his desk. The circular Sverdlov Hall, where Yeltsin had delivered his secret speech to the Central Committee in 1987, was given its original name, Catherine’s Hall, and redone in pale blue and gold, with old statuary and reliefs restored and new allegorical sculptures on Russia and Justice by Bichukov.