The playwright Edvard Radzinsky regularly streams stories of Russian history, as real as they are surreal.
One made me laugh to tears the other day and, though I don’t expect you to do exactly the same, you are still likely to smile. Barring that, you’ll learn next to everything there’s to know about Russia. (Aristotle’s inductive method I mentioned yesterday will come in handy.)
One of Moscow’s central squares is adorned with the statue of Yury Dolgoruky, the Grand Prince of Kievan ‘Rus, who allegedly founded Moscow in 1147. The prince rides a horse, stopping it just in front of the Moscow Council building.
Until the octocentenary of Moscow in 1947, Dolgoruky had been known in the Soviet Union as an “exploiter of the peasantry and the tax collector of the feudal system”. But Stalin, who liked to trace his imperial lineage back to the origins of Russia, felt a statue would be a fitting tribute to the founder of Moscow.
“A sacred place never stays empty,” goes the Russian proverb, and the Dolgoruky statue was to occupy the spot formerly filled by two others.
The original equestrian statue was erected in 1912 to commemorate Gen. Skobelev, a hero of the 1877 Russo-Turkish War. Five years later, the presence of that satrap to the tsar could no longer be tolerated by the victorious Bolsheviks.
After the revolution, the country was reeling under the blows of two deadly pandemics (typhus and Spanish flu), an equally deadly famine, the deadlier Civil War, a devastated industry and a collapse of agriculture. Millions, uncountable and uncounted, died. More to the point, the survival of Soviet Russia was still by no means assured.
All that made Lenin a busy boy, but he knew how to prioritise. So he still found time to remove the eyesores of statues to tsars and their servants. One such removal he led personally, that of the statue of Grand Duke Sergey erected in the Kremlin on the spot where he had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.
The leader of world proletariat shepherded his whole government out and led the charge from the front, in the manner of Gen. Skobelev or perhaps a Texan cowboy. The hands-on leader tossed a lasso over the Grand Duke’s torso and drew all his commissars into a tug of war. The statue was promptly toppled, eventually sharing the fate of its protagonist.
Clearly, Skobelev too had to be knocked off his pedestal. So he was, and an obelisk to Liberty moved into the vacated place, facing the Moscow Council.
The obelisk was topped by a statue of a muscular woman holding the globe, which irreverent Muscovites promptly christened ‘watermelon’. They also joked that the Council was opposite, meaning opposed, to Liberty.
Such humour was tolerated until 1941, at which point the monument was blown up, the woman decapitated, and her severed head transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery.
In 1947, it was time for Dolgoruky to move in, and a competition was announced. By then Russia’s best sculptors had become masters of monumental art, what with the thousands of Lenin and Stalin statues with which they decorated the Russian landscape. A Dolgoruky statue was a doddle, and they all pitched in.
To everyone’s surprise, the competition was won by a Sergey Orlov, known, if at all, only for producing small figurines of bunny rabbits for children. Yet he emerged the winner, teaching history buffs yet another lesson of that period.
At that time the US Ambassador Averill Harriman was leaving Moscow and, by way of a farewell party, Foreign Minister Molotov took him to an exhibition of gifts for children. There Harriman espied one of Orlov’s bunny rabbits and took a shine to it.
Molotov immediately promised to send it to him as a present and contacted Orlov with an offer of 4,000 roubles, a princely sum. Little did Molotov realise that the sculptor was a Soviet man to his bone marrow.
Orlov flatly refused to let his work be sullied by that capitalist’s fingers, normally used to strangle workers. Molotov could keep his blood money, as far as Orlov was concerned.
The rebuffed minister complained to Stalin, as one did. But Stalin explained to him in unprintable words that Orlov was right and he, Molotov, was wrong. To make him better understand just how wrong, in a few months Stalin had Molotov’s wife arrested.
Meanwhile, the great leader was so impressed with Orlov’s patriotism that he awarded him the prized Dolgoruky project there and then — even though he hadn’t even entered the competition. And the sculptor didn’t let Stalin down. He produced a small-scale model that very year.
Stalin’s first impression was favourable, but then he noticed that the horse lacked a certain male fixture. It was a mare, and no symbol of Russian masculinity could be seen riding one. Stalin’s famous yellow eyes narrowed, and the sculptor instantly saw a vision of a Siberian labour camp flashing in his mind’s eye.
Scared out of his wits, Orlov went back to the studio and attached the desired organ overnight. To be on the safe side, he made it disproportionately large, leaving viewers in no doubt that Dolgoruky’s steed was a very male stallion.
Stalin was happy, and a team led by Orlov began to create the full-size statue. The progress was slow, for the miniature figurine didn’t easily translate into a monumental sculpture. So slow, in fact, that Stalin didn’t live to see it completed. Dolgoruky first began to charge the Moscow Council in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death.
Khrushchev took over, and it so happened that every day he was driven to his dacha past the prince and – critically – his improbably endowed horse. Alas, the statue was lit up in such a way that the oversized organ cast a huge shadow on the façade of the Council building, much to the Muscovites’ mirth.
When Khrushchev noticed that striking effect, he flew into a rage and ordered that the horse undergo a sex-change operation. It took workmen a whole night to turn the stallion back into a mare by sawing off that monstrous appendage.
Federico Fellini, where are you when we need you? The Italian had such a keen sense of the surreal that he could turn this story into yet another masterpiece, provisionally titled Che Cazzo?.
I wasn’t quite seven when the statue went up around the corner from where I lived. It pleased me aesthetically, although I was aware of neither its transsexual experience nor its predecessors in Sovetskaya, formerly Tverskaya, Square.
Mercifully, I managed to acquire some sense of reality eventually, by leaving Russia and Dolgoruky behind in 1973. The men roughly my age, those who rule Russia now, haven’t had such a chastening experience.
Keep that in mind when you hear them insist that Putin is a reincarnated Peter the Great, Russia’s natural border is Pas-de-Calais, and it would take them just two bombs to turn the US into a North American Strait.
Do consider the source.