Kremlin clean-up in time for 500th birthday

Press, 17 June 1986, Page 23

Kremlin clean-up in time for 500th birthday

For almost 500 years the Kremlin has been the symbol of Moscow and of the successive regimes that have governed Russia.

In modern times, the vast agglomeration of walls, towers, palaces, and churches has been undergoing almost continuous repair and restoration.

A recent article from TASS, the Soviet news agency, describes the restoration of one of the Soviet Union’s greatest attractions for visitors. Moscow and the Kremlin are a single notion in the mind of every Soviet national. One cannot imagine Russia without Moscow, nor Moscow without the Kremlin, without its walls and the towers of the old fortress laid down 500 years ago. Alexei Vorobyev, chief architect of the Kremlin restoration project, accompanied a TASS correspondent along the walls of the Kremlin. “The Kremlin was studied and described by many scientists,” says A. Vorobyev, “For example, S. P. Bartenev, the author of a big monograph, ‘Moscow Kremlin in the Old Times and Now,’ wrote that the Kremlin walls formed an irregular poly-

gon with 25 angles. The length of the walls totals 2235 metres, and the towers take 20 metres of the length. But the most appropriate point of view on the Kremlin seems to be not mathematical, but poetical: the Kremlin is the heart of Moscow.”

As a third-year student of the Moscow Architecture Institute, Alexei Vorobyev volunteered to fight in World War 11.

After the war he returned to the institute and started his work in the Kremlin: together with Alexei Khamtsov. his col-lege-mate and also a former soldier, he examined the condition of the Kremlin walls and towers, and drew measurement plans, necessary for restoration.

Vorobyev and Khamtsov have been working together ever since.

The walls and towers built in the times of Tsar Ivan 111, 500 years ago, are now of great interest to architects. Bricks in the body of the Spasskaya Tower were called “twohanded,” for a mason had to lift and hold those eight-kg bricks with both hands.

The restorers’ work must hold for centuries.

They put in steel strings which hold together the masonry of the Spasskaya Tower. The strings can be tightened, if needed, by grooved nuts, holding them taut.

Workmen of 40 trades have been employed at the Kremlin’s restoration. The original bricks, sunbaked and frost-bitten, now neighbour the new, set in place of crumbled bricks which have been removed.

Vorobyev, the chief architect of the restoration, loves the Kremlin, and knows it'as Ivan Ill’s architects, Anton Fryazin, Pietro Antonio Solario, Marko Fryazin and Aleviz Fryazin knew it. Vorobyev had restored many other Russian kremlins (or fortresses). But Moscow’s is the biggest one of the kind, and it is spelled with a capital “K.”