A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

At half past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool.

Kazan Cathedral The first time I visited Russia was in the summer of 1998. I had travelled there with my high school English teacher, Richard Baker—the man with whom I first read Dostoevsky. While there, naturally we visited Red Square where the Kremlin, St. Basils Cathedral, and Kazan Cathedral are all located. I vividly remember standing together in the square and reading the history of Kazan Cathedral from our guidebooks. Built in 1636 to commemorate both the liberation of Moscow from interlopers and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty, Kazan was among Russia’s oldest and most revered cathedrals. In 1936, the Bolsheviks celebrated the 300th anniversary of its consecration by razing it to the ground. In part, they leveled the cathedral to clear Red Square for military parades, but also to punctuate the end of Christianity in Russia. When Peter Baranovsky, a prominent architect, was directed to oversee the dismantling of the cathedral, he initially refused on the grounds that the church was too important to destroy. But the powers that be made it clear that were to refuse to follow their instructions, he would put not only himself, but his family at risk. So Baranovsky did as he had been told. But before destroying the cathedral, he secretly drafted detailed architectural drawings of it and hid them away. More than fifty years later, when Communist rule came to its end, the Russians used Baranovsky’s drawings to rebuild the church stone for stone. I find every aspect of this history enthralling. The cathedral itself is a reminder of Russia’s heritage—ancient, proud, and devout. Through the holy landmark’s destruction we get a glimpse of how ruthless and unsentimental the Russian people can be generally, but specifically under Stalinism. While through the construction of its exact replica, we see their almost quixotic belief that through careful restoration, the actions of the past can effectively be erased. But most importantly, at the heart of this history is a Baranovsky—a lone individual who at great personal risk carefully documented what he was destroying in the unlikely chance that it might some day be rebuilt. The Soviet era abounds with sweeping cultural changes but also with stoic heroes who worked in isolation at odds with the momentum of history towards some hopeful future. While neither Kazan Cathedral nor Baranovsky play a role in A Gentleman in Moscow, their story influenced one of the novel’s central themes.