A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

Kapellen und Kirchen hat.”

There is a church almost in every street, and the Kremlin is a citadel of cathedrals. During Holy Week, towards the end of which the evidences of the fasting season grow more and more obvious by the closing of restaurants and the impossibility of buying any wine and spirits, there are, of course, services every day. During the first three days of Holy Week there is a curious ceremony to be seen every two years in the Kremlin. That is the preparation of the chrism or holy oil. While it is slowly stirred and churned in great cauldrons, filling the room with hot fragrance, a deacon reads the Gospel without ceasing (he is relieved at intervals by others), and this lasts day and night for three days. On Maundy Thursday it is removed in silver vessels to the Cathedral. The supply has to last the whole of Russia for two years. I went to the morning service in the Cathedral of the Assumption on Maundy Thursday. “It’s long, but it’s very, very beautiful.” The church is crowded to suffocation. Everybody is standing up, as there would be no room to kneel. The church is lit with countless small wax tapers. The priests are clothed in white and silver. The singing of the noble plain chant without any accompaniment ebbs and flows in perfectly disciplined harmonies; the bass voices are unequalled in the world. Every class of the population is represented in the church. There are no seats, no pews, no precedence or privilege. There is a smell of incense and a still stronger smell of poor people, without which, some one said, a church is not a church. On Good Friday there is the service of the Holy Shroud, and besides this a later service in which the Gospel is read out in fourteen different languages, and finally a service beginning at one o’clock in the morning and ending at four, which commemorates the Burial of Our Lord. How the priests endure the strain of these many and exceedingly long services is a thing to be wondered at; for the fast, which is strictly kept during all this period, precludes butter, eggs, and milk, in addition to all the more solid forms of nourishment, and the services are about six times as long as those of the Roman Catholic or other Churches.

The most solemn service of the year takes place at midnight on Saturday. From eight until ten o’clock the town, which during the day had been crowded with people buying provisions and presents and Easter eggs, seems to be asleep and dead. At about ten people begin to stream towards the Kremlin. At eleven o’clock there is already a dense crowd, many of the people holding lighted tapers, waiting outside in the square, between the Cathedral of the Assumption and that of Ivan Veliki. A little before twelve the cathedrals and palaces on the Kremlin are all lighted up with ribbons of various coloured lights. Twelve o’clock strikes, and then the bell of Ivan Veliki begins to boom: a beautiful full-voiced, immense volume of sound—a sound which Clara Schumann said was the most beautiful she had ever heard. Then it is answered by other bells, and a little later all the bells of all the churches in Moscow are ringing together. Then from the cathedral comes the procession; the singers first in crimson and gold; the bearers of the gilt banners; then the Metropolitan, also in stiff robes of crimson and gold, and after him the officials in their uniforms. They walk round the cathedral to look for the Body of Our Lord, and return to the cathedral to tell the news that He is risen. Then the guns go off, rockets are fired, and illuminations are seen across the river, lighting up the distant cupola of the great Church of the Saviour with a cloud of fire.

The crowd begins to disperse and to pour into the various churches. I went to the Manège—an enormous riding school, in which the Ekaterinoslav Regiment has its church. Half the building looked like a fair. Long tables, twinkling with hundreds of wax tapers, were loaded with the three articles of food which are eaten at Easter; a huge cake called koulich; a kind of sweet cream made of curds and eggs, cream, and sugar, called Pascha (Easter); and Easter eggs, dipped and dyed in many colours. They are there waiting to be blessed. The church itself was a tiny little recess on one side of the building. There the priests were officiating and down below in the centre of the building the whole regiment was drawn up. There are two services—the service which begins at midnight, and which lasts about half an hour, and Mass, which follows immediately after it, lasting till about three in the morning. At the end of the first service, when “Christ is risen” is sung, the priest kisses the congregation three times and then the congregation kiss each other, one person saying “Christ is risen” and the other answering “He is risen, indeed.” The colonel kisses the sergeant; the sergeant kisses all the men one after another. While this ceremony was proceeding I left and went to the Church of the Saviour, where the first service was not yet over. Here the crowd was so dense that it was almost impossible to get into the church, although it is immense. The singing in this church is ineffable, and it is worth while coming to Moscow simply for the sake of hearing it. I waited until the end of the first service and then I was borne by the crowd to one of the narrow entrances and hurled through the doorway outside. The crowd was not rough, they were not jostling one another, but with cheerful carelessness people dived into it as you dive into a scrimmage at football, and propelled the unresisting herd towards the entrance; the result being, of course, that a mass of people got wedged into the doorway and the process of getting out took infinitely longer than it need have done, and had there been a panic nothing could have prevented one’s being crushed to death. After this I went to a friend’s house to break the fast and eat koulich, Pascha, and Easter eggs, and finally returned home when the dawn was faintly shining on the dark waters of the Moscow river, whence the ice disappeared only last week.

This morning people come to bring one Easter greetings and to give one Easter eggs and to receive gifts. I was writing in my sitting-room, and I heard a faint mutter in the next room, a small voice murmuring, “Gospodi, Gospodi” (“Lord, Lord”). I went to see who it was and found it was the policeman, sighing for his tip, not wishing to disturb, but at the same time anxious to indicate his presence. He brought me a crimson egg. Then came the doorkeeper and the cook. And the policeman must, I think, have been pleased with his tip, because policemen have been coming ever since, and there are not more than two who belong to my street.

In the afternoon I went to a hospital for wounded soldiers to see them keep Easter, which they did by playing blind man’s buff to the sound of a flute played by one poor man who is crippled for life. One of the soldiers gave me as an Easter gift a poem, which I will translate literally as it is a curious human document. It is called “Past and Present.” This one is “Present”:—

I lived the quarter of a century

Without knowing happy days;

My life went quickly as a cart

Drawn by swift horses.