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In 1861 the famous novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote,

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"If there is a country in the world

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"which to other countries is more unknown or unexplored,

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"enigmatic,

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"and mysterious,

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"that country is undoubtedly Russia."

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"For Europeans," he said, "Russia is one of the riddles of the Sphinx."

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"Perpetual motion, or the elixir of life, will be sooner discovered

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"than the truth about Russia."

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Dostoevsky really believed it was impossible for anyone from the West

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to fathom the mysteries of the Russian soul, but I think that there is a way to at least begin

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to understand Russia, its rich history and its extraordinary people,

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and that's through the story of its art.

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That story will take me across the vast Russian landscape,

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to encounter the rich but often neglected art of its past...

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..from the power and mystery of the Russian icon,

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to the baroque splendours of St Petersburg...

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..and on to the political protest paintings of the 19th century,

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and the abstract art of revolution itself.

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And I'll chart the dizzying story of modern Russia

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from the tyrannical heyday of communism,

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to the artistic experiments of today.

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On the edge of Moscow's Red Square lies the State Historical Museum.

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Its ethnographic galleries are rarely visited but they're a treasure trove

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of Russia's pre-history filled with the relics of its most ancient past.

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I think of the great rooms of the State Historical Museum as

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a kind of Aladdin's cave of all the civilisations that once occupied the vast territories

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that are now what we think of as Russia

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and it begins with this boat, this wonderful boat,

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created approximately 9,000 years ago by an unknown tribe

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who floated down the River Don in southern Russia in that vessel.

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We know almost nothing else about them.

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Here we are in the second room and suddenly,

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we're somewhere quite different,

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we're in the Urals, towards Kazakhstan,

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and this is 3000 BC, about the same time as the peoples of ancient Egypt.

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This is what's happening in the Urals.

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They're making these extraordinary idols almost like African totems.

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This is a museum of the many Russias that once lay beneath the soil of this disparate land.

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These clay fertility goddesses with their jutting hips were dug up from the Caucasus.

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And this iron elk was found on the shores of the Black Sea, created by a people with roots in Greece.

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The sheer span of time and space in here is mind-boggling.

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Here is a series of death masks dug up at the absolute eastern limit

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of what would become the Russian Empire,

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and they date from about the 1st century BC, 100 years before the birth of Christ.

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It's extraordinary to think of those faces once alive, staring out, looking at me.

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And when you reflect on the immensity of Russia's territory and the diversity of its peoples,

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I think you become aware of just what an immense challenge it must have been

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for the first people who decided to turn all of this into one nation.

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I'm travelling to the place where the first attempt was made to mould many peoples into one Russia.

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That place is Kiev, now the capital of modern-day Ukraine.

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There's an old proverb which says Moscow is the heart of Russia,

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and St Petersburg the head, but its mother is Kiev,

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and that's all because of one ruler and his vision.

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In the 10th century, the city was at the centre of a vast pagan empire

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known as Kievan Rus, ruled by an ambitious prince called Vladimir.

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He wanted to unite his people under the banner of a single religion,

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and in the year 988 he made a momentous decision.

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He ordered the destruction of all the Slavic pagan idols and converted his country to Christianity.

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Prince Vladimir sent his emissaries far and wide in search of the one true faith capable of binding

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his disparate peoples together but they beheld no glory in the churches of western Christianity,

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and, as for the Muslim world, they found its ceremonies foul-smelling and frenzied.

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However, when they got to Constantinople, when they beheld the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia with

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its towering dome and its glittering mosaics, they said, "We knew not if we were in heaven or on earth."

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God truly dwells with those people.

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So it was, that Vladimir decided to recreate the glories of Byzantium here on the soil of Kievan Rus.

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The result was this cathedral, Santa Sophia.

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It was built and decorated by an army of master craftsmen

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sent from Constantinople to realise Vladimir's great plan.

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So how does this new and unfamiliar deity,

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this Jesus Christ, announce himself to the peoples of 11th-century Kiev?

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Well, he arrives in an astonishing blaze of mosaic glory.

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There he is, Christ Pantocrator,

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at the very summit of the central dome of the cathedral.

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He is surrounded by a circle, all the colours of the rainbow,

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and he gazes down at us with this tremendously solemn awe-inspiring expression on his face,

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holding the book and making the gesture of blessing, and he's got his angelic entourage

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with him, these four extraordinarily impassive, severe,

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solemn, brightly-patterned Byzantine archangels.

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You can see why the emissaries of Vladimir, when they went to Hagia Sophia,

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felt they were in heaven, and that's exactly the effect that the Byzantine craftsmen

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and master mosaicists who created this extraordinary image,

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that's exactly what they were setting out to create.

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When you imagine what it must have felt like for an 11th-century person from here

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to see that golden glow, that radiance,

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it must have seemed like a kind of miracle, as if

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the light of the sun had somehow been brought indoors and placed up there.

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The focal image of the whole church is actually not Christ Pantocrator in the dome,

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which is only fully visible to the priests at the altar.

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The central image for the people at large is this great mosaic

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of the Madonna Orans - the Madonna praying.

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Now, she is the symbol of the church because the church contains God.

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She herself had been a living church, so to speak.

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In her flesh was Jesus Christ, in her belly,

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and that idea is contained here or expressed here architecturally.

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She's been placed in this apse that itself feels like an enclosure, almost like a womb.

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She's Mary, mother of God, but she's also very much Mary the Merciful

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and there's a telling detail in the form of this gold-embroidered handkerchief

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that's tucked into her belt which, according to local tradition,

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is there to wipe away the tears of all those who might come to her seeking consolation.

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If ever there was an image that embodied the role of Kiev

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as the mother of old Christian Russia,I think this is it.

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Prince Vladimir hadn't just adopted a religion.

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He'd imported an entire Christian culture, the culture of Byzantium

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forged over centuries in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul.

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The impact on the people was immense.

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They'd leapt from a world of pagan idols of stone or wood to these glittering visions of heaven.

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It must have been like travelling 1,000 years in one day.

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But there was one Byzantine art form above all others

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that Russians would take to their hearts,

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perhaps because it had a simplicity that spoke directly to them.

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To Russian Christians it would become the most powerful symbol of their faith and their nation.

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The icon.

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The painting on wood of a saint

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or a prophet or Jesus Christ himself.

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Now this famous image, Our Lady of Vladimir,

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is really the founding icon of the whole Russian painting tradition,

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the holy of holies, the holiest religious painting in all of Russia.

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Art history's stylistic analysis tells us that the picture was painted

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in about 1130 by one of the great masters of Byzantine art

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working in Constantinople and it was brought to Russia as a great prize, a great treasure.

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But as far as the early rulers of Russia were concerned, and as far as the tradition of the painting has

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always been presented to the Russian people, it wasn't painted by a Byzantine artist in the Middle Ages.

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It was painted by Saint Luke himself!

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It was, if you like, almost a photograph

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taken in the Virgin Mary's kitchen of her with her son,

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and it projected this new race of Christian people,

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this race of converts.

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So to speak, it projected them straight into the centre of the Christian mystery.

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This is Christ the vulnerable baby in the arms of his mother.

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Look at the tenderness with which he clasps her neck.

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Look at the sadness in her eyes, those beautiful almond-shaped eyes

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that look out at you with the foreknowledge of his death.

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And in this type of image they place great stress

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on his vulnerable body.

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The underneath of his foot is presented to us, I think,

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in an attempt to make us imagine

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the terrible torment of having a nail pierced through that foot.

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It's full of pathos and humanity, this type of image,

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and I wonder if that isn't partly why it struck

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such a deep chord in the Russian imagination,

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because they had their own Slavic traditions

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of worshipping a fertility figure, a mother,

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and this is very much an image of the mother of God, and God.

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It's welcoming, it's got a warmth about it.

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Icons aren't realistic in the western sense.

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They're spaceless, shadowless.

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Yet they'd always been venerated in the eastern tradition

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precisely because they were held to represent

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the actual likeness of the saints in heaven.

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And nowhere have they been venerated, even loved, as deeply as in Russia.

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So far from the roots of the Christian faith,

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it's as if the people needed something sacred they could touch.

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As well as the art of the icon, there was the art of the book.

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This is the Ostromir gospel.

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It was created in 1056,

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less than 70 years after the conversion of old Russia.

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It's the most ancient surviving Russian book.

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The illuminations range from impish grotesques worthy of the European Gothic tradition,

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to this beautiful vision of St Mark wrapped in patterns of gold.

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But it's the text of early Russian books like this one,

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written in such supple calligraphy, that was so significant.

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At a stroke, this script removed one of the biggest obstacles

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to completing the conversion of the Kievan empire.

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You can't teach the Bible unless you can transcribe the Bible into your own language,

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and that was a problem in Kievan Rus

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because they had no written language that we know of.

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So they appealed to the scholars of Byzantium for help and the result

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was this wonderful script known as Cyrillic.

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Now the invention of Cyrillic marks the very beginnings

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of the Russian literary tradition, but I think thatCyrillic itself

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deserves to be seen as a work of art, a work of design and it's charged with significance

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because the scholars responsible for it used Greek as their basic template,

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but to that they added a series of letter shapes based on symbolic forms, the circle, the triangle

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and the cross, all of these forms loaded with Christian significance.

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With the help of bibles and books like this, by the beginning of the 13th century

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a rich Christian culture had taken root.

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But almost as soon as it was established, it was under threat.

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In 1237, a great army of marauding nomads

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advanced into Kievan Rus from the plains of the east.

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They looted and destroyed churches, burning precious bibles and icons.

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The Mongols were a warrior race driven by power and acquisition.

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Art wasn't a currency they understood,

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so unless they could melt it down for gold, they destroyed it.

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When the Mongol hordes drove across the Eurasian steppe, they forced

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a wrenching displacement of the old orthodox culture of Christian Kiev.

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The city and the surrounding region was looted and pillaged.

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All routes south were blocked by Mongol fortresses.

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As a result, Russian culture was suddenly cut off, not only from declining Byzantium

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but also from the civilisation of the West,

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from France where the first universities were being founded,

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from Italy where the first glimmers of the Renaissance were being seen.

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Old Russia would know nothing of that.

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It was its destiny to develop in isolation

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as its people were forced north into Muscovy, the wooded lands.

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The Mongols' main priority was simply to isolate the Russians

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so they could form no alliances and build no power base.

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They became a subject people, obliged to pay taxes to their nomadic masters.

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For more than 200 years, Russian Christian culture existed in a strange forest cocoon.

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To the rest of the world, it was as if they'd ceased to exist.

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During this period, the writers of medieval Europe and Byzantium simply stopped mentioning them.

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These years have been called the silent centuries.

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Central to everything was the forest.

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Their lives were dominated by its rhythms, its cycles,

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long freezing dark winters followed by the joyful rebirth of spring.

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This was a Christian world, but one from which the old pagan gods of the eastern Slavs had not yet departed.

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There was mother nature, the goddess of fertility, of the warm damp earth

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and counterposed to her was the god Perun, the god of lightning, thunder and above all fire,

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fire that was the source at once of life, light, warmth and refuge but also death and devastation.

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Now I don't think you can ever understand the unique forms

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that would be taken by Russian Christianity, its art and its architecture

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unless you grasp that its roots lay in this soil.

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Having reduced the people of Rus to subjugation, the Mongols left them alone

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as long as they paid their taxes, eventually allowing them freedom of worship.

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Denied real power over their own destiny, the Russians turned increasingly towards God

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and focused all their energies on the spiritual world.

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In the 14th and 15th century, countless settlements sprang up

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in lonely forest tracts and along northern lakes and rivers.

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This is Malye Karely in the depths of the Russian north,

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more than 1,000 kilometres from Moscow.

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Here they have preserved one of the most evocative of those early settlements.

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The quintessential expression of Christian civilisation in Russia is this.

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It's the wooden church, wonderfully homely form of religious architecture

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built, like any other house in the forest, from logs, butthey build it tall

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so it can be seen from miles away above the treeline because, after all, this is the house of God.

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One of the most characteristic features of the little wooden church are its onion domes.

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They have been shaped by the forest too.

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To me they look like architectural fir cones.

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What immediately strikes me about this space is

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its small scale and its intimacy, and if you imagine this room filled with a congregation,

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you'd feel very much as if you were part of a family of worshippers.

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That's carried through into the art and architecture, I think, that idea of the church in Russia

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as a kind of home, a perfect version of the hospitable home, because

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this is what's known as an iconostasis,

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and it's an utterly and uniquely Russian invention.

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Only in Russia do you find it, this great screen of images raised up in tiers above you.

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In the eastern Byzantine church, the icons, the images are dispersed

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throughout the space, but not in Russia.

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They bring them all together to form this kind of golden wall of imagery.

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As you look at it, with the candles shimmering off it, it gives off this warm glow,

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and I think it's very much like the hearth at the centre of a house.

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BELLS CHIME

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The humble church did indeed become a welcoming forest home.

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Here, the beleaguered people of Rus could count on the hospitality of God to provide

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light, warmth and sustenance.

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And in place of the old forest ritual whereby the visitor was given bread and salt,

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here the visitor receives the flesh and blood of God himself in the form of the communion...

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..the whole rite sanctified by the protective gaze of the icons.

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Icon painting schools flourished in the forests of Old Muscovy,

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and today they're still making icons in the old way.

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That's because the ideal of the icon painter has always been not to innovate

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but to remain true to the sacred prototypes of each saint and prophet,

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passed down by holy tradition.

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For every icon there has always been an established pattern,

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almost like a stencil, that had to be traced.

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But despite the inherent conservatism of the Eastern icon tradition,

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the truth is that, by the middle of the 15th century, it had taken a unique form here in Russia.

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If you want to experience the essential Russian-ness of the Russian icon

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there's only one place to go -

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that's the Holy Trinity Monastery in Sergiev Posad.

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I'm here on the holiest day of the year,

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the Feast of St Sergius himself.

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For centuries, this has been the place of pilgrimage for Russia's Orthodox Christians.

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They come not only to remember St Sergius

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but to worship before the icons painted by Russia's most celebrated religious artist,

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Andrei Rublev, who was himself a monk here in the 15th century.

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I met Father Dolmat, a deacon in the modern order of St Sergius.

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According to Father Dolmat, it's also important that the person

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experiencing Rublev's icons should do so in a heightened spiritual atmosphere, during an actual mass.

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This is the great iconostasis by Rublev and his workshop.

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The colours are very subtle, not as strident as Byzantine icons,

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and above all, there's this rich old gold standing for the vault of heaven.

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The paintings have faded, smoked by time and incense.

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But there's a wonderful simplicity about the story-telling in these scenes from the life of Christ.

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But as the mass unfolds, it's as if the art is transformed

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by the intensity of the ritual.

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The people and the icons seem to be communicating with each other.

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Heaven bending to earth, earth reaching to heaven.

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It's an extremely moving, powerful experience.

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It's very hard to put into words.

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But what I'm struck by more than anything else

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is this extraordinary sense of intimacy.

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When I think of the great spaces of western Christian art,

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I think of Giotto, I think of Michelangelo...

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Giotto creates this sense of sacred theatre,

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Michelangelo is like a great epic poem,

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but they're essentially painted books telling you a story.

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It's not like this, it's not like that at all here.

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It's Christianity as a refuge from the cold, Christianity for a people

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whose roots lie in the forest.

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It's totally visceral, it's utterly emotional and

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when you're there in that space, you feel as if people are almost

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literally warming themselves at the fire of the Christian faith.

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THEY SING

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Less than 30 years after Andrei Rublev completed his paintings,

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Byzantine Constantinople fell to the Muslims.

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The Russians suddenly felt their nation

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was the one true home of Christianity.

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But icons don't only appeal to the faithful.

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In recent years, they've become emblems of Russian-ness

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for the country's new rich.

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I'm off to visit publisher Victor Bondarenko.

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Owner of the world's largest private collection of Russian icons.

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I'm curious to know why a secular man, a non-believer,

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would want to possess so many sacred objects.

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Victor.

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Good morning.Thank you for having us. It's such a pleasure.

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It's my pleasure also, come on in.

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I hadn't imagined your house like this at all.

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I don't know why but I wasn't quite expecting all this contemporary art in an icon collector's house.

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00:31:16,920 --> 00:31:21,320
Now you can see in England how simple Russian people live in Russian villages.

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Oh, yes, all right, this is a simple Russian village hut.

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I feel this is my roots, I feel it.

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Sometimes I can sit on the sofa

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and look at this wall, sometimes I can sit in that armchair

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and look at this wall

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and I feel this vibration through hundreds of years

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feeling of my grand-grandparents praying to these sacred images

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which formed the civilisation.

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This is extraordinary.

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I am glad you like it.

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I like it myself.

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This is like your very own iconostasis.

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Yes.Amazing.

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What aspect of Christianity

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do you think that the icon painting emphasises?

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Does it emphasise the human aspect

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or the other worldly, the divine, the mystical?

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I guess it emphasises human aspect.

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When you are looking at the mother of God,

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don't you see in her sad eyes

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that she feels that her child will be killed,

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people will kill him and she already

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feels this and...

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you can see the grief in her eyes, grief on her face.

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Almost gesturing to us.Yes, in every gesture you can feel this.

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Talking about whether the icon in Russia is slightly different,

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I wonder if, you know the way that

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00:32:48,600 --> 00:32:53,400
this rock formation is painted and the way the sky is painted, this reminds me a little bit of

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00:32:53,440 --> 00:32:57,080
certain things in Persian painting, Asiatic, but you don't find that

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in, in eastern Byzantium.

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00:32:58,840 --> 00:33:03,280
I know you British, you always push us below and below to Asia but.

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I'd much rather...is that, you don't like that idea of?

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00:33:06,400 --> 00:33:10,120
No I like the idea, I like, I love the idea.

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I love the idea. We are not Asia and we are not Western Europe.

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We are just Russia.

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Why do we have to be like that or just like you or just like here?

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00:33:21,680 --> 00:33:23,720
We are just Russians.

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We have our own civilisation, our own alphabet, our own language.

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00:33:29,120 --> 00:33:31,920
Let's say Americans don't have their own language, even.

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We have everything our own.

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00:33:36,120 --> 00:33:42,160
I don't understand how does it happen that we become adversaries.

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It's also enigma by the way.

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The next film you should do.

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00:33:47,000 --> 00:33:51,600
Here's to international friendship and thank you so much for showing me your collection.

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00:33:51,640 --> 00:33:53,680
You're most welcome any time. It's been great.

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00:33:53,720 --> 00:33:56,120
Thank you for coming. Thank you, Victor.

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00:34:08,400 --> 00:34:11,000
But the Russians haven't always loved their icons.

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This picture shows soldiers in the 1920s carrying armfuls of images

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00:34:16,680 --> 00:34:19,000
out of a church that they've just looted.

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Under the communists, who feared and despised Christianity,

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00:34:24,960 --> 00:34:28,240
churches were shut down and icons were removed.

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But the communists respected the power of the icon, nonetheless,

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00:34:35,120 --> 00:34:39,240
and cleverly appropriated it for their own ends.

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00:34:40,800 --> 00:34:43,000
Under Lenin, public spaces had,

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like every Russian home,

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00:34:44,640 --> 00:34:46,200
a so-called red corner

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but instead of an icon,

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there was, of course, a portrait of the party leader.

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00:34:56,080 --> 00:34:59,000
Stalin, too, would seek to recreate his own image

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00:34:59,040 --> 00:35:01,000
in the caste of an icon.

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But the communists were by no means the first to steal the icon's magic

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and make it their own.

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In 1547...

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Russia's most despotic cruel and whimsical ruler came to power.

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His name was Ivan the Terrible

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and he's one of the towering figures of Russian history,

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00:35:40,120 --> 00:35:43,720
immortalised in the films of Sergei Eisenstein.

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00:35:48,960 --> 00:35:50,840
In the celluloid re-telling of Ivan's life,

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he's shown suppressing the scheming feudal lords of Muscovy,

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uniting Russia and shattering the Mongol yoke.

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00:36:04,320 --> 00:36:06,880
He did indeed achieve all of that.

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00:36:06,920 --> 00:36:09,000
He wasn't quite the black-and-white hero

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00:36:09,040 --> 00:36:11,360
Eisenstein made him out to be in this film.

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00:36:14,840 --> 00:36:19,440
Ivan was brought up in the Orthodox faith but he was hardly a model Christian.

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00:36:19,480 --> 00:36:23,600
As a child, his hobby was torturing small animals.

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00:36:23,640 --> 00:36:27,280
He once killed more than 30 puppies in a single afternoon

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by hurling them from a tower of the Kremlin,

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00:36:30,600 --> 00:36:34,800
and that was just the start of his psychopathic rampage through life.

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00:36:34,840 --> 00:36:38,480
By the age of 13 he was a serial rapist and murderer,

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and he could do whatever he liked with impunity

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because his authority was absolute.

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Ivan had a paradoxical relationship with the Orthodox faith.

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Devilish misdeeds would be followed by agonised repentance.

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00:37:01,720 --> 00:37:03,960
And this strange, twisted relationship

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00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:05,200
would be dramatically reflected

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00:37:05,240 --> 00:37:08,880
in the religious art that he commissioned.

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00:37:13,280 --> 00:37:14,840
In the State Tretyakov Museum

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00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:17,680
hangs a work of art painted for Ivan's palace,

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00:37:17,720 --> 00:37:20,640
a huge narrative icon called Church Militant

401
00:37:20,680 --> 00:37:24,440
which would change the rules of icon-painting forever.

402
00:37:29,640 --> 00:37:32,800
For me, this huge extraordinary panoramic icon

403
00:37:32,840 --> 00:37:35,280
of the Church Militant

404
00:37:35,320 --> 00:37:40,000
is the ultimate example of Ivan the Terrible's political bravado,

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00:37:40,040 --> 00:37:41,520
his devil may care willingness

406
00:37:41,560 --> 00:37:46,360
to use the imagery of the church in the service of his own ends.

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Now what it represents is a truly extraordinary watershed moment in

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00:37:53,680 --> 00:37:55,520
the history of Russian icon painting

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00:37:55,560 --> 00:37:58,280
because Ivan had to convene a special church council

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00:37:58,320 --> 00:37:59,840
to make this possible.

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What it shows us, for the first time,

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00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:06,520
is a ruler, a Russian ruler actually crossing the line,

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00:38:06,560 --> 00:38:09,800
entering the world of the heavenly and the holy,

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00:38:09,840 --> 00:38:12,840
having himself painted into the icon because there he is,

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00:38:12,880 --> 00:38:16,080
leading the massed forces of Christendom

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00:38:16,120 --> 00:38:20,360
towards the new Jerusalem, the city of God.

417
00:38:24,920 --> 00:38:28,800
OK he's, he's just behind Archangel Michael

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00:38:28,840 --> 00:38:31,840
but look who he's put himself in front of -

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00:38:31,880 --> 00:38:37,760
St George, St Dimitrios, St Vladimir with his two sons.

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00:38:37,800 --> 00:38:41,360
He's in front of all of those figures from the Christian past

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00:38:41,400 --> 00:38:43,920
and he's also in front of Constantine the Great,

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00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:45,360
the founder of Constantinople.

423
00:38:56,960 --> 00:38:59,120
This burning city stands for Gomorrah

424
00:38:59,160 --> 00:39:01,640
but I think, in Ivan's own iconography,

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00:39:01,680 --> 00:39:04,840
it stands, too, for the city of Kazan

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00:39:04,880 --> 00:39:08,680
which he had seized from the Mongols and torched.

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00:39:08,720 --> 00:39:11,800
And I think what this picture crystallises very clearly

428
00:39:11,840 --> 00:39:14,640
is the strong sense in Russia at this point in history,

429
00:39:14,680 --> 00:39:18,280
the middle of the 16th century, that having for so long

430
00:39:18,320 --> 00:39:21,240
been somehow at the margins of the Christian world,

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00:39:21,280 --> 00:39:23,560
they are now at its very centre.

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00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:24,720
Byzantium has fallen,

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00:39:24,760 --> 00:39:29,160
the baton has been passed and Ivan has taken it over.

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00:39:29,200 --> 00:39:32,000
And look, as a clinching symbol of that,

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00:39:32,040 --> 00:39:35,840
look how the artist has painted the heavenly city of Jerusalem.

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00:39:35,880 --> 00:39:40,000
He's painted it as an idealised vision of Moscow.

437
00:39:48,040 --> 00:39:51,640
But Ivan's sense that Russia was the new Byzantium

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00:39:51,680 --> 00:39:56,600
led him to an increasingly distorted view of the world and his own importance.

439
00:39:56,640 --> 00:40:02,280
He became ever bolder in twisting art and the church to his own ends.

440
00:40:04,920 --> 00:40:07,960
To see the most disturbing evidence of this,

441
00:40:08,000 --> 00:40:12,640
you have to travel to a place called Aleksandrov Sloboda.

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00:40:12,680 --> 00:40:16,520
Ivan built a monastery there where he spent much of his later years

443
00:40:16,560 --> 00:40:21,040
consolidating his power and staving off the plots to unseat him.

444
00:40:23,960 --> 00:40:27,120
As Ivan grew older, his fits of psychotic rage

445
00:40:27,160 --> 00:40:29,960
became ever more frequent and his paranoia deepened.

446
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:32,560
He surrounded himself with his own elite guard,

447
00:40:32,600 --> 00:40:34,800
the much-feared Oprichniki.

448
00:40:34,840 --> 00:40:40,200
They were his private army, his secret police and his death squads.

449
00:40:49,480 --> 00:40:52,160
These days Aleksandrov Sloboda is down at heel

450
00:40:52,200 --> 00:40:54,640
and definitely off the beaten track

451
00:40:54,680 --> 00:40:58,000
but it was once the nerve centre of Ivan's empire.

452
00:41:04,840 --> 00:41:09,240
These monastery precincts were stalked by Ivan's secret police

453
00:41:09,280 --> 00:41:14,360
whose emblems were the head of a dog, symbolising their status as the Tsar's watch dogs,

454
00:41:14,400 --> 00:41:17,800
and a broom, standing for their determination

455
00:41:17,840 --> 00:41:20,800
to sweep away his enemies.

456
00:41:26,040 --> 00:41:30,680
Murders and executions were a daily occurrence and Ivan directed much of

457
00:41:30,720 --> 00:41:34,320
the depravity from his own private chapel,

458
00:41:34,360 --> 00:41:36,240
the Trinity Cathedral,

459
00:41:36,280 --> 00:41:39,840
decorated with a great fresco sequence.

460
00:42:01,840 --> 00:42:04,520
On the west wall of the church

461
00:42:04,560 --> 00:42:07,680
we've got this vast depiction of the last things.

462
00:42:07,720 --> 00:42:11,560
Christ seated at a circle of gold surrounded by the heavenly host

463
00:42:11,600 --> 00:42:15,480
and as so often whether in the Orthodox church or the Western church,

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00:42:15,520 --> 00:42:17,800
as so often with depictions of the Last Judgment,

465
00:42:17,840 --> 00:42:24,320
the artist really pulled out all the stops when it comes to his depiction of the torments of hell.

466
00:42:30,600 --> 00:42:34,240
Up here we've got the resurrection of the dead

467
00:42:34,280 --> 00:42:36,520
and he's paid particular emphasis to those lines

468
00:42:36,560 --> 00:42:40,760
in Revelation about the sea giving up all those who had drowned or been eaten by monsters.

469
00:42:40,800 --> 00:42:44,600
There we can see some people being regurgitated.

470
00:42:48,880 --> 00:42:50,400
There, up on the left,

471
00:42:50,440 --> 00:42:54,040
you've got the blessed going off to heaven to meet St Peter.

472
00:42:55,760 --> 00:42:59,160
But down here below, is hell.

473
00:43:02,400 --> 00:43:07,360
There's Judas with his money bags sitting in the lap of the devil.

474
00:43:09,760 --> 00:43:13,080
Here, underneath a set of inscriptions detailing

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00:43:13,120 --> 00:43:16,840
the seven deadly sins in old Russian -

476
00:43:16,880 --> 00:43:18,640
avarice, adultery, lust...

477
00:43:18,680 --> 00:43:21,640
We've got the torments of the damned.

478
00:43:21,680 --> 00:43:25,400
Here the gnashing of teeth, weeping and wailing. Here...

479
00:43:25,440 --> 00:43:31,720
Freezing to death. Here, being eaten by worms and consumed by flames.

480
00:43:33,640 --> 00:43:39,520
Being thrust into eternal darkness and boiled in pine resin.

481
00:43:41,760 --> 00:43:46,320
Now if you want to get a full sense of just how perverted

482
00:43:46,360 --> 00:43:49,240
Ivan the Terrible's relationship to God became,

483
00:43:49,280 --> 00:43:52,960
you have to realise how he used this space.

484
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:57,280
He didn't use this space as a place of solemn contemplation,

485
00:43:57,320 --> 00:44:00,480
somewhere for him to meditate on the might of God.

486
00:44:00,520 --> 00:44:05,480
He actually used it as the administrative centre for his evil empire.

487
00:44:05,520 --> 00:44:09,520
He signed execution orders in here and worse than that,

488
00:44:09,560 --> 00:44:11,680
he's known, the archive tell us,

489
00:44:11,720 --> 00:44:14,600
that he used this area of the picture

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00:44:14,640 --> 00:44:17,480
as a kind of instruction manual for torture.

491
00:44:17,520 --> 00:44:20,240
He himself copied these tortures.

492
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:25,320
He enacted these very tortures on those who had displeased him.

493
00:44:26,920 --> 00:44:29,760
I don't think it was enough for Ivan the Terrible

494
00:44:29,800 --> 00:44:31,480
to be God's representative on earth.

495
00:44:31,520 --> 00:44:33,840
He wanted to BE God.

496
00:44:41,520 --> 00:44:46,280
Ivan the Terrible was the first ruler to call himself Tsar

497
00:44:46,320 --> 00:44:49,040
and in doing so, he'd invented perhaps the most terrifying

498
00:44:49,080 --> 00:44:50,360
of Russia's institutions,

499
00:44:50,400 --> 00:44:54,560
the absolute rule of a single individual.

500
00:44:58,960 --> 00:45:01,840
From the Tsars to the communists and into the present,

501
00:45:01,880 --> 00:45:06,280
the figure of a single all-powerful leader with the fate of millions

502
00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:09,240
at his mercy has been the one constant.

503
00:45:12,280 --> 00:45:14,880
And today you can still meet people

504
00:45:14,920 --> 00:45:18,880
who've had to endure the autocracy that Ivan invented.

505
00:45:20,880 --> 00:45:26,120
And their responses to such absolute power have through the centuries

506
00:45:26,160 --> 00:45:30,120
played a vital role in shaping Russian art and culture.

507
00:45:34,080 --> 00:45:35,120
Zdrastvuitye!

508
00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:38,080
Baba Vera!

509
00:45:40,280 --> 00:45:45,040
This is Baba Vera, she's lived most of her life as a subsistence farmer

510
00:45:45,080 --> 00:45:47,040
in modern Muscovy.

511
00:45:47,080 --> 00:45:49,680
Thank you for having me, very nice to meet you.

512
00:45:49,720 --> 00:45:53,920
What a beautiful house you have. Da. Da. Da.

513
00:45:54,960 --> 00:46:01,240
Vera's parents lived under the rule of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II,

514
00:46:01,280 --> 00:46:04,760
and she and her husband, Anatoly,

515
00:46:04,800 --> 00:46:08,720
experienced the extreme hardships of the Stalinist era.

516
00:47:06,200 --> 00:47:08,600
But against the hardship,

517
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:12,160
it's as if Vera has turned her home into a work of art.

518
00:47:13,880 --> 00:47:20,560
Icons offer consolation but just as important is Vera's love of colour

519
00:47:20,600 --> 00:47:22,400
and her mischievous sense of fun.

520
00:47:51,920 --> 00:47:54,320
'And with that, she exploded into song.'

521
00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:24,520
HE LAUGHS

522
00:48:37,120 --> 00:48:38,120
Back in old Russia,

523
00:48:38,160 --> 00:48:41,360
there was an art form that spoke for the Veras of this world.

524
00:48:45,400 --> 00:48:47,680
Images like this were called luboks,

525
00:48:47,720 --> 00:48:50,280
prints of popular stories and folk tales.

526
00:48:50,320 --> 00:48:55,720
And they provide a glimpse into the vast mass of unrecorded lives in Russian history.

527
00:49:00,040 --> 00:49:02,840
They're full of mischief and wicked humour.

528
00:49:06,040 --> 00:49:10,800
This could almost be Baba Vera belting out her song.

529
00:49:14,320 --> 00:49:16,000
There's a carnival-esque relish

530
00:49:16,040 --> 00:49:19,080
in the world turned upside down.

531
00:49:19,120 --> 00:49:22,360
Here the mice are burying the cat.

532
00:49:24,960 --> 00:49:30,520
It's laughter in the dark with a few vodkas to help the party along.

533
00:49:38,320 --> 00:49:41,600
People might have dreamed of change

534
00:49:41,640 --> 00:49:45,600
but old Russia was, for centuries, static,

535
00:49:45,640 --> 00:49:49,160
inward-looking...

536
00:49:49,200 --> 00:49:51,320
fossilised.

537
00:49:53,160 --> 00:49:56,240
Russia had remained essentially isolated

538
00:49:56,280 --> 00:49:59,880
from the outside world ever since the fall of Kiev.

539
00:50:03,360 --> 00:50:05,840
But one man would change everything,

540
00:50:05,880 --> 00:50:10,520
a tsar who came to power nearly a century after Ivan the Terrible.

541
00:50:10,560 --> 00:50:13,200
His name...

542
00:50:13,240 --> 00:50:15,600
Peter the Great.

543
00:50:24,360 --> 00:50:26,720
It's a measure of Russia's insularity

544
00:50:26,760 --> 00:50:31,040
that Peter was the first tsar in history to travel abroad.

545
00:50:34,520 --> 00:50:37,200
I'm going to the city he created in his name.

546
00:50:37,240 --> 00:50:40,640
It, too, is the product of a journey.

547
00:50:45,680 --> 00:50:50,160
In 1697, Peter had embarked on a tour of Northern Europe

548
00:50:50,200 --> 00:50:53,200
immersing himself in art, culture and science.

549
00:50:55,240 --> 00:50:59,880
He wanted finally to undo the consequences of the Mongol invasion

550
00:50:59,920 --> 00:51:02,200
and reconnect Russia to the West.

551
00:51:02,240 --> 00:51:05,520
There was time for some extracurricular exploits along the way.

552
00:51:12,760 --> 00:51:15,200
It's a little known fact that Russia's greatest tsar

553
00:51:15,240 --> 00:51:18,520
spent part of his reign on an extended bender

554
00:51:18,560 --> 00:51:20,080
in Deptford, South London.

555
00:51:20,120 --> 00:51:26,400
The diarist John Evelyn lent him his house so that Peter could inspect the shipyards at nearby Greenwich,

556
00:51:26,440 --> 00:51:28,600
but soon Evelyn's housekeeper

557
00:51:28,640 --> 00:51:32,200
was complaining that the place was full of right nasty people.

558
00:51:32,240 --> 00:51:36,320
Apparently Peter and his new friend, the astronomer Edmund Halley,

559
00:51:36,360 --> 00:51:38,000
who discovered Halley's Comet,

560
00:51:38,040 --> 00:51:40,240
were spending the evenings getting drunk,

561
00:51:40,280 --> 00:51:42,760
pushing each other round the garden in wheelbarrows

562
00:51:42,800 --> 00:51:44,800
and throwing up in the flower beds.

563
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:47,640
When the Tsar and his entourage finally left,

564
00:51:47,680 --> 00:51:50,600
Evelyn found that all the doors had been broken down,

565
00:51:50,640 --> 00:51:54,480
the locks had been smashed and his pictures were full of bullet holes.

566
00:51:55,320 --> 00:51:59,040
But despite all the high jinks, Peter really was a man on a mission,

567
00:51:59,080 --> 00:52:02,960
the result of which would be the complete transformation of Russia.

568
00:52:10,920 --> 00:52:13,280
Peter was dazzled by his travels in Europe,

569
00:52:13,320 --> 00:52:17,320
by the new technology and ideas he experienced there,

570
00:52:17,360 --> 00:52:22,240
and he came to think of his own nation as backward and primitive.

571
00:52:23,800 --> 00:52:26,360
He had himself painted again and again

572
00:52:26,400 --> 00:52:29,680
by the great court painters of Northern Europe

573
00:52:29,720 --> 00:52:33,640
but, ultimately, it was Russia itself that was to be fitted out

574
00:52:33,680 --> 00:52:35,960
in a new suit of European clothes,

575
00:52:37,840 --> 00:52:42,240
He started by laying the foundations for a new capital city.

576
00:52:42,280 --> 00:52:43,280
A gateway to Europe.

577
00:52:47,080 --> 00:52:50,080
He could hardly have chosen a less promising place -

578
00:52:50,120 --> 00:52:54,200
barren marshlands by the banks of the River Neva,

579
00:52:54,240 --> 00:52:58,120
facing the Gulf of Finland on the fringes of the Baltic Sea.

580
00:52:58,160 --> 00:53:04,760
Tens of thousands of workers would die erecting a whole city on these barren mudflats.

581
00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:14,200
650km north-west of Moscow,

582
00:53:14,240 --> 00:53:18,840
St Petersburg represented not just a huge geographical reorientation

583
00:53:18,880 --> 00:53:22,760
of Russia but an immense political and cultural shift.

584
00:53:23,920 --> 00:53:27,040
This great fortress represents

585
00:53:27,080 --> 00:53:29,920
the very beginning of Peter's great project

586
00:53:29,960 --> 00:53:34,480
and at its centre is the spire of St Peter and Paul's Cathedral,

587
00:53:34,520 --> 00:53:36,600
like a great exclamation mark,

588
00:53:36,640 --> 00:53:42,240
a needle piercing the sky saying this is the city that Peter built.

589
00:53:51,600 --> 00:53:55,280
The Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul was the first building

590
00:53:55,320 --> 00:53:59,480
constructed to reflect Peter's grand European vision.

591
00:53:59,520 --> 00:54:02,880
It was designed by an architect from the West called Trezzini

592
00:54:02,920 --> 00:54:06,520
and it marks a sharp break with Russian tradition.

593
00:54:08,720 --> 00:54:11,440
You have to come round the side of the building

594
00:54:11,480 --> 00:54:13,680
to see that perched on its central cupola

595
00:54:13,720 --> 00:54:15,360
there's a tiny little onion dome.

596
00:54:15,400 --> 00:54:19,160
Now to me it looks rather like a boiled sweet,

597
00:54:19,200 --> 00:54:21,520
an embarrassed concession to the old Russian ways,

598
00:54:21,560 --> 00:54:23,320
because in all but name

599
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:27,200
this is an Italian baroque cathedral transplanted to Russian soil.

600
00:54:27,240 --> 00:54:30,480
Look at the sexy curve of its facade,

601
00:54:30,520 --> 00:54:32,960
those Borromini hips jutting out.

602
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:36,840
But I think if you really want to understand just how sharp a break

603
00:54:36,880 --> 00:54:41,480
it marks with the old conventions of orthodoxy, you have to go inside.

604
00:54:53,920 --> 00:54:59,920
This is such a far cry from the old homely humble churches of Muscovy.

605
00:54:59,960 --> 00:55:02,760
Here I feel almost as if I'm in a secular palace.

606
00:55:02,800 --> 00:55:06,360
There's something almost sickly about the surfeit of decoration in here.

607
00:55:06,400 --> 00:55:08,960
Look at those great trompe l'oeil classical columns.

608
00:55:09,000 --> 00:55:11,360
They're almost like sticks of barley sugar.

609
00:55:11,400 --> 00:55:14,040
I think you have to come to the far end of the church

610
00:55:14,080 --> 00:55:18,520
to really appreciate the magnitude of the transformation that's taken place here.

611
00:55:18,560 --> 00:55:21,600
Yes, there is still an iconostasis,

612
00:55:21,640 --> 00:55:24,840
that great Russian innovation, but it's been transformed

613
00:55:24,880 --> 00:55:28,680
into a huge piece of gilded baroque stage scenery.

614
00:55:28,720 --> 00:55:33,560
And yes, there are still icons, but a lot fewer of them and painted in a Western style.

615
00:55:33,600 --> 00:55:35,920
And there's something almost cursory about them.

616
00:55:35,960 --> 00:55:40,760
They feel to me almost like postage stamps that have been stuck into the pages of an album.

617
00:55:48,760 --> 00:55:52,080
It wasn't only the Russian church that was being transformed.

618
00:55:54,520 --> 00:55:58,120
Peter ordered Russian men to shave off their beards

619
00:55:58,160 --> 00:56:00,200
and wear European clothes.

620
00:56:05,040 --> 00:56:09,240
He also changed the Russian calendar to synchronise with the West.

621
00:56:11,840 --> 00:56:15,880
But the most dramatic shift in Russian ways of thinking,

622
00:56:15,920 --> 00:56:20,040
seeing and being was announced by a single painting.

623
00:56:21,240 --> 00:56:25,200
A work of art that today hangs in the State Hermitage.

624
00:56:28,960 --> 00:56:31,200
This is Rembrandt's Jonathan and David,

625
00:56:31,240 --> 00:56:33,280
a very intimate telling of the biblical story

626
00:56:33,320 --> 00:56:34,960
from the First Book of Samuel.

627
00:56:35,000 --> 00:56:37,440
It's a moment of parting.

628
00:56:37,480 --> 00:56:40,680
Prince Jonathan, son of King Saul, is telling David

629
00:56:40,720 --> 00:56:44,920
that he must flee the kingdom or his father will kill him.

630
00:56:44,960 --> 00:56:46,320
It's a religious painting

631
00:56:46,360 --> 00:56:50,440
but unlike any work of art created by an icon painter.

632
00:56:50,480 --> 00:56:53,200
You've got chiaroscuro, light and shade.

633
00:56:53,240 --> 00:56:56,440
You've got a space you can enter. You've got this...

634
00:56:56,480 --> 00:57:00,800
deeply complicated sense of human psychology and suffering.

635
00:57:00,840 --> 00:57:05,760
None of those things are present in the shadowless world of the icon.

636
00:57:05,800 --> 00:57:10,800
This picture represents everything that Western artists had been doing for half a millennium

637
00:57:10,840 --> 00:57:13,680
and everything that Russian artists were simply unaware of

638
00:57:13,720 --> 00:57:19,000
in their world of small wooden churches, their forest refuges.

639
00:57:19,040 --> 00:57:23,960
And when this picture came to Russia, it marked a seismic shift.

640
00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:25,600
That moment of cultural exchange

641
00:57:25,640 --> 00:57:29,200
meant that nothing would ever quite be the same again.

642
00:57:29,240 --> 00:57:32,720
Russian artists would respond to this type of realism,

643
00:57:32,760 --> 00:57:34,600
this type of space

644
00:57:34,640 --> 00:57:38,920
with their own fantastic immediate deep tradition of realism.

645
00:57:38,960 --> 00:57:42,560
Russian collectors would suddenly respond to European art.

646
00:57:42,600 --> 00:57:43,880
Russian taste would be transformed

647
00:57:43,920 --> 00:57:49,880
and the reason why this picture is so significant is it's one of Peter the Great's very first acquisitions.

648
00:57:49,920 --> 00:57:54,720
He actually bought this picture and it's the first Rembrandt ever to come to Russia.

649
00:58:07,480 --> 00:58:09,520
Peter had opened the floodgates.

650
00:58:09,560 --> 00:58:12,280
And here in the grand galleries of the Hermitage,

651
00:58:12,320 --> 00:58:14,120
you're surrounded by his legacy.

652
00:58:14,160 --> 00:58:18,240
A deluge of provocative Western art.

653
00:58:19,800 --> 00:58:24,920
Art infused with eroticism and sensuality.

654
00:58:24,960 --> 00:58:28,640
A far cry, indeed, from the world of the icon.

655
00:58:29,880 --> 00:58:32,920
Russia really would never be the same again.

656
00:58:41,240 --> 00:58:45,200
Peter opened Russia up to the West and to modernity

657
00:58:45,240 --> 00:58:47,240
but it would be a mixed blessing

658
00:58:47,280 --> 00:58:49,680
and even today there are Russians who say

659
00:58:49,720 --> 00:58:51,640
"yes, he created a window onto Europe,

660
00:58:51,680 --> 00:58:54,160
"but what a shame he didn't double-glaze it."

661
00:58:54,200 --> 00:59:00,240
Peter set his nation on a new course but it would be a stormy journey.

662
00:59:04,520 --> 00:59:07,520
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