Merridale Katherine. Red Fortress; History and Illusion in the Kremlin

London: Methropolitan, 2013History of the Kremlin from the point of view of a British historian.
The Kremlin is one of the most famous structures in the world. If states have trademarks, Russia’s could well be this fortress, viewed across Red Square. Everyone who comes to Moscow wants to see it, and everyone who visits seems to take a different view. ‘The only guarantee of a correct response is to choose your position before you come,’ wrote the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. ‘In Russia, you can only see if you have already decided.’ In 1927, his decision was to be enthralled.
This is a fascinating story and well told though the pace it perhaps a little uneven. Early Russia to the sixteenth-century is particularly well done, but after Ivan the Terrible the narrative starts to become a little panoramic. The reigns of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, the invasion of Napoleon, and the move through the nineteenth-century via the Revolution and into the regimes of Stalin and his successors to the break-up of the Soviet Union feels swift and far less detailed than the earlier periods.