The Power & the Gold

THE KREMLIN (168 pp.)--David Douglas Duncan--N.Y. Graphic Society ($25).

The crown is an iridescent fountain of bubbling jewels. Diamonds spill and shimmer like droplets of moonlight. At its pinnacle, a huge, rough-cut ruby stares like an evil red eye. The diamond crown of Peter the Great is one of 80-odd superb photographic still lifes of the Kremlin's quasi-barbaric, Byzantine splendors, caught with eloquent precision by David Douglas Duncan's camera. This glittering hoard--jeweled scepters and prayer books, imperial gowns and priestly vestments, carriages and thrones--was buried art treasure until Duncan wangled Khrushchev's permission in 1956 to roam the Kremlin's history-haunted, relic-strewn halls and cathedrals with his Leica.

Five trips later, Duncan completed his photographic exclusive. Handsomely mounted and lavishly priced, The Kremlin is ornate but impressive company for his distinctively chilling combat photos of Marine action in Korea (This Is War!) and his Pan-like celebration of The Private World of Pablo Picasso. From a snowscape of Red Square--that symbolic replica of the Russian steppes in the heart of Moscow--to the two-headed imperial eagle screaming on a cloth of gold, The Kremlin is a tone poem of somber and dazzling opulence.

Gold, rather than purple, was Russia's royal color. Catherine the Great was married in a sylph-waisted, fairy-tale gown of spun gold embroidered with silver. When Ivan the Terrible broke the Tartar's grip on the Volga, he had the Crown of Kazan fashioned out of gold filigree, every contour of which mirrors the onion-topped domes of the Kremlin's shrine of St. Basil. The Great Hall of St. George in the Grand Kremlin Palace is a massive-pillared, arching vault lit by gilded one-ton chandeliers. The last Czar, Nicholas II, could boast a gilded Easter egg celebrating three centuries (1613-1913) of Romanov rule. It was inlaid with miniature portraits of all the Romanov czars, and thanks to a Bolshevik firing squad, soon proved prophetically complete.

In the book's panoramic text, which sometimes lapses into newscaster's jargon ("All Russia was in anarchy"), Author Duncan tries to capture more than 800 years, but his pictures tell a more revealing story--ropes of pearls, rather like fetters; Empress Anna's cathedral bell, a 200-ton monument to Old Russia, damaged by fire in 1737 and never hung; the golden crowns gorged with diamonds--all these are works of art. Yet this is art not as communication but as excommunication, a barrier defining the unbridgeable distance between the rulers' unlimited power and the cowed abasement of the poor and weak. The seeming paradox that the Communists cherish this "imperialistic" treasure-trove is a tribute not to their good taste, but to their psychological astuteness. They recognized that the Kremlin housed in its bejeweled splendor a tactic of tyranny as useful to the commissars as to the czars.

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