NOTES FROM AN IMPERIAL CITY

Russia, light years from Vermont... 

Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg

Detail, Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg.  (The story below.)

After assuming power in 1855 in the wake of Russia’s disastrous defeat in the Crimean war against Britain, France and Turkey, Alexander II initiated a number of reforms. In 1861 he freed the Russian serfs from their ties to their masters and undertook a rigorous program of military, judicial and urban reforms, never before attempted in Russia. However, during the second half of his reign Alexander II grew wary of the dangers of his system of reforms, having only barely survived a series of attempts on his life, including an explosion in the Winter Palace and the derailment of a train. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by a group of revolutionaries who threw a bomb at his royal carriage.  The church was built on the site in 1883.

The church and canal, with the ubiquitous electrical wires overhead

BIG COUNTRY

A recent New York Times crossword clue was “Yakutsk river.”  I figured it was somewhere in Russia, although I’d never heard of Yakutsk, so I cheated and looked it up.  Yakutsk is in Siberia and is said to be the coldest city on earth (temperature hovering around -55F in winter).  Unreachable by train or by road most of the year, it can only be reached with certainty by plane from Moscow.   The flight takes eight hours.  When I looked at photos of this strange place I was struck by how familiar it looked. So far from St. Petersburg, it might be expected to look different. Think of comparing, say, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Better yet, consider where you could end up after eight hours of flight time out of New York.  Photos of city buildings in Yakutsk looked like the looming apartment buildings of Petersburg, with the same multitude of electrical wiring hanging over streets and buildings, and south of the city were the same traditional wooden houses––houses I never thought I’d see around St. Petersburg; I thought they were only found somewhere in the vast interior––and the same mud and standing water we saw on the way to Novgorad.  (But to be honest, the mud near Yakutsk looked worse than any I’d ever seen anywhere.)  

The point is, if you flew to Yakutsk from St. Petersburg, you'd know in a second you were in the same country. Russia is big, big, big.

One of the canals in the old center of St. Petersburg

A typical apartment block away from the center

Deep in the mud in the streets of Moscow at festival time, 19th century painting in the Russian Museum

Before we moved to Vermont we had been thinking about riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, a seven-day trip.  Apparently this is only a tourist’s idea of fun.  Not a single Russian we talked with had the slightest interest in traveling to the east.  Nor had any of them been east.  They were as indifferent as we might be about spending a vacation in the middle of, say, Kansas.  Actually, more.

GLIMPSES

Members of a wedding party. St. Petersburg

The first Russian we met, originally from the Ukraine, sat next to us on the flight from Berlin to St. Petersburg. He had been teaching graphic arts and animation in Berlin for the past six months, and lived for the most part in the west.  He was returning to Russia to see family and friends, but had no intention of returning for good.  People from the former Soviet republics and from the countryside are moving to the cities, he said, and people in the cities want to live in the west.  As for him, he would never live in Russia again.

Shoppers and strollers on Nevsky Prospekt

The guy who drove us to the opera one night and later to the airport has a wife and young daughter, and has been driving for our hotel ever since he lost his job at an electronic assembly plant.  His English was not bad although he often fumbled for a word.  His father had been in the Russian Navy.  In 1982 he had been serving in the nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea that developed a leak in its steam generator that led to a release of two tons of liquid metal coolant from its reactor.  Some of the crew, including his father, were severely exposed.  His father’s health, he said, is not good.  How hard is it to get to the US, he asked?  (We’re not the ones to ask, because we really have little idea about the obstacles that exist for others.  To get to Russia we had to jump through a few hoops, but there was never any doubt that we would get there.)  He’d heard it was very difficult, insurmountable for him anyway, to get to the US.  You have to prove you have money and don’t really need to get to the US, so it’s a catch-22 situation.

Ken and Olga

Our guides for the day, Oksana and Arkady for the Novgorad trip, Olga for Pushkin and the Summer Palace, spoke fluent English.  Oksana and Olga had both spent time in the US, Oksana as a student (in Texas and Mississippi), and Olga as a translator (New York City and Denver), both capacities smoothing the way for extended visits.  Arkady was so intent on delivering information––I hesitated to leave his side to take photos as I feared he would continue talking to the air–– there was little opportunity for a more personal exchange. When we pressed him a bit for his political views he assured us he favored stability above all.  Oksana and Olga were less conservative and cynical about the role of new wealth––several answers to our questions ended with “Well, if you have money, you can do anything.”

Arkady

Pushkin Statue, with fresh flowers. Olga could recite his poetry at the drop of a hat.
Honoring the poet this way felt very Russian.

A SENSE OF HISTORY

Arkady was our guide to the eleventh century churches and Kremlin of Veliky Novgorad––a town on the road to Moscow two and a half hours south of Petersburg that was settled in the ninth century, one of the oldest cities in Russia.  In 1941 during World War II the city was occupied by the German Army and only liberated in 1944 by the Red Army.  We stood on the banks of the river Volkhov on one side of which had stood the German forces, and on the other side the Red Army.  

The Volkhov flows north into Lake Ladoga, the largest lake of Europe––who knew?––and eventually into the Baltic Sea.  According to Wikipedia fewer than forty out of  2,536 stone buildings in Novgorad remained standing after the war.  The central part of the city was gradually restored and in 1992 its chief monuments, the Kremlin, the ancient churches, were declared to be the World Heritage Sites.  In 1999 the city was officially renamed Veliky Novgorod (Great Novgorod).

The 13th century Novgorad Kremlin (fortress) and church (foreground)

The beautiful St. Sophia 12th century church,and the Millennium Monument (1,000 years of Russian history!), Novgorad

The Volkhov River, Novgorad

Seeing St. Petersburg today it is hard to grasp that in World War II St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, was under siege by the German Army from September 1941 until January 1944, one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, and an incredibly costly one, with up to a million and a half deaths of soldiers and civilians by starvation and bombardment.  

The palaces of the Tsars, including the Catherine Palace in Pushkin and other historic landmarks located outside the city's defensive perimeter, were looted and destroyed and many art collections transported to Nazi Germany. I remember reading about the siege in the 1970’s in Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad.”  After the breakup of the USSR in the 1990’s there was a burst of restoration and it was only then that the city’s name was changed back to St. Petersburg.  We read about, but did not see, a sign that still remains on Nevsky Prospekt warning citizens to stay on the other side of the street because of air bombardment.  The name change and the extensive restorations seemed to push this history further back into memory below a sheen of fresh gold.

The Winter Palace (and Hermitage Museum)

The Summer Palace (Catherine Palace) in Pushkin

Ballroom of the Summer Palace

Nicholas II, deposed by the Revolution and killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, his throne in the background.

The same throne, same ballroom, the Winter Palace

Lenin in front of  an example of Stalinesque architecture. Stalin was bad, but Lenin is still admired; fresh roses could be found at the feet of his statue in Novgorad

In the theater's "grotto"

AT THE OPERA

The opera theater, the Baron von Derviz mansion

In St. Petersburg we saw––appropriately, I thought––“Boris Godunov,” the convoluted tale of an actual sixteenth century Tsar, in a production that could easily have been at the ART (American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, where we have long had season tickets and where the production qualities have on occasion exceeded the product).  The singing was excellent, I thought, but the audience, so unlike the appreciative and sophisticated Vienna audience we were part of at the Vienna Philharmonic the week before, seemed unimpressed.  In Vienna everyone was dressed up––men wore ties, the women looked smart––but here most of the audience was garbed more for Sunday dinner with the family.  One enthusiast seated behind us shouted out “Bravo!” after impressive arias, but most of the audience clapped feebly.  A few left at intermission, and two ladies next to me left immediately after a simulated sex scene.  

At the end everyone simply got up and walked out as if they were heading for their next meeting.  As we waited in the theater lobby for a taxi––you don’t simply hail taxis in St. Petersburg, especially if you’re a tourist, as you’ll be taken for a ride, in the other sense of the word, and you’ll never see legitimate taxis sitting around waiting anyway––we saw the singers heading for the door one by one. They looked like some poorer members of the audience, wearing baseball jackets and jeans or the like, with no flowers in their arms, and no accolades or even acknowledgements from people they walked past.  They might as well have been stagehands.  I waved to one singer and he nodded back at me.  In retrospect I wish I’d waved more enthusiastically, blown a kiss, or something. Lieselotte, my cousin’s wife whom we visited in Vienna, is a fervent opera buff.  I wonder what she would have thought.  

LITTLE HOUSES

Along the St. Petersburg-Moscow highway (video)

The road to Moscow––I can vouch for the two and a half hours worth out of Petersburg––is severely potholed from one side to the other.  There’s no way for the huge trucks and car traffic zooming along at speed to avoid the cracks and holes. Oksana, our guide, pointed out the piles of tires here and there alongside the road–along with considerable amounts of trash; recycling has yet to come to Russia––that are the sad result.  People buy all these fancy cars, she said, but they only last a year or two because of the roads.  So why don’t they fix the roads?  Well, they will come and fix a part, said Oksana, but then another part needs fixing and there aren’t enough people to fix them all.  This explanation seemed incomplete.  Did I mention their contempt for seat belts?  Taxi drivers tie them behind the seat so as not to be bothered.  Americans, they’re so safety-conscious.

A dacha on the road to Moscow

Then there are the little wooden houses.  They fascinated me.  So many log houses, almost all of them with three, occasionally four, small windows in front under the gable and small fenced yards with newly cut wood piles, lined up close to the busy highway.  Muddy roads led to many more in the distance, tiny settlements.  These houses were identical to those we saw in the Russian Museum as examples of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century peasant homes as recreated in the Sturbridge Village-type park in the town next to Novgorad, with the same number of windows below the gable.  

Mostly old people live in these houses now, Oksana said.  No one wants to live outside the city now, and no one wants to farm.  But, I wondered, are there that many old people?  Well, young people who live in the city like to have dachas in the country and so they like these old houses.  In the flat muddy land between Petersburg and Novgorad it was hard to imagine country life as lived in a little wooden house while the traffic goes roaring by.  

Wood and more wood; churches and elaborate peasant houses on exhibit near Novgorad