Russia, light years from Vermont...
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| Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg |
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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.
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| 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.
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| One of the canals in the old center of St. Petersburg |
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| A typical apartment block away from the center |
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| 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
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| 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.
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Shoppers and strollers on Nevsky Prospekt
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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.
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| 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.”
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| Arkady |
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Pushkin Statue, with fresh flowers. Olga could recite his poetry at the drop of a hat.
Honoring the poet this way felt very Russian.
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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).
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| The 13th century Novgorad Kremlin (fortress) and church (foreground) |
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| The beautiful St. Sophia 12th century church,and the Millennium Monument (1,000 years of Russian history!), Novgorad |
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| 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.
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| The Winter Palace (and Hermitage Museum) |
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| The Summer Palace (Catherine Palace) in Pushkin |
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| Ballroom of the Summer Palace |
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| Nicholas II, deposed by the Revolution and killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, his throne in the background. |
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The same throne, same ballroom, the Winter Palace
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| 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 |
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| In the theater's "grotto" |
AT THE OPERA
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Wood and more wood; churches and elaborate peasant houses on exhibit near Novgorad |
