Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

GUM – the most famous department store in Moscow

This mall was built in the late nineteenth century to replace a covered market and originally contained over a thousand stores.  It is built on three levels with a vaulted glass roof and even today resembles a modern cathedral.  On this first visit, thirsty and hungry we ignored the rows of designer shops and made for No. 57 CTOΛOBAЯ, the recommended restaurant on the third floor with a noble history of providing good quality, reasonably priced food for the proletariat.  We picked up a tray, waited in line, selected our food and took it to our chosen table and it turned out to be really, really good, probably the best meal we had had so far in Russia.

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Russia, Caviar, Millionaires and Paupers

Red Square is a place that I think I would find difficult to tire of and we walked through Resurrection Gate and in the shadow of the red brick history museum looked down and marvelled again at the multi-coloured domes of St. Basil’s, at the granite blocks of the Lenin Mausoleum on one side and the cream facade of GUM shopping arcade on the other.

I think I would have been happy to wander around here for the rest of the day but it was lunch time, Kim was hungry and so we went again to No 57 CTOΛOBAЯ for something to eat and after the meal we walked through the malls to see the shops.

In 1996 when my son Jonathan was about twelve years old in I took him to London for the day and we visited the major sights and attractions.  On the way home I asked him what he liked most about the day and confidently expecting him to say the Tower of London or Trafalgar Square or Buckingham Palace I was taken aback somewhat when he declared the highlight of the visit to be the twenty minutes or so that we spent in Fortnum and Masons!  I was intrigued by that but he explained that he just thought the high prices were really funny – he wondered how they priced such an everyday item as Yorkshire tea bags and concluded that they must take the basic price, double it and then times it by ten before putting it on the shelves for the tourists.

Well, he would have found this place amusing as well then because the prices were truly astronomical and way off my scale of affordability.  In one shop a linen jacket cost £400 and that, I can tell you, is more or less my clothing budget for the year.

There was no doubting that they were nice shops, well laid out and all clean and tidy and clean and tidy no doubt because there were no shoppers inside them.  The prices everywhere were huge, in a food hall we bought some confectionary at massive prices and our knees buckled at the cost of champagne and vodka.  We took some photographs and were promptly told off for it.  The photographs were of the caviar where a tin about the size of a John West can of tuna was a heart-stopping 60,000 roubles and give or take a few kopecs that is about £1,200 and I don’t spend that much on groceries in six months!

Somebody must buy it though because it is apparently extremely perishable and will only last on display like this for a maximum of six weeks.  Worst still, once opened it has to be consumed within three days so if you are going to share a tin of this between two of you that is an eye-popping £600s worth of fish eggs each over a weekend!

And herein lies the paradox because the gap between rich and poor in Moscow and Russia is huge.  According to research, the richest slice of Russian society has doubled its wealth in the past twenty years, while almost two-thirds of the population is no better off and the poor are barely half as wealthy as they were when the Soviet Union collapsed.  The wealthiest fifth of the population receive a pay cheque equivalent to nearly double its value in 1991, while the poorest fifth made only half in real terms.  In total, 60% of the population has the same real income or less than the average of twenty years ago and some people are now looking back fondly at the days of the managed economy.

Moscow is now officially the third most expensive city in Europe after Geneva and Zurich and whilst some people might be able to afford to shop in the GUM boutiques most have absolutely no chance of doing so.

It was late afternoon so we did some final souvenir shopping in the street market stalls outside Red Square and then took a Metro directly back to the hotel district.  After the GUM experience I took more notice of the people rather than the architecture.  Ordinary people trying to supplement their income by selling a few items – hand made crochet, second hand clothes or garden produce.  At the station an old lady at the entrance had a few bunches of ragged flowers from her garden or balcony, Kim gave her a 100 rouble note, which is only a couple of £s but the look of gratitude on her face was distressing, Kim turned down the flowers and she pushed the note deep inside her coat for safe keeping.

Two hours later when we returned to the Metro station to go back to the city she was still there so Kim gave her another 100 rouble note and I reminded her that the last time she showed an act of kindness like this thirty minutes later she was robbed on the Athens Metro.

Russia, Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral

Like a lot of other people I suppose I used to believe that this was called Red Square because of the association with Communism but in fact the name has nothing to do with the link between the colour red and political philosophy or from the colour of the bricks of the buildings around it either. Rather, the name came about because of the Russian word красная (krasnaya) which can mean either ‘red’ or ‘beautiful’. This word, using the meaning ‘beautiful’, was originally used to describe Saint Basil’s Cathedral and was subsequently applied to the nearby square, which incidentally isn’t even a square but rather more of an oblong!

Before moving on and just to finish this ‘red’ issue off, the association of red with communism is rooted in the general use of a red flag by European radicals and revolutionaries and was first of all used for this purpose by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. The obvious symbolism is that of blood and red flags and were used in medieval times to indicate that a castle, to the last man, would not surrender and later by pirates and others to indicate that when they won no one would be spared and blood would flow.  In the mid-nineteenth century the red flag was again raised to symbolise the 1848 revolutions in France and elsewhere in Europe and in 1871 the heirs to this French revolutionary tradition once more hoisted the flag at the Paris Commune.

We had a couple of unsupervised spare hours now to amuse ourselves and with the sun beating down into the Square we decided that it was time to visit St. Basil’s Cathedral standing proudly in a riot of colour and shapes and resembling a penny confectionary tray in a child’s sweet shop and most accurately and delightfully described by the French diplomat and travel writer Marquis de Custine who wrote during his visit of 1839 that it combined “the scales of a golden fish, the enamelled skin of a serpent, the changeful hues of the lizard and the glossy rose and azure of the pigeon’s neck”.  It probably looked a bit different in 1839 but I like to think that I know what he meant.

The Cathedral was ordered by Ivan the Terrible to mark the 1552 capture of Kazan from Mongol forces. It was constructed by the builders Barma and Postnik Yakovlev and completed in 1560. There is a legend that upon completion, living up to his name and reputation, Ivan had them blinded so that they could not create anything to compare but I’ve heard that tale elsewhere about the Astronomical Clock in Prague and I didn’t believe that story either.

Religious and historical architects are unable to agree about the central idea behind the structure. Either the creators were paying homage to the churches of Jerusalem, or, by building eight churches around a central ninth (it’s more normal to have five or thirteen domes in an Orthodox Church), they were representing the medieval symbol of the eight-pointed star but anyway what we see today would be unrecognisable to Barma and Postnik Yakovlev because the original building is buried deep within a labyrinth of later additions in the way of chapels, domes and covered galleries

For a time in the Soviet Union, there was talk of demolishing St. Basil’s – mainly because it hindered Stalin’s plans for massed parades on Red Square. It was only saved thanks to the courage of the architect Pyotr Baranovsky. When ordered to prepare the building for demolition, he categorically refused, and threatened to commit suicide on the steps of the cathedral.  The cathedral remained standing but Baranovsky’s theatrical conservation methods earned him five years in prison.

We paid the modest entry fee and followed the visitor route through the warren of tiny rooms with mosaics and religious artefacts on display and then climbed a spiral staircase in the centre of the building to a magnificent internal chapel with religious icons and symbols painted on towering columns that held up the roof and provided perfect acoustics for a choir to entertain and hopefully sell some CDs of Russian folk music.  There was a good view of Red Square from this elevated position and we walked around the gallery with its confusing collection or rooms leading off in random order and each with a tale to tell or a treasure to show off before reaching the exit and returning to the Square.

It was just after midday now so we returned to GUM (there is a good history at this web site link) and the restaurant No 57 CTOΛOBAЯ where we had lunch for a second time at the end of a gallery on the third floor and it amused me to think that we were sitting here in the historic heart of Moscow, the epicentre of Soviet era Russia, in a westernised shopping mall that represented everything that communism stood against: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, a laudable but ultimately unachievable state of Utopia that could naturally be delivered without shops.  Lenin closed the mall and Stalin converted it into State administrative offices.  They must be spinning in their graves – well, Stalin maybe but not Lenin of course because we had seen him barely two hours ago laid out in his mausoleum in his own personal ‘groundhog day’ nightmare and patiently waiting for a spinning opportunity!

Lunch finished we returned to the Square to meet with Galina at Resurrection Gate from where we were going n the next stage of the visit – into the Kremlin.

Russia, Moscow and Red Square

I was impatient to go through the main gates into Red Square but Galina held us all up with some unnecessary commentary and so I wandered off ahead of the group and towards the Resurrection Gate (demolished by Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt in 1995) and into a cobbled area next to which on one side was the green and ochre Kazan Cathedral (demolished by Stalin in 1936 and rebuilt in 1995) and the red brick Russian historical museum (which for some reason Stalin didn’t demolish) and in front of me Red Square, a place that I had never dared to imagine that I would ever visit.

Etched in my mind are grainy images from the 1960s of Russia’s annual May Day Parade when a cheerless looking Politburo would sit close to Lenin’s tomb and watch an endless procession of goose stepping troops and weapons of mass destruction that were going to wipe us off the face of the earth parade by in what seemed to be a provocative display deliberately choreographed to create paranoia and fear in the west.  The pictures were always dull, grainy and grey and my image of Moscow was always that it was a lacklustre, soulless and dreary place so what a surprise it was now to find a vibrant and colourful scene, a square brimming with activity and effervescent energy, a vibrant place with happy smiling people, exciting and lively and crowned by the iconic brightly painted onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral at the opposite end.

Like a child on Christmas Day finding a pile of presents I wanted to dive in straight away, the sun was shining and I was at last released from the confines of the tour bus and I just wanted to soak it up but Kim was tired and hungry so for the time being I had to concede to the lure of the shopping mall and the promise of a restaurant within.

Not just any shopping mall however but ‘Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin’ or GUM, the most famous department store in Moscow.  The once grim and dingy  store filled with the endless queues that epitomised the Soviet era is now a fashionable, airy building full of fountains, flowers, bars and restaurants that stretches along one side of Red Square.

This mall was built in the late nineteenth century to replace a covered market and originally contained over a thousand stores.  It is built on three levels with a vaulted glass roof and even today resembles a modern cathedral.  On this first visit, thirsty and hungry we ignored the rows of designer shops and made for No. 57 CTOΛOBAЯ, the recommended restaurant on the third floor with a noble history of providing good quality, reasonably priced food for the proletariat.  We picked up a tray, waited in line, selected our food and took it to our chosen table and it turned out to be really, really good, probably the best meal we had had so far in Russia.

After the meal we left the mall and went back into Red Square where the sun was still shining and we made our way though the security lines which were there on account of a youth sporting event and made our way towards St. Basil’s Cathedral with its complex architectural design and nine iconic domes rising like the flames of a bonfire into the sky.  There wasn’t enough time to go in today so we thought we’d leave that until later but we walked around the exterior, gazing with amazement at the riot of tiered gables, tented roofs and twisted onion domes, each of which contains an individual chapel, and enjoying being in this very special place.

By now it was approaching two o’clock and the appointed rendezvous time with Galina and the coach so we swept through Red Square in the knowledge that we would be back tomorrow to spend more time there, through a street market where once again Kim suffered from indecision about Matryoshka doll selection so we purchased none and back to Resurrection Gate where Galina gathered everyone up in a mother hen sort of way and escorted us back to the coach.