Russia, Final Day, Reflection and Assessment

I was woken in the morning by the sound of squealing brakes and the unmistakable sound of metal on metal which means two vehicles have a collision.  I leapt out of bed and from the eighth floor window I could see two cars joined at the bumper and blocking the busy intersection outside the hotel front door.  There was chaos all around and this was going to last some time because after an accident in Russia the drivers are not permitted to move their vehicles until after the police have attended the scene.

I imagine what caused the accident had something to do with the weather because overnight it had completely changed and instead of the blue sky and sunshine that we had become accustomed to there was a steely grey sky, pavement puddles steadily filling up with rain water and raindrops running down the window like tiny pearl drops but as this was our last day and we would be leaving by midday this really didn’t seem to be too much of a problem.

After breakfast Kim decided to stay in the hotel but this seemed a waste of the last morning to me so I decided to walk to the local shopping centre to have a final look around and so I set off in the rain and took the underpass route to the other side of the main road.  The underpass was lined with tiny shops, no more than kiosks really, selling a wide selection of goods – among them clothes, shoes, pastries, souvenirs and cigarettes and they seemed to be doing rather brisk trade – brisker trade indeed than the surface kiosks at the other end where the heavy rain was keeping people away as they rushed from the shelter of the underpass to the nearby shopping centre without looking left or right or stopping.

It was a modern shopping centre with a supermarket and a department store and although it was nothing like the boutique interior of GUM the prices were still quite staggering.  So staggering in fact that there were hardly any shoppers and I found myself alone amongst the merchandise except for a heavy presence of security guards and I think they were glad of something to do or someone to watch because wherever I went there was always one of these guys to accompany me – or perhaps I just looked shifty and suspicious!

I didn’t stay long inside the store but went back outside to see where all the people might be but the wet streets were still deserted and then I spotted some women with shopping bags going into a shabby building with blue swing doors and I followed them to investigate.  Here the mystery of the missing people was solved because inside the not very promising exterior was a market hall that was bustling with activity.  Rows of florists, dairy stalls, butchers and fish mongers and they were all busy because here the prices were much more reasonable and the local people were sensibly shopping here rather than in the pricey supermarket next door.  I walked around the stalls and enjoyed the sights and sounds of a real local market and then with time passing by returned to the hotel for check-out and pick-up.

The bus arrived on time and Galina explained that the reason we seemed to be leaving so early (our flight was not for another five hours) was that the traffic could be unpredictable and that she didn’t want to take the risk of running late and missing the plane home.  An hour later she rather sheepishly apologised for this being the quickest airport transfer that she could ever remember and this would mean longer than usual waiting in the airport departure lounge.

Nothing slowed us down – the automatic airline ticket machine dispensed our tickets and we were quickly through passport control and the security checks so we found some seats and while Kim enjoyed the unexpected duty free shopping opportunity I went over the notes of our holiday and thought about setting out the top five highlights.

And here they are:

1              Peterhof Palace and Gardens

2              The Moscow Kremlin

3              The Moscow Metro

4              Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral

5              The Hermitage in Saint-Petersburg

That was a difficult list to compile I can tell you!  This had been a wonderful holiday and one that only a few years ago I would never have imagined possible.  Saint-Petersburg was much as I expected, a northern European Imperial city with large squares and fabulous architecture but as I have said before I was totally unprepared for what I saw in Moscow which took me completely by surprise and I am left with one overriding thought – I’d really, really like to go back!

Russia, Midnight Train to Moscow

Transport eventually arrived at ten o’clock but fitting all of the luggage into the small coach proved more difficult than cracking the Rubik’s Cube Puzzle.  For Kim and I, who only ever travel with cabin baggage, the size and quantity of our fellow travellers bags and suitcases was simply jaw-dropping, we were only away for a week but there was more luggage here than would be needed for a six month polar expedition; I doubt David Livingstone took as much as this when he went searching for the source of the Nile; more bags even than you would expect to find in the average suitcase department of a High street department store.

Eventually, one way or another everything was fitted in somewhere and the driver set off for the railway station on the other side of the city.  He left the island and nudged his way through the twenty-four hour traffic queue on Nevsky Prospekt and after an hour or so he pulled up at the front of the station on Uprising Square and we left the coach, reclaimed our cases and made our way into the Moskovsky Rail Terminal.

I was mildly disappointed by this, I’m not sure why but I was expecting something rather grand but instead of a cathedral sized concourse with towering cast iron girders and statues celebrating the importance of Russian railways the station was memorable only for its ubiquitous layout and style lined with shops and cafés, clattering information boards as they regularly updated  and self service ticket machines.

We were still excited about this of course because an overnight train rattling through the Russian countryside was something we had been looking forward to in anticipation of it being one of the highlights of the trip.  Our platform identified we walked a long way past the workmanlike station shunter engines manoeuvring the carriages into place in their splendid cream, brown and gold livery and walked a long way to our designated carriage.

The train was the Grand Express, a privately operated overnight service and advertised as ‘a luxury hotel on wheels’ and goes on in more detail, ‘You will be impressed by the level of service on Grand Express. It is Russia’s first privately owned luxury passenger train, offering overnight trips from Moscow to Saint-Petersburg. Only ‘Grand Express’ can offer you spacious sleeping carriages with toilets, shower cabins and air-conditioning, with wide sofas and LCD-TV sets, with DVD-players and Wi-Fi Internet access.’

We walked past the Grand Delux class carriages, we weren’t travelling in these, the Grand Class carriages, we weren’t travelling in these either or in the Premium Class and finally we reached first class and although I expected to continue walking to second or third class it didn’t go any lower than that and we were invited to step aboard and inside our first class compartment which we were sharing with two other Travelsphere travellers, Andy and Gaynor.

I had had expectations of a walnut veneered compartment with en-suite facilities and table lamps shining like glow-worms as in the Bond film ‘From Russia With Love’ or ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ but it turned out to be nothing like, tiny and functional but pleasant and comfortable and we sat down, opened the wine and waited for the moment of departure.  It was punctual too because precisely on time there was a little jolt that meant we were moving and we glided out of the station and began the six-hundred and fifty kilometre journey east to Moscow.

While everyone negotiated their sleeping arrangements and settled down we sat and watched the lights of the city suburbs slip by but by the time we were into the country it was too dark to see anything so thoughts turned to bed and sleep.  I had been allocated a top bunk which was quite high off the floor and rather difficult to get into but once this had been achieved I lay under the pristine white duvet and wondered if I would be able to drop off.  I don’t think I thought about this for very long however because the motion of the train and the rhythmic sound of wheels on rail soon sent me over and I only stirred once in the night when I was aware that the train had momentarily stopped to allow a faster train to pass and except for snoring in an adjacent compartment it was completely silent.

I woke early at about five-thirty and left the bunk and the compartment and joined some other early-birds standing in the corridor and enjoying the view.  Mile after mile of nothing but unspoilt countryside with meadows and forests, rivers and lakes and the occasional town or village with gaily coloured roofs and dirt roads.  The line is almost completely straight except for a seventeen kilometre bend near the city of Novgorod.

The story goes that  when planning the project, Tsar Nicholas I became frustrated by the constant bickering over the route and stepped in and  selected the route himself by taking a ruler and drawing a straight line between the two cities on a map but accidentally drawing around his own finger on the ruler. The planners were supposedly too afraid to point out the error and constructed the line with the bend.  There is no truth in that of course, the construction had to deal with an inconvenient steep gradient, but it’s a nice anecdote!

Eventually the train began to approach the suburbs of Moscow, the largest city in Europe and by some measures the sixth largest in the World so there was still a way to go as we were served a small breakfast that we doubted would see us through until lunchtime before preparing for arrival.  After eight hours the train approached the centre and eased effortlessly into Leningradsky Station the terminus of the line and the disembarkation process began as we stepped down from the train into a chilly morning but with the benefit of a glorious blue sky.

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More posts about Train Journeys:

More Train Journeys:

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Russia, Saint-Petersburg Best Bridges Walk

We left the Hermitage by the front door and at two o’clock it was hot on the banks of the River Neva so as we had been on our feet for nearly four hours we found a kiosk in a park next to the Museum and drank some reasonably priced local beer called Baltika (Second largest brewery in Europe after Heineken) and planned our afternoon.

Now it was time to resurrect Kim’s plan to see the best of the City bridges but an examination of the map confirmed that this a was rather ambitious project so we decided to set off and just see how far we could get in a short afternoon.

The first bridge across the Neva was nothing particularly special except for two magnificent lion statues sitting opposite the Admiralty building so we crossed it over to Vasilievsky Island and then walked along the western embankment of the river.  Kim’s objective was to see the fourteenth century Egyptian sphinxes by the side of the river in front of the Acadamy of Sciences in the University Quarter and having achieved that we crossed back over the Neva on the Lieutenant Shmidt bridge with decorative seahorse railings and once on the other side in Sennaya Ploshchad we slipped into a labyrinth of tiny streets and canals on our way the Egyptian bridge.

As I had feared this was quite a long walk and we were only about half way there when Kim, who was getting weary, began to complain as she regressed to childhood car journey mode and kept a barrage of ‘how much further is it, are we nearly there yet questions’.

The route took us past the Yusopov Palace where Rasputin was murdered, the Mariinskiy Theatre, the home of the Kirov ballet and the nearby monument to Rimsky-Korsakov outside the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory.  Kim was fed-up with the walking now and when we reached the pastel blue St Nicholas’ cathedral accused me of setting the itinerary to suit my own preferences which was untrue but she had to agree that it was better visiting the Cathedral this afternoon because the Primate of all Russia wasn’t there and it was much less busy.

It was time to start walking back towards Nevsky Prospekt and we quickly took in the Egyptian Bridge, the pedestrian Lion Bridge and then the Gryphon Bridge for a second time before taking our bearings from the golden dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral and walked in that direction because I had a mind to visit the interior.  In return for this I promised a refreshment stop but there was a surprising absence of cafés or bars in this part of the city so when we arrived at the Cathedral Kim declined to join me and I had to make a rather rushed visit to the interior which remains a museum even today and then a dash to the top of the dome to get the splendid elevated views of the city.

After my solo speed-sightseeing interlude we were back at Neksy Propekt where we stopped at the beer kiosk in the square outside the Church on Spilled blood where after twenty minutes or so Kim’s mood improved enough for us to walk to and see the Anichkov Bridge at the western end of the Prospekt with its four statues of men taming wild horses.

Despite weary legs it was important to stay out as long as possible this afternoon, not just to see as much as we could on our last afternoon, but because there was no room to return to the hotel because we had checked out earlier this morning.  After evening meal we were transferring to Moscow by overnight train but that wasn’t until very much later so an early return would potentially mean a tedious wait in the hotel lounge.  Eventually we made our way to the Metro station and took the journey back to Primorskaya for the very last time and as the mini-bus sped past the rows of concrete high rise housing blocks I reflected on life inside must remain quite a struggle for families on low incomes in a city of high prices and a widening gulf between rich and poor as Russia adapts to a market rather than a managed economy.

Each apartment had an individual balcony as a window on the world and it struck me that here, as everywhere else, the occupants had conspired to spoil the original concept by inappropriate conversions, boxing them in and glazing them and using them for all sorts of things that they weren’t really intended for – bicycle store, laundry room, high rise gardens, external store room or a place for the kid’s toys but I suppose the pressure on internal living space probably makes this inevitable.

Thirty minutes after leaving the city we were back at the hotel where we ate evening meal in what can only best be described a functional dining room.  It was difficult to spin this out for much more than forty minutes or thereabouts so shortly after that we were sitting in the hotel lounge with the other passengers waiting for the transport to arrive to take us to the railway station.

I generally find that waiting around like this is not a great deal of fun and this was no exception.  After an hour so I broke the evening up by visiting the supermarket for the last time and bought some wine for the train journey and then sat with the others and just waited.

 

Russia, Saint-Petersburg and the Hermitage Museum

This was our final day in Saint-Petersburg and we were planning to set our own itinerary and despite the alarmist stories of ten kilometre long queues at the Hermitage this was where we were going to start first.  Rather surprisingly the museum doesn’t open until ten-thirty but I suppose that with over three million exhibits there is quite a lot of dusting to do each day so this is quite understandable.  We had a leisurely breakfast, collected up all the complimentary shampoos and bath gels and then checked out of our room before returning to the city for the last time.

We weren’t too concerned about the queues and approached the Winter Palace in a relaxed and casual way because to be honest we were a little bit ambivalent about whether we visited or not. We wanted to go inside of course but we weren’t going to let it spoil our day if we found it too much of a chore to get in and we just go and find somewhere else to visit instead.

There were no queues in the Palace Square snaking through the gates as we feared and no shuffling lines of weary people in the Palace courtyard either and once inside we joined a line of no more than ten people and we were inside in under a minute for just £8 each compared with the inflated cost of £41 of the organised tour which made us feel even better!

Although we felt rather smug, one thing that we didn’t have was the benefit of a guide to help us get our bearings and this place is so huge then this would have been helpful.  We couldn’t possibly hope to see more than a fraction of the exhibits and because Kim doesn’t really like much more than a couple of hours or so in a museum it was important to be very selective.

On account of this we skipped the entire ground floor full of pre-history and ancient artifacts and made our way up the glittering Grand Staircase to the galleries laid out mostly by country and/or period on the first and second floors. We were confused at first as we wandered aimlessly through the old State rooms of the Royal Palace admiring the finery and the opulence that matched what we had seen the previous day at Peterhof because as I mentioned before the Romanov Tsars were so fabulously wealthy that they could have two Grand Palaces, one for the Summer and one for the Winter.

Eventually we established our location and started to move through the rooms and cross them off one by one.  We started at the Italian Renaissance and saw some works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo (as you do every day of course) and then through an art timeline of France, Germany and the Low Countries where there were some particularly fine pieces from Rembrandt which was good because back in March in Amsterdam we had missed the Rembrandt House Museum because of lack of enthusiasm by some in our party for visiting museums.

After an hour or so we only completed about a quarter of the first floor but mindful of not exhausting Kim’s patience it seemed that now was about the right time to find the French Impressionists on the second.  It is not only Kim I have to say because I too can grow weary of room after room of lifeless exhibits.  I like to visit these places for what they represent as history and not necessarily for the artefacts that they now display and I personally was trying to come to terms with being in a place that had played such a pivotal role in modern European history – the fall and abdication of the Romanovs in February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in October of the same year.  This is where the drama was played out and I was walking through the very rooms where it all took place.

So we made our way to the top floor to the French Impressionist section and walked through rooms of Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Seurat and Van Gogh and next to the Impressionists there were a couple of rooms dedicated to Picasso.  Wonderful but just to put things into perspective, however good they are the fact is that they are not exactly the best pieces of work from any of them because if you want to see the best of Van Gogh then you have to go to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, if you want to see the best of Picasso then you have to go to the Picasso museum in Barcelona and so on and so on.  I am not saying that what is in the Hermitage isn’t good it’s just that there is better elsewhere.

Anyway I am no art expert, as you can probably tell, and some of the Impressionist paintings never look that good to me wherever they are, a bit like a piece of work my children used to bring home from school – I’d say encouraging things about how wonderful they were and when they had gone to bed pin them up on a kitchen cupboard door – that’s inside a kitchen cupboard door by the way!

After the Impressionists Kim skillfully steered me towards the stairs and back at the first floor because it seemed rude not to, she agreed to see the Russian rooms but made this our last part of the visit and then made for the exit.

Russia, Saint-Petersburg Canal Boat Ride and a Crisis!

The boat was just about to cast off and leave so we quickly paid for our tickets and joined about twenty fellow passengers on the open deck at the rear. Some of them were wrapped in complimentary blankets and Kim asked for a couple but I thought this was rather unnecessary as it was pleasantly warm sitting in the golden glow of the sunshine in the shelter of the adjacent buildings.

The boat set off and chugged slowly along the canal beneath the towering walls of St Saviors and then turned into the labyrinth of waterways that intersect the city streets.  The route took us along canals lined with handsome pastel coloured buildings but we were unable to identify anything because the running commentary was all in impenetrable Russian.  After a few minutes we entered theWinterCanalwhich runs between the Hermitage and the Little Hermitage and then it left the narrow canals and the shelter of the buildings and headed out onto the River Neva.  It turns out that there were two different cruises, one that stayed exclusively on the canal network and a second that did a few canals and a lot of river and we had chosen the second!

Whilst it was still sunny it was immediately a lot cooler as the breeze off the Baltic was running down this channel and over the cold water and suddenly we started to shiver.  Kim used the blanket but I turned the offer down and one or two of the less hardy passengers on board abandoned the open deck for the warmth of the covered cabin.

The boat traveled south with the breeze behind us and we passed the Hermitage, the Bronze Horseman and theAdmiraltyBuildingand then turned around to return the way that we had come – into the wind!  Now it really did turn cold – Kim didn’t offer me the blanket a second time but quickly scooped it up and added it to the first around her shoulders, more passengers ran for cover and I just sat and tried to look tough.  I didn’t think that this was going to be a problem because I estimated that it would only take a few minutes to get back to the canals and out of the wind but it hadn’t occurred to me that the boat might swing out into the centre of the river again so that we could a close up view of the other side but this is exactly what happened and we stayed right there in the open channel.

After getting a view of the riverside elevation of the Peter and Paul Fortress the boat followed a canal around the back but it was still open on either side so there was still no shelter from the wind which by now I was beginning to find a bit uncomfortable.  At the end of the canal we were back on the river and it seemed to take forever to cross the three hundred metres or so to the other side and get back to the sheltered canal network.  By the time we got there, except for a couple of other people we were all alone on the top deck but as it started to warm up people began to return from the cabin so that they could enjoy the final views and ten minutes later or so we were back at the starting point.  Kim was in a hurry to leave the boat by this time so she threw off the blankets and hurried me across the gang plank back onto dry land.

It was early evening now and time to return to the hotel so we made our way to the Metro and took the short trip back.  As we approached the main doors Kim suddenly stopped dead, looked me up and down and asked where the bag that I was carrying was.  Ooops! It seemed that in the hurry to get off the boat it had been covered by the blankets and being unaccustomed to carrying a bag I had simply forgotten it.  I casually past it off – “Oh well, never mind, it was only a cheap bag and all that was in it was a bottle of water and our umbrellas”. “And my mobile phone!” wailed Kim and I could tell by the look on her face that this was all my fault which I suppose technically it was because I had responsibility for the bag and I hadn’t put the phone in the safety deposit box that morning as I should have done.  Double Oooops!!

We needed to get the phone cancelled but this proved difficult  because first of all we had to find a telephone number to report it then my phone refused to make outgoing calls and we couldn’t use the hotel phone until we left a credit card swipe.  Then I hit on a brilliant solution and contacted someone with great experience in these matters.  My daughter has lost more mobile phones than anyone would think possible including one that fell of a pedalo into the sea in Santorini and one that went down a lavatory pan so I was sure that she would know what to do and sure enough within fifteen minutes she sent a text to confirm that it was done.

This didn’t cheer Kim up quite as much as I had hoped and so after dinner while she sulked in the room I set off back into the city to see if it could be found.  Kim said that this was a completely pointless thing to do as someone would be sure to have stolen it and phoned all their mates around the World before we’d cancelled it but as it was my fault I decided to go through with the plan however hopeless.  I took the mini-bus and the metro and even at ten o’clock at night the boats were still running so even though I wasn’t terribly optimistic I went down to the office and enquired.  No, nothing had been handed in the staff explained but if I waited ten minutes the boat we had been on would be coming back and they would see if it was on board.  Eventually it arrived, a man disappeared inside the cabin and to my surprise and elation came back with the bag complete with all its contents.

I couldn’t wait to get back as quickly as I could with the good news and to invite her to reassess her faith in human nature and I skipped along Nevski Prospekt, ran down the escalators, urged the Metro and the mini-bus to go faster and cursed the hotel lift for being so slow before getting back to the room to return the lost phone and to save my skin!  Kim was happy and a crisis had been averted so we celebrated in the hotel bar where we spent the rest of the evening with some of our fellow travellers listening to a hotel lounge bar live band running through a catalogue of classics and drinking beer and wine regardless of the cost.

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Other Boat Ride posts:

Malta Tony-Oki-Koki

Captain Ben’s Boat, Antiparos

Gondola Ride in Venice

Rowing Boat on Lake Bled in Slovenia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Greece

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Istria

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Russia, The Peterhof Palace Gardens

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‘The spectacular gardens at Peterhof are remarkable for the sheer variety of styles encompassed in their layout and features.  Representing nearly two centuries of European aristocratic fashion executed to the highest standards, Peterhof is like an encyclopedia of park design’.

Whilst it was still chilly in the shade, in the sheltered parts of the garden and in the sunshine it was by now quite hot as we walked along the front of the Yellow Palace with its gleaming gold leaf roof overlooking the formal gardens below with their rows of bubbling waterfalls and gushing fountains.  We went first to the informal gardens and walked through the trees most of which are only fifty years old or so because these all had to be replaced because, like the Palace interior that was burnt in the fires, the German soldiers cut most of the old ones down for firewood during the occupation.

Luckily they didn’t dig the flowerbeds up because if they had then they would have come across the statues and monuments that were buried there by the curators for safety as they waited for the Nazis to arrive because there must have been a real danger that left in place they would have been used for target practice.  As it was they ruined the Big Cascade, the English Palace, the Marble, Monplezir and the Hermitage all of which were irreparably damaged. The hydro-technical mechanisms for the fountains were blown up, some monumental bronze sculptures of the Big Cascade were stolen and thousands of masterpieces were destroyed.

What I suppose you would call the garden path was as the width of an average minor road in the UK as it took us away from the Palace and towards the sea through flowerbeds, quirky water features, statues of the family ancestors and a foaming fountain around every corner.  It occurred to me that for the Tsar and Tsarina this garden would have been an ideal place to send the kids out to play when you wanted a bit of peace and quiet.

At the end of the path we arrived at a smaller Palace which the Tsar used for putting up visiting family and guests when presumably he didn’t want them under his feet in the Great Palace and beyond that was the Gulf of Finland which was restless today with a nippy breeze agitating the surface of the steely grey water. It was rather cold to stand around too long looking across the Gulf towards Saint-Petersburg and admiring the vista so after just a short stop we headed back towards the Palace this time through the formal water gardens.

With our backs to the Baltic Sea there was a stunning view along the canal towards the Grand Palace through rows of golden statues and fountains throwing jets of water many metres into the air.  Peterhof might be unfairly compared to Versailles but in the issue of its fountains it is so much better and this is because the fountains work by gravity which means they can be run pretty much all the time because the cost isn’t as prohibitive as at Versailles where they only tend to be turned on now and again.

The Palace and the Gardens were absolutely wonderful and just being here and sitting in the gardens of the café gardens with a grotesquely overpriced cup of coffee and a cake I suppose it was easier to understand why, a hundred years ago, there was so much resentment against the Romanovs and all their immense wealth in a country which was poor and where people were starving.

It would have been quite possible to stay much longer in the Palace grounds because there are ten working museums: the Grand Palace, Monplaisir, Catherine’s Block, Marii, Hermitage, the church of St.Alexander Nevsky, the Benois family museum, Cottage, the Bath Block including Tafeldecker and Kaffeeschenk Rooms and The Kitchen, and the Museum of Collectors but seeing all of that would have involved the inconvenience of making our own arrangements to get back to Saint-Petersburg because the appointed time for the coach to leave was two-thirty so in the warm sunshine we made our way to the coach park ready for the journey back to the city.

As it was only still early Anna offered anyone on board the opportunity to be dropped off in the city rather than return straight away to the hotel and we selected this option.  It turned out to be a mistake because the traffic was horrendously busy and the coach joined every other resident of the city who was out driving their cars this afternoon – it would have been quicker to go back to the hotel and then get the Metro!

As we crawled agonizingly through the streets we eventually recognized somewhere familiar so running out of patience we left the bus right there and left everyone else to continue.  The people I felt most sorry for were those going back to the hotel because they would surely have been there now without this detour and it turned out that it took them another hour or so after this.

We were now at the Gryphon Bridge over the Griboedov canal and by the Kazan Cathedral there was riverboat terminus which was the departure point for a one hour river cruise so we decided that as the sun was shining that was what we do next.

Russia, Tsars in our Eyes – The Grand Palace at Peterhof

Although the sun was shining there was a keen wind blowing in over the cold waters of the Gulf of Finland and we shivered as we queued for entrance to the Grand Palace and fended off the attention of the opportunist souvenir sellers.  Thankfully it was only a short line so we soon passed through the doors and the security and were inside where we were obliged to but plastic slippers over our shoes so that we wouldn’t damage the parquet floors that we were about to walk over.

Sometime during the late seventeenth century Peter the Great visited western Europe and whilst in France he was so impressed with Louis XIV’s Palace that he returned to Russia with plans to build one for himself and at this site thirty kilometres from Saint-Petersburg he began the construction of what was to become known as the ‘Russian Versailles’.

The tour began by climbing the ceremonial staircase which led to the restored state rooms on the first floor which led quickly to the lavishly gilded Ballroom and the splendid turquoise and white Throne Room.  Everything was pristine and there is a good reason for this because the restoration is only recently completed. During the Second-World-War German soldiers destroyed the Palace, looting the rooms and using whatever would burn for firewood to keep themselves warm in the bitterly cold winters.  Anna reminded us of this several times but neglected to tell us that apparently some of the damage was also done by the Soviet Air Force when it bombed the place to try and remove the uninvited guests!

After the Throne Room there were more rooms to follow and as we passed through Anna expertly distinguished between originals and reproductions.  The Germans were famous for what they called ‘Blitzkrieg’ which translates as ‘lightening war’ and when they invaded somewhere they didn’t hang about and after beginning the campaign at the end of June it took them only a couple of months or so to reach this place so the curators didn’t have a great deal of time to do the packing and they knew that Hitler’s team of archaeologists and historians, The Ahnenerbe Organisation, would soon drop to catalogue and steal the precious exhibits and take them back to Berlin.  By now most of the men were at the battle front so the work of removing the works of art, the furniture and the ornaments fell to the women who had to make heartbreaking choices about what should be saved and transported west to the Ural Mountains for safe keeping knowing that what they couldn’t take would be certainly looted.

All this thieving was a two way thing of course and among the Red Army troops who entered Berlin in 1945 were experts sent to establish “trophy commissions.” Their official mission was to look for Russian cultural property stolen by the Nazis when they had invaded the Soviet Union but Red Army officers started removing the large art collections and treasures that had been stored in bunkers and railway depots during the war and transported them home.  In 1992, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the German and Russian governments made an agreement of cultural cooperation and Germany has started to return to Russia paintings and other items plundered by German soldiers from 1941 to 1944. In 1997 they started giving back one of the most prized possessions stolen by the Nazis, the Amber Room, an ornate chamber of mosaics and gold taken from the Palace of Catherine The Great at Pushkin near Saint-Petersburg.

The guided tour took us through a succession of rooms each as lavish and extravagant as the one before it – the Blue Drawing Room, the Picture Room, The Divan Room, the White Drawing Room, the Audience Room, the Tsar’s Bedroom, and Peter The Great’s Oak Study.  There were galleries and chapels, music rooms and libraries each with its own special treasures to show off, some genuine, others perfect replicas but all heavily guarded by a watchful security guard in each room.  They had two principle duties, first to make sure no one shoved a priceless antique up their jumper and made off with it and second to make sure no one took photographs and that explains why I have had to use scanned images here rather than any photographs of my own.

Something that surprised in all this was the interest in and reverence of the Romanovs and the Royal Family, I had always assumed that there would be an anti-monarchist presentation in the historical sites but here as elsewhere there was no mention of Lenin and the Revolution and the rooms were full to overflowing with royalist paintings and mementos and I was drawn to the conclusion that Royalty must be better for tourism than the Bolsheviks.

It took just over an hour to walk through the rooms of the Palace and in future years it will probably take a lot longer because the restoration is only about half-way complete.  At the end we emerged into the inevitable souvenir shop and then down the back stairs and out through a door into the magnificent gardens beyond.

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More posts about Royal Palaces:

Palacio Real Madrid

Spain 2009 – Arunjuez

Palace Real Alcázar, Seville

San Ildefonso o La Granja

Palace of Versailles

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Russia, Saint-Petersburg to Peterhof

The weather changed overnight and in the morning there was a cool breeze but a big blue sky and a welcome freshness had replaced the humidity of the previous day.  After breakfast the coach arrived and we began the journey to Peterhof and the Tsar’s Summer Palace and immediately we joined long queues of rush hour traffic all bullying its way towards the city centre.

The driver was in a particularly impatient mood this morning and he constantly switched lanes in a rather pointless objective of finding the quickest running line and although he sometimes temporarily gained a few metres this was always ultimately unsuccessful.  It was clear however that he wasn’t prepared to sit around in the traffic jams and he began a quest to find a short-cut through the side streets which fifteen minutes later our guide, Anna, declared to be a stunning success as we crossed the bottle-neck bridge across the River Neva and gradually began to make improved progress as we headed south and west out of the city.

The road to Peterhof was a wide six lane boulevard and looking out of the window it occurred to me just how big everything was, the columns, the monuments, the statues and the buildings.  After a few kilometres we drove through massive concrete high rise housing developments in township clusters sprawling away from the road on either side in vast unattractive developments desperately in need of some urgent care and attention.

Saint-Petersburg once had the largest tramway network in the World but much of it has been dismantled now and today, and this surprised me, the longest network is claimed to be Melbourne in Australia.  By an alternative measure however the Saint-Petersburg system is the busiest in the World with four-hundred and seventy-six million passengers a year whilst Melbourne only manages around one hundred and eighty million!

By the side of the road there were the steel tracks serving these dormitory communities and every so often a red and cream tram clattered by with a hum of electricity, screaming wheels and honking klaxons.  My favourites were certain future museum pieces from the 1960s and 70s that conjured up images of the old days of the Soviet Union.  I noticed that as passengers got on board they immediately began to look grey and tired and seemed to become a feature of the tram as though locked permanently into a 1960s Leningrad time warp.  The trams whirred and screeched and sounded bells to warn of their approach as they drew up and pulled off, setting down and picking up and clattering away again between the rows of neglected buildings backwards and forwards between the proletarian flats and the city centre.

Eventually we passed out of the grey monolithic suburbs and by a monument which marked the point at which the German army was stopped as it marched on Leningrad in 1941.  It was sobering to think about this. I was bought up on tales of the war told to me by my father, but these were always gallant tales about impossibly brave paratroopers and square jawed commandos, about fearless desert rats and valiant fighter pilots, about courageous heroes and stiff upper lips, about medals and honours; I am certain that he never really understood what the war was like in the east.

Beginning on 22^nd June 1941, nearly four million troops invaded the USSR – the biggest invasion in the history of warfare and ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was the largest military campaign in human history in both manpower and casualties.  Areas affected by the operation became the site of some of the largest battles, deadliest atrocities, highest casualties, and most horrific conditions for Soviets and Germans alike.  The Axis forces captured three million Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom never returned alive because they were deliberately starved to death in German camps as part of a Hunger Plan, a cruel and spiteful program to reduce the Eastern European population.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union ultimately resulted in 95% of all German Army casualties from 1941 to 1944 and 65% of all Allied military casualties accumulated throughout the war.  Anna rattled out facts, figures and statistics and clearly could not disguise her resentment and hatred of the Nazis which remains deep-rooted in the Saint-Petersburg psyche even today.  For Hitler, like Napoleon before him, invading Russia proved to be a massive misjudgment and it seems unlikely that anyone will ever try it again – but who knows?

Beyond this memorial the landscape began to change and open up into fields, beech woods, conifer forests, lakes and small villages with expensive looking properties in contrast to the high rise we had just passed through and eventually we arrived in Peterhof and approached the Palace gardens.  The Summer Palace was designed by Peter the Great to be the equal of the Palace of Versailles in France but after the German army occupied it and completely destroyed it during the occupation it has had to be completely rebuilt and as we caught glimpses of it through the surrounding iron railings we could see what a good job they had made of it and we looked forward to our visit.

Russia, Saint-Petersburg and the Venice of the North

After dinner we left the hotel again and used the mini-bus service to get to the Metro station and then we took the short trip to Nevsky Prospekt for the second time.  It was still warm and the sky remained cloudless and blue as we walked west to the Kazan Cathedral and at a statue of the Russian Field Marshal Kutusov who helped defeat Napoleon in 1812 we turned to walk along the Griboedov Canal this time in the opposite direction and we followed the granite walls of the waterway away from the busy Prospekt.

I didn’t count them for myself but it is claimed that Saint-Petersburg has almost one hundred different rivers and canals flowing through the city.  The city has been called the ‘Venice of the North’ but this isn’t a title that it holds uniquely because this has also been applied to Amsterdam, Bruges, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Manchester, Edinburgh and even Birmingham amongst others.  When Peter the Great chose this site and founded the city it was built from the very beginning on water, on numerous islands in delta of Neva River and is spread out over numerous islands of varying sizes, frequently prompting another nickname – the ‘City of 101 Islands’.

Kim had a plan to try and see the best of the bridges and after a while we came across the first of these – the Gryphon bridge which is a suspended pedestrian footbridge crossing the canal with four mythical creatures with extravagant golden wings at each corner holding it up.  Rather foolishly I had neglected to bring a map with me this evening so it would have been reckless to go looking for the others so I promised that we would do this later.

So we walked on and at the end of the road that we found ourselves on we could see the tall spire of the Admiralty building so fearing we might get lost we headed in that direction.  Actually, getting lost in Saint-Petersburg is probably quite difficult because it is a low-level city and it is easy to spot the Admiralty Spire or the St Isaac’s Dome from virtually anywhere.  This is because in Tsarist Russia there was a decree that no building could be built higher than the Winter Palace and this is a rule that has continued to be observed up until present day.

Eventually we arrived at the Admiralty building adjacent to the river and we crossed a busy main road into the Palace Square dominated by the red granite Alexander Column which is forty-seven and a half metres high.  Saint-Petersburg claims this to be the largest column of its type in the World but I am beginning to get sceptical about all of these biggest, largest, longest, deepest claims because I have visited the La Colonne de la Grande Armée in Boulogne in France and I know that this is fifty-three metres high!

The most important Square in Saint-Petersburg looked magnificent tonight bathed in the golden glow of evening sunlight, the mint green Winter Palace appeared to be enjoying the peace and quiet of the end of the day and a few tourists wandered around and the actors in period clothing looked for the last customers of the day to pose for photographs.

It was getting late now so we left the Palace Square and made our way back along Nevsky Prospekt and to the Gostiny Dvor Metro Station where we took our Jules Verne journey to the centre of the earth and emerged twenty minutes later at Primorskaya where the mini-bus whisked us back to the Prybaltiyskaya.  We skipped the Irish Bar tonight and the equally expensive hotel alternative and had a final glass of wine in the room before going to bed looking forward to a visit to the Summer Palace tomorrow.

Russia, Peter and Paul Fortress and The Romanovs

After negotiating the souvenir shop stop and skilfully avoiding any wallet damage it was back to the bus time to be driven to Nevsky Prospekt where there was free time for lunch.  On the way we passed the Palace where the monk and favourite of Tsarina Alexandria, Rasputin was murdered and the guide told us the story of his grisly death. It was hot and there was a blue sky so we decided that we didn’t want to waste time queuing up for food and sitting at a table eating lunch that we didn’t really need so as most of the coach party made for the shops we returned to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and behind it we came across a tourist market selling Matryoshka dolls and other souvenirs and we compared the merchandise on all of the stalls.

Before the holiday Kim had said that she wanted one of these traditional dolls as a souvenir and as the prices were a fraction of the Red October store I was ready to flash the cash but after twenty minutes or so Kim was still undecided about what to buy and kept examining the alternatives and handing them back one by one without a flicker or purchasing intention.  All of this indecision is not my preferred style of shopping so at about the twentieth stall (all selling the same things for similar prices) I intervened and said yes to one of the market stall holders and as he wrapped it for me Kim looked at me as though I had gone half mad!

There was a nice street bar just outside the Church so we sat there for a while and admired my impulsive purchase, I tried to justify it and Kim tried to like it while we waited for the appointed time to return to the coach for the next leg of the tour to the Peter and Paul Fortress back across the river.

The Peter and Paul Fortress was the first structure to be built in Peter the Great’s new city of Saint-Petersburg in May, 1703.  Located on one of the city’s forty-two islands, the fortress has six bastions named after some of the prominent individuals who supervised their construction, including one dedicated to Tsar Peter himself.  The original walls were built of clay and the present-day brick walls were added later between 1706 and 1740.  All construction work on the fortress was carried out under the close supervision of Peter himself and work on the Peter and Paul Cathedral began in 1712, but was only completed twenty-one years later in 1733, eight years after Peter the Great’s death.

The Cathedral is the burial place of all Russian Tsars from Peter I to Alexander III, with the exception of Peter II who for some reason is buried in Moscow at the Kremlin.  Inside the Cathedral we wandered through the rows of marble burial monuments and listened to details of their lives.  These Russian (or to be strictly accurate, German) autocrats were amongst the richest people that have ever lived and at the time of his murder in 1918 the last Tsar, Nicholas II, was worth (in today’s money) an estimated $300billion and the personal owner of 10% of all the World’s landmass, which is an amount of money so huge it is impossible to imagine; for comparison, the richest Head of State today is the King of Thailand who is worth only 10% of this grotesque amount, $30billion, and the wealth of the Queen of England is estimated at only $500million; in 2005 the biggest ever winner of the Euro millions lottery was Dolores McNamara from Ireland who won €77million which would have been no more than mere pocket money to Tsar Nicholas so no wonder they could afford to spend $10million on a Faberge Easter Egg while most Russian peasants had to paint a hen’s egg!

It was all well and good being fabulously wealthy but being a Romanov Tsar was quite a dangerous job and this vast wealth was no help at all against political intrigue and murder and dying of natural causes was a luxury.  Of the fourteen Tsars or Tsarinas from Peter I to Nicholas II five were assassinated or murdered and one died in suspicious circumstances so, it’s safe to say that this job carried significant risk!  The last Tsar, Nicholas I and his entire family, were brutally murdered in a cellar by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918.  This was an especially callous and cold blooded act and I have often wondered about the people who carried out the order.  Were they compelled to do it? Did they do it willingly? Were they bribed to do it? Did they have to get drunk before they did it? (by all accounts they made a cack-handed job of it). How did they feel after the event? What happened to them?

Apparently it was a fairly shambolic affair.  First the Royals were shot and this took some time because the family had diamonds and precious stones sewn into their clothing which acted rather like a bullet proof vest so when this failed to do the job they were then bayoneted to death.  Their bodies were dissolved in acid to get rid of the flesh and the organs and finally their bones cremated to destroy all trace of them.  But disposing of human bodies is difficult of course (as both Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Radovan Karadžić and others were to find out later) and years after the murders their bodies were exhumed and scientific DNA analysis was able to prove who they were.  As communism began to fail and slip away into history the remains of Nicholas II and his family and entourage were also interred in the Cathedral, in St. Catherine’s Chapel, on the eightieth anniversary of their deaths, July 17^th 1998.

After the Cathedral we spent some time in the grounds of the fortress and visited a recently restored prison block where up until only frighteningly recently those condemned as enemies of the state were incarcerated, tortured and in most cases eventually died of disease or were executed.  Reluctant guests of the State imprisoned here included Dostoyevsky, Trotsky, Gorkiy, and Lenin’s older brother Alexander.

The tour ended in the late afternoon and the coach driver nudged the bus through rush hour traffic back to the Prybaltiyskaya.  I visited the supermarket again and we rested for a while and drank Russian beer before it was time to go for more school dinners in the hotel and dining room and we did this early because our plan now was to return to the city for an early evening stroll.