Russian Cruising at Speed

By Sally Branston

Day One started with Phantom of the Opera; Day Three was Emanuelle.  I didn’t recognise our early morning wake-up music on Day Two.  And although Day Three’s excursion wasn’t scheduled until 4.30pm, it was still compulsory to rise at 7.30am for breakfast, to enable us to fit in the obligatory briefing, history class, language lesson, boat drill, four course lunch and craft demonstration first… another relaxing day on board MS Vasily Surikov, floating along the beautiful River Volga (not really).  We skipped the language lesson and handicraft session for scenery watching. 

St Basil's Cathedral

Day Four involved rising at 6.30am for breakfast before departing on a trip round the city of Yaroslavl at eight.  Back on board for our 11.00am sailing, we thought we might nip to the bar for a cup of coffee.  The barman was quite busy and it took a while to get served, so quite a few of us were still sitting there when Polina, our on-board guide, came to round us up for the compulsory 11.30am briefing.  A few people tried to hide, but they were out of luck and eventually we were all herded to the ship’s conference room so that they could tell us about our upcoming arrival in St Petersburg in three days’ time – and sell us some excursions. 

Moscow had been quite hectic.  Those of us flying from Birmingham and Manchester had risen in the early hours to check in at 4.00am, arriving at the ship at 7pm for dinner, briefing and excursion sales.   But there was to be no leisurely lie-in the following morning.  Our tour of the city started at 8.45am and, unfortunately, we were in the hands of a guide who just loved to talk.  The city was spacious, light and clean: the temperature was knocking on 30 degrees.  But our guide’s volubility left us with a mere 30 minutes ‘free’ time in Red Square to poke our noses into GUM and photograph Lenin’s Tomb and St Basil’s Cathedral from the outside.  Then it was time to get back on the bus and return to the boat for lunch.  Our waitress was a young, sweet student, eager to please, but slow, and we had to abandon our plates part way through in order to get back on the bus and return to the same spot we’d left 90 minutes earlier to continue our tour with a visit to the Kremlin.  By the time we finished at the Armoury Museum, many in our party were wilting in the heat and anxious to get back for a shower before dinner and the evening’s optional tour of the Moscow metro system.  We decided to give that one a miss and have a quiet drink in the bar instead.  Next morning, we ducked out on that day’s tour too, walked to the nearest station and did our own metro tour at our own pace.  The system is similar to the London Underground – apart from the artistic nature of the decorations - and very easy to use, especially if you have a smattering of the language. 

We were woken at 2.30am on Day Six by a series of lurches and loud bangs as the ship entered a lock.  I tweaked back the cabin curtain and could see nothing but a high wall.  The vessel exited more gracefully than it had entered and the next time I awoke was to the motion of small waves.  The shoreline was no longer visible from the middle of Lake Onega and I had apparently slept through another five locks.  Our scheduled stop was Kizhi Island, a two hour stop crammed into four.  The island was green, the approach picturesque and we enjoyed a sunny, breezy walk, but the hour long exposition by the guide was wearing and there wasn’t actually much to see aside from the Church of the Transfiguration, or Church of the Restoration as it is popularly known, on account of lengthy, ongoing conservation work. 

Day Seven saw a Russian revolution by the other nationalities on board – Italians and Portuguese.  When we received our daily programme, we could see why.  ‘Lunch’ was to be at 11.15am onshore and there would be nothing else until dinner at seven.  We were supposed to be in the ship’s conference room at 8.30am for a question and answer session on ‘Russia Today’ with Alexandra, the on-board history lecturer.  The three lectures we’d attended with her so far had  been both informative and entertaining, but at 8.30?  Please.  We tried to stay in bed, but were thwarted at 7.15am by music that Ennio Morricone might have composed for one of the Spaghetti Westerns if he’d been experimenting with electric violins played by demons on acid.  So much for a lie-in!

The final destination was St Petersburg, where the weather was cloudy and overcast, but where we encountered a much more sympathetic guide.  She told us about each place while we were on the bus, in transit and then let us off to do our own thing.  We also avoided the need to return to the ship at midday by being given packed lunches, although the square where we were dropped off to eat them left something to be desired, being picturesquely populated by Russian drunks, spark out on the benches.  Some of our party donated their picnics, but I’m not sure that food was actually what these guys were desperate for. 

In the afternoon, we queued to enter the Hermitage Museum and see what we could from the centre of a surging crowd, each visitor eager to get that ‘must-have’ selfie in front of a Leonardo or a Rembrandt.  In the evening, we went to a Cossack song and dance show, strictly for the tourists, but nevertheless, extremely entertaining.  The following day, a trip to the water gardens of the Peterhof Palace concluded our stay in this city. 

Was Russia interesting and welcoming?  Yes.  How was the scenery?  Attractive.  Was this cruise relaxing?  No.  What was the August weather like?  Very changeable.  How was the food?  Good, but not gourmet.   Would you go there again?  Yes, certainly.   And we actually brought some holiday spending money home, because there was never any time to stop and spend it!

First published in VISA 131 (Feb 2017)

Impossible Things, Before and After Breakfast

by Neil Matthews

“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright -
And this was odd because it was
The middle of the night.”
(Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass)

This quotation came to mind as soon as we had booked the holiday in Russia - five nights in St Petersburg and two in Moscow. St Petersburg in June experiences the ‘White Nights’, when the city’s northerly location means that the hours of darkness are extremely short. It was disconcerting to wander back to our hotel at almost midnight under cloudless blue skies and unbroken sunshine.

Night-time sunshine was not the only odd aspect of the trip. In many ways, my pre-conceptions of the two cities derived from received perceptions of two major figures from Russian history. It is well known that Peter the Great was the essential inspiration for the creation of St Petersburg as a ‘window on the West’, a new city in European style reflecting Peter’s travels through western Europe as a young man. (Ironically, and in typical Russian fashion, the oldest surviving Russian city is Novgorod, whose name in Russian means ‘new town’.)

In contrast, I thought beforehand that the ancient and present Russian capital, Moscow, might still fall under some of the shadow of Communism - all that old footage of May Day military rallies at the Kremlin - and specifically Stalinism. Stalin, with his purges, paranoia and insistence on ‘socialist realism’ in the arts, did not seem to have been other than a negative, destructive force. Visiting the two cities did not destroy all my ideas and assumptions, but it did challenge them.

It would not be wise to make the facile mistake of trying to guess what an individual dead for over 200 years would make of modern St Petersburg. Peter was a man of his time and to treat him otherwise is to make him “a fish out of water”, as Ranjitsinghi wrote in another context. It is, in my view, quite legitimate to think about how impressive the new city of St Petersburg might have looked two centuries or more ago.

The horse drawn carriages carrying the aristocracy of the 18th century would probably have enjoyed the wide boulevards, so evocative of Paris. No doubt the painted facades in blue, green, yellow, pink and myriad other colours were even more beautiful when they had been in place for mere decades.

This is not to imply that the city is unattractive now - far from it. In some ways, in this “age of miracles and wonders”, it is surprising that St Petersburg has changed as little as it has, especially given its turbulent central role in Russian history over the past 100 years or so. The view along the Neva, for example, remains a largely unbroken and lovely vista. A visit to the Literary Café on Nevsky Prospekt, where Dostoevsky and many other writers once dined and where a string quartet will entertain you, offers a whiff of Imperial Viennese elegance. But back streets show telltale signs of decay, neglect and tiredness.

St Petersburg has embraced the West - to some extent, and not always for the better. At our nearest Metro station, there were wide screen advertisements, but no posters by the escalators. The Metro itself offers a curious mixture of design features and flaws. Many stations are designed with a little upward incline as trains pull into them, in order to decrease the pressure needed on the brakes. On the other hand, when your train stops at the next station and the doors open, there is often no sign confirming the name of the station; so you have to get out and hope that you have counted correctly!

The Hotel Moscow - the name is another perverse touch - included its own mini-market, beauty parlour, sauna, post office and casino amongst other things. While this was undoubtedly very convenient, I did wonder whether it was a legacy of the old Soviet suspicion of tourists and a wish to control them by making it easy for them to stay in one place and not ‘stray’. There was also the surreal touch of eating breakfast in a St Petersburg hotel to the live piano accompaniment of Midnight in Moscow and The Last Waltz. An English language newspaper, the St Petersburg Times, ran an article while we were there, calling for more Western investors to help set up mid-range hotels, which might be more suitable for modern tourists than the old, huge, relatively de luxe hotels.

Such mid-range hotels would probably not feature the blini bar we visited at the Hotel Moscow, where you can eat blini (pancakes) with various fillings. There is even a blini special, with choices of menu featuring blini as starter, main course and dessert. Anyone who recalls the episode from The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin where Perrin orders ravioli, ravioli and ravioli at an Italian restaurant will get the general idea.

Blini

The satellite TV in our hotel room carried BBC World broadcasts, including a special report on homelessness in St Petersburg. We recognised with some surprise that the report on Volodya (a contraction of Vladimir), who sells a Russian equivalent of The Big Issue, had been made directly outside our hotel. It was more disconcerting still to meet Volodya himself outside the hotel the next day. The world is a smaller place than ever. The local English language newspapers reported on the Bulger case and also on how one British school had imported teachers from Russia to solve its recruitment problems.

Maybe one should not exaggerate the extent of change in St Petersburg. The Hermitage is undoubtedly beautiful, although we glimpsed no more than a fraction of its content. We also spent a pleasant afternoon in and around the Alexander Nevsky monastery, and the cemetery which contains the gravesof many great composers including Borodin, Mussourgsky and Tchaikovsky. The Peter and Paul fortress now houses the remains of the last of the Romanovs; and you can buy Nicholas II commemorative mugs there, too. Thus does the whirligig of time bring in his revenges.

Overall, though, the city seems shrouded in a sense of melancholy. Its time has gone and may never come again - for all the jet skis on the Neva, the basketball competitions and rock concerts outside the Hermitage and the Pizza Huts and McDonalds along Nevsky Prospekt. I am not sure how much the city’s inhabitants actually want Westernisation - its benefits or problems. From a selfish, tourist viewpoint, it would also be sad if others could not do in future as we did, and eat blinis in a café across the river from St Isaac’s Cathedral for £1.50 per head!

One myth is due a decent burial: St Petersburg is not, never will be and probably never was “the Venice of the North”. Aspects of the city reminded us more of Paris (the boulevards and street artists), Vienna (architecture and cafes), Prague (bridges) and Amsterdam (canals). It does share a certain surreal quality with Venice, but not for the same reasons.

A 5½ hour journey on what may be the world’s slowest ‘express’ train, in the company of some excitable middle-aged Italians, took us to Moscow and the Hotel Ukraine. This monstrous creation boasts 28 floors - though no 13th - and over 1500 rooms. The tour brochure labelled its exterior as ‘Stalinist wedding cake’, but the architect had probably seen too many old RKO serials e.g. Flash Gordon or King of the Rocket Men. The inside was much more elegant in look and style, but there was still plenty to interest and intrigue. There were a number of seemingly redundant lifts at various points. One or two floors included the old Soviet ‘design feature’ of a middle-aged lady at a desk, presumably waiting for secret agents to sidle up to her with key code phrases such as “The bathroom illuminations have been destroyed”. In contrast to Midnight in Moscow on piano in the hotel in St Petersburg, taped Western music played while we sampled the array of breakfast options including sausages, rissoles with suspicious fillings and bread pudding.

A brief digression on food: Russia will not offer a great culinary experience for the discerning. But we did enjoy the solyanka (meat soup), pelmeni (a cousin of ravioli), sturgeon and other fish and the aforementioned blini. Vegetarians will not go hungry, either, even if Russian salads do tend to contain substantial meat or fish elements. We ate in Lebanese, American rodeo theme and pizza restaurants, amongst other places.

With less time in Moscow than St Petersburg, we focused mainly on the inevitable: Red Square, the Kremlin and the Metro. Red Square is neither red nor square - the original Russian name was not ‘red’, but ‘beautiful’ (I think!) The weather was so hot and sunny, and the hustle and bustle of tourists and locals so overwhelming, that any sense of lingering menace from Cold War days was simply non-existent. We did not get to see Mr Lenin, as it is forbidden to take cameras or bags into the tomb - but there is nowhere available to store these items. I should also mention that Mr Lenin is closed to visitors on Fridays. Even a dead icon of world revolution needs a day off, it seems.

The Kremlin we found most impressive, and good value at 1000 roubles - equivalent to £30 for two adults, which included an additional fee for permission to take photographs. There was virtually no queue for the Armoury, with its displays of Faberge eggs and many other attractions, when we arrived, although we did see many tourist groups entering as we left. (It was certainly better value than the overpriced Tower of London, where hapless visitors are carried on a conveyor belt past a giant screen showing a video of the Coronation, and then past the Crown Jewels - a sort of Generation Game in reverse, without cuddly toys.)

We could easily have spent more time in the Kremlin’s array of cathedrals and its beautiful gardens. The Russians are proud of possessing ‘the world’s biggest bell’, although it does have a large piece broken off it - maybe by the world’s largest mice? A large cannon from Revolutionary times faces the current State Council building, perhaps symbolically...Talking of symbolism, on one side of Red Square there is GUM, the famous shopping centre. Lenin might turn in his tomb (but not on Fridays) to see it now. GUM’s grey exterior belies a beautiful interior, whose style reminded me of St Petersburg or even Milan. Most of the shops appeared to be designer clothes stores or shoe shops.

The Metro induced mixed feelings. I had expected to be appalled by the opulence which had been described to me in its decorations. It was built by prisoners in the 1930s as a piece of political nose thumbing at the West by Stalin. Considering the shortages, the climate of fear and the millions of Russian lives lost or ruined at the time, the time and money spent on marble decorations for an underground seems obscene in many ways, and yet...

When I saw the bronze figures at Ploschchad Revolutsi, or the Socialist art in Kievskaya, Belorusskaya and Mayakovskaya, it was impossible to condemn it completely. Let us hope that the horrors of world war, experienced by Russia more than most countries, never come again. But, if they do, the citizens of a besieged city might, just might, find some small comfort in the images of unity, determination and compassion. In modern Moscow, they are a welcome flash of colour.

Time defeated our efforts to explore Moscow more thoroughly. We did finally locate the old Lubyanka - once headquarters of the KGB - in a square of depressingly similar grey buildings, having waved at the shop staff dressed up as M and Ms who were cavorting in the heat on the other side of the square. At least they lent it some cheer.

Russia is probably too vast a country to generalise about, but Lewis Carroll’s characters might very well have been quite at home in St Petersburg and Moscow - two odd and surprising cities.

First published in VISA issue 44 (winter 2001)