It was a sunny morning on our first full day in Russia. I rose at 8:40 and when we went to breakfast at 9 we got our first introduction to Russian breakfasting, which seemed to be cheese, ham, and a potato and meat mush which was actually delightful although a little bit strange for breakfast.We bought water at the hotel shop, which also seemed to sell virtually every type of vodka imaginable for not much more than the water, and proceeded to meet the rest of our tour group. Except there weren’t any. Rob and myself were the only people on the tour until it got to St Petersburg, where apparently we would be joined by another six people. This was a slight disappointment, as Sasha is nice enough but only in small doses.
At least there was one new face. Sasha was from St Petersburg, so for our tour of Moscow we got a different Beetroot employee as a guide. Our Moscow guide’s name was Elina, and was probably late thirties. She seemed to be more of a ‘proper’ tour guide than Sasha, but she was very good at it. It felt like having a friend and long-term resident show you round, except with the occasional useless fact thrown in. It wasn’t until Rob pointed it out to me on the metro that I noticed she was the only person wearing a yellow shirt. It just doesn’t seem to be a popular colour for Muscovites, but it was an impressively subtle way of helping us maintain sight of her. You couldn’t really imagine Elina with a big placard or umbrella and a hoard of identically-attired tourists blindly following.
Despite this, she was trained by Intourist before the fall of the Soviet Union. Apparently tourists would be bussed around the city, and only get out to see specific things that had been approved. There would also likely by someone from the KGB buried in the tour group, checking that the visitors were ‘appropriately impressed’ and that the guide was doing her job.
Our tour, by contrast, was to be conducted entirely on foot and metro. It wasn’t a teriibly promising start, as a very drunk man almost bumped straight into me on the way to the hotel’s local metro station. Elina tutted noisily and made some resigned comment about how early it was.
The train arrived almost immediately, and we left to have a brief tour of the metro. It seems odd to go to a city to look at the metro, but Moscow really has quite a unique system. Whereas most cities construct their metros with a view to moving people from A to B as efficiently as possible, the Soviet architects of Moscow’s metro had other plans, namely to create a dazzlingly impressive feat of artistry and engineering, protect Muscovites en-masse from a nuclear attack, and move people from A to B as efficiently as possible. They succeeded on all counts, though it’s difficult to quantify how much all this cost, because they didn’t really think that way.
In terms of the artistry and engineering, each station seemed more impressive than the last. Some had mosaics on the ceilings, some were bedecked in gold leaf, and chandeliers of all varietys but in only one size – big – filled the cavernous stations. We were on our on our fourth station, which was decorated with backlit stained glass, when Elina explained that one of the most impressive ones we’d seen had been built twice. Once here, and once in the United States, as an example of how delectable life was as an ordinary Muscovite.
The nuclear shelter idea dictated that the whole system had to be built at great depth. Where the London tube is deep, it needed to be deep to avoid other things that burrow their way though the capital’s soil, so when it was used as a bomb shelter in WW2, it was convienient that it had been built so deep. In Moscow though, the system was designed to be a bomb shelter from day one. At the bottom of each escalator shaft there is an arch maybe six feet thick before you get into the lobby area and access the platforms. On the roof of the arch, if you look up you can see the bottom of a seriously thick lead block that would drop and seal the station off. Elina also told us of huge dormitories and storerooms, accessible from the stations, which could house hundreds of thousands during a aerial bombardment. Scary stuff, and facinating too. Unfortunately these places, if they really do exist, and I think they probably do, are off limits.
That left the engineers with only one objective remaining – to move people around as efficiently as possible. Now, considering that they also had to make everything look magnificent, and withstand a nuke attack, the efficiency of the trains seems nothing short of miraculous. They are supposed to come every 90 seconds suring rush hours, and in practice that often means you can almost see the next one’s white lights in the right hand tunnel while you can still see the red of the receding train’s lights on the left.
We walked leisurely to Red Square, passing through a film set on the way, and got frowned at by somebody who clearly felt themselves to be important. Clearly they weren’t really important though, because they didn’t have a folding wood-and-canvas chair with their name on it.
In Red Square we politely listened to Elina say everything that Sasha had said the day before, although she also managed to contradict him on several issues, and provide a lot of extra information. One issue that was particularly amusing was a raised circular platform towards the St Basils end of the square. According to Elina, this is a bandstand, whereas Sasha thinks it’s an execution platform. Sasha’s explanations about virtually everything seemed altogether more exotic, so I prefer to think it’s probably a bandstand.
The right side of the square, if you are standing facing St Basils, features Lenin’s Mauseleum, where the great man is still on public display, and apparently looks just a little too perfect, to the point that many people think he is probably a waxwork. Elina looked after out bags while we went to have a look. If it is him, he is very impressively preserved, but I’d prefer to think it’s a waxwork, because I’ve never seen a dead person before, enbalmed or otherwise. On leaving I stopped to tie up my shoelace on a stone bench, and got whistled and frowned at by a Russian security officer who seemed to be dressed for jungle warfare. Before he decided to summarily order up a firing squad, we made a hurried exit.
On the way back to Elina, we spotted the graves of the former leaders of the USSR, which featured a huge stone bust of each person with their name engraved below. I recognised Stalin, but most of the others were strangers to me. Elina was ready with another story when we made our rendevous. Stalin used to lie next to Lenin in the Mauseleum, but he was famously denounced by Kruschev at the 20th Party conference, after which he was buried. At that point the man in charge of maintaining Stalin’s body had given it a 25-year guarantee with no further maintenance. Communism collapsed almost exactly twenty five years later. Is it because Stalin’s corpse has finally rotted away and his influence is no longer hanging over the Russian consiousness? No.
The GUM occupies the whole of the left side of Red Square. It’s essentially the national shopping centre of Russia. In soviet times it was state run and sold no branded goods. Now it has been divided internally into small boutiques with names like Gucci, Armani, Nike, Addidas, and French Connection predominating. It’s difficult to imagine what it would have been like.
We walked back across Red Square and past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and into the Alexandrevski Gardens (at least, I think that was the name – correct me if I’m wrong). This is a bit like Hyde Park is to London or Central Park to New York – a landscaped area in the centre of the city, though this one seemed to be holding an ice-cream vendors convention. Once I’d walked past five of them I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. Maybe that was the point.
A bridge took us across the River Moskva on Ulitsa Seratinovicha, and gave good views of the side of the Kremlin. You can’t take bags inside the Kremlin, so after parting with Elina, and having lunch, we left our stuff with Sasha.
‘Kremlin’ is actually just the Russian word for castle, which is precisely what it is, a small fortified settlement. It’s also not the only one in Russia, which is why it’s known officially as the Moscow Kremlin, even though it is the most famous one in the country. Another myth is that the Kremlin is the Russian seat of government – the equivilant of the White House for Americans. This is only partly true, because although the Kremlin contains the official residence of the President, the actual seat of government is in the nearby Duma. Most of the space inside the walls is occupied by five cathedrals, a wooded area and two large open squares.
We did a circuit of the five cathedrals. The Russian Orthodox Church is quite different from more familiar branches of Christianity, and the most obvious changes are the lack of seating and the presence of a decorated partition wall between the congregation and the altar, known as an iconoclast. The iconoclast has rows of images, or icons, of prophets, saints, and various other religious figures. At first glance it looked as though this wall was the farthest extent of the church, and in the one we were in at the time this seemed odd, because accordig to the guidebook it should have had two more pillars. In fact they were simply on the altar side of the iconoclast. As for the seating, it seems that it is customary to stand during services.
Some of the signs in the last cathedral needed updating. One finished: “This building has been returned to its former glory by expert Soviet craftsmen and restorers, who succeeded beyond expectation for the glory of the motherland”, or something like that.
Walking around the open air parts of the Kremlin, I noticed that people were being frequently whistled at by the police for walking across the road where there was no zebra crossing. This seemed very funny, because outside the Kremlin’s walls, zebra crossings seem to mean even less to pedestrians than they do to drivers.
Of all the attractions that the Kremlin had to offer, the highlight was the Faberge egg collection, which was on temporary display in one of the churches, which had been converted into an exhibition space. Each of the eggs was incredibly intricate – works of art in themselves, but the detail of some of the objects tucked inside was astonishing. One had a model of a palace, complete even down to the individual bars of the railings, and another contained a locomotive.
On our way back to the entrance, we passed the President’s official residence, on the other side of a road with no zebra crossings and plenty of police. We got the hint that Mr Putin probably wasn’t taking visitors.
The metro took us back to our Hotel’s district, and we took a detour to the local supermarket to buy some snacks. Just in case you’re still under the impression that Russia is a land of shortages and rationing, be reasurred. This place was as big as any Sainsburys or Tesco, and sold practically everything. The only odd thing about it is that you have to have your bag sealing in plastic upon entry, so that you can’t put anything in it. Just in case you fancied stealing an apple.
Dinner was a canteen-style place near the metro. Very good food, lots of choice and freshly cooked – I was impressed. But then self-serve restaurants in the UK are not usually very good, so my expectations were low. If I lived here I could imagine myself eating at a place like this regularly.