ST PETERSBURG
No sooner had our aeroplane touched down at St Petersburg airport than the tone was set for our three week visit to Russia. After our jet taxied past two derelict passenger jets without engines, we were taken to the terminal with décor right out of the 1960’s. It was more like a regional airport in New Zealand than a major city of a country that not so long ago was seen as a major world power. Our gaping mouths of disbelief had begun.

We were met by a stunningly beautiful government tourist guide named Victoria and her not so stunningly beautiful driver, Vladimir. He packed our bags into an old Lada with a broken mirror. Like most cars we saw, it had not been cleaned for a very long time. Driving through St Petersburg was like driving through a movie set. The buildings were all fallen down, the cars were all fallen down and the people were all fallen down.

We were taken to the Hotel St Petersburg where the décor was every bit the equal of the airport. A ripped piece of wallpaper in our room had been just glued back on the wall. We had arrived during the times of the ‘white nights’. For a few days around the summer solstice, the sky never gets dark, because St Petersburg is so far north. At 11.30pm we looked from our hotel window in bright daylight over the Neva river to all the historic buildings, bridges and monuments.

Within a half hour we had seen four breakdowns and one accident. Broken-down cars were pushed to the side of the road until the owner could flag down a passing truck to tow them home. A bus drove right up on the footpath to get around the car crash. Eventually the Police arrived to investigate the crash in their usual dirty, white Lada with ‘Militsia’ stencilled in blue on the side. Only after they had measured everything and interviewed those involved, were the people free to be towed away.

Our guide was from Intourist, the Government Tourist Bureau. With her in front, we would walk straight past queues of a hundred or more people to enter museums, churches and historic buildings. It also meant, however, that we only heard the government line on any issues we asked about. Often, we would later hear a more realistic version.

St Petersburg is the most European of Russian cities, because it is the only one with direct sea access to Europe. Three hundred years ago Peter the Great founded the city and brought all the best craftsmen, artists, architects, builders and gardeners of Europe to Russia. To visit St Petersburg was to visit all of Europe.

Peter the Great founded the city on an island in the Neva River where the Peter and Paul Fortress now stands. Peter the Great and all the Tzars since are buried in a Dutch style cathedral with a very high spire inside the fortress. Tzar Nicholas II and most of his family, murdered by the Communists and buried in a Siberian wood, were reburied in the cathedral several years ago. We were told the only taller building in St Petersburg is the KGB headquarters. It used to be said that from the top of that building, one could see Siberia!

Next, we were taken to Palace Square. In 1905 there was a demonstration of around 120,000 people in Palace Square asking the Tzar for help in their poverty. They came dressed in their Sunday best bringing portraits of the Tzar and icons of saints. Tzar Nicholas II responded by having his soldiers fire on the crowd killing hundreds. My grandfather was in the crowd. It made it a very special event for me to stand in the square where my grandfather had stood.

Two days later, I was back in Palace Square during the annual Samsung sponsored ten kilometres race along Nevskii Prospect, the main street of St Petersburg. The race ended in the Square with people leaping into fountains to cool off. There were bands playing and thousands of people dancing and enjoying the warm mid-summer sun. It felt so wonderful to see such enjoyment and frivolity in the place that had been one of death and suffering for my grandfather and his people.

In front of Palace Square on the embankment of the Neva River was the Winter Palace of the Tzars. We saw the extravagance of their lifestyles, that must have been so much more overwhelming to the peasants of their day. Virtually all the royalty of Europe had at some time feasted, danced and discussed politics there. We saw the stairs where Alexander II left a trail of blood as he died following an assassin’s bomb and walked the corridors through which the communist revolutionaries stormed the building in 1917. The palace also houses one of the best art collections in the world, especially its post impressionist collection, stolen from the Germans at the end of World War II.

 In every room, as in all the museums, art galleries and historic buildings, there was a very stern middle aged or elderly women sitting in the corner to protect all the collections. It would be a brave person indeed who would to tempt the wrath of one of those women.

The Yussupov family was an extremely powerful family of nobility. Their palace also stands on the Neva River. Rasputin the notorious monk who had so much influence on the royal family, was murdered in this palace. We were taken down a small winding staircase to a small room with wax models of Rasputin and his murderer, Felix Yussupov. Rasputin was depicted eating poisoned cake and wine. When the poisons had no apparently, Rasputin was shot through the heart and fell to the ground right where we stood, but he was not dead. He escaped out a doorway on the small staircase we came down. Outside, he was shot again and taken and thrown into a hole in the ice across town. It was found that he was still alive as he was dumped into the frozen water.

While in New Zealand I had sent emails to find ballet performances that we might be able to attend. I contacted the third largest company in St Petersburg, the Konstantin Tatchkin Ballet Company, and discovered they would be performing Swan Lake. We had not been able to organise tickets before we departed. To our surprise, we received a telephone call at our Hotel from none other than Konstantin Tatchkin himself to organise our tickets. My wife, Pam was especially pleased to see the ballet as she had been a ballet teacher for twenty years. The performance was spectacular and well worth the effort. We found that the ballet company had toured New Zealand and would be touring again in 2002. We would recommend the company to anyone interested in ballet. In all we saw three performances in St Petersburg and two in Moscow.

BOAT TRIP
A band played as we departed on our boat trip from St Petersburg aboard the Maxim Litvinov. The tours, which only operate through the Russian summer months, take fifteen days to sail through the lakes, rivers and canals between St Petersburg and Moscow. We had 137 passengers and 100 crew with cabins on four levels. There were around fifteen ships similar to ours that we passed at various points on the journey.

The ships were built in Germany especially for the river cruise. Often our boat would glide under a bridge with little more than ten centimetres to spare. We passed through seventeen massive concrete locks built by political prisoners in the times of Joseph Stalin. Each enormous cold, dark concrete slab seemed to talk to us of its pain.

The bulk of the passengers were Germans, with a few Russians, and our small group of nine English speakers; five Canadians, two Chileans and we two New Zealanders. Our little group had our own translator and a mini-van at each stop instead of a large bus, which we found more flexible.

From St Petersburg, we travelled along the Neva River and into Lake Onega, the largest lake in Europe. In the middle we could see no land and yet we were told that in winter the entire lake freezes over. During the Seige of Leningrad (as St Peteresburg was known in World War II), the only way to get supplies into the city was by driving trucks over the ice on Lake Lagoda.

We travelled to Petrozavodsk in the Karelian Republic of North Russia, named after the factories that Peter the Great established there. As in many places, we saw a wedding party laying a wreath at a statue to remember the war dead. The wedding cars had large wedding rings on top and in Petrozavodsk they had ribbons in the Karelian colours.

The people of Karelia are fiercely independant and many would like to see Karelia as a separate country. Both the Russian and Karelian flags flew on government buildings. There is a strong Finnish influence that we saw in a traditional dance group that performed for us. We joked on our ship that the national bird of Karelia must be the mosquito. In Lake Onega we also visited Valaam with one of the oldest Russian Orthodox monasteries.

From there we passed to Lake Onega through the White Lake and into the Volga river. We stopped off at Kizhi, Irma and Gortizy. At almost all stops was a band busking at the wharf playing tunes such as Dixie or Love me Tender.

We visited small rural villages and big cities. After being taken on a tour, usually to an ancient monastery or church, we would be left for a few hours to look around ourselves before the ship left for the next stop. We met local people in their own homes and saw their daily life.

We decided to present a Maori action song for the ship’s concert. Our cabin was too small to practise, so we had to seek out a place on the ship where we would not be seen. Everywhere we went there seemed to be people watching; German spies to our left and Russian spies to our right. We finally found a spot near the stern that seemed to be out of sight, so we began our practice. Before we had finished however, a pair of alert German spies caught us out. They pointed to us and said, "kangaroo, kangaroo!"

Our little item in the concert was a trip highlight for me when we announced our waiata in English, German and Russian, and then sang it in Maori. It was very well received.

We then sailed back up the Volga River and into the Moscow River stopping off at Yaroslavl, Uglich, and Kostroma before moving on to the capital, Moscow.

On the boat we had a question and answer session with members of the crew. We felt that the crew were open about how they saw Russia today. There was a noticeable split between how the young and the old saw life today. Nobody wanted a return to Communism, but capitalism is yet to create what it has promised. The young were optimistic about the future, while the old just felt worn out and left behind. They had lived through Stalin’s years of horror, the destruction of the Second World War, the end of Communism and the loss of life savings through the financial crisis of 1998. They often had little to look forward to.  The crew did comment that with Vladimir Putin from the KGB now in power, that they were concerned that the KGB’s power might be increasing.

I asked two of our translators if they would be surprised if there was a crew member or passenger who was a member of the KGB. I received politicians’ answers; a perfectly logical and clear explanation that had nothing to do with the question whatsoever.

We had several concerns before arriving in Russia. One was personal safety. We found that by taking common sense precautions we had no problems. The Russian Mafia and prostitution were definitely not as evident as we had expected, even with prostitution being legal. We never felt threatened.

We were also concerned about possible health problems. Luckily, we did not need any major medical help, but we did have some problems with our ship doctor, who was more familiar with people doing whatever they advised without question. Dealing with a doctor through a translator added to the difficulty.

We were not sure how easily we would have access to email to contact with family and friends. We found public access in St Petersburg, Moscow, Petrozavodsk and Uglich.

Overall, in spite of some problems, we were thrilled by our trip. We saw more of Russia and its people than we expected and the crew, and especially our translator, worked very hard to make our journey a most memorable one.

MOSCOW
Our hotel in Moscow was the Hotel Rossia, just outside Red Square. It was an enormous building built in the 1960’s, deservedly voted as the ugliest building in Europe by the Lonely Planet travel guide. It has four wings forming a rectangle enclosing a quadrangle. Our room was on the eleventh floor of the west wing. I went exploring to find myself suddenly in an empty concrete shell of a room, which blocked further access. I went on several other floors, but every time I found my way blocked. When we went to breakfast on the second floor of the north wing, we had to go down to the ground floor, walk outside the building for about 800 metres around to the North wing and then up to the second floor. If we wanted to get some travellers cheques from our safety deposit block, we had to walk a further 800 metres outside the building to the east wing.

Gorky Park is an amusement park in Moscow.  There we saw a space shuttle named Buran. It was intended to send it into space, but the government ran out of money. It ended up in the park and cost $15.00 to go inside.

The public toilets at Gorky Park won the prize as the worst public toilets I saw in Russia.  While walking along a path we noticed everybody suddenly racing under umbrellas, stall awnings or archways. We thought we had better follow suit. We huddled together with about twenty other people under a large sun umbrella. In seconds very heavy rain pounded on the ground around us. Some of the young people stayed out in the rain dancing and splashing about in the water. After twenty minutes the extraordinary rain stopped as quickly as it began.

In Red Square is GUM, the large government department store that looked like a Mall anywhere in the world. We could have bought fur coats for $20,000 or more. It is a wonder poor old Lenin was not turning in his grave on the opposite side of the square. We also bought meals in GUM. We were used to the reply ‘nyet’ to say something was not available, but in GUM we would point to food in front of us, and would still hear, ‘nyet’. We never found out why and we never received the food.

We were in two minds about visiting the tomb of Vladimir Lenin in Red Square. On the one hand we would get to see someone ‘in the flesh’ who changed the course of world history nearly a hundred years ago. On the other, it felt like a macabre circus.  Eventually, we decided to go and joined the queue for three quarters of an hour in the scorching sun to be told my bag was too big. I was told to go back down to the gate and turn left and after a ten minute walk I would find a place in a tower where I could leave my bag. Needless to say, I never found the tower. We had to go through one at a time, while the other held the bag.

  I entered the square stone mausoleum, from the top of which many Russian leaders have viewed the enormous military parades through Red Square. It felt cold as I stepped down the stairs. At the bottom was a young Russian officer with his big wide hat indicating with his finger over his mouth that we should be silent. Then, moving into the next room the understated lighting illuminated the body of Lenin, or more probably, a wax model replacing him. From there my eyes were blinded as I re-entered the sunlight to walk past the graves of Russian ‘heroes’, such as Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, and an assortment of KGB heads, and Joseph Stalin.

Russians don’t mow lawns. Even in big parks, around monuments which are extremely numerous or along the roadsides, the grass is normally not mowed. After a while you get used to it and even start to wonder why we spend all the time we do keeping our New Zealand lawns so tidy.

The Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was only rebuilt in the last ten years after it was destroyed by Napoleon. A gold/titanium mix was used instead of gold on the roof to keep the cost down. Inside it was just marvellous. As had occurred so often, just when we thought we’d seen it all, suddenly we stood open mouthed and thoroughly amazed yet again. It was an opportunity to see what all the five hundred year old buildings we had visited would have looked like when they were first built.

The Russian Orthodox Church is all pervasive in Russia. Every place we went to had a church or an ancient monastery all with their sacred icons. In every church was an iconostasis, a most beautiful highly decorated wall made of rows of icons reaching to the ceiling. At the bottom in the middle is a gateway, through which the priest passes to the holy area behind. We found these most beautiful inconostases to be very contradictory. In spite of their obvious beauty, they formed a barrier between the people and God. Only the priests could go behind the wall and only they could make contact with God. Throughout the services we attended, the priest either talked with their back to the people, or from behind the iconostasis.

In New Zealand we do not have to cope daily with beggars on the street. In Russia we had to decide how to react. A few coins could give a homeless person food for a day. But, for every person we gave to, there were more waiting. There were also favourite ploys such as having a dog with seven or eight puppies that have to be fed to encourage people to give money. It was heart-wrenching to see people without limbs, with disfigured faces, old women who could not stop shaking or old men proudly wearing their war medals begging for a few kopecks to survive another day. Some would ride the underground railway all day explaining their plight and walking through the carriages begging. Others were talented musicians. Many were gypsies who were very adept at stealing and were reviled by locals. We found we would give money to some and walked past many others. Agonising as it was, it was good that we had to face the reality of poverty in this way.

 Russia is a great place to go if you want a holiday that is more of a challenge than a rest. You will be constantly amazed by the poor service often encountered, the wealth, the wonder and the richness of Russian history, the poverty and dilapidation, and the beauty of the land. Months later, I often find myself still travelling back in my mind to Palace Square, an ancient Russian monastery or the Kremlin.

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