Friday, October 3, 2008 9:35 PM CDT
Charleston resident's tour a lesson in history, splendor and architecture
By Michael Leyden
Editor’s Note: Charleston resident Michael Leyden recently took a river trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg in Russia. Following is the story of his experiences.
From the tarmac at cton (Charleston) International Aerodrome, aim the plane skyward so that 10 hours, 5,200 miles and nine time zones later, SVO — Sheremetyevo Airport — appears out the window. Land. This is Moscow. Russia, not Idaho.
Physical science
meets poly sci
Flying to and landing at SVO is a simply a matter of Bernoulli’s Principal and other physical science concepts, but being legally admitted into Russia is a complicated feat involving the political science of acquiring a VISA.
Economically, Visa is a credit card while the nuisance travel document with the same name requires a credit card and patience. There are five pages of instructions regarding the five pages of requested documentation for a Russian VISA. This silent interrogation featured such commands as:
n List every country visited in the past 10 years;
n List all schools attended — and their telephone number;
n Enclose the “invitation” to visit Russia that is issued by the tour agent;
n If staying extra nights, enclose the “invitation” sent by the hotels in which you will reside;
n Should you stay with friends or relatives overnight, attach the permit they have received that allows them to host foreigners.
So, foreigners, do not just bop into Russia on a lark, nor do college students “back pack” and pirouette, Bolshoi style, through the country. Every nightly whereabouts is recorded.
But in the tit-for-tat world of politics, a Russian resident sighed: “You should see the incredible forms we must complete to visit America.” Touché.
‘Waterway of the Czars’
This is the exotic name given to a 12-day river trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg, which precipitated a need for the VISA.
Moored on the Moskva River, the cruiser, LITVINOV, hosted 165 guests.
As the crow flies, 395 miles separate Moscow from St. Petersburg, but as the ship sails it is 1,699 kilometers — 1,036 miles. That is a lot of zigs and zags.
Moscow is 690 feet above the level of the Baltic Sea and the destination city of St. Petersburg. The descent begins in the Moscow Canal, an 80-mile waterway constructed between 1932-37 by prisoners.
Six locks drop the vessel 125 feet to make a connection with Russia’s main water artery, the Volga River. As ships approach St. Petersburg they step down with more locks, which make the inland waters marry the sea.
Moscow
Shaving 20 percent of the cornfields from the edges of Coles County makes it a 20-by-20-mile square simulating the size of Moscow; and then sprinkle in an additional 10.3 million people to duplicate Russia’s crowded capital.
The ratios are about 125 people per square mile in Coles County vs. 25,000 in Moscow. It is Europe’s largest city — dwarfing London and Paris. St. Petersburg is surprisingly in fourth place.
Red Square is the center of government, religion, commerce. Kremlin means “fort” and so many cities have one — just not one like Moscow’s. Its area is 68 football fields (acres). The walls are 3 to 7 feet thick and yes, the bricks are red.
For a little bit of a lot of colors, St. Basil’s cathedral at the south end of the square provides a rainbow, but architecturally and philosophically the next most striking feature forms the square’s entire east wall.
Goom and gloom
Spelled RYM in Cryllic, and GUM in English, but pronounced “goom,” the 242-meter-long building was a symbol of “gloom” when it was the GHQ for Stalin’s bureaucracy. It was erected at the turn of the century — that’s the 20th century — as a shopping mart with more than 1,200 stores. In 1928 the building evolved into a Communist command post, but in 1953 reverted to the county market.
Gosudarstvenny Universal’nyi Magazin is the actual name of the place, which makes one appreciate the moniker, GUM.
While the world focused on tanks, missiles, troops featured in the May Day parades, just a few meters distant was the procession of shoppers at Gucci, CK, Dior, Laurent, Versace and other high-end retailers. There are more than 200 stores in three parallel lanes or galleries, three stories high. Arched walkways let shopper crisscross the galleries.
“Mall walkers” churn away the miles and calories and never pass the same store twice during any one fashion season. One down-and-back stroll through each of the nine corridors and traipsing across the bridges totals more than 3 miles.
Seventy percent of those strolling the galleries are ogling the artistic iron and glass skylight whose 20,000 panes stretch the entire length of the building. The rest of the visitors are pulling rubles from their pockets and actively pursuing the contact sport of shopping.
But in this emporium architectural awe trumps merchandise.
Moscow’s underworld
If GUM was a place visitors wouldn’t think of visiting, then the Moscow Metro (subway) is another.
For 19 rubles, call that 75 cents, riders zoom through the underground exploring the various stops and never see the light of day for hours. Metro station art and history exhibits lure many people down under.
Each station — there are almost 200 — is bedecked with sculptures, paintings, mosaic and stained glass set in an immaculately clean depot.
In 2007 Moscow was named the world’s most expensive city. Here is an example, albeit, a skewed one.
For those “Putin on the Ritz,” the lowest price room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel has about 800 square feet and is $1,700. Should a spouse want to lie abed, it is $71 more. Breakfast for one is also $71.
As for the top-of-the-line Ritz Carlton Suite — it has more than 2,500 square feet and rents for $21,140 per night.
Buoy oh buoy
Time to leave the city life. These northern waters not only lift 30 tourist ships each day, half going north and half going south, but they also float a tourist economy in a twofold manner.
First, there are the foreign currencies flowing into the coffers via the tour companies, and then there are the rubles that tourists leave behind in the kitschy kiosks and sophisticated shops.
Kizhi is an island of hardly 3 square miles set in Lake Onega with 83 wooden structures — barns, windmills and peasant houses were imported from the region to stand in an outdoor museum dedicated to wood.
Capped with 22 “onion domes,” The Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1714, is a 121-foot-tall magnet for priests, pastors and carpenters. All that wood and not a nail in sight. Wooden pegs, friction and gravity provide the adhesion for beams, boards and shingles.
What’s in a name?
At 21, Peter the Great (1672-1725), who stood almost 7 feet tall, was in his 11th year as tsar and founded the new capital of Russia: St. Petersburg.
For 201 years, 1713 to 1914, it was the capital, but because St. Petersburg sounded “too German,” on the eve of WWI, Petrograd was born.
Beginning three days after Lenin died in 1924, it was dubbed Leningrad and remained that way for almost 78 years, which took the calendar to 1991, when this city on the water was retitled St. Petersburg.
Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg are archipelagos — cities set on islands. It has the same latitude as Anchorage — 60 degrees — so both sit 1,400 miles north of Old Main.
Sites that are sights
America’s national museum is the Smithsonian and the Russian equivalent is a six-building chain under the umbrella name of The Hermitage. This is where all the big guys “hang” (out): Goya, Monet, Michelangelo, van Gogh and Picasso. Get the picture?
There are about 3 million artifacts in the Hermitage but only 40 percent are displayed, so if visitors spend a minute at each and think in terms of strolling eight hours a day, in 6.8 years their retinal inventory would be complete.
Catherine’s Palace
It started in 1717 as a simple estate gifted from Peter the Great to his spouse, Catherine I. She was not the fabled Catherine The Great (Catherine II). Each succeeding ruler added and subtracted boards, bricks and glass through a process involving hammers, saws, dust and noise.
When Peter and Catherine’s daughter, the spunky 32-year-old Empress Elizabeth, took the throne in 1741, the remodeling became serious. Liz was a contractor’s dream as she wanted change that involved more than spending change. She had the place completely destroyed and then serious monetary expenditures created a home of disbelief.
The House on the Hill
To picture this incredible summer palace, think of a bungalow 154 feet wide (a football field is 160 feet wide) and almost 1,100 feet long (three football fields); three stories high. Go ahead. Picture it.
Now, three realty items of note:
n Color scheme — egocentric Empress Elizabeth’s exterior motif: light blue to match her eyes, white for her pale skin and gold for her tress.
n The Great Room — 154 feet long and 56 feet wide. Visualize a football field with the ball just inside the 19 (8,624 square feet). One room.
n MIA — One of the most interesting rooms is not here — sort of. Someone stole it. Really.
In 1941 the “visiting” Germans dismantled it — supposedly to protect the treasure — and carted it somewhere, but it has never been seen since. This is the fabled Amber Room, whose walls and ceiling were bedecked with tons of yellow-orange-red amber (fossilized tree sap) glued together.
For those who enjoy jigsaw puzzles, this was Eden. The intrigue of the missing room has spurred many hypotheses, books and documentaries. From 1982-2003, the room was reconstructed at a cost of $12 million and this replacement process defies the imagination. Call this Amber Room 2.0.
Since the entire palace was heavily bombed in World War II, much of everything here is a facsimile. They rebuilt the 500,000 square foot “house” to exacting detail using pictures, written descriptions and memories.
n Closets: the lack of storage space is a deal-breaker with many real estate sales, but that is not a problem here. Elizabeth was skilled at spending money and when she died there were less than a dozen rubles in the country’s treasury, but her closets clutched 15,000 gowns. That would be two for each day of her 20- year reign.
However, she owned only several thousand pair of shoes, which led to an embarrassing and unacceptable ratio of shoes to gowns and probably caused many an exasperated courtier to sigh: “Oh, Liz, we simply must get to the mall.”
C2
Catherine II — The Great
This gets complicated. With the death of Elizabeth, Peter III — (P3) — the grandson of Peter the Great (P1) took the throne for 185 days and was murdered in a coup to which his wife, (C2), might have been party.
P3 and C2 met in a convoluted path of political love: an arranged marriage and not a union made on eHarmony.com. There was little harmony as each shared “intimacies” with many — and hardly ever with each other.
Despite all the construction initiated by Elizabeth, Catherine II did still more while residing in a place with the coincidental name, Catherine’s Palace.
Although not Russian, she succeeded (P3) because of the precedent established when another non-Russian followed her husband to the throne: Catherine I. C2 disliked the title “The Great,” but earned it because she ushered the country into an era of enlightenment — politics, arts, education and literature — during her 34-year reign: 1762-1796. As a time reference, George Washington ended his presidency in 1797.
The ABCs of Russia
Russia is a very unfriendly country for speakers of English, as bilingual signs are rare — save such examples as Pizza Hut, McDonalds and KFC. Across its 11 time zones the Cyrillic alphabet ostensibly holds true, so all 142 million inhabitants of the Federal States of Russia (formerly USSR) speak the same tongue.
In reality, there are 30 other co-official languages in the 83 subdivisions that Americans would call states, and they stretch to places 3,200 miles east of Moscow, which means Alaska is on the horizon for those towns.
There are 33 letters in the alphabet and 10 of them are vowels. The thought of training the mind to accommodate these symbols, spellings, definitions, syntax, pronunciations,and decoding incoming speech is humbling.
Looking at all the city signage is tiring as the brain strains to make sense out of the letters. A visitor may not speak the language in Paris, but seeing “R-E-S...” on some door gives a hint that it could be a restaurant or a restroom. In either case it is rewarding to enter.
In Moscow there isn’t a clue to what is going on behind the door with these letters: backward-R, backward-N, pi symbol and asterisk. Even when the words are “translated” into their English equivalents there is a problem. Anglicized, the name of one of Moscow’s nicest apartment buildings, becomes Kotyelnicheskaya Nabyerezhnaya. See.
Four Cyrillic letters are emblazoned on those red octagonal traffic signs: cton, and amazingly it is pronounced just like its English sign equivalent.
Since this trip began at the cton (Charleston) airport, now is an appropriate place to cton.
Michael Leyden is a retired Eastern Illinois University science educator.
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rgb1955 wrote on Oct 9, 2008 2:39 PM:
You didn't mention the nasty toilets in public places.
Barf!
My wife is a Russian/American citizen, a Phd, and teaches calculus, and higher math at a major university in upstate South Carolina
She really hates it when mention that. Made me constipated rather to go into a public restroom. I paid $.25 to use a port-a-pottie rather than to enter a public facility.
Pretty gross. But otherwise, Moscow was beutiful, the people kind and warm. I'd go again in a heartbeat. "