Russia was incredible. Really, really incredible. It was like no country that I had ever seen before. Distinctly different feeling than Western Europe and bearing many present-day remnants of its most fascinating history.
Early Sunday morning we flew out of Copenhagen and landed in Saint Petersburg around noon Russia time (which is two hours ahead of Copenhagen time).
Even though we were tired we wasted no time in beginning our sightseeing. Jon, the teacher of the Russia Past and Present class and our leader on this study tour, was all about making the most of our time and so the trip ran at a very fast pace. After checking in at the hotel, we ventured into the depths of the St.Petersburg metro system to begin our tourism. And I do mean depths – the St.Petersburg subway system is the deepest in the world. The escalators last for what feels like forever – I timed one and it was 2 minutes and 45 seconds long! Your ears pop going down the metro escalators and each station is vast, so it involves quite a bit of walking to get to the correct platform to catch the correct train. It was exciting that first day to just walk down Nevsky Prospect, the main street that runs through St.Petersburg, getting my first glimpse of what was to be my favorite building in Russia, the Cathedral of spilled blood (a breathtaking cathedral) as well as many other buildings. Jon talked about how the Cathedral of spilled blood is not really traditional Russian style and how instead it represents a fantasy of whimsy and greatness on the part of Russia but I didn’t care if it wasn’t authentic. I thought it was striking and beautiful and like nothing I had ever seen. I tried to take as many pictures as possible and soak in its bright colors and flamboyant spiral domes. I’m posting two pictures here that to give you a sense of this building, even if photographs can’t do it justice.
Everything we saw that first day caught my attention. We saw Russian police, who really do wear those fuzzy hats that you imagine them to, and the names of American fast food chains written in the Cyrillic Russian alphabet.
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| Cathedral of Spilled Blood |
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| Cathedral of Spilled Blood |
Our second day of sightseeing in Saint Petersburg included a bus tour to many of the central sights in St.Petersburg, including a statue of Peter the Great and St.Isaac’s Cathedral, the Peter and Paul Fortress and Peter and Paul Cathedral, as well as a statue of Lenin and the Tsar’s winter palace from across the water. The Peter and Paul Cathedral houses the bodies of former Tsars (kind of like what Roskilde cathedral is to Denmark) and is very beautiful inside. We also took a look at two houses, one that appears old but is actually more recent, and an older one from the Stalin era. Jon explained how the newer building, built during the 60s, looks older because at that point in the Soviet regime there was a push to highlight Russia’s great imperial history and this was partly done through harkening back to old-fashioned architecture. Buildings like this, the statue of Lenin, the fact that St.Petersburg only fairly recently changed its name from Leningrad – these traces of the Soviet history are all around Russia and it was incredibly interesting see these ways in which bits of the USSR linger.
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| Peter and Paul Fortress |
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| Statue of Lenin |
Monday afternoon we took a tour of “Dostoyevsky’s St.Petersburg”, where Jon took us around to the location that Crime and Punishment author Theodry Dostoyevsky lived in while he wrote his famous novel, as well as the fictional buildings that much of the scenery in the novel is thought to be based on. Forced to read Crime and Punishment for my AP English class in high school I strongly disliked the book – finding it dense, rambling and not particularly insightful or prolific. After I turned in that assignment senior year of high school I was confident I would never have to touch Dostoyevsky again – but here he was coming back to haunt me in my Russia Past and Present course. Although I would by no means call myself a Russian literature enthusiast now, I found myself enjoying the Dostoyevsky walk more than I thought. After having been forced to analyze the murder scene between Raskolnikov and Alyona I got a thrill from counting the number of steps between where he would have lived, finding out that it is actually more than the 730 steps that Dostoyevsky writes about.
We finished out first full day in St.Petersburg by attending a Russian ballet, which had excerpts from Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and other classic Russian ballets. Being no ballet connoisseur myself I enjoyed the show, although I heard from some classmates who knew more about ballet that this was definitely not the most professional or skilled ballet they had ever seen. A lot of us found it was more difficult to follow than a usual ballet because there was no one cohesive story line but just a series of short, unrelated acts. I was in awe of what the dancers could do with their bodies and enjoyed seeing a ballet simply because Russia is known for its ballet.
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| Russian Ballet at Hermitage Theater |
Tuesday was our last day in St.Petersburg and we started the morning off with another tour of St.Petersburg, “St.Petersburg behind the facade.” This tour was really unique and one of my highlights of the trip. We were split into three groups and led by guides who were locals to St.Petersburg. They took us to sights that we wouldn’t have seen were we coming as tourists on our own. Our first stop was a marketplace where we sampled two types of pickles and purchased some pickle slices to chase down the vodka that we would soon consume. The culture around drinking, and around vodka in particular, is very strange in Russia. Russians love their vodka and they consume quite a bit of it, same goes for beer. They drink shots of vodka like it is water, too hard core to mix it with any sort of juice or fruit beverage like Americans do. However, they openly acknowledge that plain vodka tastes terrible and are only drinking it for the effect so in order to bear the strong taste they have pickles, or some other food like a slice of bread, at the ready to eat right after taking a shot of vodka. The second location we stopped at was like a bar, in that its purpose was to serve alcohol, was unlike a bar because there was no social aspect whatsoever. This type of establishment, of which there are many all over the city, looked like a takeout pizza restaurant, but instead of pizza they served vodka shots. We were there at 11am in the morning and several men came in to quickly down their needed daily vodka shot.
The third stop on our behind the façade tour was to a kommunalka. Kollunalkas are old, apartments with long hallways and many rooms that used to be owned by wealthy aristocratic Russian families that are now owned by several families in common. Instead of one person being the owner and the others renters, each family or individual owns the square footage of their single room. Although there are shared bathroom and kitchen facilities there is little community or sense of connection between the families that live there. On the contrary, often the families avoid one another as much as possible and there is usually conflict over cleaning schedules or paying rent. Our guide explained how kommunalkas are undesirable living situations, left over from the days when many poor peasants flooded the city and needed places to live, and that many who live in kommunalkas today inherited this piece of property from their parents or grandparents and in this way are kind of stuck. It was so interesting to learn about this distinctly Russian phenomenon and to actually get to go inside the kommunalka of one of our tour guide’s friends to see what it looked like. The last stop of our ‘behind the façade tour’ was to an antique shop, where I purchased some old Soviet Union political pins and political propaganda from when Russia was the USSR.
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| At the market in St.Petersburg |
Tuesday afternoon we got a tour of the Tsar’s winter Palace and the Hermitage Museum of Art, an extensive art gallery that is attached to the winter palace. Seeing the great riches of the Tsars made clear the vast wealth disparities in Tsarist Russian. Can you really blame the millions of peasants struggling to make their living for organizing a revolution to take down capitalism?
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| The Tsar's Winter Palace |
One of my highlights of the whole trip was our visit, after the Hermitage museum, to the largest Synagogue in St.Petersburg. It was an absolutely beautiful building, and our tour guide was an expert in St.Petersburg Jewry. She explained how three waves of emigration have left a small number of Jews in St.Petersburg. The Jews there today are mostly secular but there is a small Orthodox community clustered around this synagogue. The large synagogue that we saw is used now only for high holiday and other special services but there is another smaller, also beautiful, synagogue right next door that is used for everyday worship. They also had a small gift shop with kosher foods and beautiful judaica. This trip to the synagogue was so meaningful and interesting because I have ancestors who were Russian Jews, and being in this synagogue I felt like this was a place my great grandfather, or his father, could have come.
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| Synagogue in St.Petersburg |
Later that evening (I told your our days were really packed!) we went to see a man speak who was a political dissident during the Soviet years. He worked to found an artists co-operative, which is where we went to see him, and he fought for freedom of expression for artists who wanted to create art during the soviet years that was not state-sponsored and which did not promote the communist party. He was part of a group that illegally put up artwork all around the city reminding people that they were not really free under the soviet government. He was eventually arrested and spent several years in a particularly severe labor camp in Siberia. He was also a member of parliament at one point and in this position negotiated with Chechen rebels to diffuse a hostage situation. This man has led an incredible life and I felt really privileged to be able to listen to him tell his story.
Wednesday morning we left St.Petersburg and took a train to Novgorod, an old medieval city that lies between St.Petersburg and Moscow. We saw the Novgorod Kremlin (kremlin, we were told, just means fortress and so this Kremlin is just a large brick fortress unlike the Kremlim that refers to where the Russian government is situated in Moscow). We saw many old churches, including St.Sophia’s, the oldest church in Russia. In Novgorod we also visited St.George’s monestary and met with a monk who resides there.
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| Novgorod |
From Novgorod we took an overnight train to Moscow. I was really looking forward to this, as I had never taken an overnight train everywhere. Tt certainly proved to be quite the experience. The compartments, which each housed four beds, were impossibly tiny and it took quite a bit of maneuvering to fit four people, linens and suitcases into each room. Once we finally got into our beds I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep, despite the bumps and stops of the train. The train arrived in Moscow at 5:16am so there was no getting a full night’s sleep.
We arrived in Moscow bleary eyed and slight disoriented but excited to be there. First stop, rest at the hotel and breakfast. Only half of our hotel rooms were ready, because we were there way before the check-in time, so we doubled up and had time to briefly shower or nap. We then hopped on our trusty coach bus and saw many of the famous Moscow sights, including St.Basil’s Cathedral and the red square. St.Basil’s, like the Cathedral of Spilled Blood, is one of those sights that you just can’t take your eyes off. Same goes for the red square, which really requires a panorama shot to capture how you feel when you are inside, as there is another incredible-looking building in every direction you turn.
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| St.Basil's Cathedral |
For our first night in Moscow we were paired with what Jon likes to calls our “forced friends”. He had recruited a group of Moscow college students to spend the evening with us, paired up in small groups, to go to their apartments and cook dinner. We discussed stereotypes of Americans and of Russians, how they like living in Moscow (they were split over whether they liked Moscow or St.Petersburg better), and the best places to go in New York, because one of them was planning a trip to the states. It was experiences like this that made me really glad that I chose to go to Russia on a DIS trip. Not only does a difficult visa application process and the fact that few Russians speak English make it difficult to go to Russia on one’s own, as a tourist I never would have gotten to meet Russian young people, or go inside a kommunalka or talk to a Soviet dissident. All of this was made possible by Jon’s deep knowledge of and connections in Russia, and of course his fluency in Russian and English (and Danish!).
Friday was our last full day in Moscow. We went to Jesus Christ Our Savior church and then the Kremlin. The rest of the day was on our own, and my friends and I set out to find a Japanese restaurant that one of our forced friends had recommended the night before. We proficiently navigated the metro to get there (which I was very proud of – the Moscow metro is easy to navigate but HUGE, with station names all in Russian) and were rewarded for our efforts with amazing Japanese food. I have only had sushi once while in Copenhagen and so although not cheap this sushi was far less than what you’d pay in Scandanavia and so a great treat.
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| Our Savior Church |
Friday night we had a closing dinner party and Saturday morning we had a chance to go to a local market to buy any last minute souveniers. What I believe they told us was the largest market in Moscow was within walking distance of our hotel. There were hundreds of vendors, all eager to attract customers and all selling similar varieties of Russian nesting dolls, along with anything else you can imagine – belts, leather jackets, gloves, postcards, books, hand painted crafts, etc. etc. We did our best haggling and tried not to get ripped off too much. I purchased some nice souvenirs for friends and postcards for myself.
It was really sad leaving Russia on Saturday. Russia is such a different destination from most of the western European countries we have been visiting that part of me still feels like I didn’t actually go there. But I have the pictures and memories to prove it, and I think this is a trip that I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.
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