FLASHBACK: "During Soviet Times" (2002)

Vladimir Putin had been in power just two years when Chris invited the Pines crew to visit him in Russia for Thanksgiving.  Two things stand out in my memory:  1) our guides' use of the phrase "during Soviet times," as if it referred to the distant past; and 2) the subway's beauty, depth, efficiency and odor.  

 

Subway Mosaic

Subway Station

Two decades later, it seems the Kremlin now seeks the restoration of the Soviet Union by any means necessary. 

Slava, our cheerful driver picked us up at the rudimentary Moscow airport.

Dan, Donald and I arrived first.  They posed with Chris in front of a barely armored World War II tank. Thom and Joe took a later flight and stayed in a hotel.

We saw our first onion domes at the Trinity Lavra St. Sergius, a monastery in Sergiyev Posad about an hour's drive northeast.  It dates back to the fourteenth century.

Jet lag and the passage of time prevent me from remembering much about our very chilly visit to the spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church other than eating lunch at a nearby McDonald's.  After the invasion of Ukraine, a crony of Putin's bought the place, rebranding it "Simply Delicious."  McDonald's not the monastery, although the Patriarch Krill seems to be in Putin's pocket, too.

Our itinerary also included a short flight to St. Petersburg on a rickety airplane that did not inspire confidence.

We stayed in a hotel just across the street from Saint Isaac's Cathedral.  Built in the mid-19th century to honor a patron saint of Peter the Great, it became a museum during Soviet times, like many churches.  As Karl Marx shrewdly observed, "religion is the opiate of the masses."

Most museum guards have it pretty cushy compared to this woman.  I don't think her booth was heated.

Fun fact:  Boston has been around longer than St. Petersburg.  You can see our surprisingly cozy hotel in building to the left of the park.

Joe definitely needed a hat, although temperatures would drop another 20 degrees before our trip ended.

Photos must not have been allowed in the Hermitage.  Either that, or it was too dark to take pictures.  Things may have changed, but little had been done to encourage tourism by non-Russian speakers. The art works, which once belonged to Catherine the Great, were identified only in Cyrillic. As we exited, street vendors outside hawking (counterfeit?) tins of caviar labelled in English, surrounded us.  Commerce caught up to capitalism more quickly than culture.

A tsar was assassinated on the site where the Russian Orthodox Church of the Savior on Blood was erected in the early 20th century.  Donald, a rabid capitalist, knew a lot more about the House of Romanov, Russia's imperial dynasty, than I did.

Nevertheless, the church made a vivid impression, particularly after two Russian soldiers in the area demanded to see my identification and tried, unsuccessfully, to shake me down. "They probably thought you were a Danish tourist in that coat," Chris later speculated. Close--I had purchased it the year before in Berlin at KaDeWe.

Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, considers throwing himself into the Neva River.  It must have been summertime.

We returned to Moscow via train, on the possibly apocryphal Anna Karenina Express.  There may have been a game of Scrabble with Dan & Chris.  Vodka was on offer, too.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with Janet, Chris's best friend from law school, and Gregory, her boyfriend.  They've now been married for more than 20 years and just visited us at the Folly.

While Dan, Donald, Thom and I made our way to Seleznyovskiye Bani, the 19th-century bathouse once favored by high ranking members of the Communist Party, Joe stayed behind to help Janet prepare our delicious meal.

Somehow, Thom always managed a lewk in those days.

Another Chris who worked for the American government brought his younger Russian boyfriend to dinner.  Different times, for sure.

We spent a very frigid morning on Red Square, first visiting Lenin's Tomb and walking past a phalanx of armed military guards to view, fleetingly, his embalmed body.  It's been on public display since his death in 1924. Strange, but absolutely fascinating. Thom posed in front of St. Basil's Cathedral.  The nine domes are intended to evoke the flames of a bonfire.

We did not, however, go to the State Historical Museum, housed in a building almost as striking for its neo-Russian architecture.

On the final morning of our trip, we visited the Kremlin which, like Red Square, was within easy walking distance of Chris's apartment in a guarded compound for members of the U.S. diplomatic corps.

We couldn't say cheese because our lips had frozen together.

Marina, our guide for the day, repeated the phrase "during Soviet times" on at least a dozen occasions. Chris had arranged a private tour of the Kremlin palace through his connections at the American embassy.

Let me tell you, I didn't know what to expect as she led us from room to room, but it wasn't anything as deluxe as what we saw from floor to ceiling.  We literally had the place to ourselves.

The polished marble reflected the sconce and chandelier lighting.

Lots of gilt wainscoting, too.  

I'll admit, I approached the dramatic throne room with more than a little awe.

Nicholas II and Alexandra were the last Romanovs to occupy these thrones, along with Maria Feodorovna, a former empress of Russia by marriage.  Of the three, only she escaped execution by firing squad after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

On a purely symbolic level, it appeared as if the tsars had returned to power, only now we call them the oligarchy.

That's probably why I found this photo of the "democratically-elected" president of Russia so compelling.  He and our own fearless leader definitely fancy gold and the trappings of royal power. 

Photo by Grigorv Sysoer (2021)

Multiple buildings comprise the huge Kremlin complex.  The world's biggest bell and cannon can be found of the grounds.

The bell has never rung and the cannon never fired a shot during war.  Both are old enough to have been derided by Voltaire as evidence of Russia's inferiority complex.  No matter how much things change, they remain the same.  At 5'7", Putin is only an inch taller than Napoleon.

Janet joined us to check out Maxim Gorky's crib after lunch.   The revered Russian writer earned his reputation by writing passionately about the indignities suffered by both the common people and the intelligentsia under the Romanovs.  Nicholas II blackballed his honorary election to the academy of literature.

The Bolsheviks seized the Art Nouveau jewel, built in the early 20th century by a Russian banker, eventually giving it to Gorky, who had an off-and-on again relationship with the early Soviet leadership.  Although he had allied himself with Vladimir Lenin, his pacifism and internationalism after the revolution forced him into Italian exile until Joseph Stalin invited him to return from Capri in 1928.  Gorky and his wife moved into the house in 1931. Five years later he was dead, but Gorky's wife continued living there in shabby splendor for another three decades.

None of us were aware of Gorky's anti-gay bias at the time of our visit.  After the Stalin regime anointed him as the father of "socialist realism" for his writings about the proletariat, he supported a law to criminalize homosexuality.  "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear," he wrote in Pravda.  No wonder Donald hated the communists; he was group member most likely to be described as fascist for his right-wing politics.

There's a snail on the ceiling!

By the time Gorky died he had alienated Stalin, too, and was under "unannounced" house arrest.  Although the fearsome dictator came to visit him in his sick bed, and was among the mourners who carried the urn with Gorky's cremains at his funeral, several historians have speculated that both the writer and his son, who had died under mysterious circumstances a month earlier, were likely victims of a poisoning engineered by the NKVD (the early 20th century equivalent of the KGB).  For political purposes, Gorky was more valuable to Stalin dead than alive.