30th April 1984 - Moscow tours, best ice cream ever

THIRTIETH OF APRIL, A MONDAY SCENE: A MOSCOW RAILWAY STATION, PLENTY OF PEOPLE MILLING ABOUT. A TRAIN, THE OVERNIGHT ЗКСПРЕСС FROM LENINGRAD, PULLS INTO A PLATFORM A LARGE GROUP OF FOREIGNERS GET OUT, LUGGING THEIR LUGGAGE. THEY PROCEED TO THE EXIT AND FILL UP TWO INTOURIST BUSES. THEY RETURN TO THE HOTEL COSMOS AND HAVE BREKKIE.

Breakfast was a sort of egg pancake rolled up. It was quite nice. Apple juice day. After the meal we went on the Morning City Tour, just driving around the streets of Moscow. More red banners and flags and huge hoardings with Socialist paintings and slogans on them.

 We had two stops only – the first was just outside the Cathedral of the Intercession, otherwise known as St Basil’s. The object of this stop was to watch the changing of the guard outside Lenin’s current abode.

The other stop was at the New Maiden’s Convent [Novodevichy Convent], which is surrounded by an effective defensive wall. This is the place where czarinas had to go if they were divorced by the czar of the time – ‘twas law. 

Novodevichy Convent, thanks to Wikipedia.

Moscow is certainly a very interesting city with its big old buildings and its big new buildings. The old buildings look as if they’d fit well in a film of ‘War and Peace’ and that sort of thing, though Leningrad would be better for this. Then there are the massive “skyscrapers” built in the fifties, all modelled on the Moscow State University building. These buildings would not be out of place in Superman’s metropolis.

  Dear oh dear, it was so long ago I can’t remember all the little interesting pits and bieces that liven up a boring account like this. After the tour, we went back to the hotel for surprise, surprise, lunch.

After lunch I was terribly intrepid and went down to the Metro by myself. More of that later if I think of it. I got out at Marx Prospekt where the Bolshoi Theatre is (I couldn’t go in) and then I walked down to the 50^th Anniversary of the October Revolution Square and up Gorky Street as far as Mayakovsky Square (named after the outstanding Soviet poet. There is a statue in the square of Mayakovsky standing outside). On the way up I bought a yummy ice cream [I mean, really, one of the best ice creams I’ve ever eaten. Very memorable.] and had a look at the Stanislavsky Drama Theatre, but not inside. They have a programme of three or four plays which are performed on alternate nights. One of the plays was Cyrano de Bergerac – it’s quite easy to read the Russian alphabet if you know how. Stanislavsky [1863-1938] is important in the history of drama if you didn’t already know. [The Stanislavsky Method, or just Method Acting.]

Stanislavski Theatre of Drama

On Mayakovsky Square is the Peking Hotel, Moskva Cinema, the Satire Theatre which is next to the Tchaikovsky Concert hall, which is used in July and August as Intourist’s cultural centre.

I chucked a leftie here and walked along Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, a ring road inside the big Garden Ring Road. (I think this section of it is called Tchaikovsky Street.) Along it is the United States of America Embassy, Tchaikovsky’s house (No. 46) and Chekhov’s house (No. 12, I think. Anyway, I took a photo of it.) (I think.) I think they’re both museums now, I think.

I chucked another leftie [this does not mean I threw a Socialist, but merely I took a left turn] and went down another broad crowded street, Kalinin Prospekt. Along here on both sides are tall office/apartment blocks with a lot of shops underneath. I went into Jupiter, a large shop dealing in cameras, cine- and photo supplies. I can’t say much for the seemingly antique cameras, but they stock a lot of photographic paper, piles and piles of it, and film is expensive – four roubles for one type. I also went into a large bookstore, where they sold foreign language books, such as Penguin editions of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grahame Green, Doris Lessing, Bernard Shaw plays, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and the Penguin Roget’s Thesaurus for 25 roubles. Also a book on David Attenborough’s animal expeditions, lots of Shakespeare, the volumed set of The Literary History of England, and French editions of Emil Zola. These foreign language books are expensive.

I finally made it down to the 5oth Anniversary Etcetera and went to a Metro Station to go to the hotel again, for dinner.

   Then at 8.00, the City Evening Tour – up Gorky Street, along Tchaikovsky street, around Garden Circle, a look at a large outdoor [largest in the world] swimming pool used all year round, down Kalinin Prospekt (this is not in order), and then opposite the Kremlin on the banks of the river. It looks very nice all lit up. The streets are lovely too because they have the May ay lights. May Night Lights, twit. [The swimming pool, the Moskva Pool, was made on the site of the never-built Palace of the Soviets, which was to be built on the site of the demolished-by-the-Soviets Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had been consecrated in 1883. It had been built in honour of the victory over Napoleon, and it is where Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture had its premiere in 1882. The cathedral was re-consecrated in 2000 after five years of reconstruction, and is where the punk band Pussy Riot was arrested.]

The Moskva Pool in 1980, thanks to Wikipedia

    The driver got booked by a policeman near the swimming pool for some misdemeanor we couldn’t figure out – Tanya wouldn’t say. The bus driver we had from the station the first night in Moscow was also booked. We’ve seen a lot of drivers being booked every day. Apparently if they are booked three times they lose their licences for a year; they get their licences hole-punched every time they are booked.

We went to Lenin Hills, to look at the University – highly impressive.

   Guess what!  Back to the hotel.

29th April 1984 Leningrad: Wonderful Sites/Sights

Sunday 29^th April

   I think we got up early, I think we had breakfast but I don’t know what it was. We left at some time during the a.m. for Petrodvorets [now known – again - as Peterhof], a palace built by Peter the Great. It was started in 1714 and finished about ten years later. Which is a silly thing to say really because it’s the sort of building that was always being extended or redecorated. And also, it was absolutely rebuilt after the Second World War because it was devastated by the occupying Nazis, who had a “vicious hatred for the Soviet people and for Russian culture”.

   Fortunately, before the invasion, 7,363 objets d’art and 49 statues (from the Great Cascade) were evacuated. Unfortunately, 34,214 museum pieces and 11,700 books had to be left behind, and these were plundered or destroyed. However, from the restoration work to be seen in the palace, you could never tell that the place had been reduced to rubble, or rouble if you prefer. The stuff is magnificent.

   The way they restored things was to evacuate one example of each item and then make exact copies after the war. For example, one chair from a set; a piece of silken wall-cloth (right luvly designs).

   When we got to Petrodvorets, we found it was a bit chilly, there was only one fountain working in the Great Cascade, and the canal leading to the Gulf of Finland wasn’t in a water-bearing state. There were also a lot of people there (it must be worse in summer) which is why we were stuck in the entrance hall for a while. [Very true about it being crowded in summer. When I was staying in a house in London later, a housemate showed me the photos he took at Petrodvorets in either May, June or July – huge crowds there…]

   This museum is one of those places where visitors are required to wear felt slippers over their shoes. This is hardly surprising when you see the wonderful designs and different woods of the parquet floors (restored, of course).

   Rooms, rooms. The Crown (Bed) Room, with its Chinese scenes on silk covering the walls (so too the Divan Room); the Throne Room, mostly white, large and empty, chandeliers and parquet floor; a couple of rooms with ceiling-high stoves of Dutch tile (Delft?), blue on white, each tile different in design; and the Portrait Room, with hundreds of portraits on the walls, each representing a different national costume, or expression, but not always a different face – they used models more than once. Three hundred and sixty-eight portraits, all done by Pietro Rotari [1707-1762] and acquired by Catherine the Great.

   

Portrait Room at Peterhof

Sofa Room at Peterhof.

   The place is a marvel to see, but we couldn’t stay there forever; so ‘twas back to the hotel, which is in Leningrad, twenty-nine kilometres away. On the way back we passed many old mansions, lovely buildings, sitting in their acres of land surrounded by trees looking out onto the Gulf. We more than likely passed them on the way in, but I was dozing then so I didn’t see them.

   Lunch at the hotel was borsch and saucy meat. Then it was a tour of the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, that massive beautiful blue and white-columned building on the banks of the Neva, near the Admiralty. It comprises five buildings and houses 2.7 million bits and pieces in grand halls and rooms. Wonderful architecture – it’s a pity they don’t build the same sort of thing nowadays. There are twelve thousand paintings, fifteen thousand sculptures and over a million coins and medallions. Thirty thousand people visit it each day. I don’t know if they’re the same ones every day, though, but they probably think it’s worth it.

Inside The Hermitage

   On the way to the displays of early Italian, Spanish and Dutch paintings, we went through a hall of magnificence: chandeliers and marble, a floor mosaic, and some tables with mosaic tops. These Russian mosaics have tiny little tiles that look like dots of paints when you look at them closely. The artists had something like 3000 hues at their disposal, and they used them well.

  There certainly are some great paintings, and such a crowd, mostly tour groups [like us]. And photography is allowed inside, but no flash. I was taking a picture of a Rembrandt but just as I did Luba put her hand in front of the camera. Not to stop me taking a picture, but as explanation to what she was saying at the time.

   A couple of Leonard’s were there too.

   The last exhibit we went to see was the French Impressionists (by popular demand). Some very nice Monets, a Pissaro or two, van Gogh, Renoir and two rooms full of Matisse; and others, of course, including quite a few of Picasso. [It transpired that, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Hermitage had paintings stored away that had been thought to have been lost or destroyed during the war – this included some van Goghs, which in the Taschen catalogue (complete works), were printed as pre-war black and white photographs.]

   Well, we couldn’t spend all year at the place, so we went back to the hotel. Hermitage means “place of solitude”. There is no such thing as that there now.

   Back at the hotel. I went over to the big Berioska Shop across the road and bought a large book on Palekh, lacquered black boxes of papier-maché from the town of the same name. I bought a book instead of buying a piece of the real stuff, which is expense-ridden – about $50 for a reasonable piece, but they can be higher than $200. The book cost $17.90 (US).

  We had dinner of crumbed fish, got ready to go and went. We went back to the station, waited on the bus, then got on the train. It left with us all on board, so I went to bed.

An example of Palekh. I received a postcard of this earlier this year - printed in about 1976, from original piece painted in 1940, it shows Duke Stepanovich.

28th April 1984 - Leningrad: Museum and Ballet

Saturday 28^th April.  I woke up early, before sunrise. The train was still going, which was reassuring, and going fast. I looked out the window – snow on the ground. No wonder it was a wee bit chilly. I watched the sun come up – a red ball, an orange ball, a yellow ball – over countryside with towns much the same as anywhere else in Russia. No more snow on the ground, but it was green! Green fields, not green trees. We did pass industrial complexes as well.

   We arrived in Leningrad at about 8am. The Moscow Station is one of the oldest in Russia (or Leningrad) and is an exact copy of the Leningrad Station in Moscow.

  We got on board our buses and waited. Then we drove along the main drag of Leningrad, Nevsky Prospekt. At the end, the golden spire of the Admiralty shone in the sunlight like a gold spire shining in the light of the sun.

   The buildings in Leningrad are big and beautiful though some need repairing and a bit of renovation here or there wouldn’t go astray either. We passed Dvorcovaja Place which has another name. This is where the Hermitage/Winter Palace is, and there were a lot of people dressed in blue or red tracksuits and some red-draped floats a-gathering for their May Day Procession rehearsal.

   We drove over the Neva River into Vasiljevskij Island [Vasilevskiy Island]. This has another name too but that’s the name I have on the map. On this island is the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, finished in 1978 overlooking the Gulf of Finland and near a whole lot of condominiums. Room 8071 was it. We had breakfast at 9.30 in the restaurant overlooking the bay. Some egg flan stuff which was all right, with the Mullins and John Basely. [This hotel currently has 1200 comfortable European furnished guest rooms. It’s one of the biggest hotels in Saint Petersburg.]

  Then for the city tour with the local guide Luba. Leningrad is infested with 4.8 million burghers graders and covers 606km. It consists of forty-two islands and sixty-five rivers and canals, with three hundred bridges (in the whole region there are over 5000 bridges). There are forty-six museums and two hundred and seventy-five memorials to the man himself [dah, Lenin].

  We saw the Peter and Paul Fortress, outside the walls of which the locals stand up sunbaking on the bank of the Neva.

A postcard I bought in Leningrad.

  I am not sure of everything we saw because I had my eyes shut for some of the time. We got out at St. Isaac’s – great. [But we didn’t go inside.]

   We went back to the hotel for lunch – I had bread and borsch but didn’t stay for the main course as I went upstairs to rest.

   At 2.45 we left for the tour for the (National) Russian Museum, which is an art gallery of Russian art. The building is one of those impressive old ones they have in Leningrad. It houses more than 300,000 pieces, examples, of old Russian art and handicrafts, paintings and sculpture, drawings and decorative and applied art.

   Luba showed us the paintings – not all nine thousand, of course – but paintings significant in the history of Russian art and by the most famous Russian painters.

   For many centuries, the only Russian painting done was purely religious in subject matter and use – the icons. Some of these are superb. After reforms to reshape feudal Russia in the early eighteenth century, Russian artists started to paint in more realistic genres – particularly portraiture. But the early portraits still showed an icon-like quality.

 We saw many beautiful canvases, and some of the paint on them wasn’t too bad either. In a painting, ‘Frina [Phryne] and the Festival of Aphrodite’, you feel as if you could reach out and put your hand around one fellow’s arm. Very realistic. A big picture, (This painting is probably by Karl Briullov [his most famous painting is probably Last Day at Pompeii], or Fiodor Bruni. Unfortunately it is not in the book I bought later in the Berioska shop on the Russian Museum paintings.)

  It certainly is a very interesting place to visit.

   Back to the hotel for dinner at six. In Leningrad, as in Moscow and probably everywhere else in the USSR, they are making ready for May Day, with lots of red banners and flags, with some light blue; big paintings of such Marxists as Lenin and such Leninists as Marx, and Engels and whoever else. The banners they drape over the front of buildings, several storeys long. They have flags in special holders on front of buildings, on street posts, and along bridges – two or three together. Signs saying “MAY, PEACE, LABOUR” in any order.

  For dinner we had some paté, crumbed veal with mash, Pepsi Cola and a cream horn.

   We then went to the Academic Maly Theatre of opera and ballet, which is on the same square as the Russian Museum. Tonight’s performance – “Czar Boris” by Prokofiev. [I have kept the ticket, for some unknown reason, in whatever iteration wallet I've had for 30 years. See the scan below.] Inside the building is an oval-shaped auditorium; you know, you’ve seen the sort before. The ceiling has a fresco and there are ornamentations all over the place. On the first floor are a series of high-ceilinged rooms where they sell drinks, ice cream and cakes. Some of the rooms have tables and chairs; beautifully carved wooden panels; displays of balletalia – photographs, newspaper cuttings, stage designs, that sort of thing. 

Ticket to "Czar Boris", back and front, recently laminated for the second time.

  The ballet is about Boris Godenov-or-however-you-spell-it and is probably the same story as the opera. It starts off with a couple of priest-types carrying a large bell (which has a capacity of one Boris) and four or five other characters with smaller bells suspended from the ceiling. There are soldiers or Cossacks, and a tiny ballerina dressed in white who represents the 9 or 12 year old boy [Ivan the Terrible’s son and Boris Godunov’s brother-in-law Dmitri] that Boris had killed so that he would go mad by the haunting memory. Also, a tall mysterious priestish bloke with a black costume and beard [“the Evil Monk”]. And also a lot of ballerinas, of course. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep my eyes open to watch it, but I listened to the music which was great. [The ballet seems to be based on the play by Pushkin and the opera by Mussorgsky.]

  After the show, which wasn’t really very long, we went back to the hotel. I went for a wander down to the shore of the bay to watch the sunset. This was just after ten o’clock, mind you, which seems very strange.

  During the course of the day, I bought at the Berioska Shop the previously mentioned book on paintings at the Russian Museum and also a book on the Environs of Leningrad. (8.90 roubles).

Recent postcard from St Petersburg.