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Published: January 6th 2008
One plus point about leaving Yekaterinburg was that I'd finally been able to get a ticket on one of the more prestigious trains in the Russian network and would be arriving in Moscow on the Trans-Mongolian #3. This was the most expensive (in terms of cost per km) of the legs I did - unfortunately it turned out to be the least fun also.
The extra money had gone towards a carriage that came with a smiling provodnitsa and one free hot meal per day (both days fish, once containing half a skeleton's worth of bones, once without). The downside was the couple who were already in the cabin, who had spread their luggage and food over all available surfaces and showed no inclination to (re)move any of it. So with the guy's luggage in a bin under my lower berth where he had no easy access to it, and my rucksack stuffed in a space next to his upper berth where I had no easy access to it, and seemingly no common language between them and me, I spent the next 26 hours in silence.
Though I'd felt as though I'd been in Europe for a couple of
weeks, it wasn't until we were 40km out of Yekaterinburg that we entered the continent (as defined via some geological criteria). About 300km further west we topped out at the highest point in the Urals, which at barely 500m above sea level required no supplementary oxygen. The towns of Chaykovskaya (named after the composer Pyotr Ilich), Mendeleevo (named after the chemist of Periodic Table fame), and Bum-Kombinat (named after a buttock-shaped hill formation nearby, I may have misread somewhere), not to mention crossing the mile-wide Volga near Nizhny Novgorod (aka Gorky), marked our continued westward progress.
Approaching Moscow, we passed many dachas, the country retreats of the city's inhabitants which are used for relaxation as well as for growing vegetables. Though many were painted in bright blues and greens, those vivid colours were muted by the brilliance of the snow.
Having known that I spoke English and no Russian from the moment I arrived in the cabin, it seemed more than a little odd that the woman spoke nothing but Russian for the whole journey until reaching Moscow, where it became apparent that she spoke perfectly good English.
The Moscow metro was my first glimpse of the
Detail
St Basil's Cathedralcapital's public transport, and I noted with distaste that tickets have to be bought from a manned booth (though at least entry into the system is automated), generally recognisable by the lengthy queue in front of it. Mid-afternoon on a Monday, it was surprisingly busy but then again I got on at the closest stop for the 3 main line stations serving Helsinki, St Petersburg, Central Asia, and most Trans-Siberian trains. The metro platforms are well below ground, meaning that the escalators, though speedy, took sufficiently long that I saw people reading books on them. The metro is also an attraction in its own right, with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and mosaics among the decorative touches.
The crush of passengers on the train belied the fact that Russia is actually one of the few countries in the world with a declining population, with one reason being the sheer expense of raising children (apparently there are more abortions than live births). A surfeit of alcohol-related issues and poor health care are just two factors that mean the average man will not live to see 60 (i.e. life expectancy is lower than it was a hundred years ago), though the
average woman will reach her early 70s. I wonder if the Russian bride service available on many Russia travel forums is emphasising that it's not just personal happiness that's at stake but the repopulation of Mother Russia.
My hostel was disappointing, being expensive (though average by the standards of Moscow hostel prices) and having apparently more working people than travellers staying there. As I think I moaned about at length in Australia, anyone who stays in a hostel for weeks on end will treat it like it's their own and not respect the shared areas. The free Internet that I'd been looking forward to was unavailable due to some technical fault, and ongoing renovations meant I had to wander upstairs for a shower. Neither situation had been rectified when I returned from a week-long visit to St Petersburg (blogged separately).
There's a vast gulf in Russia between the haves and have-nots, with the difference in net worth between the richest and poorest 10% in the country being twice what it is in the UK. A quarter of the nation's wealth is owned by just 100 people. Much of this wealth is concentrated in Moscow, which boasts more billionaires
Icicles
Kolomenskoye than any other city in the world (including New York). I didn't find this hard to believe judging by the frequency with which I saw expensive cars on the streets.
What was more surprising was that President Putin, who has presided over this inequitable division of the country's fortune, has such enormously high popularity ratings (though it's hard to know whether or not those are rigged, given his influence on the media). It's almost as though people think that the country as a whole must be doing well if some of its citizens are able to purchase Premier League football clubs. Democracy can sometimes be overrated, but with power being concentrated in such a small clique in the Kremlin, it doesn't look as though it's even going to be given a chance in Russia. Obviously the blame for this is not entirely Putin's. He was chosen by Boris Yeltsin as a safe successor because they had a similar attitude to personal gain - Putin's first decree as president was to grant lifelong immunity from prosecution and seizure of assets to Yeltsin and his inner circle.
My first night in Moscow, the temperature rose about 10 degrees, causing the
snow to melt on the ground (good for walking) but also loosening whatever had been on the rooftops (bad for walking, as chunks of snow and ice would suddenly rain down at random intervals). However the sky remained grey and unfriendly.
As with the last couple of capital cities I've visited, Moscow's heart is in a square containing a mausoleum. In this case, the square is Red Square and the mausoleum is Lenin's (though for some reason he wasn't accorded the same aircraft hangar-sized building that Mao and Damdinii Suhbaatar merited). Red Square is bounded on one side by a wall of the Kremlin, with the department store GUM opposite. St Basil's Cathedral is an orange wonder at the south-eastern end - having already seen the Church of the Resurrection in St Petersburg in a very similar style, St Basil's didn't give me as much of a jolt as if it was the first example of its type I'd ever set eyes on, and up close it did lose some of its grandeur (as do most buildings - the Taj is one of the few that, if anything, improves with proximity). However it's still a fascinating creation and the
succession of cloudy days I endured gave me a great deal of frustration that I couldn't capture its colour and vivacity. I was surprised to learn that Ivan the Terrible, a man better known for throwing dogs off the Kremlin walls, frying up miscreants in a man-sized pan, and killing his own son in a fit of rage, had given the go-ahead for the building of the cathedral (though legend has it he liked it so much that he had the architect's eyes put out to prevent him designing anything similar, an inconvenience that the architect supposedly took in his stride and was next to be seen supervising a project in the town of Vladimir 250km to the east).
The square itself acquired its name from the Russian word for beautiful, that morphed over time into "red" due to the colour being an approximation of beauty in the long cold winter. Sadly, a skating rink had been set up outside of GUM during my visit, ruining the lines of sight across the square.
There's an incredible amount of things to experience in Moscow, which I only realised when I augmented the 6 pages of the TSH with the
200+ pages of the RG to Moscow that I borrowed from the hostel. You would probably need a week of constant haring around to make inroads into the sheer number of places to see and activities to do. I had a week, but insufficient energy to make the most of it so I only have a handful of experiences worth describing.
The Kremlin citadel is the largest of the main tourist sites in the heart of the city, looming over Red Square and bordered on its southern side by the Moskva river. Its towers, spiking skyward from the skewed pentagon described by its walls, overlook what has been the seat of Russian power for hundreds of years. To have ones remains buried in its walls is an honour reserved for a chosen few. Though Parliament now meets elsewhere, the President still has an official residence in the Kremlin and enough official business is transacted there that two thirds of the buildings are off-limits to tourists, a policy enforced by whistle-happy policemen.
Though anyone of my generation would have first heard of the Kremlin in the context of the atheist Soviet state, its walls contain a number of churches
and cathedrals. The oldest (originally built in the 14th century) and most important of these, used for coronations, inaugurations of Patriarchs, and divine requests/thanks, is the Cathedral of the Assumption. It contains an enormous iconostasis, one of whose component icons is a copy of the much-revered Our Lady of Vladimir. A second copy of this icon resides at the rear of the cathedral, and between them these two copies are venerated at least as much as the original.
For sheer opulence, there can not be many places in the world to rival the Armoury Chamber, a mere couple of hundred metres away from the Kremlin's religious buildings. This collection of state treasures includes coronation robes, carriages, armour, jewellery, dinner services, crowns, thrones, swords, guns, maces, plus umpteen ambassadorial gifts from foreign countries. The amount of gold, silver, and precious stones is staggering, with clearly no expense spared.
However my main reason for visiting was to see the Armoury's collection of Faberge eggs, intricate jewel-encrusted creations from the workshops of Carl Faberge that were exchanged by the Tsar and Tsarina as Easter gifts. Sumptuous materials and astounding craftsmanship produced a set of miniature masterpieces, each with its own unique
characteristics, e.g. containing a model ship or playing a tune when opened. Of most interest to me was the Great Siberian Easter Egg, widely regarded as the finest of the clutch. This marvel contains a tiny gold clockwork train with locomotive, 5 carriages, and a church car, which could apparently travel 20m when fully wound up. Its headlights are diamonds and its rear lights rubies. Though bearing little resemblance to the trains that I had crossed Siberia on, it was a reminder that the route I had recently traced across the breadth of the country had been in existence for over 100 years. There was a certain asymmetry to viewing an object made to commemorate the opening of the railway soon after I'd reached its end.
My trip to Kolomenskoe coincided with the one exception to dull weather that Mother Nature was to grant me in Moscow. Kolomenskoe was a royal estate that boasted a wooden palace described as yet another "8th Wonder of the World". Its construction in 1667, with no lessons having been learned from London's main newsworthy event the previous year, used neither saws nor nails, however within a generation it had become so dilapidated that
it had to be pulled down.
Fortunately the estate contains other, still extant, attractions which loom among the oak trees on the snow-carpeted bank of the river Moskva. The Church of the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan is the first, its blue domes covered with gold stars. Soon after you reach the Front Gate, which was originally flanked by mechanical lions that roared a greeting, sadly now lost. But the real spectacle becomes apparent as you walk through the Front Gate, the ground gradually sloping down to the river with Moscow spread out to the north and the creamy-white Church of the Ascension thrusting into the blue nearby. The church has a tent roof that's atypical of the prevailing ecclesiastical domed style of nearly half a millenium ago, and its monochrome simplicity has the starkness of a winter's day. It has a connection to St Basil's, being built by the then-childless father of Ivan the Terrible as an offering to the heavens to grant him an heir - it was then Ivan who commissioned St Basil's. The church is also linked to Ivan via its appearance in Eisenstein's film about his life.
With the Hermitage in St
Petersburg having overdosed me with what the rest of the world had to offer in the way of art, I redressed the balance by visiting the Tretyakov Gallery, housing the planet's largest collection of Russian art. In fact I was predominantly interested in religious icons, holy images to be found in Russian churches and homes which are venerated and often believed to possess great powers. Painted on wooden varnished panels, they were often augmented with plain or gem-studded metal revetments that highlighted (or hid) certain parts of the icon. For over half a millenium, pretty much the only art being produced in Russia had a religious theme, and icons were the most important genre. The works of masters such as the 14th century monk Andrei Rublev are highly atmospheric, their depictions of saints, Our Lady, and Christ himself darkened by the candle smoke of their host churches.
I also enjoyed the paintings of Vereshchagin, who had travelled widely in Asia and captured much of what he saw on canvas. The colours and detail of his views of the Taj and a glacier near Ladakh have an immediacy that is missing from black and white photos of the same period,
and it was like browsing someone's holiday snaps. It's astounding that we can capture a memory nowadays with a simple click of a button - the equivalent process in the past required hours if not days, and no little skill, and even then you weren't left with a minuscule SD card but an unwieldy painting.
There's impressive Soviet architecture dotted around the city. Seven enormous buildings - all ornamented with statues and topped by illuminated red stars - form an arc around Moscow's centre. These "Stalin skyscrapers" were supposedly built so that foreign visitors wouldn't make unflattering comparisons with Western capitals on the basis of a lack of tall buildings. There were also some impressive pavilions at the VVTs (aka the All-Russia Exhibition Centre), a complex originally built to showcase Soviet products and technology but now awash with imports.
With Christmas fast approaching and little in the way of contents for my family's Christmas stockings, I headed to Izmaylovo Market to remedy the situation. The market attracts locals and tourists in hordes, with the approach form the Izmaylovsky Park metro stop lined with babushkas selling home-made textiles and home-grown vegetables. The sections of the market aimed at the
tourist trade were clear form the presence of a vast population of matrioshkas, the stacked dolls peering out at prospective customers from faces ranging from that of the traditional country girl to more recent novelty developments such as Saddam Hussein, and in sizes from 18 inches all the way down to almost microscopic. There were matrioshkas with up to 50 components, and prices up to several thousand dollars for those exhibiting the most detailed and precise workmanship. I would guess there were enough of them to fill every mantelpiece from Moscow to Vladivostok.
There were also numerous stalls offering Soviet propaganda posters, military paraphernalia (pins to helmets to medals to guns), icons, lacquer boxes, brown bearskins, balalaikas, and anything else you might associate with Russia. The sound of so many American and English voices seemed incongruous, with nowhere else that I'd visited having had such a density of foreign tourists. It was clear that many Westerns would be waking up to a matrioshka under their Christmas tree on 25th December.
As with most of the known world, and an indication of what a pitiful state we are in as a race, Harry Potter books are popular here too.
Except that in Russia, courtesy of the lack of an "h" sound in the language, he's acquired the harder-sounding name of Garry Potter. However I bet that even in Cyrillic he's an annoying little sgit.
My couple of interactions with Moscow nightlife were disappointing, with decent music proving impossible to find, and crowded venues predominating. Many of the recommended places also featured "face control", designed to keep out the type of guests who might turn up scruffy, unshaven, and wearing a fake Diesel T-shirt, battered cargo pants, and trainers ready to fall apart. Since my pride wouldn't be able to handle such a rejection, I left such establishments to the young and trendy of the city. As if they'd be listening to O-Zone anyway.
Russian food has a reputation for being utilitarian but, with so many European and Asian influences from the ex-Soviet republics, there was no shortage of interesting dishes on offer throughout the country. I ticked off the obvious chicken Kiev (yes, the name's Ukrainian and it was invented by a Frenchman and popularised in the US but I think most people would associate it with Russia), beef Stroganov, blini, and pelmeni (Siberian dumplings that for
some reason are usually described as ravioli even though they resemble, and are descended from, Chinese dim sum). Borscht was given a wide berth due to my gag reflex to the smell of beetroot. I'd eaten caviar before and it hadn't done much for me. I also avoided vodka as my interactions with hard liquor this year have generally left me bedridden. There's a lot of beer around, even though Russians seem to view it more as a refreshing drink rather than booze.
Sadly my final few days in Moscow were a return to dorm living, brought on by a lack of private room availability at a sensible price, and the world of snorers and smelly feet was briefly mine before the calendar indicated it was December 18th, a day that featured the end of my Russian visa and the beginning of my flight to London.
Dull but possibly useful info Buying a ticket on the #3 train straight through from Beijing to Moscow would have cost about $370. With the stopovers I did, and buying each leg's ticket in person as I went, I paid just under $400. By contrast, a guy I met in Moscow went
via an agency for his ticket straight through from Moscow to Beijing and paid $600. I would certainly advise that if you're travelling at this time of year, you should do it yourself as availability is not an issue (in the sense that you'll be able to get on
a train from A to B, even if not the particular one you want) and neither is a lack of Russian-speaking ability. Even if you get your hostel/hotel to buy your next leg's ticket each step of the way (probably $10 commission each time), you'll still save over $100. Flying would cost $500-600. One obvious difference with flying is that the average speed of the entire trip via rail was a mere 60km/h - taking all the border-crossing time out of the equation would increase this but not by much.
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james smith
non-member comment
great photos
great photos, but your blog is so miserable