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Published: March 30th 2009
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Red Square
Can't you just see the tanks and artillery rolling by in the annual May Day Parade? The Kremlin is on the left, just behind the wall Another early morning, another early flight and it’s off to Moscow. Our Aeroflot Tupelov TU-154 was comfortable and well attended. Aeroflot is the old Soviet commercial airline. Since the fall of communism, they’ve done a marvelous job of bringing the airlines into the 21st century.
The flight was pleasant, uneventful and right on time into Moscow Sheremetievo airport by about 11 AM. After a quick stop at an ATM to get some Rubles we took a 90 minute cab ride through some of the most depressing apartments, stores, offices and just plain Soviet drech you can imagine.
When we got closer to our hotel, which is within a few blocks of the Bolshoi Theater, Red Square and the Kremlin, the architecture looks more like late 1800’s Eastern Europe. It could be Vienna or Prague or Budapest. But it’s not.
It’s the central location of the Soviet block of communism. It started with the Bolshevik Revolution to depose the Tsar (remember Doctor Zhivago?) and became home base for Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev - all the guys we of our generation grew up learning to hate and to fear.
Red Square was the site for all those May Day
GUM Department Store
a far cry for waiting hours to buy a single loaf of bread. parades with the tanks and guns and precisely marching Soviet troops. The word “Kremlin” conjures up images of the Politburo, the party elite and the Khrushchev saying “We will bury you.” It brings to mind the KGB and all the spy vs spy metaphors.
Well, it’s all here, folks. All the history and all the drama and all the memories from those cold war days are easily recalled by walking these places and seeing these sights.
We walked the halls of the GUM department store. Today, it’s an upscale shopping center filled with high-end shops. The shelves are loaded with high-priced shoes (about every third store), designer clothing and eateries with unpronounceable foreign names.
During the cold war, GUM was the only game in town and the people would cue up for hours just to get a single loaf of bread, a pair of shoes or half a kilo of potatoes. No longer is this true. The country is not filthy rich, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at this 2-block long 3-story shopping center. The only clue to its Russian heritage is the Cyrillic lettering on the outside and in every shop window. There is
Coffee House
yep, it really says "Coffee House" a prohibition against having foreign words on the outside of any building or on any billboard. Accordingly, unless you read some Cyrillic as I do, you’re easily lost.
It’s ironic that our hotel gave us a map with the street names, sights and attractions in English-like Latin script, but none of the signs on the streets or buildings coincided with them.
The Kremlin is full of Orthodox cathedrals, statues of Soviet heroes and canons that date back to the 19th century. It was a fortress constructed in the 18th century by the Tsars to protect against the Mongol hordes.
Outside the walls is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We witnessed the changing of the guard ceremony that occurs at the top of each hour. The ceremony is rather unimpressive when compared to some of the others we’ve seen for example, our own US ceremony at Arlington Cemetery, the one in Athens, the one in Sophia Bulgaria and so on. Oh yeah, the one in London ain’t bad either.
Finally, we walked entirely too far down an entirely too crowded street to get to the end and catch a glimpse of the old KGB headquarters. If
St. Basil's Cathedral
pretty much like a fairy tale you are considering the trip, don’t waste you time on this tiring saunter from Red Square.
A much more impressive site is St. Basil’s Cathedral. If you’ve never seen the multi-colored domes of this masterpiece, just at the south end of Red Square, you’ve truly missed something. I think it rivals if not surpasses crazy King Ludwig II’s fairy tale castle at Neuschwanstein - the one that inspired Walt Disney world’s castle.
Of the three days we spent in Moscow, the weather was consistently right around freezing during the day and predictably cooler at night. There’s snow on the ground, but not a lot of it. We had bright sunshine droning our middle day and overcast/snow flurries the other days. Pretty fitting for this place, don’t you think?
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