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Day 17
You can’t travel without some bad weather and today was our day with heavy rain and temperatures in the upper 40’s. We started the day with a bus tour of the city. You know the tours where you sit on the bus and the guide points out buildings and gives you a two-sentence factoid. St. Petersburg will be hosting the World Cup and so the city is being spruced up which means road repairs which mean huge traffic jams; unlike Moscow the traffic problems are very localized. The one place we got us of the bus was to visit Peter & Paul Fortress which was built by Peter the Great as defense for the city in the event of a counter attack by Sweden. Prior to Peter the Great, the now insignificant country of Sweden was a dominant European power. Defeating Sweden and obtaining the land on which St Petersburg stand and access to the Gulf of Finland was a major effort for a good part of Peter’s reign. It is where Peter and most of the Tsars that followed him are buried. Along side it is the Trubetskoy Bastion which was a prison from the early 18
th Century through the early 20
th century. The Communists claimed it was a place of torture and death under the Tsars, but, it was the four Seasons of prisons when compared to Stalin’s prisons and work camps. It is true that torture was a primary means of interrogation under Peter and many of the Tsars that followed him, but it was also used extensively under Stalin. In Svetlana Alexeivich’s Secondhand Time, she relates the oral history of the time of Stalin. In one person’s history he tells of getting massages for his trigger finger because he and his colleagues in the NKVD couldn’t meet the quota for shooting people because their trigger fingers got tired. He goes on to say he wore a leather apron at work to protect himself from the blood of the people he was torturing and shooting. At the end of the day he would be given cologne to wash with to get rid of the blood that covered the upper part of his body and vodka to numb himself. It was the modern-day version of the rack and wheel.
Around lunch, which was Russian pies, the rain let up. We had an hour boat ride
through the waterways of St Petersburg. It is a beautiful city that deserves the title of the Venice of the North. In fact, in some ways it is more beautiful as well as being a much grander scale.
Jack was sick again so when we got back to the hotel, he went to rest. I set out of the Museum of Ethnology to see the exhibit of the history of the Jews. The Museum was supposed to be open until 9, but when I got there at 6 they were just closing. Subsequently, I learned that the museum’s audio guide did not cover this and even if I had gained entry, I wouldn’t have understood much of what was on display.
We ate at Restaurant Schengen and had a great meal.
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