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Published: June 11th 2010
MOSCOW, THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION - (August 2007)
- (Wednesday 22nd to Wednesday 29th August) - (Moscow) The train pulled into Kazansky train station in central Moscow during the mid-afternoon of Wednesday 22nd August - (Whilst I think it was Kazansky Station, after all this time I can’t be certain as Moscow has a number of train stations which serve Russia, the former Soviet Republics and the rest of Europe, and beyond).
It was a relief to finally get off the train. However, I was slightly apprehensive about what lay in front of me in this unfamiliar city. This feeling wasn’t helped by all the stories I’d heard about Russia being very unfriendly and bureaucratic. As with all nationalities, I’d heard my fair share of stereotypes about Russians being very sullen and stand-off’ish and generally, just being unfriendly. However, as is generally the case with stereotypes, these turned out to be largely untrue - apart from people behind ticket counters at railway stations - in which case the stereotypes were certainly true!
Being in a new city and not knowing whether it would easy to get about, I had already pre-booked a taxi through the hostel to pick
me up and take me from the train station to the hostel. However, I couldn’t see any sign of the taxi when I got off the train. I wandered around the station and went in and out of the station several times trying to find some sign of where the taxi was. I’d virtually given up when I quite randomly bumped into the driver who was wandering around the station aimlessly with a piece of cardboard with my name on. In pigeon English, and with hand signs and exasperated sighs from the driver, I worked out that he was telling me he was late because of the traffic. And as I was to find out on this and on subsequent visits to Moscow with work, the traffic in Moscow is indeed horrendous!
Surprisingly for a taxi, the taxi was of the modern expensive variety of four wheeled drive car - although it really doesn’t matter what type of car you have in Moscow, because you can’t get very far very quickly because of the traffic. After what seemed an eternity of stop/ start/ slow driving, stop and start again, we finally arrived at the hostel.
Accommodation throughout Moscow
is exorbitantly priced, even the hostels. On the recommendation of a few people I’d met in Uzbekistan, I’d booked into a hostel called Godzilla Hostel which was relatively near Central Moscow albeit still a few metro stops away from the Red Square area. Although if you wanted to, and I quite often did, you could walk from the hostel to Red Square in just under an hour.
The cost of the hostel was around £35 per night for a bed in a 6-bed doom room which was exorbitant compared with what I had been paying ever since leaving Australia 5 months earlier (I’m almost certain it was £ but it could have been $!). However, I had just arrived in one of the largest cities in Europe and the hostel was conveniently located and clean, so I suppose it wasn’t that badly priced, and while it was not the best hostel I’ve ever stayed in, it was ok and clean, and the staff friendly and helpful.
Thurs 23rd August- (Day trip to Sergiev Posad) - On the first night in the hostel I met up with Andrew, an Australian Civil Engineer who had spent quite a bit of
time in Russia and could speak a little Russian.
Whilst I had planned to spend the next few days orientating myself around Moscow itself, Andrew had plans to visit Sergiev Posad, an important Monastery town located around 60km from Moscow, the following day. After being stuck on a train for the last 3 days with virtually no one who spoke any English, I was glad of the company and decided to take up his offer and go with him.
Getting there was supposed to be relatively easy but as is quite often the case when you don’t speak the language, things weren’t that easy. The hostel had given us the train number and the times of the trains that we could catch to get to Sergiev Posad, so it should have been relatively straight forward. However, as I was to find out in Russia, getting a train ticket at a Russian train station is never easy for foreigners. So after Andrew had tried out his limited Russian and got shouted at and ignored a few times by the women behind the ticket counters, we gave up and found a bus that was going to Sergiev Posad instead. Fortunately,
the bus ended up being far more straight forward and relatively easy to use.
The Monastery town of Sergiev Posads is said to be one of the most important and active in Russia and was at one time shortly after it was founded in the 1340’s, the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox church. The Bolsheviks closed down most of the monasteries in the town shortly after taking power. The main monastery however, was reopened after WW2 as a museum and was later used as the residence of the Russian patriarch. The Russian patriarch and the church’s administrative centre moved to Moscow in 1988 but despite the move, the Monastery of St Sergius in the town remains one of the most important spiritual sites in Russia.
It was my first sight of the 'onion domes' of Russian churches and they looked spectacular. Within the Monastery compound there were lots of churches dating back to the early 1400’s which looked impressive both on the outside and also on the inside where lots of the Russian religious style icon’s and frescos were painted onto the walls. The compound was made all the more fabulous with all the ornate churches being
packed tight together and with monks mingling with the long queues of pilgrims queuing up to get into the churches.
We spent a good few hours wandering around and in and out of the Churches soaking up the atmosphere. A visit to Sergiev Posad can easily be done in a day and after a few hours wandering around the town and monasteries, we caught the bus back to Moscow and the hostel around mid-afternoon.
Fri 24 - Sun 26th Aug - (Moscow) - I spent the next few days sightseeing around Moscow. I hadn’t realised before I began reading up on Moscow about how much there is to see and do in the city. Moscow really is well worth a visit and I was glad I'd made the effort to get there.
The most spectacular attractions are probably all clustered around Red Square and the Kremlin which were easily accessible from the hostel either by using the metro or by walking. Red Square itself is a large (400m by 150m) open space which is lined with magnificent buildings. As we all no-doubt remember from watching TV pictures from the Soviet era, the Soviets used to use
Red Square for elaborate military parades during which they showcased the armed forces and presumably tried to instil a bit of fear into the ‘Capitalist Enemy’!
One way to enter the Square is through the impressive Resurrection Gate which was rebuilt in 1995 as an exact copy of the original which had been built in 1680 but which had apparently been knocked down in 1931 because Stalin considered it an impediment to the parades held in the square. The square is virtually closed to traffic except for the occasional limousines that travel in and out of the Kremlin from time to time. The Square, adjacent Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral, which are the picture postcard images of Moscow, are all very impressive, particularly when floodlit at night.
Adjacent to Red Square is Lenin’s mausoleum which stands at the foot of the Kremlin. The mausoleum contains the embalmed body of Lenin who was placed in the mausoleum in 1924 and has remained there ever since apart from a brief period during WW2 when the body was removed to Siberia because of the threat of the Nazis occupying Moscow.
In the past I’ve visited the mausoleums and seen the
embalmed bodies of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh in Beijing and Ho-Chi Min City respectively. So as I was here in Moscow, I just couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit another embalmed body, of which Lenin as far as I’m aware, is the last one on the list of ‘Great Leaders' whose bodies have been embalmed and are now on display to the general public that I had to visit!
One footnote concerning the embalmed body is that apparently from 1953 to 1961, Lenin shared his mausoleum with Stalin. However, in 1961, at the 22nd Party Congress the esteemed Bolshevik Madam Spiridonova announced that Lenin had appeared to her in a dream insisting that he did not want to spend eternity with his successor - and who would blame him! And as a consequence, Stalin was removed and buried along the ‘Kremlin wall’ along with other former Soviet leaders and dignitaries.
I must admit to being very underwhelmed by it all. There was a bit of a queue to get inside but the whole process didn’t take long. When you were inside you had to file past the body quite quickly and you didn’t have the chance
to have a good long look. The majority of the people visiting the mausoleum were tourists who were there out of curiosity, just like me, and there was none of the reverence that perhaps the tomb may have had in past communist times and which I had seen at Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum in Vietnam.
The most impressive sight adjacent to Red Square is St Basils (Pokrovsky) Cathedral which was built between 1551 and 1561. Within the Cathedral are nine main chapels which are lined with spectacular frescoed walls. The Cathedral really is an impressive sight with all the brightly coloured onion domes and spectacular painted fresco’s inside and it’s well worth a visit and walk around after dark as well when the Cathedral looks even more magnificent all lit up.
Adjacent to Red Square is the Kremlin which has been for a long time, and still is, the apex of political power in Russia. Today, the Kremlin is enclosed by high walls 2.25km long with Red Square outside its east wall.
Before arriving in Russia I’d always thought that the Kremlin was exclusive to Moscow. However, apparently a ‘Kremlin’ is a town’s fortified stronghold and any
town or city of any relative size in Russia has its own Kremlin.
According to the tourist literature, the first Moscow Kremlin was built in the 1150’s and was relatively small compared to the current Kremlin compound. Over the years, the Kremlin grew with the importance of Moscow’s Princes and became the head-quarters of the Russian Church in the 1320’s. By the end of the 15th century, the Tsar Ivan the Great brought in master builders from Italy to supervise the building of new walls and towers, most of which still stand today. The builders also built the Kremlin’s three great cathedrals which are located within the current Kremlin compound.
Although Peter the Great moved the capital to St Petersburg in 1710, the Kremlin’s cathedrals continued to be used for coronations and other celebrations up until the Bolshevik revolution. Assumption Cathedral, which was the main Russian cathedral of pre-revolutionary Russia (built between 1475 and 1479) was the burial place of most of the heads of the Russian Orthodox Church from the 1320’s to 1700 and the cathedral contains some of Russia’s oldest icons which date back to the 12th century. Another of the cathedrals, Archangel Cathedral (1505 -
1508) was for centuries the coronation, wedding and burial church of the Tsars. The tombs of most of Russia’s rulers from the 1320’s to the 1690’s are contained within the cathedral.
To enter the Kremlin compound you need to get a ticket and I’d been told to get there early to avoid the tickets selling out, which I duly did. Once inside the Kremlin compound, I headed straight to the cathedrals with the rest of the tour groups. Whilst there were plenty of tour groups about and at times it got quite crowded within the cathedrals, this didn’t take away from the magnificence of the cathedrals themselves.
The cathedrals are all packed in closely together which only seems to add to their magnificence. The ornately decorated cathedrals with their onion domes and brightly painted icons and frescoed walls all made for a very impressive experience. Even though some of the icons and frescos were slightly faded through age, this didn’t detract from their splendour. I spent an hour or so just looking around the cathedrals soaking up the historic religious nature of the setting and the magnificence of the architecture. Unfortunately you can only take pictures outside and
you have to make do with buying postcards to remember the inside of the cathedrals.
Apart from the cathedrals, the ticket that I had bought also allowed me to visit the Kremlin Armoury, which is a vast collection of opulent treasures collected over the centuries by the Russian Tsar and Russian church. So vast are the displays and so popular with tourists, the tickets that you buy are for a specific entry time. Once inside, it was immediately obvious how vast and opulent the collection was. The royal regalia contained within the Armoury included such items as the joint coronation throne of boy Tsar Peter Great and his half-brother Ivan V, as well as an 800-dimond throne of Tsar Alexey, Peters farther. The Armoury also contains the gold Cap of Monomakh - which is a jewel studied crown that was worn for two centuries at royal coronations until 1682. There are also rooms upon rooms full of ornately decorated coaches which were used for coronations, together with clothing and weapons worn and used by the royals.
There is also a separate diamond exhibition which shows off a vast collection of precious stones and jewels obtained by the Tsars
and Empresses over the centuries including apparently the largest sapphire in the world, as well as a 190 carat diamond given to Catherine the Great. One room also houses the renowned eggs made from precious metals and jewels by St Petersburg jewellers Faberge. Apparently the Tsar and Tsarina traditionally exchanged these gifts each year at Easter. The most famous of all the eggs, (although I had never heard of it previously), is the Grand Siberian Railway egg which was created to commemorate the completion of the Moscow to Vladivostok railway line in 1905. The egg contains a gold train and a platinum locomotive which has ruby headlamps.
All of this opulence made the British crown jewels displayed in London seem very ordinary and modest. The Armour was indeed very impressive although there was just too much in the museum to take in all at once. Despite the fact that it was all very impressive, after a couple of hours I started to lose interest and began to skip rooms and hurriedly walk through others while merely glancing at the displays.
Not all the Kremlin is open to the public. On the other side of the complex is the
700 room ‘Great Kremlin Palace’ which was built between 1838 and 1849 as an imperial residence. It is still in use today as the official residence of the Russian President and is now used for state visits and receptions.
Moscow is a vast city with much to see although I spent quite a bit of my time there just walking around the Red Square area where there were plenty of grand historical and not so historical buildings to admire. Fortunately though, Moscow has a great Metro system which first opened in 1935 and which makes it easy to get around the city. There are over 150 stations on the metro system with many of the stations being works of art with marbled-faced frescoed walls and gilded works of art lining the tunnel walls.
The metro stops also seem to be a magnate for impromptu music concerts all around the city and I would often walk up from the metro to street level and have to pass through lots of teenagers sat around in the early evening sun listening to some rock/ pop group/ busker.
Contrary to reports/ exaggerated scare stories that I had heard before arriving about
the police stopping tourists and asking for papers and trying to get money out of them, I didn’t come across any of this while I was in the city and the metro proved to be an invaluable and easy way to get around.
While I am on the topic of the police, Russian regulations require you to register within 3 days of arriving in Russia and you are always supposed to carry your passport and this registration certificate with you at all times. Your hotel/ hostel is supposed to register you (and mine did - for a price of course!). However, there appeared to be some confusion within the traveller community, but also at the hostels/ hotels themselves as to whether you had to register within three days of entering the country or whether you only had to register if you were staying in one place more than three days at a time. And also, whether you had to register only once when you arrived in Russia, or whether you had to register everywhere you stayed more than 3 days. Now after 10 visits to Russia (all with work apart from this one), I still don’t know the answer
and I’m not sure the hotels do either!
I think that it is this confusion that catches a lot of foreigners out and the police look to stop tourist and try to exhort money out of them because they know that there is a lot of confusion about the requirements. However, as I said, I was not stopped or approached once during my time in Russia by the police so perhaps it is just what I said above, exaggerated scare stories!
I didn’t find Moscow as expensive as I had initially thought it would be. It wasn’t cheap, but it is a capital city so you have to expect that. The hostel where I was staying had a few cheap restaurants around it to eat at although even though I had now been in Russian speaking countries for the last few months, I still couldn’t decipherer much of what was on the menus and I still had to resort to picking my food at random and hoping for the best if the restaurant menu wasn’t in English, which they generally weren’t apart from those located around Red Square and the Kremlin.
Around Red Square and the Kremlin
there were plenty of nice restaurants where, if I splashed out a bit, it was possible to sit, eat and drink outside in the evening sun and people watch. While I was in Moscow it was quite hot (being around the mid 30's during the day) so it was nice just to sit out in the sun at one or two of these restaurants and bars and just let the world go by.
The first MacDonald’s that opened in the old Soviet Union in 1990 is also located quite near to Red Square. I have to admit that I did go in and it seemed to be much the same as any other MacDonald’s anywhere else in the world. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but I can still remember the pictures on the TV news all those years ago which showed people queuing up for the restaurant to open and then everyone rushing inside to get to the counter first!
Being one of the biggest cities in Europe, if not the world, there is a lot to see in Moscow. I tried my best to see as much as I could in the 3 or
so days I was there. However, it was impossible to see everything. Places that I visited during my time in Moscow worthy of a mention that are not mentioned above include:
• The Novodevichy Convent which was founded in 1524 to celebrate the taking of Smolensk from Lithuania. The convent is very impressive and atmospheric and the interior of the cathedral is covered in 16th Century frescos while the convent grounds are peaceful and atmospheric and a nice place to walk around and sit and contemplete.
• The adjacent Novodevichy Cemetery which was unfortunately just closing when I arrived and as I consequence I only had the chance to have a quick 5 minutes look around. The cemetery is apparently a who’s who of Russian politics and culture with lots of famous Russian and Soviet people buried here. Among them is Stalin’s second wife whose tomb is covered by unbreakable glass to prevent vandalism. In Soviet times the cemetery was also used to bury eminent people whom the authorities judged unsuitable for the Kremlin wall - most notable amongst these is Khrushchev.
• The Andrei Sakharov Museum which is located in a two storey house in a
suburb of Moscow which took quite a bit of finding, although it was probably just about worth the effort if only to find out more about the life of the nuclear physicist, turned human rights advocate. One of the most eye catching things that I can remember from the museum was watching short TV clips of the testing of plutonium bombs which looked unbelievably powerful and destructive while at the same time very colourful and oddly beautiful!
• The Contemporary History Museum which provided an account of Soviet history from the 1905 and 1917 revolutions up to the 1980’s where there was an extensive collection of propaganda posters which were all very interesting;
• The State Tretyakov Gallery which is said to hold the best collection of Russian icons as well a collection of other pre-revolutionary Russian art - I must admit that I didn’t spend too long in here although I’m told it is very good if you are a fan of art galleries;
• The Museum of the Great Patriotic War which is located within 'Victory Park' and which has displays of every major WWII battle involving Soviet troops as well as exhibiting weapons, photographs,
documentary films and other authentic wartime memorabilia. Again, this museum is massive and well worth a visit; and
• ‘Sculpture Park’, formally called the Park of the Fallen Heroes which has a strange collection of statues of all the (in)famous Soviet heroes such as Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev’s and many more.
In Russia, there is a tradition of going to steamed bathhouses and whilst I was in Moscow, Andrew suggested that we go and try one out. Banya’s, which they are called in Russia, are steamed bath houses where people wash and 'steam' themselves, and also occasionally beat themselves, or someone else, with a venik (a tied bundle of birch branches). While this can apparently be painful, the effect is said to be generally pleasant and cleansing. Apparently, the birch leaves used (or sometimes oak or juniper branches) can help rid the skin of toxins.
We decided to go to a bathhouse recommended in the LP. When we entered, the reception looked and felt like an old Victorian bath house and reminded me a bit of the old swimming baths that I used to go to with my old school in Nelson, England albeit this one
was a lot more ornate. The bath houses are separated by gender and on the reception there was a price list for various things that you could have, although we didn’t really understand any of it.
Fortunately, the receptionist could speak some English and we were given a little bit of an introduction to the facilities, and after we had decided what we were going to pay for from the price list, we were given towels and gowns and shown the way to the changing rooms (a mistake that we made at this stage was not to hire any slippers).
The changing rooms were more than just your average changing rooms, being also a place to hang out with your mates and order food and drink. As tempting as it was, we resisted the urge to order some beers and we got changed into our gowns and headed toward the actual bath house. It was at this stage that it became clear that we would need some slippers as the titled floor was red hot and impossible to walk on with bare feet.
Once we had found some slippers, we headed into the bath house. The bath
house was a large tiled room containing lots of different sized pools which were heated to various temperatures ranging from reasonably hot to ice cold. After having a dip in a warm pool, and then in a slightly cooler pool, we headed into the steam room - and by god it was hot! The steam room was so hot that we could initially only manage a few minutes inside before we had to come out, after which it was even possible, and even nice and welcoming, to plunge into the ice cold plunge pool to cool down!
On occasions, the steam room had a bit of a theatrical performance to it. One of the guys working there would every so often come inside the steam room and start to swirl a towel around and you could feel a blast of heat hit you straight in the face when the swirl of the towel came close to you. He would start off very slowly and gradually build up the speed of his ‘swirling’ like a hammer thrower until coming to a final crescendo where the towel was being swirled around so fast with blasts of heat hitting you slap bang
in the face every other second. After finishing his act/ routine, the ‘swirler’ would then get a tremendous round of applause from everyone inside the steam room. After this ‘swirling’ though, the temperature in the room got even hotter and it was practically unbearable.
It was after one of these performances that we decided that we would test out the birch branches! I don’t think we particularly hit each other very hard as it wasn’t particularly painful. However, it did feel really good and cleansing and hopefully it provided some health benefits. We stayed in the Banya for perhaps a couple of hours before we’d had enough. It was a fantastic experience and I felt so clean after it, although so tired as well. It was well worth going and I made a note to myself that I should do it again - when in Russia, do as the Russians do!
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