Russian Rambles

The great outdoors - near Khimki

2008-01-13T21:37:00.000+03:00

It being the quiet Sunday immediately after the long New Year holiday, and not too cold (-2C), I set off on the bike for the forest. The first thing I came across was these three ladies in towels only and slippers standing outside this building, smoking. Though it was clearly a sauna, or banya, I was so astonished that I had to turn back and take a picture. Seeing me coming back, they retreated inside, and also I was forced to take the picture while cycling, so it is not much to look at, but it illustrates Rob Leitch's (from Mull, but living in St Petersburg) motto for Russia: "Expect the unexpected!"

Next I found these houses in the old part of Khimki, which was built in the mid-1950s when the Communist idea still had some genuine adherents. Khimki was a closed town then as it had aerospace industries in it--it still does--and many "secret" factories. These were some of the more attractive houses for the privileged workers who manned these high-tech plants and were better paid than average for thier contribution to the struggle against capitalist encirclement. They were probably desirable houses when built and, even now, might make nice homes if properly restored, or even maintained. But they are owned by the municipality and so are decaying tragically.

Then I headed out into the forest. The snow-covered tracks are wonderful for cycling on, and they go on for miles and miles. This is completely untrammelled nature, yet only three miles from the centre of Khimki, and not even as far out as the airport. Any further, and you are in total wilderness. One wonders how SNH's fatuous Landscape Inventory would categorise this ground. The picture below is of a shallow lake, with bullrushes round the edge. Doubtless it provides grand duck hunting in the season, as well as many charming places for discrete picnics at other times of the year.

Beyond the lake, I came to the first of new коттеджи (Cottage) developments, of which there is an almost infinte number round Moscow. I cycled up the hill and in through the back, which the viewer will see is open to the forest. I then nosed around taking pictures and having a look. After that, I cycled to the gate and had to ask the astonished guard to let me out through the high-secrity gate pictured at the bottom.

The great outdoors - in Khimki

2008-01-12T21:17:00.000+03:00

Hunters are keen on camouflage. In Russia, the hunting shops seem to feel the same: at least the one in Khimki does, offering a forest scene to confuse the unwary customer who might be looking for a way in. The tell-tale sign is the diagonal handle amidst the trees. Pull that towards you (на себе) and you will be admitted to a world of exotica. The front room, immediately below, is for fishing and and related activities, with, on the right, a rack of awls for boring holes in the ice of frozen rivers. The back room, in the pictures below that, is where the guns are kept. There is a rather wider variety than I remember in, for example, Jimmy Campbell's shop in Bridgend on Islay. But that stocked Isles of the West too, so he's excused.

Skating

2008-01-10T10:49:00.001+03:00

While walking from the Manezh in the Aleksandrovsky Gardens, where there was a rather unremarkable exhibition of Moscow-based photo-reportage (no wit, too many posed pictures, and not enough beauty--I think "ugliness", being "Western" is cool--круто), to Kitai-Gorod, I went through Red Square and saw this enchanting scene. The ice was being prepared for the 4 p.m. session. Prices to skate are from £5 to £10, depending on time, and skate hire is £5 (children are much less). With the huge Christmas tree and the Kremlin walls over to the right, and GUM illuminated to the left, it must make an enchanting scene at night. Eat your heart out Anna Karenina!

A day out on the bike

2008-01-08T19:13:00.001+03:00

It being the last day of the holidays, and a clear blue sky, I thought I would get out on the bike for an hour or two of brisk exercise amd tgry to photograph the ice-fishermen who sit on the ice on rivers in Russia and drop lines through holes which they bore with awls. I cycled down through the pack in Khimki where this T-34 tank is displayed. It was -16C, so although the sun had been out all day, the snow even on the sunny side of the tank had not melted.

Next stop was the church in central Khimki--yesterday (7th January) having been Christmas Day, Old Style--in front of which there is this rather nice little ice rink. The church is being restored, like so many in Russia, and I managed to evade the hawk-like gazes of the old ladies pottering about within and photograph the ceiling, as shown below, which has been recently repainted. The Orthodox Church seems to have a lot of money: I gather much of it from oligarchs who are laundering souls at the same time as money.

Down on the Moscow-Volga canal, the ice was about six inches thick. This was one of the first big projects which Yagoda undertook for Stalin--the other had been the largely useless Baltic-White Sea canal. It was completed in 1937, soon after which Yagoda was replaced by Yezhov, put on trial, then shot. In court, he is said to have shouted out, "I built two great canals for you, Stalin!" According to Fitzroy Maclean, who attended the trial (Bukharin was the main target), Stalin could just be discerned, behind a gauze curtain, lighting his pipe while his former servants pleaded with Vasily Ulrikh (see below) for their lives.

The book about the Butovo Polygon, which I mention below, has an interesting section about the construction of the canal, most of which was done by GULAG labour, excluding the engineering. It gives a chronology which is, roughly, this:

27 March: Water first flows from the Volga into the canal

6 April: The water in the Moscow part of the canal canal reaches the planned level

17 April: The water throughout the whole 128 kilometers of the canal reaches its designed level

22 April: Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Yezhov inspect the works

28 April: All the engineers responsible for building the canal are arrested, including the designer S. Firin

2 May: Grand opening of the canal, attended by Stalin and Molotov, including a procession by river flotilla from the Moscow river to the river port at Khimki

Subsequently: the total of arrested technicians and engineers reaches 218, almost all of whom are shot.

There seem to be no fishing on the canal at all today, though there are many holes revealing the presence of fishermen in recent days. Instead there are strollers, like the two elderly people above, plus skiers, and the marks of some skaters. I see the spoor of a snow-bike and even, slightly to my surprise, another bicycle. I am pleased to see I can move more quickly than the skiers.

I stopped after a few miles as the light was going and photographed this church. Next time, I shall start earlier, not stop in any churches and make a lot more distance. It is a fantastic place to cycle, being completely flat and without motorised traffic. Lots of people were walking along the bank, and I even saw a man, naked from the waist up, doing exercises amidst the trees at the edge of the canal.

Final picture, of a the setting sun reflected off a block of 1970s flats, not far from where the Moscow-St Petersburg railway line crosses the canal. Incidentally, the long neglect of Soviet years shows in the broken-down state of the canal banks. Millions and millions will have to be spent to bring the works up to proper standards.

First year, miscellaneous

2007-12-08T21:25:00.000+03:00

Finally, for 2007, a few images which have escaped categorisation elsewhere...

The view from half-way up one of the highest buildings in Moscow now, where one of the British accounting firms where I work, has its offices. The Moscow river is in the middle ground and the famous White House, seat of some parts of the Russian federal government, is at the top. This was the building Yelstin's forces shelled during the failed attempt to assert parliamentary government over presidential diktat in 1993.

This is the little church (of Nikola in Khamovniki) near Tolstoy's Moscow property, which is yet another museum I have yet to visit. It is hard to photograph as it is surrounded by other buildings. By contrast, nothing much but mud and wreckage surrounds the sheds at the end of the purple Metro line which takes me to and from Planernaya station every working day. Large parts of Soviet-era Moscow look like this. It is a miracle anything works: yet the metro is actually far more reliable than the London underground, whose sheds, I imagine, are a lot smarter than this.

Below is what it so me one of the most hideous buildings in Moscow, though one of the most lavish--the two often go together in Modern Russia. It is the reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which is a replica of the original, built in the 1880s to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon, and which was blown up in 1932 as part of the reconstruction of Moscow along Soviet lines. It was here that the great Palace of the Soviets was to be constructed, with its 300-foot high statue of Lenin on top. But the ground could not take the projected weight, and money ran out, so the project was abandoned after only the foundations had been dug. In the 1950s the hole was converted into a massive, heated, open-air pool, which became known popularly as the swimming pool of Christ the Redeemer. When I visited the Cathedral with some friends, the Russian lady accompanying us was told not to speak to me and my friend from Scotland about the church, especially in English, as she was not an accredited guide. The official who said this, a smart young man who looked like a Mormon might in Russia, was entirely serious. This is a good example of the fact that the Russian church today has the most oppressive and unpleasant officialdom of any institution in this country that I have had contact with. The hideous car outside, for a wedding, seemed to me entirely appropriate to such an ugly-spirited place.

Below is part of one of the sales counters in an ecclesiastical outfitters to the south of the city centre, very close to where Walter Duranty used to live.

Other aspects of modern Russian life are much more appealing...

This is an advertisement for a mobile phone--Motorola--in the parking lot outside our local supermarket.

And finally a Russian street scene such as the pedestrian encounters fifty times a day.

And very finally, a foreigner: it is seldom hard to tell the difference. Standing in front of one of the million Moscow building sites, he, like me, was waiting to get the marshrutka to the largest foreign-owned media publishing company in Russia. He was tapping his right foot impatiently.

Sukhanovo

2007-10-23T20:45:00.000+04:00

Three miles south of the MKAD, just off the Kashira highway, lies the village of Vidnoe. Nearby is the hamlet of Sukhanovo. It used to be part of the vast estate of the same name, which was owned by the famous Volkonsky family. In the middle of the hamlet lies a seventeenth-century monastery, called St Catherine’s. It is a peaceful spot, with all the buildings carefully restored in recent years. The visitor would never know that this place used to be the most feared prison in the whole Gulag system.

Nearby stands the neo-classical mansion which was built in the early nineteenth century for Prince Peter Volkonsky, who had commanded the Russian troops at Austerlitz and subsequently became Chief of Staff in the Russian Army. After the revolution, a desirable property like that was naturally taken over by the new rulers, whose notions of proletarian equality were flexible enough to include setting themselves up in the palaces of former princes.

In the case of Sukhanovo, it was Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the NKVD who ended up here. In 1936, after allegedly plotting to kill Stalin, Yagoda was succeeded in his grisly post and princely properties by the strangest of all the blood-thirsty men who ran the NKVD: Nikolai Yezhov. It was he who, when out walking in the grounds of Sukhanovo, spotted the monastery and thought it would make an ideal prison.

It was (then) surrounded by fields and therefore far from prying eyes, yet it was close enough to Moscow to be easily reachable for an evening’s torturing, which was what both he and his successor, Lavrenti Beria, used to like to do when winding down after a hard day’s arrest-warrant signing at the Lubyanka. So common did this practice become in the 1940s, that the prison became known popularly as “Beria’s dacha”.

Yezhov supervised the Great Purge in 1937, but was soon on the other side of the wire himself as an inmate of what was by then known as Sukhanovka. In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn says that prisoners in Lefortovo, Butyrka or the Lubyanka were told that if they did not co-operate with their interrogators, they would be sent to Sukhanovka, which was “the most terrible prison the NKVD had”.

Yezhov was only 5 foot tall, but he used to threaten his victims by making a strangling gesture and saying, “I may be small but I have hands of steel, because they are the hands of Stalin.” After he was incarcerated in the underground cellars of Sukhanovka, he pleaded with his interrogator, “Shoot me, if you like, but do not make me suffer agonies.” When he was finally taken away to be shot, in February 1940—in a building in Varsonofevski Lane, not far from Kuznetsky Most metro station—he collapsed completely. His legs gave way and he had to be dragged screaming, crying and hiccupping uncontrollably to the execution room, with its sloping floor (to ease the task of washing the blood away) and wall of pine logs (to absorb the bullets).

Today, St Catherine’s Monastery echoes to the sound of the Orthodox liturgy, rather than the wet slap of rubber rods on blood-drenched bodies. When the church is silent, the only sounds are of the wind in the trees round about and the quiet slop-slopping of the shoes of the monks as they cross the quadrangle inside the huge, ancient walls. The old interrogation block now contains expensively modernised “cells”, as they are called without any sense of irony, for the monks. Everything inside is warm, clean, carpeted and tastefully furnished. The refectory has beautifully painted Biblical scenes on all the walls. The kitchen is a miracle of stainless steel and micro-wave ovens.

The only evidence of the monastery’s hideous past is a cross and memorial stone in the gardens and, if you look further, outside the walls a pair of crumbling, two-storey buildings which used to house the prison guards.

After Beria’s execution in 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin, Sukhanovka ceased to be a political prison. In 1958 it was turned into a psychiatric prison. Then it became a barracks for the nearby training college for the Moscow militsia (they train these guys?!). In 1991 it was returned to the church, though in a ruinous condition. The rumour is that the main building had, in the 1940s been used as a human incinerator.

The restoration task was enormous. But teams of volunteers, funded generously by the church, have undone the damage of the locust years. It is hard to believe that the place was as smart as this even in 1918 when it ceased to be a monastery (the church was used until 1931). There are lots of excellent photographs showing all stages of the reconstruction work in the lavishly-illustrated book which visitor can buy for a mere 170 roubles in the kiosk on site. It describes the whole history of the monastery from its foundation in 1658 to 2002 when the memorial to the Stalinist repression was unveiled. These can be seen in the foreground in the top photograph.

Sukhanovo - the monks' refectory

2007-10-23T20:44:00.000+04:00

Sukhanovo - the prison

2007-10-23T20:42:00.000+04:00

Above is one of the two, identical buildings which used to house the guards for the prison, now decaying in the middle of a forest of maple trees. The lower picture shows the block which used to house the prison cells.

Sukhanova for petrol heads

2007-10-23T20:16:00.000+04:00

Round the back, beside the garages, I found an old ZiM which dated, I was told, from 1955. Apparently, it still runs. Beria used to drive a Packard. Even if this car had been older, it would have been too modest for the great man (who, incidentally, played football for Georgia in his youth).

Butovo - the killing ground

2007-10-23T20:15:00.000+04:00

From Sukhanovo it is less then ten kilometres to a place called Butovo, where in the 1930s there was an NKVD firing range, or полигон ("polygon"). In 1937, at the time of the Great Terror, Nikolai Yezhov, the successor to Yagoda and Beria's predecessor as head of the Soviet secret police, started shooting people on a huge scale at this site, which was then in woodland fifteen miles or so from the then southern edge of Moscow. Many of the prisoners who had been tortured and/or tried at Sukhanovka prison, were transported the short distance east to Butovo where they were shot and their bodies shoveled into mass graves. One of them is shown in this picture. The heaped ground, perhaps fifteen feet wide and a foot high, stretches fifty yards or so through the trees. In total, there were nearly 21,000 people shot here between early 1937 and late 1938. The place is now a memorial ground, and was visited by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in November 2007.

Butovo - the killing ground

2007-10-23T20:10:00.000+04:00

This picture shows part of the display board near the entrance to the Butovo Polygon. The blue strips show the tranches where the bodies were buried. The whole area is perhaps five or six acres. The previous picture is of the long, slightly kinked trench to the left of the plan around and slightly below the middle.

Butovo - the killing ground

2007-10-23T20:05:00.000+04:00

The table is also displayed near the gate at Butovo, and it shows the number of people shot here every day between August 1937 and October 1938, when the madness started to abate, largely due to the increasing lack of any vaguely plausible victims. Alongside are pictures of some of the people killed, as shown above the table here. A beautifully-produced, 500-page book, full of fascinating illustrations and reproduced documents, gives a full history of the tragedy that took place on this spot, along with a great deal of interesting context and background information. Though sold on site, it is probably available only in Russia. Published in 2007, it is called Бутовский Полигон: Книга Памяти жертв политических репрессий ("Butovsky polygon: a book in memory of the victims of political repression"). The ISBN is 5-93547-008-X. Below is an illustration in the book. It is the signature of a man called Pavel Troitsky, on the left as it was before his arrest, on 29 October 1937, and, on the right, as it was on the night after he was interrogated.

Butovo - the killing ground

2007-10-23T20:00:00.000+04:00

This is the cosy, intimate little church which has been erected near the gate of the Polygon. Across the road is a large, more modern church which was completed this year, and is shown below. The lady in the photograph would not let me enter until she had finished sweeping the steps. There were no other visitors on the occasion I went to Butovo. In side the church was, to my taste, very beautiful.

But, for all the archaeological work that has been done at Butovo, it is not known just how extensive the mass graves are. It is known that some extend outside the fence of the current memorial park, out into the forest which used to surround the area. Today, there are modern houses all around, and the threat apparently exists that some will be built onto of as yet undiscovered mass graves. Below is picture of one of the graves which extends outside the fence, into the as yet undisturbed woodland. But given the rage for building in and around Moscow, and the money at stake, how long will this place stay undeveloped? The relationship between history and the present/future in modern Russia is such that cottages will probably conquer any conscience about the catastrophes of the past.

Butovo

2007-10-23T19:55:00.000+04:00

This is the new memorial church which is one of the more bizarre buildings I have seen in Moscow. The inside (see below) shows the lavishness of the funding, but also an almost chilling sense of cleanliness, order and control. It did not, to me, have any sense of spiritual expresion--not unlike the massive but ghastly Christ the Saviour Church in the central of the city. Perhaps I am missing something, but I preferred the little wooden church, whose interior is shown above.

Butovo

2007-10-23T19:50:00.000+04:00

Perhaps one should not be unfair about the new church. At least it has in its grounds the cross, shown on the left in this picture, which was made from wood taken from the original GULAG camp on the Solovetski Islands. It was brought to Moscow by way of every labour camp on the way, with appropriate ceremony. But then again, maybe I was not being unfair because I was ticked off by a gardener for standing on his lawn when taking this photograph. In the anti-septic, strictly "face-controlled", turbo-anal mood of the nouveau riche in Russia today, it is very much "Keep off the Grass": almost like England!

Tsaritsyno

2007-09-30T21:40:00.000+04:00

Every picture I have seen of the recently reconstructed palace at Tsaritsyno on the southern outskirts of Moscow has shown a massive, pseudo-Gothic building with a few people in the foreground. When I visited the place recently, I found the opposite: a massive crowd with a few pseudo-Gothic towers in the distance. Admittedly it was a Sunday afternoon; admittedly the weather was sunny, warm and pleasantly autumnal, with the feeling that this was probably the last time to get out in shirt-sleeves before the onset of autumn. But really, the crowds! A Russian William Powell Frith could have painted a modern version of “Derby Day” there. So the first point about Tsaritsyno is make sure you visit when it is cold and gloomy, and definitely on a week-day. In fact, that will probably enhance the effect of the extraordinary buildings. Perhaps snowy weather would be the best.

Tsaritsyno has a long and interesting history. It first came to prominence in the seventeenth century when the Streshnev boyar family were recorded as occupying four villages in the area, collectively known as Чёрная Грязь, or Black Dirt/Mud. Later the estate passed into the famous Golitsyn family who built a large manor house there.

But Peter the Great hated and feared the great boyar families, confiscating this one and passing it on to Prince Dmitri Kantemir, the former ruler of Moldova. The Kantemirs avoided Kremlin intrigue and concentrated instead on beautifying their houses, pavilions, lakes and grounds at Чёрная Грязь to such effect that when Catherine the Great visited in 1775 she felt she had to own it. Along with her reputed nymphomania, she also displayed the related quality of almost uncontrollable acquisitiveness. In a less wealthy woman it might have ended up as kleptomania. Within three weeks of setting eyes on Чёрная Грязь, the estate was hers.

Within three months of acquiring the property, Catherine had commissioned the architect, Vasily Bazhenov, to design and build a completely new ensemble of palaces, pavilions and other buildings, including bridges, gates and stables. She specified the Moorish-Gothic style, which was then in vogue in western Europe. Bazhenov is known today for having designed the Pashkov House, which became the Old Building of the Lenin Library. It stands, newly restored like Tsaritsyno, on high ground overlooking the Alexandrovsky Gardens and the Kammeny Most.

Catherine renamed her new estate and work started immediately, continuing until 1786 when Bazhenov was sacked. Some people think that part of the reason was that he was a Freemason. After the Pugachev Revolt in the early 1770s, Catherine had come to regard all secret societies with great mistrust. She had part of Bazhenov’s palace demolished and appointed Matvey Kazakov to replace him.

Kazakov subsequently became famous as one of the most influential architects of the new Moscow which was built after the great fire of 1812. He designed the Moscow University building and the Kremlin Senate, as well as famous Hall of Columns at the bottom of Tverskaya Street. He has been compared to Quarenghi in St Petersburg. But his talent never bore fruit at Tsaritsyno because building stopped again, almost as soon as it had re-started, this time due to lack of money. The reason was the outbreak of the second Russo-Turkish war in 1787, which followed Catherine’s annexation of the Crimea.

At this point, the creative history of Tsaritsyno stopped. The building was never completed, falling slowly into disrepair. Parts of it were used variously as a hospital, rest-home, museum, unofficial nature reserve and home for the drunks of south-west Moscow. Today it is a lavishly appointed pleasure park for Moscow’s emerging consumer society. Over $15 million has been spent on restoration in the last ten years, and it shows.

Even if the crowds are so dense that you cannot get into the palace, it is worth visiting Tsaritsyno simply to see the fountains, which are spectacular. I recommend taking the Metro to Орехово (Orekhovo) on the green line, then walking back through the grounds, past the palace and down to the lakes where the fountains are. It is then a short step to Царицыно (Tsaritsyino) metro station, on the same line. Apart from the fact that this route in generally downhill, it also means that you will save the fountains for last.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T08:00:00.000+04:00

The night after the wedding we all went to see the Kremlin Zoria, a festival of military music inspired by the Edinburgh Tattoo, but held in Red Square. This was the first Zoria--the word is Russian for tattoo--and ran for four nights only. It was organised by a history teacher called Vitaly Mironov who travelled in the 1990s to Paisley and fell in love with Scotland, and its culture, history and approach to military reverance, which he thought had a lot on common with the Russian attitude. He helped bring the Russian Navy Band to the Edinburgh Festival in 1998, and was helped by Brig. Mel Jamieson in organising the Moscow event.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T07:00:00.000+04:00

And pipe bands stole the show! There were 350 pipers, drawn from Scotland, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and other places. "It is great to see not only Scottish bands, but all our people," I remarked to Tanya, surprising her that I should consider "our people" to include "folk from furth of Scotland". The absolute highlight of the evening was this gentleman playing Amazing Grace, later accompanied by the other 349.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T06:00:00.000+04:00

This was the Russian President's Guard. There were also troops dressed up in Napoleonic-era costume, as well as Germans, Italians, Danes and many others. My impression of this group was that they were not so well-drilled as the old Kremlin guards that I remembered from Soviet times marching out to Lenin's tomb and back again.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T05:00:00.000+04:00

Some of the other spectacular acts came from the Caucasas and Central Asia.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T04:00:00.000+04:00

Is there anything to write? An extraordinary moment.

Kremlin Zoria

2007-09-16T03:00:00.000+04:00

Of course, being Russia, it all ended with fireworks.

Kremlin Zoria - the true spirit of piping

2007-09-16T02:00:00.000+04:00

In the stand, we sat near a small group of Transvaal Scottish officers, some porcine and white, others super-porcine and black. The blacks looked bureaucratic but dignified; the whites sort of half-furtive, half-apologetic. In the queue to get out, I asked one of the black Generals what he thought of Moscow. "Very nice," was all he would say. Polite but cold. By contrast, I overheard one of the white officers--they all seemed to have "pips for Africa"--saying to another, "Hey! Let's all meet in the same bar we were in last night." After we walked out of Red Square, we found (yet another) Baltika tent with lots of Transvaal Scottish pipers and drummers standing round drinking beer. I bought a glass myself, while waiting for Tanya and the others to catch up--they were watching Italian flag-wavers performing very artistically in medieval costume outside the old Lenin Museum building over the way. On the spur of the moment I shouted out to the musicians, in half-remembered Afrikaans, "Play us a tune, man! Give us Sarie Marais!" They looked duly astonished, but a couple of them laughed, conferred, picked up their instruments and started playing the great song: "Bring my terug na die ou Transvaal / Daar waar my Sarie woon". Others quickly followed suit. The Italians were over the way with their fifes and drums, making a cultured but moderate noise, but when the pipes got going they took over the whole square. They gave us Flower of Scotland and many other old favourites, including Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, with the drums played like tom-toms. The whole show carried on for the next half an hour. The crowd which quickly gathered staying until exhaustion set in, close to midnight. I don't think the Russians had ever seen anything like it--a brilliant finale to an amazing evening. This was, for me, the true spirit of piping: informal, noisy, lightly alcohol-fuelled and politely swaggering. Thinking about it always reminds me of the great pipe tune: "A hundred pipers and a' and a', a hundred pipers and a'! / We'll up and gie them a blaw a blaw, we'll up an' gie them a blaw!!!"

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T19:28:00.000+04:00

Red Square -- where else? (These Moscow misc. pictures were not all taken on the date given.)

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T19:01:00.000+04:00

How times have changed! Outside the History Museum, I spotted Lenin hanging out with Nicholas II. When the lion takes time out to have a smoke with the lamb, can the Age of Aquarius be far behind? Later, when Valdimir Ilich took his cap off, it occurred to me that he bore a striking resemblance to Maxwell MacLeod.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T18:38:00.000+04:00

Summer is here and fountains are everywhere. These are on the branch of the river that flows past one of my teaching places, opposite the statue of Repin in Bolotnaya Square, on the Vodo-otvodny Canal, not far from the Kremlin. The bridge in the picture is known as the Luzhkov Bridge, after the Mayor of Moscow, since 1992, who enables everything and who calls forth bridges where hitherto bridges ran there none. The tented structure to the left is a summer restaurant, which is erected in spring and will be dismantled in the autumn.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T15:48:00.000+04:00

This is a view of the Ivan Veliky church in the Kremlin from the square outside Kropotkinskaya metro station, taken from the base of Engels's statue.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T14:01:00.000+04:00

This is the same church viewed from near the famous Дом на Набережной or House on the Embankment. This was an elaborate, Washington-style apartment house built in the mid-1930s just across from the Kremlin, where Stalin's elite lived--or did until they were whisked away in the early-morning bread vans for a less luxuriously existence, first in the Lubyanka and later, if they were very lucky, in the lumber camps or salt mines of Siberia.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T08:20:00.000+04:00

This is the small but charming Church of St Nicholas, with the west front of the House on the Embankment behind it, larger but less attractive, though one of the most desirable and expensive addresses in Moscow today.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T07:23:00.000+04:00

This, of course, is the grand-daddy of all Moscow churches, St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square (see also the first picture in this section). It was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1555 to commemorate the capture of the Khanate of Kazan on the Volga from the Tatars, a victory which cleared the way for Russia's expansion into Siberia. It is said that Ivan was so pleased with the final result that he had the architect, Postnik Yakovlev's, eyes put out and his hands cut off so that he could not build anything comparable for anyone else. Rumours of this sort came to the ears of Queen Elizabeth I of England, whom Ivan once expressed a wish to marry. Apparently they influenced her decision to refuse the Tsar's hand. (Where, I have often wondered, would they have lived if they had got married? It is hard to see her in Moscow or him in Whitehall Palace.) Four hundred years later, Stalin was asked by Lazar Kaganovich whether it would not help facilitate military parades to have St Basil's demolished as part of the Soviet reconstruction of Moscow in the 1930s. Stalin is said to have curtly dismissed the suggestion.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T07:05:00.000+04:00

Moscow not only has churches and cupolas, but cars: three million of them at the last count. This is part of the so-called Garden Ring, near the Paveletskaya railway and metro stations. The ring was originally a defensive earthwork surrounding the city about a mile and a half from the Kremlin. After Napoleon, it was made into a boulevard with gardens in the middle. Stalin had the gardens ripped out and a ten-lane trafficway built. That was large then; now it is far too small. Parking is free in Moscow--no meters, no yellow lines, no wardens--so if you can stand the jams, it makes sense to drive. Massive numbers of people do, and so the jams expand. It's a cruel world when you're allowed to seek your own convenience, rather than being forced onto the crowded (though cheap and very fast) metro, the often dilapidated trams or the busses with their blaring music and even greater crowds at rush-hour (часпик).

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T06:15:00.000+04:00

The reason there is so much traffic in Moscow, is because there are so many people. Fifteen million of them, I gather. Since I last visited, in 1991, the population of the city has grown by more than the entire population of Scotland. This picture gives some idea of the consequences. The Kremlin is in the middle, with the Ivan Veliki tower "conspic.", as they say on the Admiralty charts. This picture was taken from the 29th floor of the Swissotel, south-south-east of the Red Square.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T06:12:00.000+04:00

This one was taken from the roof of the Foreign Languages Library, one of my favourite places in Moscow. I like it not because of the the Foreign Languages Library, which is old-fashioned and hard to use, but because of, first, the English Language Law Library on the top floor, which is run by Olga Sukhova, a lady who deserves a medal for being one of the most helpful state employees in Russia (or anywhere). Secondly, I like it because of the American Centre on the second floor, run by another very helpful person who deserves credit, Marissa Fushille, from El Paso, Texas. She runs the best English-language lending library in Moscow (with a lot of interesting material on the American legal system), making the British Council (downstairs) look hick and provincial--it is also embarrassingly unfriendly in a wannabe-snooty, "red brick" ex-pat English sort of way. You get the impression that the "Anglo" staff there would be happier in Torremolinos drinking bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, and moaning about greasy, emaciated dagos with 9" hips...

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T06:11:00.000+04:00

This the St Basil's and the Saviour's Gate of the Kremlin from the same vantage point. In the background is the Ukraine Hotel

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T06:10:00.000+04:00

For all the humans, and their chaos, life still goes on.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T05:22:00.000+04:00

This is Mikhail Frunze, a Romanian revolutionary who became head of the Red Army after achieving many striking successes against the Whites in the Civil War. He subsequently fell out with Stalin and died, apparently of accidental chloroform poisoning, in 1925 while being operated on for stomach cancer. Many believe Stalin engineered the accident. This statue stands opposite a Russian army artillery academy, and when I sat on the bottom step to rest my camera on my knee to take the picture without blurring the picture, the officer on the door of the huge building came down to tell me I was on the "territory" of the Russian Army and that photographing, even pointing away from the building was forbidden. When I said ничего, and carried taking my pictures, he smiled rather sheepishly and walked back up to his place on the door.

Moscow miscellaneous

2007-06-24T05:20:00.000+04:00

Moscow is a very romantic city. This is the metal tree which the authorities fixed to the middle of the (pedestrian) Tretyakov Bridge, next to the statue of Repin (see above), in order to discourage newly-wed Muscovites from attaching symbolic padlocks to the iron-work on the bridge. The custom is to paint the initials or name of the couple on a padlock and fix it to the tree, or bridge, then throw the key into the river, as a symbol of eternal union. Ribbons are attached for fun and show. Presumably, rather than cutting the locks off from time to time, the Moscow city parks department will remove the tree, trash it and install another one, ready for next season' s romantics.

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T15:15:00.000+04:00

What is it with cars and girls that brings out the open-roader in a boy? The Blue Elephant restaurant at Barrikadnaya, one of the haunts of the rich, the cool and the casual, sponsors an annual Ladies Rally (Женское Ралли) round the streets of Moscow where any woman with a classic car is invited to show up and put her foot down. I went as representative of Passport magazine (http://www.passportmagazine.ru/), which I am now helping to edit. The food was great, the drink free and abundant and the... well, this is one of the local girls, Светлана Хоркина (Svetlana Khorkina), the world champion gymnast, sandwiched between a Roller and a Jag--lucky Roller; lucky Jag!

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T14:29:00.000+04:00

If only Stirling Moss had been there in Mercedes 722 with Denis Jenkinson in the navigator's seat, it would have been like the start of the Mille Miglia. As it was, instead of cars "accelerating homicidally along Via Dante" (Douglas Rutherford), we had them accelerating none too cautiously out into the afternoon traffic along the Garden Ring road, which means they were probably doing 70 mp.h. before hitting the underpass below the Arbat. Bemused Militsia-men looked on, and the band played 1930s German jazz of the sort Lord Haw-Haw broadcast during the war. And of course, the champagne never stopped...

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T13:58:00.000+04:00

And this was Оксана Фёдоровна (Oksana Feodorovna), recent Miss World. Someone remarked that, with legs like hers, she could have driven the car from the boot.

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T13:48:00.000+04:00

It's hard to imagine cars like this being allowed on the roads in puritanical, virtuous, "law-abiding" Britain...

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T13:30:00.000+04:00

And a Cord! The only two cars that had to be pushed was the Volga and one of the Jaguars. This whale-like machine went as smooth as the cocktails which came out at 6, between the return of the cars and the prize-giving, but before the dinner and the other band.

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T12:22:00.000+04:00

In the middle of it all, a magician appeared. He had an amazing bag of tricks from which he drew, amongst many other things, some money which he could change from singles into tens at the flick of an uncovered finger. Coins would appear in his hand, without any handkerchiefs or other devices to conceal the sleight-of-hand. Then they would disappear, as if by magic! I saw it all at a range of five feet or so. Tanya was as fascinated as I was, and got even closer. For some reason, it made us laugh, the simple absurdity of what we saw with our own eyes, yet could not believe, rationally.

Ladies Rally

2007-06-23T11:31:00.000+04:00

And finally, as evening faded into night, one cocktail succeeded another and the light of the westering sun seemed to glow in the hair of ladies...

St Petersburg weekend

2007-06-09T20:15:00.000+04:00

Tanya and I went to the Venice of the North for a weekend in early June, to see the White Nights. This, being 9 June, is within a fortnight of being as "white" as it gets. This was 1 a.m: midnight "true", just before the bridges were raised to let the service boats move. This is the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum, one of the largest in the world and so crowded in summer that it is best avoided, as we discovered the following morning. But you can enjoy yourself just wandering round the city which has a much more European atmosphere than Moscow, which in some respects still seems to carry the shades of socialism and Muscovy in its wrinkles, crevasses and echoing переходы. Petersburg was simply fun, as I hope the next picture shows.

St Petersburg weekend

2007-06-09T20:10:00.000+04:00

Boats everywhere....

St Petersburg weekend

2007-06-09T20:05:00.000+04:00

A whole yacht race going on in front of the Winter Palace, with the Church of the Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Alexander II was murdered in 1881 (the year the Napier Commission on crofting was established in Scotland), in the background of this shot. Alexander II was the Tsar who emancipated the serfs of Russia in 1861. The church was built in the neo-traditional style of Russian architecture which became popular in the late-imperial age, mirroring the contemporaneous Gothic revival in Britain (also late-ish-imperial). In my opinion, it stands in relation to St Basil's in Red Square (see above) rather as St Pancras Station does in relation to King's College Chapel in Cambridge, only without the element of creative adaptation. But Russians seem to like it. It is thought that Alexander was murdered because he moderated the pace of reform from what he had set early in his reign. This did not please the pale, moping, "Dostoevsky"-style intelligentsia, few of whom had any stake in political stability. Their outsiderdom was partly a result of the way in which state had agglomerated all power to itself in the early modern era (after the Mongol conquest) and only grudgingly relinquished small aspects of that control in the modern era. The Crimean War (1853-6) showed just how weak an autocratic and therefore technologically-backward state was in comparison with the semi-liberal and rapidly-industrialising powers of western Europe. Alexander II decided to liberalise his Empire and try, thereby, to unlock its enormous potential. When this resulted in assasination, his son, Alexander III, reverted to reaction. This policy was continued by his son, Nicholas II, who was unable to prevent the drift to war, then revolution, in the early 20th century. He and his whole family were shot in the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg in the Urals in July 1918 when White forces were approaching and threatening to liberate them. Their corpses were thrown down a mineshaft. King Knut's attempt to resist the ocean tide met with less tragic consequences than the Romanov crusade against their own people.

St Petersburg weekend

2007-06-09T20:00:00.000+04:00

We went to Kronstadt, the previously closed island ten miles off St Petersburg which used to be one of the Soviet Navy's main bases, and still has many Russian naval ships. It is a fascinating place, time-travel Soviet-style, with everything which the Red matelot might have wanted, including rather nice blocks of flats, a huge church converted into a museum and elegant gardens, only slightly trampled by the feet of the heedless proles--and now their successors, the baggy-shorted consumers with iPlugs in their ears. The whole environment was designed in order to keep the run-silent run-deep crew happy by giving them confidence that their families were being better looked-after than the rest of Soviet society. Now the isolation is not needed and a ten-mile-long causeway links the island with the north shore of the Gulf of Finland. A tunnel is being built to link it with the south shore. Part of the aim is to prevent tidal surges which could easily drown St Petersburg, and regularly floods the city as it is. For some hydro-geographic reason which I could not understand, there is no fear of the waters coming in south of the island, where there is to be no causeway, just a tunnel. We visited Robert Leitch, famous Russian website administrator, and son of Bert Leitch of Mull, the man who threatened on television to shoot next eagle he saw taking a lamb of his. Разумниц! Who needs so many eagles anyway? But Rob, who has lived in Petersburg for four years now, had never visited the island and was unaware that it was open. Doing so is therefore a rare experience, which I can highly recommend for those with a curiosity about the "touch and feel" of history.

St Petersburg weekend

2007-06-09T19:00:00.000+04:00

After Kronstadt, we went to Peterhof (as it was originally named by Peter the Great who built it, or Petrodvorets as it used to be called in Slavophile, Soviet times). This is the most extraordinarily extravagant summer house on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. It is a triumph of conspicuous consumption or, as the Admiralty charts might say, "consumption conspic." The place was swamped by visitors and not really worth visiting in the height of the tourist season, like the Hermitage. But the golden statues in the grounds were impressive, even if it was not always clear, as in this one, exactly who is having sex with whom.

Doing the decorating

2007-06-06T20:54:00.000+04:00

I went up to the northern suburbs of Moscow, sort of Neasden-ish area but less cultured-looking, to see the Moscow Times and came upon this, the lovely Church of Faith, Hope, Love and Their Mother Sophia (at least that is how I translated the name!). The Orthodox Church, which embodies an unworldly faith in what I really think is profound wisdom, has been one of the conduits of cultural history in Russia since the middle ages. One recent aspect of that cultural history, if "cultural" is the right word, is the Soviet tradition of officiousness, rudeness and contempt for the public. If you want a bit of time-travel back to the cleaner, simpler world when the proletariat were in charge, go into a church. You will have old ladies bustling about telling you not to do this, not to sit there, not to take photographs and so on. When you point out that they are selling photographs, the walnut-shaped shrew with the headscarf on will get angry in a peculiarly shrivelled, nasty sort of way. When you ask, why? the hatred for reason and equality will boil within your benighted babushka almost visibly. Both the Orthodox and the Victorious Proletariat believe(d) in absolute authority--which is possibly why they didn't get on. Like Stalin (see next section below), Orthodoxy has produced many spectacular buildings, but almost as many horrible people.

Doing the decorating

2007-06-06T20:26:00.000+04:00

In a church, even the artists can be awkward. This painter, working on an image for public display(!), said I should not take a photograph. I ignored him, of course, as I ignore every Russian-Soviet knee-jerk нельзя (it is forbidden). Few people seem unduly bothered when I do. It is just a habit, an unpleasant one, but no more than a habit. It is the ones who take it seriously who worry me, but they tend to be elderly, poor and bitter-looking, as if the defeat of the proletariat was the result of trickery rather than the complete practical absurdity of the expectation that the meek might actually inherit the earth. In this respect, I think Kim Philby (see below) got it about right when he surveyed his options after the crimes of Stalin became known. He said that he faced the alternatives of either sticking it out in the hope that wiser counsels would one day prevail or (I am quoting from memory) "becoming a querulous outcast of the Muggeridge, Koestler, Crankshaw variety, forever railing against a God that had failed me. That seemed a ghastly fate."

Doing the decorating

2007-06-06T18:39:00.000+04:00

This was another нельзя, but your fearless correspondent just looked squarely at the нельзяист and said, in English, "May the holy Mother of God keep you from the sin of covetousness, especially with regard to other people's pixels." Often I have found jokes baffle Russians. Though they have a tremendous sense of humour, many do not like a lot of what seems funny to Britons. For example, the Borat film is universally disliked. It is thought cheap, racist and contemptuous. I do not know anyone in Britain who does not think it hilarious. I got a serious ticking off from Tanya, for example, after we emerged from the enormous church in the Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg and I had said a few times, not very loudly, as I walked past the immense line of people queueing to get into what I thought was a not very interesting building, "Бога нет." These are the famous words which Gagarin is supposed to have uttered from Vostok, as he circled the earth for the first time. It means, "There is no God." He had been up "in heaven" and was in a position to settle the intractable, one thousand nine hundred and sixty one-year old controversy for the first time. Tanya was not amused. Well, I could understand that. But I was not amused when she said she seriously expected me to desist from such jokes in the future.

Moscow University

2007-05-24T17:40:00.000+04:00

In the midst of all the beautiful architecture of old Russia, and some of the occasionally interesting new building, it is worth having just one quick look, for the sake of contrast, at the world of Stalin set in stone. Shown above is the largest of the seven huge небоскрёбы (sky-"skrebi", the second syllable has no meaning in Russian, it is just a transauderaton, if that's a word, of the English word "scraper" put into the plural) which were built in a ring round the capital between the end of the Second World War and the death of the Great Leader and Teacher. They seem to me to be designed to intimidate, to convey the impression that the individual is insignificant in front of their unassailable hugeness. Moscow State University, known as Em Geh, Oo (МГУ - Московскый Государственный Университет), is an enormous institution, once the pinnacle of the Soviet educational system. Today, students with rich parents can buy their way in. But still many places are reserved for the highest academic achievers. I went to give a lecture to a group of law students there in March (on Scotland's judges--in English!) and the person who invited me, Professor John Cleary from San Diego, told me that about half the intake is reserved for the clever students (who have to be even cleverer than formerly as the places for them are now restricted by 50%), while the other half buy their way in, at great cost. As a democrat, he disapproved of this approach. But he was open to my observation that it is not unlike Eton, where you have the super-rich alongside the super-clever, mixing and occasionally learning something from each other. "Education should not be too exclusive," I said, "either with regard to money or brains. Each has to learn to get along with the other." He had the grace to laugh--but then he is nearly 70. He grew up in Chicago where his father, an Irishman, was a "caap". He told me that the court system there, when he first started work, was almost as corrupt as it is today in Moscow--which is why he moved to California to practice. If he did not put his $2 bill in the Police Benevolent Society box (or whatever it was) at the door of the courthouse when he arrived in the morning to plead a cause, he would find his case mysteriously moved to the back end of the docket by the judge, with the result that he had either to pay or to waste the whole day sitting waiting for his case to come up. If he left, the police would let the judge know. It would be brought on while he was out of the building, and dismissed as having been vacated. Of course, petty police bribery plus judge-police collusion were comparatively innocent aspects of the justice system in 1950s Chicago.

Moscow University

2007-05-24T16:45:00.000+04:00

The Stalin building is only superficially of stone. In fact it is brick faced with stone. Its lack of "fit" in the modern world is illustrated by this shot of the network cabling which, due to the unflexable (i.e. cannot be "flexed"--inflexible is a different concept) mode of construction has had to be "laid" externally. This reminds me of either Peterhead Prison, where the granite was so hard that they could not plumb in the pipe-work for the lavatories in the post-"slopping-out" cells, or the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Inside, the gloomy, oppressive atmosphere is more reminiscent of the how I imagine the former to be. The security is almost as tight, which rather ruins the atmosphere of careless freedom which universities ought to have, in my opinion, if they are to rise above the Americo-Soviet concept of employment training colleges.

Moscow University

2007-05-24T16:18:00.000+04:00

Opposite Stalin's monolith is this new building, completed in 2005 for the 250th anniversary of the founding of Moscow University, the first in Russia. In the foreground of the last picture is the back of the statue that is in front of the door of this, the new library for the University.The statue is of Ivan Shuvalov, Empress Elizabeth's Minster of Education, whose idea it was to allow Mikhail Lomonosov--who is said to have walked from Archangel to Moscow (600 miles)--to carry out his proposal to found a university within the Russian Empire. Previously higher education could be got only abroad, which ruled it out for almost everyone because, until the 1790s, the Tsar's permission was needed even for nobles to travel outside the country, and it was rarely given. The original institution was located in the centre of Moscow, moving out here to the Sparrow Hills--renamed the Lenin Hills--when the neboscrebi (see above) was completed in 1953. This building is amazingly lavishly specified. And the plans for further building are vast, some of it already started. The idea is that the whole area will become one of the world's largest and greatest centres of academic work in the world in the not too distant future. It already has 50,000 students and a million square metres of interior space. The conception is almost Stalinist in scale.

Moscow University

2007-05-24T12:35:00.000+04:00

Since I dislike everything connected with the Stalinist approach, this view of the 1953 monstrosity is the one I prefer. It was shot in reflection on the windows of its modern counterpart, the new, arrogantly affluent but utterly charmless, Library building (see above).

Novodevichi Monastery

2007-05-20T20:49:00.000+04:00

In 1524 Grand Prince Vasily III founded the Новодевичий Монастырь (New Maiden Monastery) to commemorate his victory over the Lithuanians in the battle to re-take Smolensk for the Principality of Muscovy in 1514. (Both Russia and Tsardom came later, essentially after Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatars of Kazan and stared building his Siberian empire.) The main church, which is featured in the next picture, is the Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk. When Vasily's wife failed to produce an heir, he sent her to live in the convent here and took an attractive young replacement into his household, though he could not divorce his immured wife. The walls of the Monastery resemble those of the Kremlin. It was an important defensive bulwark to the south-west of Moscow (today it is lies in the inner suburbs) when the Poles and others attacked the capital of the expanding but still precarious Principality. Stability was achieved with the accession of the Romanov dynasty early in the seventeenth century, and within a hundred years, the Monastery owned 36 villages and 15,000 peasants. This financed a nunnery, a military hospital and an orphanage, as well as the normal quota of monks, iconographers and aristocratic ladies under sentence of immurement. Napoleon tried to blow up the buildings in 1812, but he was thwarted by the nuns. However, they failed to thwart the Bolsheviks, 110 years later, when they turned Novodevichi into a Museum of Women's Emancipation. Under pressure to propitiate the religious element in Soviet society during the most desperate days of the Second World War, Stalin returned the Monastery to the Church, though the level of involvement with the general public was, of course, small since no member of the Communist Party was allowed to enter a relgious building. Today, it is a thriving religious and tourist centre.

Novodevichi Monastery

2007-05-20T19:45:00.000+04:00

This is the Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk. Unfortunately, on the day Tanya and I visited it, it was closed. Women tend to cover their heads, even just with a scarf, in church precincts and almost always do inside a church, while men are bare-headed indoors. (Russia winters preclude customs like going bareheaded out of doors.)

Novodevichi Monastery

2007-05-20T18:15:00.000+04:00

There is wonderful display on historical artifacts associated with the Monastery, and of icon writing through the ages, in (I think) the old armoury. We heard the tail-end of a magnificent choral performance, by six men, unaccompanied, for a group of tourists. It was totally informal, with the men standing in the main hall of the icon exhibition, without amplification, stage setting or even a stage. Though I presume the tour group must have paid something to arrange it, the whole thing was completely безплатно for anyone else who happened to wander in while it was in progress--rather like the Russian Church, actually. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Church became fashionable as an expression of Russian national feeling. Pressure built up from well-connected people to be buried in famous places like Novodevichi. Soon it could not longer accomodate them. So in 1898 a cemetery was opened outside the walls. Many famous Russians who died in the twneieth cnetury are buried there--see the section below.

Novodevichi Cemetery - Yeltsin

2007-05-14T21:39:00.000+04:00

This is the freshly-dug grave of Boris Yeltsin, whom most Russians I have met thought of after his death on April 23 with affection and respect, though some considered him to have been foolish in connection with the break-up of the Soviet Union. The grave is in the central square of the Novodevichi (New Maiden) Cemetery, underneath the walls of the Novodevichi Monastery, on the banks of the Moscow River, beneath the Lenin (formerly Sparrow) Hills. It is one of the best-known cemeteries in Russia. The south wall of the Monastery was breached in 1898 in order to expand the cemetery. More ground has been added since, but now the limit has been more or less reached and it is rare (and expensive!) for new burials to be allowed.

Novodevichi Cemetery - Rostrapovich

2007-05-14T20:51:00.000+04:00

Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist, died on 27 April. He was buried four days before Yeltsin. Traditionally, graves are left like this for a year, to give them time to settle before the headstone is erected. Putin attended the funeral, which was significant since Rostropovich had been an exile from the Soviet Union, in protest at its restrictions on cultural freedom, since 1974. In recent years, though he had homes in Russia, he mainly lived in Paris. Though he was born in Baku, he chose to be buried in Moscow.

Novodevichi Cemetery - Gogol

2007-05-14T19:11:00.000+04:00

This in Nikolai Gogol, though I could have chosen from any number of other writers. Amongst the names whose graves I photographed, but have not got space to publish, are Stanislavsky, Shaliapin, Chekhov, Shostakovich, Scriabin, Sviatoslav Richter, Prokofiev, Galina Ulanova, Ilya Ehrenburg, Madame Furtseva, Khrushchev, Podgorny, Mikoyan, Gromyko, Madame Dzerzhinsky, General Panfilov, Polina Zhemchuzhina (Molotov's wife), General Lebed and Raisa Gorbachev. There were many I could not find, most grievously of all, Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, despite a helpful map of the cemetery's layout being on sale at the gate. Others were Kropotkin, Alessandra Kollontai, Isaac Levitan, Mayakovsky, Molotov himself, Ivan Maisky and the violinist (скрипач) David Oistrakh, whose music I remember listening to in far-away Johannesburg, from my father's small collection of classic music favourites. An interesting feature of the cemetery is the plots which contain memorials to the likes of "Самолёт Ил-18 (Югославиа 1961г)", or "Aircraft Ilyushin-18 (Yugoslavia 1961)". All the people on the flight are named and therefore remembered, even if none of their remains were identifiable, or even buriable.

Novodevichi Cemetery - Brunov the Clown

2007-05-14T18:29:00.000+04:00

Much of the charm of the cemetery derives from the interesting gravestones. There is not the atmosphere of universal gravity--excuse the pun--which makes non-Orthodox cemeteries such uninviting places. Not even the Glasgow necropolis has headstones like this one! And few people ever visit to place flowers on the graves.

Novodevichi Cemetery - Vasily Ulrikh

2007-05-14T10:37:00.000+04:00

This was the headstone I went to the cemetery primarily to find. It marks the unkempt, weed- and bramble-covered grave of Vasily Vasilivich Ulrikh, the repellant face of Stalinist "justice" (expand the image and look closely). He was the judge at almost all of the great show trials of the 1930s, though he was over-shadowed in court by the more famous, cleverer and more influential Andrei Vyshinsky, the Prosecutor. Ulrikh was a Latvian of half German, half aristocratic Russian descent. He so enjoyed his work of applying Stalin's pre-determined sentences that he often watched the executions, and occasionally carried them out himself. He features largely in chapter 3 of my forthcoming book, The Justice Factory, which describes the Metro-Vickers trial in Moscow in April 1933. The brilliant American journalist, Eugene Lyons, described his appearance in court in terms which seem to me to be reflected exactly by the photograph on his grave: "In his round podgy face the gods had modelled a mask of impish, gloating cruelty. His flushed, over-stuffed features were twisted continually into a grimace of brutal sarcasm... That melon-face, hovering above the trial, sneering and jeering, was a caricature of the very idea of justice." There were no flowers on his grave.

Victory Day

2007-05-09T17:10:00.000+04:00

The three tank traps in the foreground stand on the spot where the German Army got closest to Moscow on 5 December 1941. The main front-line was about twenty miles behind, at Kryukovo (which is Zelengorod today) on the Moscow-Leningrad highway. A small motor-cycle reconnaissance unit penetrated as far as Khimki, which the Germans described as "in the outer suburbs of Moscow". It was not. It was then a village many miles from the edge of the city. The Germans apparently claimed they could see the "towers of the Kremlin". This cannot have been true. Even without all the high-rise buildings which obscure the view today, it would have been impossible to see the Kremlin from ground-level at Khimki, any more than it would be possible to see Big Ben from Staines. The German unit thought they had found a gap in the Soviet front-line, soi they raced back to tell their commander. The next morning, at 4 a.m., the Siberian divisions attacked all along the front, from Kalinin (now, and previously, Tver) to Tula. The temperature was more than 30 degrees below zero Centigrade, and many German units refused to come out of their quarters to fight. Snow was falling, in a high wind. Visibility was less than fifty yards. The Soviet troops had white camouflage, heat-packs inside their uniforms and ponies to carry supplies. The Germans, having been told by Hitler when they invaded in June that they would "be home before the leaves fall" were unprepared for Russian winter conditions. They had stuffed shredded newspaper inside their denim uniforms to try to keep warm. But they had, for example, hob-nailed boots, the metal parts of which conducted the cold direct to the soldiers' feet. Over the following two months they were pushed back a hundred miles or so, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. This was the first time that Hitler's army had been comprehensively defeated in a land battle. The myth of Nazi invincibility was shattered. It happened more or less on this spot. Today, Ikea, Aushan and Mega, said to the largest mall in Europe, stand behind the monument.

Victory Day: celebrations in Khimki

2007-05-09T16:26:00.000+04:00

After paying my silent respects at the Khimki memorial (where, to their delight, I saluted a group of veterans who had come to lay flowers), I cycled to the memorial park in Khimki in which a range of Second World War armaments is displayed. There, under a mounted T-34 tank, a band of young army medics, in uniform, were played страшная современная Русская музыка with great vigour and elan, and at considerable volume, but with no discernable melody. It struck me as Vysotsky-lite in berets. I'd've preferred Danny Boy, or Lochiel's Farewell to His Guest. Despite the music--in fact probably because of it--a huge number of people were milling about, eating гречка from a smoking, wood-fired field-kitchen (such as Andrew Hamilton has outside his tent at the Kelso races), and listening to the musical exhibition. There were as many veterans as younger folk. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Victory Day - the band

2007-05-09T14:19:00.000+04:00

They looked like nice kids. They were popular.

Victory Day - a veteran

2007-05-09T12:21:00.000+04:00

One, sadly, of millions--many of whom did not live to hold the flowers.

Victory Day - is there anything left to say?

2007-05-09T10:24:00.000+04:00

This picture reminds me of Lord and Lady Aldington, and the fact that at Aldington's funeral they played There'll be Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover. What a contrast!

Tchaikovsky - one of the giants of world music

2007-05-08T13:11:00.000+04:00

Often it is only by experiencing historical phenomena in person that it becomes possible to appreciate their full significance. I always understood that Tchaikovsky was one of classical music's giants, but until I saw his statue in the grounds of his house in Klin, I had no idea just what an enormous man he really was. Tanya is shown here enjoying a joke with the composer of the theme tune for On the Beach, the film of Neville Shute's novel about nuclear winter. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dun, daaah, di, dun, di, dun, di, dun, dah... и так далее

Tchaikovsky's piano

2007-05-08T11:21:00.000+04:00

It is amazing to think that Tchaikovsky could have got those immense knees under this ordinary-sized piano. But he must have done as he wrote the Nutcracker sitting at it. The exhibition staff have fixed little speakers inside the casing so that if you wish to hear the great man playing they can oblige at the flick of a switch.

Tchaikovsky's house, Klin

2007-05-08T11:02:00.000+04:00

This is where Tchaikovsky spent the last decade of his life. His piano is in the main upstairs room. He liked the house because of its rural setting, and the fact that it was on the main railway-line from Moscow to St Petersburg, so he could reach either city easily for concerts. It is no longer quiet, lying less than a hundred yards from the Leningrad to Moscow highway, on the edges of a much-expanded town, about 100 kms from Moscow. It was occupied for about three weeks in November and early December 1941 by the German Army, which used the building as a motorcycle repair shed.

Soviet submarine

2007-04-22T23:22:00.000+04:00

This is the boat, originally called "Б-396", then renamed "Новосибирскый Комсомолец" (Novosibirsky Komsomolets). It is moored on the Tushino bank of the Khimki reservoir, on the Moscow-Volga canal. It has been jacked up on piles to expose the propellers to view. Notice the St Andrew's cross on the stern. This was the pre-Revolutionary Russian Naval ensign, and is the post-Soviet one too. Other boats will shortly be joining the exhibition. The entrance is 150 roubles (£3). The very friendly and knowledgeable guide speaks Russian only. It can be reached by a half-mile walk from Metro station Сходненская.

Soviet submarine

2007-04-22T22:39:00.000+04:00

This is the exhibition room in the centre of the submarine. Although a lot of the equipment has been taken out, there is still a lot to see. The boat was designed in the 1970s by theRubin bureau, which also designed the Kursk and many other Soviet submarines.. It was built in Nizhni Novgorod and served in the Northern Fleet, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as a hunter-killer (as we would call it) from 1980-1998. It was armed with six torpedoes, and displaced 3,000 tons.

Soviet submarine

2007-04-22T09:58:00.000+04:00

The display is informative. Having been aboard HMS Vanguard, one of Britain's Trident submarines, the comparison was interesting, mainly for the similarities. Both boats looked cramped, old-fashioned yet hi-tech for their day. One big difference was that this was an entirely Soviet product, whereas the whole missile section of the Vanguard is controlled from America. The result was that the crew were not authorised to give me permission to photograph there, even though there were only blank missile-tube walls to be seen. Of course, the chances of getting aboard a Russian submarine on active service, even without a camera, would be nil.

Philby's grave

2007-04-19T21:13:00.000+04:00

This is Kim Philby's grave in the military part of the cemetery at Kuntsevo, in the western suburbs of Moscow. Though it is in the suburbs today, a long way from the edge of town, it is five miles further out than Stalin's "Nearby" dacha, which was also at Kuntsevo, and built in 1934 in the countryside. Though intact, that cannot be visited--sadly.

The graves in the cemetery are arranged in date order of burial, so Philby is next to generals and admirals who died in the last years of the Soviet Union. They almost all have flabby-looking, uninteresting faces, unlike the older communists who were often lean and lively-looking. Philby stands out in this company as very much an individual amongst rows and rows of very similar-looking men (though, in fairness, that is partly due to the habit of stylised posing for something as formal as a photograph which would later be etched onto the gravestone).

Philby's headstone

2007-04-19T20:29:00.001+04:00

Click on this picture to enlarge it. Do you, as I do, detect a disappointed man? He wrote in My Silent War (1968 -- I do not have the book here in Moscow so I am quoting from memory) that in 1932 he left Cambridge "with a degree and a conviction that my life should be devoted to Communism. I have long since lost the degree, indeed I think it is in the possession of MI5, but I have retained the conviction." When faced with the aberrations of individuals, he was forced to chose whether to abandon his faith and "become a querulous outcast of the Koestler, Muggeridge, Crankshaw variety, railing against the god that had failed me, or to stay the course. I stayed the course. Now as I look out of my study window in Moscow, I see all around me the solid foundations of the future I first glimpsed at Cambridge over thirty years ago."

What, I have wondered many times, when seeing Ferraris and Bentleys racing black Porsches and Hummers round the Kremlin and up Tverskoy Street--no longer Gorky Street--would Philby have thought if he had lived just a few years longer?

Kolomenskoe

2007-04-19T20:29:00.000+04:00

This is Kolomenskoe's operational Church of the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan, built in 1644 by Tsar Alexei in memory of the war against the Poles during the Time of Troubles. Inside the elderly ladies who bustle about keeping everything in order provide the best reminder in modern, post-Soviet Russia of the world and attitudes of the USSR. When we were there the vestibule was thronged with other old ladies selling budding willow cuttings which people buy as symbols of spring.

Kolomenskoe: part of the museum

2007-04-19T12:51:00.000+04:00

Part of the old monastery at Kolomenskoe. The churches are still operating, but the rest is a museum and public park. On display is the wooden hut in which Peter the Great lived when he first spent time at Archangelsk overseeing construction of the fort there, before St Petersburg was founded. There is also a massive orchard, plus archaeological diggings. We saw people giving a concert of what could only be described as flat bells. They were pieces of metal hanging from frames which were tapped with felt-covered sticks, much as one would a xylophone. It was a very beautiful sound and carried a long way in the crisp air.

Kolomenskoe: first day out with the new camera

2007-04-19T11:03:00.000+04:00

Just to get started: a view of Moscow from the heights at Kolomenskoe, to the south of the city. The Moscow River flows between the photographer and his subject. It was a sunny but chilly afternoon at the beginning of April. Nonetheless an enormous number of people were out strolling on the first weekend after the snow had melted (very early this year).

For some reason this item has come in after the previous two, when I intended it to be first. Anyway...

In the beginning...

2007-04-18T05:01:00.000+04:00

This is the first entry in an impulse creation, a blog designed so that my family, any friends who might be interested and anyone else curious about Russia at a first-hand, sub-headline level can, as it were, follow me and my nw digital camera round this fascinating country. While looking up "civil jury trials in Scotland" on the internet, I found a blog from an Edinburgh advocate and at the side there was a logo which implied that by clicking on it, a blog could be created. It seemed so easy, that I decided to try. I have no idea what I will end up writing, or whether I will continue to write after the first burst of enthusiasm. But why not give it a go?

I should add that I really ought to be writing my book (The Justice Factory) instead of doing this, but, well, if I can't skive off two thousand miles from the Birlinn editorial suite then where can I? I should possibly also add that this is a five-year old photograph, the only one on hand. But it is a way of saying, "Hi!" So here we go... And it really is easy.

REMEMBER THAT YOU CAN CLICK ON ANY PHOTOGRAPH TO SEE IT ENLARGED