St Petersburg

I was lucky enough to visit Russia about a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1993. My girlfriend at the time had lived and studied in Leningrad, and had made friends with a family there. We decided to go visit them.

We arrive at Leningrad airport. It has “ST PETERSBURG” on the top in obviously brand-new letters.

I see row after row of identical Aeroflot planes. Our British Airways plane taxis for about half a kilometer around the outside of the old ‘external’ airport, to the main airport building. Apparently now that people can travel, they don’t feel a need to physically separate international and domestic flights.

The plane stops and sits for a while. Eventually, someone comes back, having found some steps. Some soldiers stand and watch us as we disembark.

We fill out some customs forms to declare what we’re bringing into the country. The form is an old USSR one, and it’s fairly obvious that nobody is taking customs very seriously anymore; they just make us complete the official Soviet paperwork because, well, it’s their job, and they haven’t been told to do anything else. Their asses having been covered, we clear customs and immigration quite quickly.

We meet up with Olga, her husband Alexei, and their daughter Natasha. We learn that Alexei’s car has broken down, and the garage has refused to even try to repair it, saying it needs a new body. Hence, we find ourselves squeezing onto a yellow bendy bus full of Russians.

The electric bus rattles along the streets, which could apparently use some maintenance. They look brown and dusty. The ballast of the bus’s electrical system is apparently completely shot, and the back of the bus is filled with an eerie electronic whining noise that rises and falls in pitch depending on what the bus is doing. This turns out to be a common feature of Russian buses; I name it “The Song Of The Lonely Bus” and find myself wishing I had a tape recorder…

We switch to the Metro. When the train arrives there are doors in the walls which open up, followed by the doors of the train a few moments later. I find myself wondering if the two sets of doors ever fail to line up.

Ascending from the Metro by escalator is rather like the stairway to heaven scene in the classic movie “A Matter Of Life And Death”. Unlike the Underground in London, there are no posters here to give a sense of scale; when you look to the side, the lights continue as far as the eye can see.

The apartment block where Olga and family live looks a lot like the ones in East Berlin — but even more so. The outside is run down, crumbling, faded and shabby. The stairwells are unlit — the lights have been ripped out. The lift isn’t working. We walk up to the fourth floor. I notice a faint smell of urine in the stairwell, like Watford car park. We climb nine flights of stairs in all.

I’m a bit nervous as to what we’ll find, but the apartment turns out to be nice inside, though very obviously Eastern Europe.

Olga and Alexei have moved into the main room, and given me and XQ the bedroom. Olga’s mother and Natasha are sleeping in the remaining room. The “bathroom” is a shower that has been bolted onto the side of the kitchen by Alexei.

This is, by Russian standards, a luxury apartment. Three whole rooms, plus a kitchen! Originally this was three separate communal apartments with a shared kitchen. Olga’s family got the other two when their neighbors moved out; fortunately for them, they had connections, and grandma survived the Siege of Leningrad, so the second time they applied for more space they managed to get preferential treatment because of her war hero status and the fact that they had a child.

It’s time to eat, and we are given special treats: fresh fish to start with; sprats, to be precise. Unfortunately the main course turns out to be some kind of meat dish in jelly.

I had already decided that I would give up being vegetarian for the duration of the trip. It’s hard enough for Russian families to get food at all, without putting crazy demands on them. So I try to eat the jellied meat, really I do. I just can’t manage it, though. I’ve always had a problem with anything that has a texture like fat, and the jelly sets off my gag reflex. I realize that if I try to force it down, I’ll end up vomiting. I opt to survive on bread and vegetables.

We go out at 1a.m. and find that it’s still light. We walk down to the riverfront and watch the bridges to the island being raised. Wispy clouds drift in front of the moon, moonlight sparkles on the water, and the gilded dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral glitters against the blue-orange sky. A ship passes through the bridge.

Alexei has a Russian clone of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as well as a radiation meter and a four band (shortwave) radio. Natasha tries to teach me the alphabet for a while, then we all go to bed.

We walk to the waterfront again in the morning. In the daylight we can see how shabby all the buildings are.

It was once forbidden to take photographs of the bridges; they were considered military targets. Nobody seems to care now.

We go in to a featureless shabby building. It turns out to be the bank; there’s a guard behind a screen in the outer lobby. Everything looks typically Soviet — faded painted official notices, dim lighting, institutional color paintwork, bored clerks. However, on one wall is an electronic display showing exchange rates.

Today’s official rate is 1416 rubles to the UK pound. We walk back out again. A soldier sitting in a jeep watches us, and makes a note of something on his clipboard.

Once we’re a discreet distance away, we suggest to Olga that an exchange rate of 1000 rubles per pound sterling seems very reasonable to us. She protests, and starts trying to work out the right amount on a piece of paper. I hand her £15 and badger her to hand me a round 15,000 rubles. She gives in.

A private currency transaction like this is still strictly illegal, though we suspect nobody will care too much for such a small amount of hard currency. However, we have other police business to attend to. Olga must report that we are staying with her, or she will risk a hefty fine for harboring foreigners illegally.

We call in at the police station, and check the times for reporting ourselves. Wednesday and Friday, 10-12a.m., so we’ll have to come back another time.

We cross the bridge to the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, now a giant museum of fine art. In spite of the peeling paint, the buildings in this part of the city are beautiful and majestic. The gold-coated domes of buildings in the distance glint in the sunlight.

I feel like I’ve landed on Mars. Having grown up during the Cold War, Russia has always been the distant enemy you’ll never see unless they invade… and now here I am, standing in Russia, surrounded by the enemy — and their children at play. It doesn’t seem real.

Olga has a word with a man standing guard at one of the rear doors of the Hermitage. He offers to let us in for free. Olga’s mother says it’s God thanking us for our earlier generosity.

The art collection encompasses European and Russian art, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet and DaVinci. I hear an American tour group go past; their guide says “These paintings are by Monet. He’s famous.”

Olga is our tour guide; she worked as an official guide for Intourist during her student days.

The building is incredibly over the top inside, and it reminds me of St Peter’s in Rome. There are dinner tables made of solid slabs of lapis lazuli, giant columns of green malachite, that sort of thing. And of course, there’s gold leaf everywhere.

The Golden Room, incredibly, has even more gold. It almost looks as though the Czar must have had King Midas as a houseguest. There’s so much splendor that it winds the dial right back around to tasteless again.

I find myself understanding why there was a revolution. OK, so Communism sucked, but the Czar wasn’t much better. At least after the revolution the people could look at all this stuff, even if they still lived in poverty.

For an afternoon snack, we have open sandwiches. Apparently Russians typically have breakfast, an afternoon meal at 3 or 4 p.m., and an evening meal at 8 or so.

We head into the middle of the city. At the Metro station there are women selling kotyonki, grey fluffy kittens.

The large state-owned shopping mall (like the famous Gum store in Moscow) has been privatized. The space is now taken up by hundreds of independent franchised shops. LEGO, VRs, Philips TVs, Tampax — you name it, you can get it. Assuming, that is, you can afford it.

The difference is stunning to XQ: “Mathew, I don’t believe it, they’ve got Toilet Duck!”

We consider getting some nice coffee for Olga, since we drank quite a lot of her Russian coffee the previous night. We decide that she would be insulted, and would assume that we were really buying it for ourselves because the Russian stuff tastes awful. Besides, unknown to her, we have all kinds of non-perishable treats in our suitcases, including coffee — we’re hiding them until we leave, so she won’t serve them to us.

We walk down Nyevsky Prospekt, which is Leningrad’s equivalent of Oxford Street. (Officially renamed or not, everyone still calls it Leningrad.)

We pass a shiny new hotel, sticking out from its surroundings like a Rolls-Royce in a junkyard. There aren’t any Rollers outside it, but there are a few BMWs. It’s a joint Russian-Western venture.

The skyline of the Square of the Uprising has been enhanced with a huge illuminated neon Philips sign. You can still see the Communist red star on the top of the obelisk, though.

We decide to visit a hard currency shop, as XQ has forgotten to bring shampoo. The idea of a hard currency shop is simple: it’s a place which actually stocks all the things you can’t get in a state-run store. The snag, if you’re Russian, is that they won’t take rubles in payment. To avoid time wasters, there’s a bouncer to keep out the riff-raff. He checks that we both have credit cards. This establishes that we have access to hard currency.

We look at the array of goods on offer, and fight off waves of guilt. We leave with shampoo and nothing else. Later at a kiosk we give in and buy two Snickers bars, and a hairband for XQ.

We notice that most of the people going into the hard currency stores look decidedly iffy. I wonder if there’s a special clothes store for con-men and crooks to buy suits at, as they look exactly like you’d expect a con artist to look like at home. Come to think of it, Boris Yeltsin looks like a used car salesman.

We visit the University where XQ stayed during her months here studying. In those days, it was still CCCP. I still can’t really believe I’m here. Everything seems so…normal. Well, apart from the crazy alphabet, anyway. XQ says it probably doesn’t seem strange because Leningrad is such a European city. In fact, walking along the wide streets of Vassilivski Island, I’m reminded of Boston, Massachusetts more than anywhere else.

Dinner that night is a big improvement on the first night. It’s a Siberian dish consisting of bits of meat wrapped up in tiny parcels of…well, pasta really. It’s basically Russian tortellini. They taste great, presumably far too good as they are served with vinegar. I make up for my inability to eat the previous night; this is one special treat I don’t have to force down.

Olga seems much happier once I’ve eaten, and so am I. For a while the day before I had been worrying that I’d find everything inedible, and end up raiding McDonald’s in Moscow.

I’m offered some genuine Russian vodka. Soviet issue, in fact. I feel obliged to try it. I imagine gasoline must taste quite similar, and I cough a bit. I decide it’s an acquired taste, and that I’d really rather not acquire it.

We watch the famous “600 Seconds” TV show on St Petersburg’s local TV channel. The camerawork is incredibly amateurish, like a bad home-made video. Afterward, there are two episodes of a Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian. The man providing the dubbed voice just speaks the words in monotone over the top of the original soundtrack. As the characters play out their drama, their voices remain completely deadpan. XQ finds it hilarious, and I probably would too if I understood Russian.

Olga tells us a Russian joke:

A tourist from the west is walking down Nyevsky Prospekt, looking at the architecture, when he falls into a pit in the pavement. Some workers are standing nearby.

“Hey,” he says, “this pit is dangerous. You should put some red flags around it to warn people.”

“What, didn’t you see the red flag on the boat on the way over here?”

The sun is still shining at 11p.m. when we go to bed.

The plan is for us to go to Pushkin and see some majestic summer houses which belonged to the Russian nobility. We will get the Metro to the edge of the city, then catch a train to Pavlovsk and see the Czar Pavel’s Summer Palace.

Czar Pavel was the son of Catherine The Great. He reigned for only 4 years, then his German wife lived in the palace.

There we will also meet one of Olga’s relatives, who is also (conveniently enough) called Olga.

The plan fails when we miss the train to Pavlovsk by about two minutes. Instead, we get back on the Metro and head to an outlying residential district, and catch a bus from there.

As is usually the case in Russia, the bus is packed with people. We stand at the back and try not to fall over whenever the bus hits a pothole, which is frequently. This bus is small and red, unlike the larger yellow-orange metropolitan buses.

The summer palace in Pushkin is white, with an amazing cobalt blue paint. There are the traditional Russian gold leaf onion domes on the top. Stone statues of Atlas hold up the balconies. Like the Hermitage, it’s amazing, but a bit too much.

We walk through the gardens and over the bridge. I curse myself for forgetting my camera, but console myself with the fact that it isn’t actually a very Russian building; it’s more Italian in style.

The Pavlovsk gardens are painstakingly landscaped based on precision drawings made by a Scotsman, to make them look like English countryside. There’s an aviary, but all the birds died in the harsh climate. More amusingly, there’s a luxury peasant hut, built for the nobles so that they could sit and drink milk in the sun and pretend to experience the lifestyle of the happy peasants.

We manage to get the train for the return journey. The benches are hard wood, like church pews. The train is packed with people, just like the bus was. I get stared at when I hold a door open for someone. He’s a man, which probably makes it even more insulting.

In the evening XQ and I go out alone. We get the Metro to the other side of the island, and walk past row after row of brutal Soviet architecture. We turn the corner and past more blocks of flats, to the block where XQ spent her student months. Now she’s shocked to discover that there’s a shop on the ground floor selling everything from Mars bars to vodka to Tampax. She used to have to sneak to the hotel hard currency shop for such luxuries; most of the time she’d be joining the food queue at the state shop down the road with all the Russians. Now there are no queues, and no rationing.

The whole area is a huge grid of tower blocks near the sea. It’s vast, the blocks are hundreds of meters apart. I try to imagine what it must be like in winter, when the temperature drops below -20 Celsius, the sea freezes over, and gales blow snow in from the Gulf of Finland.

We visit the hotel where Alexei works, near the student hostel. It’s mostly a hotel for rich foreigners; it’s space age Soyuz chic, big and square and ugly.

We wait for a bus home. After a while, we decide to splash out on a taxi fare. The bus is 20 rubles, but a taxi is 1000 — an incredibly expensive extravagance for a Russian, one quid for us.

The taxi is licensed, meaning it’s one of the better ones. It’s painted to look like a taxi, has a light on the roof and everything. Unfortunately, the car beneath is Soviet built, and has seen better decades; I can see the asphalt rushing past through a rusted hole in the floor. The driver drives like his life depends on it, and given the state of his vehicle it probably does. We get to the nearest Metro station alive.

There are two girls in spandex on the Metro on the way home. They’re reading a Russian medical textbook about sex, and giggling.

Dinner is borscht. An egg, something green, and some stuff that resembles sour cream, in soup. Then there are blinni, little pancakes, and more cream stuff, and actual raspberries. I demonstrate again that I really can eat, and the previous evening wasn’t a fluke.

We go to St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Olga has another ‘contact’ there, and as a result we get a free personal tour.

St. Isaac’s is the fourth-largest church in the world, after St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Paul’s in England, the Duomo in Firenze. It reminds me very much of St. Peter’s, except it’s more tasteful. There’s less gold and the place is more colorful, with lapis lazuli and colored marble everywhere.

We climb to the balcony and look out over the city. I take some photos. It turns out that it’s still illegal to take pictures of St. Petersburg from the air, and a Russian berates me. It probably doesn’t help that my camera is a small Western one which slides open and closed like a spy camera and fits in a pocket.

After the cathedral, we walk a small distance and go into a more traditionally Russian church. The first thing I notice is the smell of incense. The place is filled with icons — in the original sense of the word — and people are lighting candles, placing them in front of the icons, and praying for whatever it is that people who pray, pray for. The church is very dark compared to any other church I’ve been in.

For those who don’t know what real icons are, they’re small pictures, paintings of religious significance, often almost covered with hugely elaborate frames made of wood and metal. As well as the icons on the pillars above the candles, there is also an entire wall dedicated to icons.

The Orthodox cross is different from the ‘normal’ one I’m used to: it has two extra crossbars, one above the main beam to represent the nameplate, and one at the bottom to represent where the feet were nailed. The bottom crossbeam tilts down slightly on the right side. I’ve no idea if there’s any Biblical basis for the idea that Jesus’s left leg was longer than his right one.

In the evening we go to see Oscar Wilde’s classic “The Importance Of Being Earnest” at the local theater. Since it’s performed entirely in Russian, and I only know a handful of words of Russian, I must admit I don’t find it as hilariously witty as the author intended.

Dinner is some kind of Russian meatballs, with potatoes and vegetables. For dessert there’s some excellent apple cake.

Peter and Paul’s Fortress is on its own island, part of the cluster that makes up St. Petersburg. Inside is a church where almost all the Czars are buried; I’m not sure what happened to the other two.

As usual, the fortress features onion domes covered in gold leaf, and a big spike on the roof.

We see the cells where various political prisoners were once held, including Lenin’s brother.

On our way back, imprisonment still in mind, we report ourselves to the police. We fill out two forms written entirely in Russian declaring our whereabouts, queue for half an hour, show our passports and visas, get two more forms which the bank has to stamp, pay 1000 rubles, and we’re then told to report back the following morning.

In the afternoon we take a boat trip on St. Petersburg’s many canals and rivers. Olga buys the tickets for us, and we thereby avoid the 1000% markup charged to anyone paying hard currency and unable to read and speak Russian.

This kind of “dual pricing” is pretty much standard. It’s not that the Russians are trying to rip us off; the pricing for Westerners is entirely reasonable by our standards. It’s just that the economy is in such a crazy state right now; as soon as the ruble became convertible, its value plummeted, and it’s still in free fall. Unfortunately, Russian wages haven’t been rising. So while paying nearly a dollar for a Mars bar trucked in from Europe is pretty fair, if you translate that to rubles it’s more than a day’s wages for Olga.

In the evening Alexei shows me his computer. It’s a Russian clone of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, build from Russian components and an imported Zilog Z80. The RAM is on four piggybacked ICs, and the ROM is 16 PROMs on a separate board. We play the original Russian version of Tetris, in Cyrillic of course. He’s much better at it than I am, but I beat him at E-Motion. Reagan and Gorbachev should have tried this.

Dinner is soup, and a surprisingly excellent salad. Having seen a couple of Russian marketplaces at this point, I’ve no idea how Olga got hold of these vegetables.

There’s an ad on TV I recognize: it’s for “Veeskas” (as they say it). Apparently koshki would choose it. We watch an old episode of “The Sweeney”.

Petrodvorets is amazing. There are huge fountains everywhere, the weather is beautiful, clear blue skies, and it’s hot enough to dispense with sweaters and overshirts. I don’t have much more to say about the place, except… look at some photos.

In the evening we go to the ballet. The Kirov is away on tour abroad, but we get to see what I’m told is the world’s second-best ballet. The music is all Tchaikovsky — three pieces, one of which is part of Swan Lake.

I’ll admit I’m not big on ballet, but I’m irritated by the behavior of a Japanese family in the next box. They talk through most of the performance, stand up and take flash photographs of themselves with the stage behind them, and have a brat of a kid who leans out and obstructs everyone’s view.

Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful evening. Even a fairly uncultured oaf like me can tell how incredibly skilled the performers are.

Afterward XQ and I go into a bar. It’s another “hard currency only” place — they give you a card to buy drinks with, and you settle your bill in hard currency on the way out. If you lose the card, you pay 90 Deutschmarks.

The bar is smoky, and naturally it’s full of foreigners. I can tell because they’re all speaking English. I find the place offensive and unpleasant. When we leave, XQ mentions that she and the other students used to go there all the time. I find this hard to believe, and ask why — and she explains that it was the only place you could get into without queueing for hours. Oh well, fair enough then…

Nowadays, there are many hard currency establishments, and we try a small “Gino Ginelli” ice cream and coffee shop. We buy 4 small scoops of ice cream for 8 DM. It’s ridiculously expensive, even to us. To Olga… a week’s wages, pretty much.

XQ: “Do you fancy anything else?”

Me: “I still feel guilty about the ice cream.”

XQ: “So do I. Funny, isn’t it?”

I’ve not been carrying any hard currency around with me, and I suddenly realize the subconscious reason why not: I feel it would be wrong for me to be buying things that Russians can’t get for any amount of rubles.

I learn that Alexei wanted to visit Europe, but was denied an exit visa. He’s a trained engineer and has worked on Russian nuclear submarines, and is still a marine reserve. He shows me some of his books, stuff like how to recognize different types of American warship through a periscope, and reference guides to Cyrillic ‘Morse’ code and naval signal flags.

Alexei’s visa refusal is perhaps the reason why Olga was able to visit us the previous year — the authorities knew her family would be in St. Petersburg, and therefore she wouldn’t defect.

We head out into the countryside. The family owns half of a dacha (country summer house) near a lakeside village, set in woodlands. It’s very beautiful.

We have a barbecue. Some of Alexei’s friends from Murmansk are there. Murmansk is Russia’s most northern port, where many of the nuclear submarines were based during the Cold War. The ocean regularly freezes over there, and during mid-winter there are only minutes of daylight each day.

It’s around 23-25 Celsius where we are, comfortable room temperature; in Murmansk that day it’s a blazing 3 Celsius, a typical midsummer day. Alexei’s friends are sweating profusely in the heat, and they keep a careful distance from the barbecue.

I notice that when Russians buy sunglasses, they leave the stickers stuck to the lenses saying things like “UV protection” and “scratch resistant”. I laugh and ask why they don’t peel off the labels. It turns out that leaving on the stickers is the fashionable thing to do, at least in St. Petersburg right now, as it shows that you have Western sunglasses. English words on a sticker are as good as a designer label.

There’s another minor misunderstanding when we talk about food shortages. I explain that England did have food shortages, back in the 1940s. I mention “ration book”, and they hear “Russian book” and get offended for a moment, thinking that it’s a slang term like “French letter” or “Dutch courage”. XQ explains.

We wander through the woods a little. At one point I hear some Russian voices and the sound of dogs barking, and suddenly the memory of every Cold War spy movie I’ve ever seen is telling me to run and hide. I start to realize the true extent to which I’ve been brainwashed in spite of my skepticism.

The exchange rate is now 1,466 rubles to the UK pound, a gain of 50 in 6 days.

The Russian Museum has a lot of Russian art, naturally. The collection seems to go as far as the early 20th Century, but there’s very little sign of any kind of abstract art. It’s all pictures of Czars, men with beards, peasants, landscapes, that sort of thing. Upstairs are lots of icons.

Alexei has given me a wristwatch as a gift. It’s a special commemorative design celebrating the anniversary of St Petersburg being opened as a port. XQ has a watch too, as a gift for her brother. The luxury watches don’t come with straps, so we track down some watch straps that match. 1,200 rubles for two. We also look for the traditional big furry hats, or army satchels, but we don’t see any apart from on very dodgy looking market stalls.

Art books are as expensive here as in Britain; one book on Soviet art in the museum is $90. Most are priced 20,000–30,000 rubles.

I get my mother a small lacquered box. She already has Russian plates and matryoshki, and I can’t stick a balalaika in my suitcase. XQ is adamant that we shouldn’t export any native foodstuffs from the country, and she has a point.

That night, at around 23:30, we get the overnight train to Moscow. Olga knows someone who works at the station, and has managed to get us three tickets in the “first class” area — that is, the one which only has four bunk beds to a compartment.

XQ and I are not officially supposed to travel outside St Petersburg, as we don’t have internal visas. In the Soviet days, we would be deported if caught, and given how uncertain things are it’s quite possible the same would happen now. I’m under orders to avoid speaking, as even if I knew more than a dozen words of Russian, my accent would be a dead giveaway.

On the train in the morning, Olga tells us another Russian joke:

Q: What should we do if the Americans launch a massive nuclear attack?

A: Wrap yourself in a white sheet, and crawl very, very quietly to the graveyard.

Q: But why must we crawl quietly?

A: So as not to start a panic.

The train is actually more luxurious than the sleeper train we traveled on in Italy. However, there are no straps or railings to prevent you from rolling off the upper bunk beds, and I don’t get much sleep. The fourth passenger in our compartment is a quiet Russian girl.

The railway station in Moscow is an exact copy of the one in Leningrad, but labeled “Leningrad” instead of “Moscow”. Similarly, three other stations in the vicinity are built to look just like the ones their trains go to. In between the stations there’s a sea of people milling around, trying to sell things, and yelling at each other.

Metro tickets are made of translucent neon green plastic. They used to be metal, but the currency devalued so fast that people apparently began hoarding them, melting them down, and selling the scrap metal for more than the cost of the tokens.

The Metro map is circular with diagonal lines, quite the coolest I’ve seen in any city. We take the train to Red Square.

At this point I’m not feeling too good. Olga’s been feeding us plenty by Russian standards, but my overactive metabolism has been burning it off, and I feel weak, tired, and sometimes dizzy. At least my digestion is just about coping with the temporary return of meat to my diet, unlike XQ’s.

Red Square is neither red, nor square; the “Red” part is from the Russian for “beautiful”. “Kremlin” just means “fortress”, so one should really talk about “The Moscow Kremlin”. Lenin’s mausoleum is still there, big and red and low and boxy.

Most of the square is closed off; apparently there’s a meeting going on in the Parliament building. St Basil’s is closed, so I don’t get to see inside it. We walk across the bridge a bit to see the Kremlin from the river.

We go into ГУМ (GUM), formerly the state department store. Now it’s full of expensive Western boutique stores selling things people don’t need, for hard currency only — stuff like Бзнетон (Benneton) and Yves San Laurent. Millions of people are on the poverty line, but at least you can pay $100 for a sweater.

There are also small Russian shops scattered amongst the chain stores; they too stock a variety of Western goods. I see one store selling ЛЕГО (LEGO); at least that has some value.

We go inside the Kremlin and look around. There are the usual onion-domed church buildings, the parliament building, and a nasty looking Soviet government building. Lots of American tourists are here, doing what they do best.

Next we head for the old Jewish quarter of Moscow. It used to be lively, full of people and market stalls, but now it seems to be fairly dead. Olga says it’s the same everywhere — there are no Russian tourists anymore, just the Westerners who can afford to travel and are prepared to put up with the bureaucratic paperwork.

We cross over to the main entry road, which was demolished and rebuilt to look impressive as you drive into the city. There are large Soviet tower blocks and concrete department stores along its length. XQ says there used to be many bookstalls. Now, there are kiosks selling jeans, cassette tapes, food, drink, and anything belonging to the Soviet Union that wasn’t nailed down. The books that remain are trashy pulp novels and the Russian version of Penthouse, rather than poetry and literature.

We decide to buy Olga lunch. Somehow she never got to eat pizza while visiting us, so we take her to Пэцца Хат. I eat until I’m completely stuffed. When we leave, I feel bouncy and full of energy once more. The clouds have cleared, and the sun has come out.

We get the train to Zagorsk, which houses an ancient monastery. Walking from the station, we get to the observation point on the hilltop overlooking a valley. On the far side is a dazzling spread of onion-domed churches and other buildings. Some have gold roofs, some are deep blue with gold stars. We go there and look around inside.

An Orthodox service is going on in the church with the blue dome with gold stars. We look inside. The room is full of candles and incense; there are icons everywhere. It’s dark, and there’s a monotone chanting. It’s hard to believe this religion has anything in common with the Church of England.

We go to a small hard currency café and buy tea, then return to Moscow by train.

Back in Moscow, in the station, we see an old drunk lying in a pool of liquid. He has apparently just been beaten up by a policeman, and several women are berating the policeman. The old man tries to get up onto his feet, and the policeman kicks him viciously in the chest. He falls backwards, and his head hits the stone floor of the station with a sickening crack. We don’t stay around to see what happens next.

We visit the Moscow University district, and see the much-derided “wedding cake” building. The Soviet Union apparently built a number of them during the Stalinist era.

On the train back to St Petersburg that evening, I sleep better for some reason.

We see a few last bits of St Petersburg. In the evening, we visit Olga’s friend Anna. Anna has recently been to America; she seems to like New York more than I did.

Epilogue #

A few weeks later, Boris Yeltsin sent tanks in to shell the Russian Parliament building. I watched on TV. Suddenly news from Russia seemed a lot more real, a lot more important. I saw the Pizza Hut where we had bought lunch, this time with an armored car outside it.

I realize now that the only reason the Cold War worked was the Soviet Union’s keeping the borders closed. You can only fear and mistrust the enemy that much if you are ignorant of who they really are.