Shivering in Anticipation of the Winter Palace

Posted on May 22, 2014 by malnare

It was incredible (although initially underwhelming) to first behold the grand Winter Palace: it was the legendary place so frequently put forward by old friends as a dream, the most beautiful place in the world. It appeared again in high school when learning of the last days of the Tsar’s family, mentioned as the opulent seat of Romanov power. And perhaps my expectations were too high, at least for the facade.

The facade itself is very wide and entirely identical. My first impression was not ‘wow!’ but whimsical.

At only three stories, it appeared shorter than most buildings in Petersburg, and the entire front showed the same repeated patterns of Baroque style and mint-toothpaste-colored paint. I was hoping that it would just be the clouds that prevented the true color and gilding from standing out, and waited until we got inside to see the Hermitage.
The courtyard began to change my mind, but I was still not really convinced that this was a grand palace, the place from which a powerful family could hold sway over the broad expanse of Russian domain and snatch a place among the great rulers of Europe.

It still all looks the same! But one does begin to get the impression, “This is a big building.”

That impression did not arrive until we actually entered the museum and arrived at the Jordan Staircase. The mere amount of gold was impressive, but what caught me was the magnificent effect of the space: the extensive gilded woodwork all hand-carved, the enormous mirrors making the stair swallow its guests, the massive ceiling mural, and solid marble columns that provided a stern and impressive backdrop.

Wow!

It caught my breath in a way that made me realize it is not just a figure of speech. For the next few hours, passing from hall to hall of carefully carved wood floors, elaborate gilding, soaring ceilings, tall windows and mirrors, semi-precious vases, and stunning pieces of art, I simply could not regain my breath. It was far too much to believe that anyone could own such a place! Truly this could be the center of an empire, where the mightiest and wealthiest rulers could rule. The extravagant throne room only proved that this is the very seat of the empire!

If only I could have gone up to the throne!

Water Quality

Posted on May 22, 2014 by kaspers

Everybody that I’ve met so far in Moscow and in St. Petersburg drinks bottled water instead of water from the tap. The bottles we get are in increments of liters: I have nearly gone through four 5-liter bottles during my stay here. Ashan (they sell everying from nylons to kulich Easter bread) is the cheapest place to buy water, but it’s a bit of a hike, especially while carrying a large jug of water. Solution? If you don’t mind spending a few rubles more, the mini-marts in the Glavnoe Zdanie is much closer.

Somehow, I’ve managed to buy four different brands.

In Russian 150, I wrote a research paper about the drinking water quality of St. Petersburg but I only found one source that had been updated within the past five years. There have been water quality checks from outside sources, finding subpar results. Since then, Vodokanal (the company in charge of providing sanitized water to the city’s people) has implemented new technology and opened new water treatment plants. They assure that the water is safe to drink, but the population tends to buy bottled water despite this, perhaps out of habit.
In my paper, I did not research Moscow’s water quality, but the situation seems similar to that of St. Petersburg. At the dorms, we are told that even if the water tastes fine and we don’t get sick, there may be heavy metals (carcinogens) from the pipes webbing through the our homely monolith. We have chainiks (electric tea kettles) to boil water, but heavy metals don’t boil away.
It is impossible to know the water quality situation exactly – recent English sources are lacking and in St. Petersburg, Vodokanal does not make all of its statistics publicly available. Perhaps the water in both cities is drinkable and there are pipes (privately owned) that unintentionally add contaminants. We do as the Russians do; we drink bottled water. It is simply a safety precaution.

The Canals of St. Petersburg

Posted on May 21, 2014 by aldrichc

As we were walking about St. Petersburg, I noticed how many canals there were across the city. It truly is difficult to walk around that city without going across a bridge at some point because of all the canals.

James floating along the Neva

The fact that all of the canals had to be constructed, as opposed to already existing before the construction of the city, was truly baffling to me, and demonstrated one of the significant contrasts between St. Petersburg and Moscow, and “intentional city” versus a sprawling one.

However, there was an unintentional element about these particular canals. Peter the Great originally intended for boats to be the primary form of transport around the city, as one could notice with the special entrance in the Church of the Savior on Blood, and the Peterhof palace, which is most grand when approached by sea.

Unfortunately, as the city developed after his death, the canals ended up becoming a less prominent feature of the city, and most people ended up using roads on land to traverse the city. Now the canals are mostly used for boat tours, like this one!

As a result, before taking the tour I noticed the canals mostly as a passing feature, as I was mostly walking along them or above them on the hundreds of bridges that span these canals in St. Petersburg.

This perspective was flipped when I was on a boat tour along the canals of the city. It was cold that day, and as we passed under the many bridges that I had been walking over during my stay here, and I began to notice all of the entrances onto the street that were unused, and connected the dots.

This city was meant to be traversed by water. Unfortunately, that does not really happen much anymore.

Three Hours

Posted on May 20, 2014 by calderong

If you want to create a feature-length film in just one take, the beautiful State Hermitage of St. Petersburg is probably the best place to do it. Commissioned by Catherine the Great in the mid-1700s, the museum is one of the largest in the world and houses thousands of paintings, sculptures, furniture, and more.
In fact, on December 23, 2001, Alexandr Sokurov did just that. A camera ran without stopping for 90-minutes straight (after a few start-overs), following the unnamed narrator of his masterpiece, Russian Ark, as he wanders from room to room in the Hermitage. This 2-kilometer path presents 3 centuries of Russia’s history, taking the viewer on a journey through Russia’s past.
When I first saw this film, I was taken aback by the beauty of the Hermitage. As the camera wound through various rooms, stumbling across balls, receptions, and past Russian rulers, it seemed as if there were no end to this magical realm.

The larger-than-life narrator of Russian Ark

We were fortunate enough to experience the State Hermitage for ourselves in early May. I’m a realist. I wasn’t expecting the same Hermitage of Sokurov’s tale–I am fully aware of the post-production magic that often goes on with most major motion films. However, upon climbing the same Jordan staircase featured in the film, I immediately realized that I hadn’t given the Museum enough credit. Built during a time when St. Petersburg had to prove its worth in the European world, the Hermitage is grand, beautiful and boasts an impressive collection of artwork. We spent 3 hours in the Hermitage, almost as much time as it took Sokurov to film Russian Ark. Following our Marquis-analog tour guide, we looked at paintings and frescoes, imagining a time when the Hermitage was filled not with tourists, but with Russian officials and nobility.

Additional Reading:
“Art’s Fading Sway: Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov.'” The White Review, n.d. http://www.thewhitereview.org/art/arts-fading-sway-russian-ark-by-aleksandr-sokurov/
“The ‘Russian Ark’ Project of the State Hermitage and Aleksander Sokurov.” Hermitage Museum, n.d. http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/13/hm13_2_002.htmlhttp://www.thewhitereview.org/art/arts-fading-sway-russian-ark-by-aleksandr-sokurov/
“Era of Catherine the Great: 18th Century.” Hermitage Museum, n.d. http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/03/hm3_6_4.html

Venice of the North

Posted on May 18, 2014 by moreesandersa

St Petersburg is often described as the “Venice of the North,” a city of canals and bridges built on the marshlands where the Neva river flows into the Gulf of Finland.

A view of St Petersburg from the water.

Its location, surrounded by water, has not always been an asset. While in Petersburg, we read Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman, which is set during the devastating food of 1824. Floods were not uncommon in St Petersburg for three hundred years after the city’s establishment, and were not brought under control until the 2011 completion of a highly controversial dam in the Gulf of Finland. You can read more about the dam here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Dam.
As a tourist, though, I really appreciated the city’s water. After over a month in landlocked Moscow, I was ready for the smell of salt water and some slightly less dry air, and I found that in St Petersburg.

Gisell and Lily looking cold on our boat tour.

On our second day in St Petersburg, we went on a very windy boat tour of the city’s canals. It was fun to see the city from Peter the Great’s intended perspective (he had hoped that Petersburg would be navigated almost exclusively by boat).
On Saturday, we visited some of the royal estates outside of the city and got to see (and briefly stand in) the freezing cold Gulf of Finland.

“You can tell it’s the ocean because of the way it is!”

I can think of very few other large cities with such tight connections to water, and I loved getting to experience that in St Petersburg.

Freemasonry in St. Petersburg

Posted on May 13, 2014 by kaspers

Yesterday was the second time that the topic of Freemasonry came up. In class, we had been discussing Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and we briefly discussed a reference to the secretive Freemason society. The first time this topic came up was in St. Petersburg when somebody asked about the pattern above the grand entryway of Kazan Cathedral.

The back side of the Kazan Cathedral

Diane informed us that it was one of the Freemason’s symbols. The freemasons are a secret society (or rather, a “society of secrets”) whose members have been famous leaders, inventors, and politicians such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
Knowing very little about the Freemasons, I browsed the internet for general information and for Freemason symbols along with the structures that these appear on. One of their most famous symbols is the Eye of Providence:

Eye of Providence. From the Wikipedia Commons.

This symbol has appeared across the world. Take this church in Germany, which has the Eye of Providence above its roof:

Church of St. Peter (Church of Illumination) in Munich, Germany. Picture from http://www.thestillman.com/stillmanfiles/.

The Freemasons played a significant part in the American Revolution, and the Eye of Providence appears on the dollar bill.

The US dollar bill. Picture from listverse.com.

Eye of Providence has also been associated with the Illuminati, another secret society, making it difficult to determine whether this particular symbol belongs to the Freemasons or to the Illuminati.
Diane directed me to Nicolas Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea for some information about Freemasonry in Russia. The first masonic lodges (a lodge is a local, organized group of masons) emerged in 1731 during the reign of Catherine the Great. In 1738, Catherine suppressed Freemasonry, but when Alexander I came to power in 1801, bringing with him his Freemason connections, Freemasonry once again became popular with Russia’s intellectuals and political activists (such as those who classified as Decembrists in the revolt of 1825). On December 1 1825, Alexander I died from an illness. The people were shocked to find out that Constantine, the Alexander I’s successor, had secretly renounced his claim to the throne. And so, when Nicholas I claimed the throne, the Decembrists revolted, and among them were the Freemasons. During one of our walks around St. Petersburg, Diane referenced the Kazan Cathedral and its symbol of the Eye of Providence, informing us that the Freemasons in Russia played a part in the Decembrist revolt of 1825.

Kazan Cathedral

Freemasonry is a difficult topic to write about. Historically, it has been a secretive society, and to do it justice with this short post is impossible. My goal is to make a brief connection with the Freemasons, a group that has spread its influence throughout the world, to a beautiful and famous St. Petersburg building – the Kazan Cathedral.

Metro: St. Petersburg and Moscow

Posted on May 13, 2014 by kaspers

We have spent over a month riding around on the Moscow metro and I love it. It’s fast and affordable. So naturally, when we traveled to St. Petersburg, I was curious about the subway of Russia’s other capital city. St. Petersburg has fewer stations than Moscow does. First, Moscow is Russia’s capital. And second, canals and rivers wind their way through St. Petersburg, making it rather difficult to build a subway system rivaling the “underground palace” that Moscow has.

St. Petersburg has 67 stations

and Moscow has 194 stations

True, the Moscow metro is no small feat, pumping water out of its system every day, but it is not located on the bank of the Gulf of Finland as St. Petersburg is. In Sunlight at Midnight, Bruce Lincoln writes that the location of St. Petersburg is one of the worst possible places for a city – frequent flooding, poor soil, and harsh winters. Needless to say, the opening of a new St. Petersburg station is greeted as a greater accomplishment than a new station in Moscow is.
Compared to Moscow and the rest of Russia, St. Petersburg is a city of the west. For example, the city’s architecture favors European styles over traditional Russian styles (such as the traditional onion domes) and this European influence is even present in each city’s stations. To me, St. Petersburg’s stations seem more business-like than Moscow’s stations do. While the few stations we got the chance to see in St. Petersburg had artful entrances, the platforms beyond the escalator were rather stark, contrasting with some of the impressive, beautiful Moscow stations.

St. Petersburg’s Admirality station. From http://tour-to-st-petersburg.com/.

One of Moscow’s stations. Photo taken by Matthew Buck. From http://www.cntraveller.com/photos/photo-galleries/25-reasons-to-go-to-moscow/the-moscow-metro.

To enter the metro in Moscow, we hold our “smart cards” up to the turnstile’s scanner. Once we’re in, we can stay in the metro as long as we like and transfer to any station. The St. Petersburg metro operates the same way, but rides are paid for using coins instead of cards.

The coin I used in St. Petersburg.

My Moscow metro card.

I greatly enjoyed exploring a few of St. Petersburg’s metro stations, and I wish we could have spent more time traveling around the city. But now we’re back in Moscow, whose underground palace provides more metro stations than we have time to explore.

Story of a Traveling Rock: The Bronze Horseman

Posted on May 13, 2014 by aldrichc

Люблю тебя, Петра творенье,
Люблю твой строгий, стройный вид.

These are two of the lines from the famous poem The Bronze Horseman, by Pushkin. They translate as follows:

I love you, Peter’s great creation,
I love your view of stern and grace.

The Bronze Horseman in stormy weather.
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Pushkin definitely thought of this monument as being fantastic, and the name for the monument comes from this poem. If there were any symbol of this city, the horseman would be it. The Statue of Liberty is to New York as The Bronze Horseman is to St. Petersburg.

The Thunder Stone below the Bronze Horseman.

However, I would like to draw your attention to the pedastal below the statue. Known as Гром-Камень (literally: Thunder Stone), it is touted by Russians to be the largest stone ever moved by man. It weighed nearly 1500 tons, and was called the Thunder Stone because it was said that thunder broke off a piece of the boulder. Not only that, but the boulder was nearly halfway submerged in a marsh not far from the Gulf of Finland. Naturally, no other average boulder would do for the monument that Falconet wished to design under the rule of Catherine the Great.

Initially, Falconet wanted to shape the stone at location, but Catherine the Great insisted upon moving the entire boulder before shaping it in St. Petersburg. And so it was. The engineers for the project had to develop the ancestor to the ball-bearing and had these large spheres run on track, which was constantly disassembled behind the stone and moved to the front, with nearly 400 men pulling just so they could move the stone. Meanwhile, carvers ceaselessly sculpted the stone as it was being transferred. Naturally, the massive scale of this project meant that progress was slow. All of these people only managed to move the boulder about 150 meters a day. Once the group managed to reach the sea, a special barge was built for the stone, and two warships were required just to keep the barge afloat. After nine long months, these men, with their everlasting resolve, brought the stone the six kilometers to its current resting place under the Bronze Horseman in Senate Square.

It is moments like this in history of daring to do what nobody has done before that awe me. However, if one were to just stop by the monument, one would never have known about the struggle and ingenuity required to make the Bronze Horseman a reality.

It was pretty cold.

A Formidable Foe

Posted on May 12, 2014 by akgundud

The overwhelming magnitude of the power the Romanovs held until the 20^th century is oppressively obvious in each building commissioned by the tsars. While I felt the tsar’s power walking from room to room in the Hermitage and seeing paintings that cost more than I will probably make in a lifetime, it was in a few of the rooms in the Catherine Palace, a summer residency located on the fringes of St. Petersburg, that I understood the extravagance of the Russian royal family.
The first room I saw there had furniture made of intricately carved wood with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. I do not even want to think about the cost of the matching chandelier for the room (you can see pictures below—the whole room was also restored after the damage and pillage incurred during World War II). The main ballroom was jaw dropping. Carvings plated in gold and massive mirrors decorate the entire hall. In the next room, as a guest, you had the pleasure of eating marzipan dipped in edible gold in the shape of apples. The entire palace is very much in tune with the fashion of Western Europe in the 18^th century.

Outside of the palace.

The main ballroom.

A wider view of the ballroom; not my own picture! When we went, there were so many tourists present in the palace that even our tour guide was astonished.

The beautiful lapis furniture!

Old, but relevant: Golden apple marzipan tree.

I mention the extravagance of the palace not to inform you about the excesses of the tsars and tsarinas in the 18^th century, but to help you imagine what your thoughts would be if you were a foreign dignitary or ambassador, for example maybe from Britain or France. Would you go to war with a country that had no problems displaying the strength and might of its empire through its lavish palaces while also managing to fund its many successful wars for expansion? The royal family had complete control over their vast empire during the 18^th century, and any sign of revolt against tsarist power was brutally put down and dealt with immediately (for example, the power struggle during the time of Peter the Great). The 18^th century was a time for the Russian Empire to signal to western Europe that is was more than capable of holding onto its power and land and that it was an empire that housed an Enlightened royal family and embraced western ideals. Russia was a formidable foe, and St. Petersburg was the symbol of its power. How many empires in the world have successfully built a city in the middle of nowhere and pulled it off so well that it looks like it has been a part of the landscape for centuries?

Dom Knigi

Posted on May 12, 2014 by moreesandersa

One of our days in St Petersburg, a group of us split off and visited Dom Knigi, or “house of books” a large bookstore on Nevsky Prospekt.

The Singer building, which houses Dom Knigi.

It was really fun to look around a Russian bookstore. I had already been to Biblioglobus in Moscow, which is even bigger, but I still get a strange thrill out of seeing so many Russian books in the same place.

Sahree contemplating the cover of a Russian young adult novel at Biblioglobus in Moscow.

The coolest thing about Dom Knigi is definitely the building that houses it. Built as the Russian headquarters of the Singer sewing machine company in 1904, it has an impressive glass dome complete with a huge metal eagle. After the revolution, the Singer headquarters was converted into a bookstore, and it has been one since then, except for a few years of restoration in the early 2000’s. Our tour guide joked once that the eagle on top of the former Singer building was the only American symbol in the city that had survived the communist period. The building’s Стиль Модерн (“modern style”) architecture contrasts sharply with the massive empire-style Kazan Cathedral across the street, built almost exactly a hundred years previously.

Kazan cathedral, across the street from Dom Knigi.

We saw a lot of interesting and varied architecture in St. Petersburg, from palaces to a jail, but I thought the Singer building was one of the most unique and beautiful buildings we visited.

Carleton Moscow & Beyond 2014

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Category Archives: St. Petersburg