Moscow Musing
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2006
1
11
27
Trip End
Nov 19, 2006
Moscow,
Russia
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Moscow is very very different to St Peterburg
Kremlin and Lenin
. Whereas St Petersburg was designed to be very European, Moscow retains that Slavic stoicism. The hostel is very nice, in a good location - I can walk to Red square in 30 mins, which is super dooper close by Moscow standards. Of course, the metro is far closer, so I use that. The metros in Russia are quite strange to my eyes. The actual tracks are far deeper than in London - it's not unusual for the super steep, super fast escalators to take 4 or 5 minutes to reach the bottom. It's so steep everyone coming the other way looks like they're almost lying down! The number of people using the system is astounding - more people use the Moscow metro than those that use the London and New York metros put together! I dread to think of the stampede that will ensue if there'a ever a fire - you get thousands of people scrambling for on escalator when it's busy, let alone when they're panicing. I felt quite bad about not really doing what I wanted to in St Petersburg, so I decided that in Moscow I'd make the extra effort. In Russia, it's fairly standard for museums to be shut on either Monday or Tuesday, but, previously unbeknown to me, on the first week of the month, most are shut both days. Can't see any reason why, except maybe to foil my plans of ever seeing anything!
There's a famous convent in Moscow, that Peter the Great banished his half sister and first wife to (what a lovely man!), called the Novodevishki Convent (means the new maidens convent). Alas, this was shut on Monday when I turned up, all ready to explore. There's a cemetery outside though, and after the Kremlin walls, this is THE place to be buried in Moscow. And a normal headstone won't do here, no no no, they have huge statues/busts/various other sculptures instead
Kremlin Tower
. There were thousands of graves, but some that stood out were Gogol (a writer), Prokoffiev (a composer) and Khruschev. Deemed unworthy of the Kremiln walls for being too anti-Stalinist, he was buried here. There were a lot of Soviet graves with extra special embellishment, which were pretty cool.Big life sized statues of people - there was an astronaut in full space gear, and a few soldiers too. It was a very peaceful place, as you'd expect, giving me a lot to think about. Although I've been here before too, I still don't really have time to see everything I want to. All the 'tourist' things I've done before - I've seen Lenin, the Kremlin, a ballet, blah blah blah. This time I'm just going to catch up with things I missed before. I went to The WWII museum yesterday in Victory Park - actually, that's rather inaccurate, it's the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (basically, a museum of Russia's achievements). They take WWII very seriously here, and in the other former USSR countries, but when you consider that over 25 million soldiers died, and at least half that again of civilians, you can see why. Most cities in Russia (and Ukraine) have a "Park Pobedy" (victory park), and not surprisingly, Moscow's is the biggest I've seen. The museum itself is huge - a central building with 'arms' running 100m either side, and a 142m column out the front (10cm to remember every day of the war apparently). The most powerful part of the museum was the 'Hall of Tears and Sorrow' - a wide, dark corridor lined withbooks filled with the names of the soldiers that died from each region. And believe me, there's a lot of books. The museum also had dioramas of the main battles the Russian were involved in (well, the ones they won) - huge paintings to depict the battle scene. Some were really haunting. Upstairs is less sad and more boasting though, culminating in the "Hall of Glory"
St Basil's Cathedral
. As much as they revere their dead, they love to show that they won. The hall is circular, with the names of all the 'Heroes of the Soviet Union' (and more recently, the Heroes of Russia) engraved, and a massive statue in the centre. Very similar to the final room in the museum in Kiev, but I think the one in Kiev had the better museum overall. The park is on the site of the retreat route used by Napoleon in 1812 - there's a huge arch just down the road to commemorate it. Today I actually got up and did lots of stuff, I was very impressed. I went to the Mongolian Embassy super early to get my visa (after being told off for having bad posture by the lady that worked the photo machine in the metro - yes, you're not trusted to use a photo machine yourself.), then I went to the Pushkin Museum across the street. Pushkin is the father of modern Russian literature - sort of the Russian Shakepeare, but more a poet than a playwright. He lived in the early 1800s, and died in a duel defending his wife's honour in the 1840s. The museum is in a flat him and his wife lived in for a couple of years on one of Moscow's most important trade street, Ulitsa Arbat. I was a little disappointed - although I did learn some things about Pushkin's life in Moscow - his friends, the theatre, literary reviews etc - the flat didn't really feel his. Pushkin lived most of his life in St Petersburg, which was the capital of Russia then, and the flat in which he slowly died from his duel wounds has been converted into an excellent museum. However, where the Petersburg museum has all the original furnishing and decoration, even the waistcoat Pushkin was wearing when he was shot, the Moscow museum's only original piece was a very small writing desk. It just didn't feel right.
After that, I meandered over to the State Historical Museum in Red Square, The building sits at the opposite end of the square to St Basil's. It had a lot of things to look at - Russia's history from cave men to about 1910 - but no explanations in English, and very little in Russian. There was a massive room full of artefacts from the Napoleonic war (during which Napoleon actually occupied Moscow for a while), and while each item had a description, there was nothing to explain what was important about the collection. It was basically looking at pretty things, instead if learning about Russia history.
Tonight is my last in Moscow - tomorrow I'm going to head out to the Izmailovsy Market (the biggest in town, tourist tat and normal tat, all contained within a newly built fake Kremlin), then catch a train to Kazan in the evening. After that I'm pretty hectic for about a week (mostly on the train), so probably see you all again at Lake Baikal.
