Scenes from St Petersburg

(Again, apologies for the delay…anyway, the second part of our Russian journey was to Petrograd…no, Leningrad…no, St Petersburg…and here’s a little bit about it…)

Window on the West

(above: The Winter Palace)

To walk along the Nevskiy Prospekt is to walk along the main street of a European city. From the Alexander Nevskiy Monestary to the Admiralty, past the Moscow train station, the Kazan Cathedral and the House of Books, this bustling street, jammed with traffic at almost all times of day and night, has more in common with its spiritual brothers in Mitteleuropa than its big brother down the railway line. Peter the Great conceived of St Petersburg as a “window on the west”, the showpiece city at the heart of his project to Europeanise his nation.

That was over three hundred years ago, but even now you can see in the canals, boulevards, gardens and palaces that populate the heart of St Petersburg the concept in action. But despite Peter’s intentions, the city remains as much a window on Russia as it does on the rest of Europe, and at all times you are aware of the looming mass of the country spreading out east from this Baltic port all the way across the mountains and steppes to the Pacific shore, not least in the faces of the many and varied nationalities that call St Petersburg home, but whose origins lie elsewhere in the empire.

St Petersburg is undeniably beautiful, even if the excesses of the Tsars – still wonderfully and garishly apparent – were so outrageous they would drive even the most mild-mannered materialist to revolution. The city has a more positive legacy though when it comes to the arts, and the list of artists, poets, novelists and composers who were inspired to creative heights on these streets is as impressive as any city in the world. And it is this is what makes the city so appealing, as well as its oftentimes cruel but always fascinating history, whether as St Petersburg, Petrograd, or Leningrad.

Natalya

At home Natalya has a shrine to a lost royal family, her holy Nicholas II, Anastasia and the rest, the icons saved by her family during the long years after Lenin’s revolution, bank notes from the nineteenth century, and a collection of literature that would persuade everyone of the righteousness of the Romanovs, if only people would read the right books. The men that murdered them betrayed Russia, and took the country into decades of decline. They are, to Natalya, simply “demons” that she would prefer not to even think about. She knows the names of every second cousin in the Russian royal family, the dates and places of every event big and small, but when asked what year a particular banknote adorned with Lenin’s bald head she refuses to remember. “It is so easy to forget this time,” she says, and it is clear she would like to forget it altogether.

At the Peter and Paul Fortress she pauses at the entry and crosses herself, the family who – thanks to God’s Will – have been sanctified and can now rest in peace. She delights in the stories of Russian royalty, of the glories of their palaces, their taste in art, and their humble service for the Russian people. Back then the peasants had “the best land” she insists, given to them thanks to the largess of Peter the Great, and you get the feeling that in Natalya’s imagination Russians lived in a perpetual Golden Autumn before the endless greyness of Communism and Collectivisation. In the Hermitage we pass portrait after portrait and Natalya describes them with rapture in her eyes and passion in her voice, the myriad dysfunctions of certain members of the family simply part of their colourful personalities as opposed to being symbolic of the hubris and decadence that would be fundamental to their downfall.

There is no way of arguing with Natalya, for we have read the wrong books, the wrong newspapers and the wrong history. This goes for most of her fellow Russians as well, but Natalya is keeping the flame alive even though she knows the chances of a Tsar once more ruling her country from the Winter Palace is as remote as the chances of the Red Flag flying once more over the Kremlin. But she loves her city in a way that is truly inspiring, and her enthusiasm for this city is infectious. She wastes no time comparing it to Moscow, which may be “the heart of Russia, but it is St Petersburg that is the head”. She harbours the hope that one day sense will prevail, and this glorious city will once more become the capital, and the exorcism of those demons who stripped it of its title and then changed its name to honour one of the worst of the lot will be complete.

Under a grey sky

(above: once…the sun came out)

Under dark clouds and light drizzle, the winter daylight struggling with little success against the conditions and latitude, St Petersburg has an overwhelming atmosphere of melancholy. We drive along the banks of the Neva, the rain adding texture to the river that is rolling slightly with the wind, the water high against the embankment. This expanse of dark, threatening wetness seems to somehow dwarf the various palaces that we pass, the constituent parts of the Hermitage look as if they are closing in together, huddled against the weather, only a few lights shining out of the gilded windows.

As we move along, slowly through the late afternoon traffic, we catch a glimpse through the mist of Lenin’s statue, the threatening façade of the Kresty Prison – where lack of space means the prisoner have to sleep in shifts – and boxy, off-white housing blocks reminiscent of suburbs all across the former Eastern bloc. It all serves to remind you that there is more to this city than Tsarist excesses and opulence to be marvelled at by the tourist masses. This is a city that since the collapse of the Soviet Union has become the Russian capital of organised crime, with local authorities and police implicated, as well as pockets of poverty – especially amongst the elderly – that is characteristic of elsewhere in the New Russia.

And as Lenin’s statue suggests, it was also the home of a revolution that changed world history, and looking down over gloomy, melancholy streets it is easy to imagine yourself back in the early years of the century, intrigues and upheavals playing out on these very embankments. With the Tsar holed up behind those gilded windows, men in heavy coats and hats pulled down over their ears would be scurrying across grand boulevards or over bridges across the Neva, monarchists, liberals, nihilists and Bolsheviks all jockeying for position in a country that was about to explode. As we finally reach our hotel and escape from the now darkened streets, the overwhelming sense one has is of a city that has lost a lot of what it once had, a city that for good or ill was where history played out, but no longer, and that is now trying to rediscover what it is for, what it should be, and what it can be.

A Writers House

In 1878, at the end of his life, Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived with his family in an apartment at Kuznechniy 5, where they had moved following the tragic death of one of his children. In the early years after the October Revolution, like many middle class apartment buildings in what was by then Leningrad, the house had been divided up and turned into communal flats. After his rehabilitation in the 1950s the flat was restored to how it had looked when the Dostoyevsky family had lived there and turned into a museum.

It was in the small study at the front of the building, where the clock is stopped at the exact time a throat hemorrhage struck whilst he was writing his diary, Dostoyevsky wrote one of his masterpieces – The Brothers Karamasov. Now, in museum that occupies the floor below the apartment, a first edition of the book is displayed, along with manuscripts of some of his other literary triumphs, including Crime and Punishment, and The Gambler.

We wander through the rooms, his hat perched on a stand in the hallway, cigarettes rolled and placed in a tin but never to be smoked, a message written from his daughter…it is not a large apartment, but it is homey. The streets that provided the setting for Crime and Punishment a short walk away, to the Haymarket and the Griboedov canal, but the imagination is stirred not so much by the locations featured in such an iconic work of literature, but seeing the place where such works were created.

Night at the Opera

(above: the Mariinskiy Theatre and a woman waiting for a bus)

Two other great artists to which this city lays claim are Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, and we get an evening with both of them (and a few hundred Russian schoolchildren) at the Conservatory, where Tchaikovsky both studied and taught, across the square from the legendary Mariinskiy Theatre. We pay ten times the normal price for our ticket, a combination of agency fees and the foreigner tax that still applies to a certain extent in Russia, but as an experience it is worth every cent.

The school kids pursue every imaginable activity during the performance, from flirtatious chases along the aisle, to playing endlessly with their beeping, vibrating mobile phones, only giving the performers – who are working hard to keep on top of this most indifferent of audiences – any attention at certain epic moments in the story, when they cheer and stamp their feet as they remember why they came in the first place.

It is not so annoying in the end, the beauty of the performance and the music overcoming all the distractions in the seats around. Eugene Onedin is a tale of friendship ripped apart by love, jealousy and pride, and Tchaikovsky’s musical rendering of Pushkin’s novel in verse is truly wonderful. One scene in particular resonates, when the eponymous hero kills his friend in a duel born out of all those themes just mentioned, and with the benefit of knowing what was to follow in the authors lifetime, it is slightly unsettling to see him predicting with some accuracy how he would meet his end.

In the footsteps of Pushkin

Pushkin was actually born in Moscow, but he came west in 1811, at the ripe old age of 12, to study at the Lycee in what was then called Tsarskoe Selo, a few kilometres south of St Petersburg, which in Soviet times was named after the nation’s favourite poet. The palaces of Pushkin are suitably grand and ostentatious, but it is their gardens that are the real delight, and it is not difficult to image the adolescent Pushkin wandering along these sculptured pathways and discovering the first stirrings of his genius. In the wintertime the blankets of snow that envelop the gardens and trees and turn the frozen lake into a wide open blank space have the effect of somehow dulling the planned nature of the space, and returning it – to some extent – to nature.

Wandering through the parklands of Pushkin and nearby Pavelosk it is easy to imagine how brutal winter conditions can be in this part of the world can be. On the drive back to town we pass the former front line of the Second World War, from where German forces blockaded Leningrad for 900 days between 1941 and 1944. The siege of the city cost the lives of at least 670,000 people, although the true number that perished may never be established. It is impossible to imagine conditions in the city during one of the most extended and bloody sieges of modern history as food shortages, devastating destruction, and the brutal Baltic winters took their toll on the population of the city.

Amongst the truly horrific depravations of the period, Shostakovich penned much of his Seventh Symphony, and it was performed by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra in 1942 as German forces still surrounded the city, the musicians granted extra rations to help them get through the concert. But despite becoming a symbol of the resistance and the spirit of Leningrad found himself denounced by the Communist regime in peacetime, and his rehabilitation in the eyes of the Soviets would only take place following Stalin’s death.

Resting Places

(above: a writer’s grave)

On our last morning in Russia we cross the Nevskiy Prospekt and duck into the peace and quiet of the Alexander Nevskiy Monestary. On the bridge a number of crippled soldiers sit in wheelchairs, waiting for the Sunday worshippers to pass by, their medals still shining brightly on their torn and dirty uniforms.

Here, in the Tikhvin cemetery, a number of St Petersburg’s creative sons and daughters are buried. Despite his comment that he hoped he would not be buried here, “surrounded by my enemies”, Dostoyevsky was, and his grave is one of the most photographed, along with that of Tchaikovsky. Other composers, writers, actors and painters are also buried here, such as Borodin, Glinka, and Rimsky-Korsakov…a final reminder on our final day as to the creativity of St Petersburg, this city of canals and bridges, palaces and parks, an artificial creation for sure, but still with the potential to inspire like all the great cities of this world can.

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Go West’, Pet Shop Boys.

A Moscow Diary

(So it took a while, thanks to deadlines and various celebrations and illnesses in the family, but here is some more on our trip to Russia…beginning with Moscow, with St Petersburg to follow…)

First impressions and an old French general

(above: A view from the entrance to the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds to the Hotel Kosmos)

A few minutes out from Domodedovo Airport and our plane finally emerges through the low clouds to give us our first glimpse of Russia. A light drizzle is falling, spotting the small window on the Airbus, and below us a forest of bare birch trees spreads out towards the horizon. Here and there the forest is broken up by frost-covered fields and smallholdings, the smoke rising out from the chimneys of wooden farmhouses. Not far from the runway we pass over the rooftops of a small town, populated with boxy six-storey housing blocks similar to those we left behind in the eastern suburbs of Berlin. Both Katrin and I are excited. We’ve talked about Russia for a long time, and now we are finally about to arrive.

At immigration we wait patiently whilst the female officers, immaculately made-up but stony-faced like immigration officers the world over, make sure that our papers are in order. Beyond customs and into the arrivals hall we are plunged into a crowd of taxi drivers hustling for business, but someone is waiting for us, and she takes us through the crowds and beyond the metal detectors, out into the light rain.

Traffic has jammed all routes through the centre of the city, so we circle this great metropolis on the ten-lane ring motorway, awash with slush and grit, waiting for the best place to plunge in. We pass by car showrooms and garden centres, an IKEA and a huge water heating plant powered by the gas that is helping fuel Russia’s economic boom. After about thirty kilometres we reach our turn-off, and a sign greets us as we swing down the off-ramp. Welcome to Moscow. Slower now, we cruise through the housing blocks of the northern suburbs, the television tower looming ever closer through the mist until we are almost upon it, and our hotel appears on the left. It is an enormous construction, a twenty-five storey horseshoe, and the slightly surprising vision of Charles de Gaulle, imperious in bronze, standing guard in front of the main entrance.

Memories of a lost empire

(above: Lenin and the House of the Russian People)

The Hotel Kosmos was built by the French, which explains the statue of their former President, and was erected to house the visitors that descended on Moscow – those who were not boycotting at least – for the 1980 Summer Olympics. With 1700 rooms it is a monster, the lobby alone occupying the first two floors. If you have the money you can make use of numerous bars and restaurants, hair salons, souvenir stores and blinking musical gaming machines, whilst all the while flashing signs tempt the weak-willed to the roulette tables of the casino or the scantily-clad dancers of the basement nightclub. At all times of day and night the lobby is thronged with people; drivers waiting for pick-ups, Chinese tour groups, American businessmen, stern security guards, and the odd prostitute looking for business.

Our room looks out over the French General’s head across the eight-lane Prospekt Mira to the grandiose pavilions of the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds. We head out to explore, passing under the street through a damp, crowded underpass, filled with tiny kiosks where customers bend to waist height to order drinks, pastries, a DVD or a patch-up job on their trousers through tiny windows. Out the other side and we are soon passing through a triumphal arch and into the exhibition grounds. Built in 1939, these pavilions and gardens were designed to showcase the economic achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the constituent parts of empire had their own building, from Armenia to Uzbekistan, but it is the neo-classical columns and soaring star-topped spire of the House of the Russian People that takes centre stage. It may be bombastic and dramatic, with a statue of Lenin striking a typically iconic pose out front, but inside the heavy doors the effect is somewhat underwhelming, as we find our selves in a labyrinth of yet more mini-kiosks, this time devoted to second hand cameras, universal remote controls, and Playstation games.

We are not here for shopping, so we stick to exploring the grounds from the outside, past the pavilions designed to reflect the republics or the activity they were supposed to represent, pine trees lining the route down towards the pair of Aeroflot planes and a space rocket that is all that is left of the technological collection, most of which was sold off following privatisation in the early 1990s. Inside what was once the technology hanger stalls are selling more earthly products, such as seeds and fertiliser, rakes and lawnmowers, and other gardening supplies. Despite the limited attractions of the low-level economic activity that now makes up much of the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds, it remains a fascinating place, and as with so much in this city, it is built on a grand scale. Over the next few days, as we wander along the wide open boulevards of Moscow, or plunge into the depths of the Metro alongside the nine million other daily passengers, we will be continually reminded that this city – often grand but sometimes garish, occasionally beautiful but ugly in parts – reflects the image a procession of leaders, regimes and systems wanted to express. Moscow is a city that has been reinvented and rebuilt a number of times but always with the same idea in mind. This city has been built to impress

The Mother City and a view from above

(above: The view from Sparrow Hills)

Talking to Muscovites you get a sense of pride in their city similar to that of inhabitants of those other iconic metropolises, London and New York. For our guide, Galina, nowhere on earth comes close to the Mother City, and especially not that upstart on the Baltic coast: “St Petersburg is nice enough,” she says, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “but they have no style of their own. All they can do is copy the Europeans. But in Moscow…” and she trails off, as if no adjectives can do justice to the glory that is her hometown.

The best place to appreciate the scale of Europe’s largest city is from the windswept plateau at the top of Sparrow Hills, where you can gaze across the city in the shadow of the largest of Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers, the 240 metre-high Lomonosov Moscow State University. With 5,000 rooms occupying 36 stories, and an estimated 33 kilometres of corridors, the Lomonosov was the tallest building in the world outside of New York when it was completed in the early 1950s. It remained Europe’s largest until as recently as 1988, but it continues to be dwarfed by new pretenders, not least in its own city where a number of new mega-scrapers have risen in recent years, the most ambitious of which is the 600m Russia Tower which is due to open in 2012.

Development in Moscow, whether it is new skyscrapers to house business, apartment blocks to provide refuge for oligarchs, or huge shopping malls filled with designer boutiques for the beneficiaries of the recent economic explosion, the aim seems to be to think big. This has always been the case, as is apparent as you take in the view from Sparrow Hills. New developments cannot completely dominate the six gothic skyscrapers of the Stalin era, the sister buildings of the Lomonosov, and in turn they did not completely overshadow the golden domes of the Orthodox churches or the Baroque-spires of the Novodevichy Monestary. Each era might build larger and higher than the last, typical of the architectural willy-waving that is common in self-conscious regimes the world over, but the message these buildings send out is the same.

Point Zero – the centre of a world

(above: Red Square and the GUM department store)

However much all these constructions hope to reflect the power and wealth of their time, the heart of Moscow and the seat of the power remains the same as it ever was. Close by the entrance to the undulating cobblestoned expanse of Red Square is point zero, the marker from which all distances in relation to Moscow are measured. Here locals stand and toss a kopek or two over their shoulder for look, causing a scramble amongst the elderly beggars, whilst look-alikes of Lenin and Peter the Great share a cigarette and a chat between posing for tourist holiday snaps. As we walk through the archway and onto the square itself, a parade of images comes to mind, from Boney M music videos to military parades, Khrushchev banging his shoe belligerently on the table at the UN and Gorbachev booed, Stalin’s giant portraits in the Tretyakov Gallery, and the colourful onion domes that seem to provide the front cover for every guidebook and novel based in this city.

No matter how many times you have seen it elsewhere however, nothing can prepare you for the beauty of Red Square. Those domes of St Basil’s Cathedral are suitably exotic, reminding you that although Moscow may be Europe’s largest city there is much about Russia that sets itself up as a place apart. The heavy red walls of the Kremlin run down one length of the square, combining with the squat Lenin Mausoleum that stands in front of it to provide a suitable atmosphere of reverence and authority to go alongside the religion. And from Orthodoxy to Communism to Capitalism, as across the square from the Kremlin the fairy lights of the GUM department store add the final piece of the jigsaw, where once queues formed for the most basic of household goods, now the covered walkways are flanked by the boutiques of the world’s designer labels, all protected from the Russian winter by a soaring glass roof.

We return many times to Red Square, at different moments of the day, and there is something about this, one of the world’s greatest public spaces, that keeps drawing us back. It does not matter that Lenin is away to be cleaned and bathed, denying us the view of shuffling queues there to pay their respects, or that someone has taken the aesthetic-disaster of a decision to erect an ice rink in the heart of the square, nothing can completely erode the dramatic majesty of the place that proves that it is possible to visit the world’s most photographed sights and have them exceed all expectations.

Lenin, Luis Vuitton, and the man in the Kremlin

(above: Inside the GUM, home to Gucci, Prada and Luis Vuitton)

Lenin on one side, Luis Vuitton on the other…a contrast that is often repeated as we tour the city that has become a celebration of 21st Century consumerism, whilst still littered with memories and memorials to a Communist past. It’s a kind of Ritz-Carlton-Marxism, where Karl and Friedrich statues stand proudly in place as they have done so for decades, on streets occupied by branches of Toni&Guy hairdressers, Nike superstores, and advertisements for the smash hit musical Mama Mia – now in Russian! The souvenir shops are filled with all kinds of Communist-era nostalgia, but the icons of the previous religion are no longer sacred, as evidenced by the t-shirts featuring Lenin with bunny ears, the leader of the October Revolution now appropriated for Playboy.

Regardless of one’s political persuasion, there is no question that the USSR was one of the dominant forces in international affairs during the majority of the 20th Century, which gives you the feeling that the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent upheavals and crises of the Yeltsin Presidency during the 1990s must have come as something as a shock to a proud nation. The fact that Vladimir Putin, in his eight years as President, has restored some stability helps explain why – despite alleged electoral abuses, the complete destruction of a free press, and the brutal and cynical prosecution of the war in Chechnya – he remains a fairly popular figure for many in the country.

Later, in St Petersburg (Putin’s hometown) we spoke to a woman named Natalya. It was two days before the election, and we asked her whether or not the outgoing President was genuinely popular amongst ordinary Russians, and if so, why. Her answer was a simple one. “He gave us our pride back,” she said. “He made Russia proud again. And strong. To be strong you need a strong leader, and only a strong leader can rule Russia properly.” Yeltsin had been a “catastrophe”, she continued, but as a committed Tsarist she had little sympathy for the “demons” that had come before. The only Communist she had any slight respect for was Stalin. “Another strong man,” she said, emphasising the point she had just made.

The New Russia – Running on gas and a widening gap

(above: Putin and Medvedev on a Moscow election poster)

There does seem to be broad agreement that Putin has brought some level of stability to Russia during his Presidency, getting inflation under control and overseeing a creation of wealth through an economic boom fueled by Russia’s ample natural resources, in particular oil and gas, resulting in an overall rise in wages, consumption and living standard. But the fact remains that although Moscow in particular is booming in macroeconomic terms, the reality is one of an ever increasing wealth gap that is obvious as you wander the streets of a city that has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else on the planet, and yet pensioners survive on less than a hundred euros a month.

According to many sources the health, pension and education systems remain in a state of crisis and near collapse, and whilst the unemployment rate in the country is around 6%, comparable to the UK and Canada, the Moscow Institute of Social and Economic Studies of Population report that 30% of salaries in the country are less than the “minimum required to live”. The Russian Orthodox Church, otherwise a friend of Putin, has also expressed concern about the growing wealth gap, making the point that no real middle class is developing, and that 20% of the population, mainly in rural areas, are living below the poverty line.

Beyond the economic inequalities, it is clear that elsewhere in society the stability of the Putin era has come at a price. Under his watch, Russia has become a country where critical journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya are murdered in their apartment buildings, and other in the media have been locked up or intimidated. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International report widespread abuses, including the complete erosion of press freedom, a wholesale clampdown on rights to expression and assembly, not to many any number of “Extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and abductions, torture including in unofficial detention centres, and arbitrary detentions continued in the North Caucasus region, in particular in Chechnya.”

On the day we left the country Medvedev, Putin’s hand-picked successor, won the election, and I found a copy of the Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper, in our hotel reception. On the front page was a story of opposition supporters being beaten and arrested by police. Their crime? The unauthorised carrying of a banner that protested the “New Iron Curtain” fifty yards down a street. This was no mass demonstration, just two men and a hand-painted placard. The police made no statement, and gave no reasons for the arrests, whilst the journalists bemoaned another example of the creeping authoritarianism of the new Russia.

Guest workers and a night train from Leningrad Station

(above: A guard at the Kremlin)

One day we take a trip to the picturesque monastery of Sergei Posad. As we pass underneath the Moscow ring road, we come across a gathering of men dressed in black, waiting on the snow-lined hard shoulder of the road. We ask Galina who they are, and she explains that they are “guest workers”, who do not have permits to live in Moscow itself, but are waiting on the edge of the city for casual work to come their way, perhaps on a building site, or in some rich Russian’s apartment painting the walls or plumbing in a washing machine. Formerly, she tells us, these “guest workers” came from the Ukraine, or Belarus. Now they are more likely from one of the central Asian republics, such as Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. This moves her to talk about the inadequacies of state pensions, and the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, and she does so without comment, as if it is inevitable, in the same way she describes Dmitry Medvedev as “our new President” days before the election has even taken place.

We leave Moscow from the Leningrad Station on a journey through the night to St Petersburg, and as the high rise suburbs of Moscow give way to the darkness of the countryside, Katrin and I sit in the restaurant car and sip on Baltica beers, trying to come to terms with the impressions and memories of our visit to the Russian capital. One theme comes around time and again in our conversation is that Moscow gives the impression of being a tough city in which to live, and that to make it there you need to be hard, because otherwise such a large, brutal and ruthless place will spit you out with no remorse for your plight. The rewards on offer are seemingly endless, if you have the right connections and access to the opportunities on offer, but for a lot of the population you get the feeling that life can oftentimes be a struggle.

As our train makes its progress across but a tiny fraction of this enormous country I try to give voice to my feelings about Moscow, a city that is completely overwhelming, undoubtedly impressive, most definitely fascinating and certainly troubling. I am looking forward to return.

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Winds of Change’, The Scorpions.

Photos from Russia

(above: Red Square - unfortunately Lenin away for his bi-annual bath and touch-up, so the Mausoleum was closed)

Last weekend we returned from our trip to Russia. We spent three days in Moscow before taking the night train to St Petersburg, and it was one of the most fascinating and wonderful trips I have had. We were only away seven days, but it is still hard to get my head around everything that we saw and experienced…once I dig out my diary and have some time to collect my thoughts there will be more, but for the beginning here are some pictures…

(above: A bridge over the Moskva on our first day. The weather was as unpredictable as you can imagine for February. We had rain, sun and snow, although it was nowhere near as cold as expected. Indeed, the people we spoke to in both Moscow and St Petersburg told us that they were not having a “real winter” this year…a lot like Berlin)

(above: The view from our room in the 3000-bed Hotel Cosmos, out across the All-Russia Exhibition grounds in the north of the city. The pavilions, built to celebrate the achievements of the different Soviet Socialist Republics were impressive…less so the collection of electronics stalls that are now housed within them.)

(above: The Moscow State University on the Sparrow Hills. One of the seven “Stalin Skyscrapers”, the university building has 5,000 rooms.)

(above: St Basil’s Cathedral at night. We visited Red Square at a number of different times of day, but it was once darkness fell that the uneven public square was at its most impressive and dramatic.)

(above: On the banks of the Neva, across from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.)

(above: The gardens of the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, about 25 kilometres south of St Petersburg. The town got a new name in the Soviet-era, after Russia’s national poet, who attended the academy in the town and who found inspiration for much of his early work in the gardens of the palace.)

(above: Statue of Lenin in front of the House of the Soviets, along the Moscow Prospect south of the historic centre of St Petersburg. This area was developed as the new heart of socialist Leningrad, like a Karl-Marx-Allee to the power of 20. Both the historic centre, and this neighbourhood provided a fascinating illustration of how different systems use architecture to reflect their perceived strengths and to send a message both to the outside world, and their own people.)

(above: the Griboedov Canal in St Petersburg. We wandered along a good stretch of this canal one evening, between the Dostoyevsky Museum and the Conservatory, where we caught some opera - Eugene Onegin, by Tchaikovsky and based on the novel-in-verse of Pushkin - including around the Haymarket area of the city where much of Crime and Punishment is set.)

(above: the happy travellers, in the window of our room in the Hotel Moskva in St Petersburg, which looked out over the Neva, and the Alexander Nevsky monestary, where the Artists Graveyard houses the final resting places of Dostoyesky, Tchiakovsky, and many other Russian writers, composers, actors and painters.)

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Back in the USSR’, The Beatles.

Olympic Lifts - I am Cursed

I first met the guys from the Olympic Lifts when they stayed at the Circus hostel way back in (I think) 2003. They came back to Berlin a couple of times to play at Bastard and also the Circus over the Love Parade in 2003 and 2004, and then to appear at the World Cup Lounge in 2006. They are local heroes back in Belfast, and describe their music as “AC/DC fighting Gorillaz at a Funkadelic Party”… After a long time of waiting they have finally released a new single on Bruised Fruit, the video of which is above. Like with much of their work it is a catchy-poppy-hip-hoppy mix, with added monkey noises, which surely can’t be bad. Apparently there is an album to appear sometime soon, and hopefully they will make Berlin a future tour destination. If you are interested in hearing more, their myspace page has some tracks, including the impossibly-ear-wormy “Do the Getdown”.

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Do the Getdown’, Olympic Lifts

Winter in Roquetas

(Above: A morning stroll in Roquetas)

Over Christmas we spent a week in Spain, mainly in the pleasant village of Bercules in the Alpujarras, but for the last couple of days we were in Roquetas, a Spanish resort town a few kilometres from Almeria.

Ten at night in Roquetas. Waves crash against an empty beach, a cold wind chilling the few hardy late-night promenaders. From the sands the town is dark, with only a few buildings showing signs of life. The hotels, if they are not closed entirely for the winter season clearly have rooms to spare. It feels lonely on the beach, the wrong time of day in the wrong time of the year.

But under the warming winter sun the following morning, it becomes clear that even in December there is life in the town. Along the neat paved promenade old people stroll - mainly Spanish, English and Germans - enjoying the comfortable temperatures of the Mediterranean and the mobility-friendly terrain. Many of them are not tourists, they live here, spending their autumn years in southern comfort, drinking schnapps with friends at Ulla’s Bier Bar, or wolfing down a full English breakfast at Bob and Carol’s Pub, home of live Premier League football on the big screen and the Royal British Legion, Roquetas branch. There is also a Belgian cafe, Scandinavian doctors, a German evangelical church, and a number of local newspapers in a variety of Northern European languages. It’s a long way from Wolfsburg, Mons or Coventry, but at the same time it is reassuringly familiar. There’s a Lidl on the edge of town, PG Tips in the small corner store, and ZDF and BBC on the local cable television network.

At a small soap shop in a tiny arcade set back from the beach an English couple are a day away from final closure. The man seems philosophical that their retirement in the sun has not worked out as expected. The winter months are too slow, he tells us, and the summer not busy enough to make up the shortfall. If only he was selling Bangers and Mash or Newcastle Brown Ale. But he chose soap, right-on environmentally friendly soap at that, and the market can be an unforgiving place. It seemed mean to ask him what he will do when he goes back to Blighty, and so we just bought some herbal candles, perhaps his final customers.

The approach to the coast from the Alpujarras is through the utterly bizarre sea of plastic agriculture tents that fill the space between the water and the mountains. For centuries this was an arid desert, but deep-water irrigation techniques allowed agribusiness to make a killing, on the back of global desires for year-round produce and the labour of barely-legal Romanian and North African immigrants. From a distance, high in the mountains, it is hard to work out where the shimmering sea of plastic ends and the real water begins. This is probably the only place in Spain where real estate for agriculture is worth more than land for tourism developments, and the plastic tents push right up against the backs of the resort towns, offering views over this artificial sea from the least well-appointed of Roquetas’s hotel rooms and apartments.

However ugly they may be, the plastic agriculture developments have made more money than the province of Almeria could ever have imagined. In the 1980s this was one of Europe’s poorest corners, and now the land is some of the most expensive in Spain. But aside from the aesthetic disaster, the explosion of plastic agriculture has brought new problems to the region, from the immigrants treated as basically slave labour, an increase in crime, and the rapid development of wild west-style frontier towns awash with speculators, alcoholics, and chancers out for the fast buck whatever the cost. The resorts and the agri-towns are two sides of the same province, but both give you a strange sense of being unreal and artificial constructions, built to make money - whether it is from hotel beds or tomato plants - and that seem to have little or no connection to the place upon which they have been planted.

Some more photographs below, and also here.

(Above: Club Tropicana…where seventies-era holiday apartments are for sale at a good price, but you have to pay for any drinks)

(Above: On the main promenade, this old chap was selling religious paraphernalia to passing strollers. Business appeared to be slow, although the man selling knock-off designer clothes a few metres further down the beach was doing better)

(Above: The playground on Roquetas beach)

(Above: Plastic Fantastic - the huge plastic greenhouses can be seen at the back of the picture, taken from a nature reserve just next door to Roquetas)

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Club Tropicana’, Wham

Berlin Tour Guides

This seems to be a few months old, but I had not seen it before today. The trailer for a “mockumentary” about walking tour guides in Berlin…

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Jungleland’, Bruce Springsteen

Berlinale: Filth and Wisdom

Hysteria at the Zoo Palast, photographers fighting for position, schoolgirls and some others who were old enough to know better begging for tickets, a pop star, and a decidedly average movie. That the Berlinale took the opportunity to show Madonna’s directorial debut is not really surprising, given the hype and media coverage that it generated, but it is a little sad to see such scenes for a movie that would struggle to make it past the television programmers of even Channel Five if it didn’t have a certain name attached to it.

The story is…well, the story is just a little bit silly, but anyway there’s a Ukrainian singer who has to make his living dominating little Englanders, a blind poet, a ballet dancer who has to turn to stripping to pay the bills, and a chemist’s assistant who dreams of being an aid worker in Africa. They all have to find a way to make themselves happy with their lot in life or achieve their dreams, but the biggest problem you have watching the movie is that it is extremely hard to care either way. The script deals in stereotypes and cheap laughs - Indians in England have lots of kids and say “bloody hell” a lot - the acting is wooden, the story is not only boring but stupid, and if I hadn’t been with friends I would probably have walked out of the cinema, something I have only done once before in my life. Madonna seemed quite nice though.

The main actor, Eugene Hutz - lead singer of the excellent gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello - was as good as he could be with the material he had to work with, and the best parts of the film were the scenes where we saw him and the band playing. A documentary about him and his bandmates would have easily been a more interesting and enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. Madonna described the film as being her “film school”, which is nice for her, but it does seem sad that when there are so many talented filmmakers who could make a better film than Filth and Wisdom with their eyes closed and a tenth of the money, and who struggle to get their short films into the smallest of film festivals, that this genuinely bad movie is given a Panorama slot at one of the world’s most respected film festivals, just because a pop star made it.

Ah well, we are all living in a material world.

More stuff:
Filth and Wisdom at the IMBd.
The Telegraph review from Sheila Johnston.
Article about the film in Der Spiegel.

EDIT:
Peter Bradshaw’s review in the Guardian includes this most memorable of lines:
“She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens.”

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Wonderlust King’, Gogol Bordello.

Berlinale: Standard Operating Procedure

The first of two films I have seen in the last 48 hours at the Berlinale, ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ is a documentary by Errol Morris about the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2003, when images of mistreatment and abuse of prisoners in Iraq were broadcast around the world. The film tells the story of the affair, mainly through interviews with the soldiers and others who were working at the prison, dramatic reconstructions, and of course the photographs themselves. The interviewees include the likes of Lynddie England, the woman soldier who featured in many of the photographs, and what I found disturbing about the film was the level of denial England and some of the others seemed to have about the affair.

Morris does not seem to push them too far, indeed he seems to be basically handing them the rope they need and then lets them get on with it. A couple of the interviewees come out with a tiny portion of credit, but in the end the film for them seems to be an exercise in “it’s not my fault!”, as they grope wildly for justifications and explanations for the abuses they took part in.

I do have a couple of problems with the film. Firstly, the use of dramatic reconstructions of some of the events described in the interviews was completely unnecessary. They did not add to the film, and even, in the case of one shaky handheld video that was actually genuine, sometimes caused a blur between what was real and what was imagined. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the film only covered the story of the soldiers and the other Americans in the prison. Although we saw image after disturbing image of the Iraqi prisoners, we did not hear their side of the story, nor indeed did we even find out any of their names. We heard the nicknames that they were given by the soldiers, but we did not learn anything about any of them…and for me this left me feeling a little uneasy. In the main I just found it an odd technique to tell the story of an abuse, without getting the perspective and experience of the abused.

In general I would say that the film is both well made and important, especially through the role it plays in exposing the level of cover-up within the armed forces that meant that no-one higher than the rank of Sergent faced charges for what happened in Abu Ghraib. I just wish that the film had taken the time to get the perspective of the “others” in the story, who remain as anonymous after seeing at as they do in the photographs themselves.

More reviews and info:
Standard Operating Procedure at the IMDb.
Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw.
More on the Berlinale in general at the Spiegel Online.

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘American Land’, Bruce Springsteen.

Old Old Arab Well

Another photo from the recent trip to Spain. This was taken in Cordoba, outside a small souvenir shop. One of the ways that the owners enticed people to visit his Bullfighting-Flamenco-Tackorama was that in the back of the shop was a well that dated back to Moorish times. Having at some point advertised this fact outside their shop, they obviously asked their visitors to add to the noticeboard in their native tongues. At some point, they asked someone called Zoe from Singapore and/or Malaysia to contribute to the multilingual display…

Phil Redmond should cast Zoe in whatever he does now that Grange Hill has been cancelled.

As for the well itself, it was surprisingly impressive. But I didn’t buy anything.

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Valerie’, The Zutons

Where did you go? Answer on the following postcard…

(above: the road from Pegalajar to La Guardia, Jaen Province)

Is it so long since November? Blimey. Anyway, for all seven of you (hello Mum) who have been checking A Berlin Diary over the lost winter without reward, well…I spent some time writing, some time in Spain over Christmas, and then again last week as we took to the road once more to ride on two wheels through Andalusia. And it was a blast, not least because I managed to stay upright the whole time, and deliver the bike back to the rental company in the same condition in which I received it in the parking garage of Malaga airport.

Apparently the single largest cause of traffic accidents in Malaga are British and Japanese tourists driving their rental cars on the wrong side of the road out from Malaga Airport, but there were no such problems for the three of us as we pointed our bikes in the direction of Almeria and set out along the coast road. Anyone who has been to this part of Spain will know that it is not the most attractive of coastal stretches, an endless procession of identikit tourist resorts, and then the incredible wild west landscape and dusty one-horse towns that appear amongst the plastic agriculture around Almeria itself. If you ever wanted to know where your year-round peppers and tomatoes come from, then this is it. From the air the plastic greenhouses blend in with the water, and even if it is not exactly pretty, it makes for a fascinating sight. On the ground level it is just depressing, although not as depressing as it must be for the poor souls who have travelled half-way across Europe or Northern Africa to work in them.

On the second day things took a serious turn for the better, after we had a quick shufty at Cabo de Gata, we then turned inland and headed north on winding empty roads, first through the Badlands-style landscape of the Sierra de Alhamilla north of Almeria, and then across the Olive-groves towards Cazorla and the Parque Natural de Cazorla. And a pleasant town it was too, clinging to the side of the Sierra de Cazorla, with stunning views across the seemingly endless Olive fields of Jaen province.

From there we made our way to Cordoba for a few days rest, recuperation, and exploring the delights of what was once the capital of the Western Islamic empire, and for a while a thousand years back it was the largest city in Europe. What draws most people to Cordoba in the 21st Century is the Mezquita, which was built as a Mosque and now houses a Cathedral, and is an incredible mix of religious and architectural styles. The Moors were not even the first to built impressively on the site, the Romans built a rather lovely bridge, and beyond the thousands of years of cultural and architectural traditions, Cordoba is an extremely picturesque, friendly city in which you can wander the narrow cobbled streets of the Juderia (the former Jewish quarter, and heart of the old city), search out local food and wines, and otherwise just pass the time in an extremely pleasant way.

After Cordoba we headed south, aiming for Ronda and the White Towns, and the landscape once more did not disappoint. The ride over the Puerto de las Palomas (the Pass of Doves) from Zahara to Grazalema was simply stunning, as was the next architectural highlight of the trip, the incredible bridge across the gorge in Ronda itself, that joins the two sides of the city. The final days ride was from Ronda to Malaga, via the El Churro gorge and yet more wonderful views under brilliant blue skies…a last reminder of how beautiful this part of the world is, once you escape from the traffic and the concrete-monstrosities of the coastal resorts. We did not make it to Cadiz, or Granada, or the Alpujarras (although the latter was where I spent Christmas so there is some excuse for missing it out), and we did not drive over many lemons, but it was a good taste of what Andalusia has to offer, and leaves reason enough to go back.

Some pictures follow, with even more here.

(above: The Mezquita in Cordoba. The combination of Islamic and Christian architectural traditions is fascinating, and perhaps unique - it would be interesting to know if there are other such religious buildings that have so obviously served two purposes during their lifetime)

(Above: A view across the water at the lighthouse near Cabo de Gata)

(Above: The bridge in Ronda…it is an incredibly long way down, especially if like me you do not have much of a head for heights)

(Above: The view from a rest stop somewhere along the Pass of Doves)

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’, Status Quo (don’t ask).