Photos from Russia

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(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.

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