Magical Mystery Cruise: Along Russia’s Rivers
This article was first published in the July 1995 issue of Wingspan, the inflight magazine of Japan’s All Nippon Airways and was later reprinted in Morning Calm, the inflight magazine of Korean Air. It was my first trip back to Russia since 1992 (see related article [1]).
Musicians in Russian folk costumes welcomed us aboard the M/S Alexander Griboyedov with balalaika music. The 424-foot ship was broad, bright, and very well-apportioned by Russian standards — “the pride of the Russian fleet,” according to our brochure. There was a fully-stocked Western bar, a large, immaculate dining room. even a casino. Our group would spend a few days in Moscow before leaving for its river adventure. The Alex G., as everyone called it, would serve as our floating hotel.
Our first excursion into Moscow took us near Red Square, where we saw people discovering what was still a fairly new ideology: consumerism. Fewer and fewer Muscovites were showing up at Red-flag- waving rallies these days; more were fascinated with pitches for products like Gherbalaif (“Herbalife”).
We strolled down to the Moskva River, a polluted but stately waterway that runs through central Moscow. At night, its surface reflects the bright red stars of the Kremlin and golden onion domes of the Annunciation Cathedral. We boarded a tour boat.
Flammable Fish
People along the banks were dangling their feet in and, yikes — fishing! (Hadn’t they heard? A local newspaper had reported that some fish in Moscow’s waterways were so polluted with petroleum that if you touched a match to them, they would simply burn up!)
Drawn by its beautiful domed roof we disembarked near the Novospassky Monastery. On the way there, we stumbled upon a crowded pond, where we found the real inner- city Moscow sunbathing, drinking, and splashing. The acrid smell of state-brand cigarettes and beer and the din of cheap radios filled the air. Two militia officers questioned a man with a pile of beer bottles next to his car. Three teenage boys picked up a girl by her arms and legs and tossed her, giggling and squealing, into the murky water.
l wondered what the 500-year-old Novospassky Monastery was thinking as it looked down on the spectacle at the pond. For centuries, the pond had been a clean, pure source of fish for the monks living there, but after authorities closed the monastery in the 20s, the pond, like the rest of the place, was neglected and abused.
We walked up to the monastery pausing at the gates as several elderly women in dark kerchiefs bowed and crossed themselves three times before entering. In the courtyard, there were many more like them, contemplating the flowers and praying.
The sun concentrated on Brother Nikolai in his heavy black habit and he dabbed his young shock of red hair with his handkerchief. As we walked, he showed me the tombstones spaced evenly around the perimeter of the courtyard. “We don’t know whose body lies where,” the monk admitted. Over the years, vandals had kicked the grave markers around and piled them up in heaps. “We just put the stones where they look nice,” he said.
A Dacha of Color
From the Alex G.’s dining room, we could see high-speed hydrofoil boats leaving Moscow’s Northern River Port at regular intervals. We decided to take one the next morning and go where the Russians were going.
We got off at the little village of Cheveryovo, where a woman named Larisa took us in and showed us through the garden of her suburban dacha. She was taking a break from her work in the city as a “computer construction and technology engineer.” During the summer everyone from former Parry apparatchiks the newest biznesmeni heads out to their country dacha every chance they get.
Behind Larisa was a skyline of sunflowers and birch trees. The smell of fresh dill pervaded the warm air. The epitome of Russian hospitality, she handed us piles of muscats and strawberries even though our arms were already full.
“We grow everything here naturally, under the open sky,” she told us. “You wouldn’t know what that’s like. In America they grow every thing indoors with chemicals.”
We nodded sincerely.
“Oh, these are our ‘Siberian felt cherries.’ They’re really great. Try some!” Larisa’s garden was large, and she was building an extension of the dacha, which already had running water, gas and electricity. There was a chicken coop and a greenhouse, too, but she insisted she wasn’t wealthy. The dacha had been her great-grandfather’s home.
Larisa looked out over the canal, where a couple of kids were making waves with their fluorescent-green water scooters. The next day she would have to return to her Moscow apartment, yet she would much rather stay out here among the sunflowers and dill, collecting mushrooms in the forest and sunbathing by the water.
She smiled. “Our government considers us poor, you know, but we are spiritually rich. The only thing we don’t have is money.”
Flowery Pros
Our first morning in motion aboard the Alex G, we were awakened on our approach to the town of Uglich. Uglich is not well-known because it is the largest town on the Volga, but because one of Russia’s most famous murders allegedly occurred here.
In 1591, Dmitry — young heir to the throne of Czar Ivan the Terrible — in the town under “questionable circumstances.” Officially, he died while playing with a knife, but the people blamed Boris Godunov, who then took power. After Godunov‘s death, a succession of “False Dmitrys” claiming to he the boy — miraculously not murdered —attempted to take power, leading to the Time of Troubles and eventually the ascension to the throne of the first Romanov. The Church of St. Dmitry on the Blood was erected 100 years later as a memorial to the young would-be czar, and its walls depict his murder.
We walked through the town’s dusty residential streets, where goats munched grass at the side of the road, toward the town center. In Uglich’s small downtown marketplace, there were flowers, flowers everywhere. Nearby, in the towns grassy park where black-and-white cows meandered along small brooks, young girls held bouquets of dahlias in the deepest swooning shades of purple and red.
In a spot where several women had set up stalls to sell the flowers, we commented on the depth of their color. Suddenly the market came to life like a carousel beginning to spin and grind out its music. The women straightened their bouquets and smiled.
These women could teach their city cousins a thing or two about sales. They didn’t rely on the laconic Moscow technique — that of holding an object in front of you for ages until someone asks the price — but actually enticed customers.
When I protested I didn’t need any flowers, they turned the pressure up.
“What, don’t you have a girlfriend? Wife? Mother? Everyone has a mother. A relative? A friend, even?”
I shrugged.
“These flowers would look good in your room,” one woman insisted, lifting a bouquet. “You’re staying on a cruise ship. aren’t you? There’s a little table in your room, right?”
I hesitated.
“A room without flowers is an empty room,” she said. “And they last a long, long time.”
I was won over by her charm and bought a small bouquet of crimson dahlias. As a bonus, she gave me a homemade pickle.
After leaving Uglich, we entered the Karelia region of northwest Russia, where many residents are ethnically Finnish, as the Alex G. sailed north to the 10,000-square-kilometer Lake Onega, the second-largest lake in Europe. All kinds of wildlife are abundant in its pure waters and along its shores. but we had come to see the human-made beauty on Kizhi Island.
The Land Perestroika Forgot
Kizhi is a wonderland of wooden architecture and old lifestyles. As we approached from Lake Onega, we could see the aspen spires of the Church of the Transfiguration. Multiplied in the still water of the lake, the 22 raw, cascading onion domes made the church look like the log cabin of the gods. A government tourist brochure boasted that not a single metal nail went into the construction of this unpainted wooden cathedral.
The people on the island are the curators, preservationists, technicians, and the score of firefighters who look after the “museum preserve.” In the warmer months, life for them is picturesque: misty dawns over whispering meadows, sweet air, and freedom from noise. But in the half-year winter, when the thick ice creeps up to Kizhi’s shores, life changes.
“That’s when the wolves and the bears come over the ice and roam the island,” said Igor, sitting on the steps of Kizhi’s little general store, waiting for it to open. He passed the time chatting with his neighbors, who were also patiently waiting.
There are winters when the store doesn’t get any supplies for a month. If a helicopter doesn’t arrive with the essentials, people will ride 25 kilometers across the frozen lake on horseback. When it gets cold enough, they can drive their tractor across the ice.
Ivan was born just across the lake — he pointed to a little village about a kilometer away — but moved to Kizhi because his hometown had no electricity and no work. It’s still without electricity.
“We’re simple people,” he told me, looking at the fishing net he was mending. He hunts, and proudly offered to show me his five guns.
Next door, a woman carried an armful of dishes from her house down to the water’s edge and washed them in the lake.
“Perestroika hasn’t touched us out here,” Ivan said. “It’s all the same.”
For decades, his people worked as kolkhozniks, 20th-century serfs on the state collective farms. Fear and the law conspired to keep them tied to the land.
“If you were a kolkhoznik, you had no passport,” he explained. “You were forbidden to go and work anywhere, to move anywhere.”
“They kept a little notebook and they made a checkmark each day you were at work, and you had to work your share.”
Or else what?
“They’d just come for you and haul you away. And nobody knows where they took you.” He paused. That was what happened to his father.
Now his people are free to own their own land and become independent farmers, but a lingering fear keeps them from doing so. Ivan explained their worries. “Maybe after you’ve cultivated the land, they‘ll turn it into a collective farm again,” he said.
From Kizhi, the Alex G. traveled west along the Svir River to Europe’s largest lake. Immense Lake Ladoga looks more like a sea: within its 18,000 square kilometers are over 500 islands, and its waters reach depths of 230 meters. After Ladoga, our next stop would be our final destination, St. Petersburg.
Dazzling City of Czars
Waking up in St. Petersburg at the end of our cruise was a bit like parting the vines in the jungle and seeing a cocktail party. We suddenly found ourselves in the city of Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Peter and Catherine the Great, the Ballet Ruse and northern lights.
Peter the First picked the location for his new city for its strategic location on the Finnish Bay of the Baltic, not for its lovely climate. The spot he picked was a nasty, inhospitable marshland. The aristocracy scoffed, but when Peter offered them the choice of joining him there or losing their heads, they packed up, left Moscow and began to build new palaces in St, Petersburg. ln 1712, Peter declared his new city the capital of Russia, and it was from here that the czars ruled until the October Revolution.
St. Petersburg is dazzling. We began by exploring Nevsky Prospekt, the historic thoroughfare in the very heart of St. Petersburg. It is a microcosm of the city — everything is here, old and new. Consequently we found ourselves in this place again and again.
Squeezing in among the numerous photographers and ice-cream vendors, we marveled at the colorful Church of the Resurrection of Christ, one of the most photographed buildings in the city. With its confectionery-colored domes multiplied in the canal, it rivaled St. Basil’s on Red Square with its beauty.
On the other side of the street, in front of the Kazan Cathedral, a pro-Communist, anti- Yeltsin rally was in progress. Most of the five dozen or so demonstrators were older people, many distressed because their pensions no longer met their living expenses. Marina, a woman in her fifties, told us her monthly pension from the government amounted to little more than $40 a month, barely enough to buy food.
Just down the street we found an 18th-century Roman Catholic Church whose interior had been gutted by fire. Inside, amidst the charred blackness, three stark white temporary walls had been erected to enclose a Spartan little chapel within the cathedral. A golden cross, a single icon, unfinished chairs: this small, beautifully simple arrangement sat brightly illuminated inside the dark, cavernous, hollowed-out ruins of what once was the huge cathedral. It was both art and a symbol of rebirth.
St. Petersburg itself is being reborn. It has the feeling of a place awakening from a long slumber, and here we felt much more of a sense of freedom and vitality than we felt in Moscow.
Around the corner, we had cocktails at the Grand Hotel Europe, a Western-built hotel in the city center that was both luxurious and expensive by any standards. Outside, the city’s only Mercedes taxis waited for fares.
From Elvis to Eiffel
At our request, a friend had introduced us to Nika, a young painter, who said she could show us the city’s subculture. Coincidentally, this was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, and there would be a commemorative concert featuring Goodnight, a popular St. Petersburg band. Nika promised to take us.
In the meantime, we decided to visit the Hermitage, up the street.
The Hermitage is one of Russia’s most staggeringly opulent treasures. Items on exhibit include a large Western European collection with works by Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and many others. We could have spent days simply deciding what to see — they say that if a person spent only half a minute looking at each exhibit, he would need nine years to see everything!
Taking a break from the Impressionist exhibit, I looked down onto Palace Square and was flooded with a sense of history. It was here that the October Revolution had started, when Lenin’s Red Guards rushed in and stormed the very palace in which l was standing.
We decided to wind down with a sunset cruise before heading to the Elvis commemoration, and boarded a double-decked cruise boat in front of the Hermitage, whose thousands of windows danced in reflection on the surface of the Neva. The cloudless sky spattered its blue onto the choppy surface of the Neva and the August sun, hours away from rest, lazed above the horizon, igniting the cathedral spire inside the Peter and Paul Fortress on the opposite bank.
That gleaming point, topped by a winged angel holding a cross, marks the very location where nearly three centuries ago, Peter the First decided to build the first fortress of the city he rather suspiciously dedicated to the saint who shares his name.
The fortress eventually became a prison for political dissidents and once even held Dostoevsky. Now it’s used for much more benign things — during the 1994 Goodwill Games, tan, bikini-clad athletes competed in beach volleyball there.
We began to settle in for our sunset cruise, when suddenly — Pop! Bam! Whshh! — passengers all around us popped open champagne. They graciously shared their bubbly with us.
Our guide first pointed out the Cruiser Aurora, its six-inch gun still pointing at the Hermitage. In October 1917, that gun fired a single blank shot to signal the beginning of the takeover of the palace by Bolshevik forces. Petersburgers juke, “The cannon on that ship is the most powerful gun in the world. One shot — over 70 years of destruction!”
We were surprised to see a bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame — here was a magnificent example of the same swooping, open-arch design used in his tower, built at the time when he was known as the world’s best bridge-builder. Who knew it was here?
In fact, St. Petersburg is made up of 101 islands connected by over 600 bridges, no two of which are alike. As a result, bridge design was raised to a high art here. Many of the bridges are incredibly interesting, as Eiffel’s Foundry Bridge and the Lion Bridge, which looks as if it were held up by four golden, winged griffins.
Back in the USSR
As luck would have it, we arrived just after the commemorative Elvis concert ended. Not fazed, Nika ferreted out another party for us. She said some of the musicians were going to Kolya Vasin’s house, and that things there would just be getting started.
His address was number 10 Pushkin Street, a building that houses avant-garde artists, performers, and musicians — St. Petersburg’s version of the Chelsea Hotel. We stumbled over debris and across ditches in the muddy darkness of the courtyard. The building is not only the artists’ home — it is part of their art. In one corner was a vintage slop wagon of the type used to feed hot kasha to the troops during World War II. Opposite stood a glass elevator shaft, broken.
“This place must have been beautiful when it was new,” I remarked.
“And it will be again,” Nika assured us.
The sign outside Kolya Vasin’s place read, “The Church of John Lennon.” Nika pounded on the brown steel door with her fist. The huge door opened with a click and a gray-bearded, grinning hippie stuck his head out. A lazy eye gave him a permanent expression of wildness. He was wearing a T-shirt with John Lennon’s likeness and the phrase “All you need is love!” on it. As we filed in, he greeted everyone with hugs and kisses, shouting in English, “Oll you need eez lahv, BAYBEE!”
The place was decorated in early rock ’n’ roll. The walls and ceiling were painted black, and Beatles memorabilia was plastered everywhere, A full-length textile portrait of Elvis hung from the ceiling. A young man resembling Bruce Springsteen, wearing a denim jacket and thick sideburns and holding a guitar got up from a sofa to greet us. His name was Vova, and he spoke not a word of English, but began a perfect rendition of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” in English. He was a professional Beatles impersonator.
Kolya clapped and hooted and stamped his foot and sang. The other guests began to sing and vodka began to flow.
On our last evening in the city, I strolled along the banks of the Neva, watching the hues of the water and the buildings soften as the sun set. Poet Joseph Brodsky wrote that in the evening light along the Neva, “a walker’s thoughts travel farther than his destirration.” My thoughts wandered to the time I would next visit St. Petersburg.