An afternoon at GMPIR!

I HAVE to tell you about where I went today. After lunch Sandra (another friend from Munich) and I went to GMPIR, or the State Museum of Russian Political History, formerly a Museum of the Oktober Revolution and Communist Party. Sandra and I went alone because no-one else in the group was interested in soviet history.. their loss! Housed in two mansions, the Museum seemed huge to me (we spent nearly 4 hours there and only saw half!) but is probably child's play compared to monster museums like the Hermitage (which I can now get into for free, thanks to my new russian student card, that looks like KGB ID). The Political Museum was great - very contemporary design with lots of interactive exhibits and just full of Soviet relics like Kalinin's cane, Marshall Voroshilov's cossack sword, Yuri Gagarin's (suprisingly tiny) uniform, and Nikita Krushchev's hat and pants (!!). Some of the other more interesting things: a detailed chess set made of pieces of chewed bread by a gulag prisoner, early Soviet dinnerware with slogans like "Those who are not with us are our enemies!" or "Long live the Red Terror," and a moving letter from two teenage boys in the 1930s, appealing to the soviet authorities on behalf of their arrested parents. In it, they wrote that their father was a devoted party member and always worked hard - despite this, the parents were shot and the boys later starved to death in the war. The exhibits went nearly all the way to the present, the newest exhibit about the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The most impressive room was a brand new exhibit devoted to the Great Patriotic War, which is the Russian name for WW2. It was like a shrine in there - stark white walls with jeep tracks and boot prints painted on the floor in silver, blue, and black leading to a title wall, under which a row of candles burned. Photos (interestingly, all the photos of Germans were inverted like negatives, making them stick out from the rest) and signage everywhere, although unfortunately all in Russian, unlike the Russian/English in the museum. Sandra thought it was on purpose - the war does seem to be a very personal subject for Russians; even 60 years on, it has huge importance and remains a very present issue - one display was about a Russian archaeological team that has found the remains of over 700 Russian soldiers around Saint Petersburg in the past few years so that they can finally be given proper burial. A nearby glass showcase displayed rusty war finds dug from the ground here - cracked helmets, unexploded shells, barrels of rifles and submachine guns(the wooden stocks rotted away), and everyday items like battered cutlery, ID tags, and a gas mask. When you walk the busy streets amongst all the pretty buildings, it's hard to imagine that this incredible city was the site of so much death and destruction during the desperate three-year siege of the city in which something like a million Russians lost their lives. That exhibit really brought it home a bit.