Sour cream and onion domes

I've visited so many cathedrals here; it's impossible to come to Russia and not spend half your time gawking at these fabulous structures! They're such a definitive symbol of Russia, especially ones like Saint Basil's in Red Square or Saint Isaac's in Petersburg (photos soon, I promise!). The Orthodox Church really knows how to do it up in style; graceful onion domes and golden crosses on the outside, while on the inside masses of glittering icons, brilliant frescoes, and cavernous domes filled with music and incense (or as Helen so eloquently put it, "the bells and smells!"). Everything is so ornate you cant help but be impressed, if not overwhelmed by the richness of it all. The old story about the origins of Russian Christianity goes that the Muscovite prince Vladimir, after sending out envoys to all the major religions to find out which was the best, was so impressed by the rich churches and ceremonies of the Byzantines that this alone convinced him to convert his people to Orthodox Christianity! Even if the story's a little fanciful, you can understand why he might have!

Although the churches are incredible, it's really sad the condition most of them are in - 70 odd years of neglect and purposeful destruction under the Communists sure took its toll. Most churches in Russia were forced to close under the Soviets, who tried to wipe out the "backward" and "superstitious" influence of religion. One cathedral I visited just down the street from my university, the Temple of the Annunciation (with a stunning gold and silver dome you can see from miles away) was actually turned into a skating rink! A lot of others served similar "practical" purposes during those years; one on Nevsky became a swimming pool with the high-dive up in the apse, another an underwear factory (no joke), and lots were turned into storehouses, stables, community halls, or Young Communist League clubhouses. And it wasn't just churches - Petersburg's sole Bhuddist temple was converted into a laboratory.

Now that the majority have been turned back over to the Orthodox Church since the fall of the Soviet Union, the golden crosses have gone back up, and a massive restoration drive has been going on. Just about every church you see her if covered in scaffolding and green netting, workmen scurrying about patching up the crumbling brickwork and stucco, while artists repaint the obliterated frescos of gold and rich colours that once covered the now white washed interiors. Often you see one of these fantastic churches, with onion domes and amazing exterior decoration, and think wow, it must be twice as incredible inside! When you enter however it's shocking how bare it is - a few icons and candles tended by the ever-present babushki are all that show that this cavernous shell is still alive and on the road to recovery.

I'm sure if I were to come back in 10 or 20 years thing will be much better and the restoration work will have brought them back to some semblance of their former glory. Some of the bigger ones have already been fully restored and are just awesome (like the Kazan Cathedral and the Church-on-Spilt-Blood), but there is a ton of work to be done on a lot of the smaller, more out of the way ones. I went to the Troitsky (Trinity) Cathedral last week and it was in particularily terrible shape; a big fire had torn through the half-restored church in early September, causing the giant middle dome of the church, painted a striking dark blue with gold stars all over, to collapse. The poor old church a rather headless look, but not for long I'm sure.

Ploschad Pobedye

Yesterday I was at the giant war memorial at Ploschad Pobedye, or Victory Square, dedicated to those that died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944. It's really quite something - a huge column of granite in the center of a massive, bunker-like concrete memorial that you approach between two lines of dramatic statues of the city's defenders; soldiers, sailors, munition workers, and nurses. You then descend into a sort of circular atrium in which eternal torches burn around a sculpture of the dying hungry of the city - over one million civilians starved to death in the siege. Haunting symphonic music plays quietly over the loudspeakers.

There's also a huge underground memorial hall, lit by 900 electric torches and built of granite and marble. Huge glittering mosaics cover either end of the long hall, while Red Army banners and the names of some of the more famous dead in gold take line the other walls. The place has a very solemn feel, like you've just entered a giant mausoleum. Red granite display cases line the floor like rows of sarcophagii, adding to the sepulchural effect. Each case displays some aspect of the siege illustrated by artifacts, such as a the melted remains of a German incendiary bomb, a shrapnel damaged Communist Party membership card, and finger-sized piece of sawdust-filled black bread that was the daily ration for the besieged. The only sound in the silent hall was the monotonous ticking of a metronome; throughout the siege this was played continuously on the radio and through loudspeakers on the streets of the dying city. Like a heartbeat, the eternal metronome was supposed to show the starving inhabitants that their city was still alive.

Ross in Rossiya

Exciting news! Ross is coming to Saint Petersburg for a visit in mid-December! For those of you who dont know the illustrious Mr. Turner, he's a good friend of mine from UBC. Actually he might have been the first person I met at university, being my next door neighbour in first year at the infamous Totem Park residence. Good old First Shu! It's so great he's coming out - I really didn't expect anyone to actually visit me in Russia, it's a little out of the way. So I'll be sure to give him the grand tour and make sure he doesn't fall into the Neva or get kidnapped by gypsies.

Sorry I can't post more often, I've got a lot on my plate just now with looking into graduate schools (January deadlines are approaching much too fast!), trying to find a new place to live, and working out Christmas plans. I just found out that nearly all of my friends here are going home for Christmas; darn Europeans can actually afford to do that, living so close. The prospect of spending Xmas alone in Russia is just too grim to even consider so I think I will also try to escape! I've got relatives in Prague so perhaps if they don't mind too much, I can visit them. Christmas might be saved after all...

Coming soon: More photos!

The Kirov Museum

I found my new favourite part of town. On Petrogradsky Island (the big island just to the east of Vasilievsky where I live and have class) is an area centred on Kamennostrovsky Prospect became the fashionable place for the rich to live in the years leading up to World War One, creating the most amazing collection of super cool art nouveau buildings! It's really fantastic - the narrowness of the busy streets, the towering buildings with their graceful organic curves and art nouveau details. In my opinion so much more beautiful than most of the older neo-classical and baroque architecture you find around Petersburg.

In the middle of this art nouveau area is the S.M. Kirov Museum, dedicated to the popular Communist Party chief of the city Sergei Kirov, who was in power from 1926 until he was assassinated in 1934 by a lone gunman in a corridor of the city government building at Smolny. There's alot of speculation that the murder was arranged by Stalin himself, who perhaps saw a dangerous threat to his own power in the growing popularity of his charismatic colleague. Whatever the truth behind Kirov's murder, it had dire consequences for the whole Soviet Union. In the investigation into Kirov's murder, a "conspiracy" in the Communist Party itself was "uncovered", leading to a series of mass arrests, deportations, and executions, first in Leningrad (Petersburg's name under the Communists) and then across the Soviet Union as the hunt for traitors and enemies spread. Kirov's murder was the event that really sparked Stalin's bloody purges of the 1930s, in which he ruthlessly destroyed his enemies, both real and suspected, in the Party, government, army, and in all layers of Soviet society.

Ok, enough with the history lesson! Knowing the background info does make these museums and historical sites meaningful though, especially when all the signage is in Russian only, which really is the norm! The Museum consists of three parts, the first being the carefully preserved flat where Kirov spent his final years with his wife. The apartment was amazing - spacious rooms with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and rich furnishings that included a polar bear rug, a library of 20,000 books, all sorts of trophies from Kirov's hunting trips, and gifts from workers' organizations and factories to their boss everywhere. A very rich apartment, especially considering that most people at the time were often living without bare necessities and were encouraged to live simply as good Communist people should! In the dining room, Kirov often entertained leading Bolsheviks such as Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, and even Stalin himself on a number of occassions - it wasn't hard to imagine that sinister crowd, partying well into the night. On Kirov's nightstand stood an interesting piece of Soviet anti-religious propaganda - an egg-shaped radio of red plastic that the sign said was supposed to be mocking the traditional Easter eggs of the Orthodox Church!

The second part of the museum was dedicated to the life and accomplishments of Kirov. Like the apartment, it was apparent that this area had not changed since the days of the Soviet Union; propaganda paintings and photos of Kirov hung everywhere, accompanied by Lenin quotes and explanatory text, all in Russian of course! One of the nice old babushki insisted on walking me through the whole thing and explained everything to me when she saw me struggling reading the signs. Unfortunately, she could only speak Russian so I didnt understand a whole lot of what she said, but hey it's the thought that counts! It was interesting the reverence with which she spoke of Kirov. Despite the fact that he was a Stalinist croney with as much blood on his hands as the rest of them, he still retains some of his former popularity it seems, as you can tell by the huge number of streets, squares, palaces of culture, stadiums, and other buildings in town that are still named in his honour, although many of the old Soviet names were changed after 1991. The focal point of the museum was the set of clothes that Kirov was murdered in (complete with bullet hole and tear where the doctors tried to get at his heart to revive him as he died) hanging in reverence in a reconstruction of his office at the Smolny Institute. Well, usually hanging there.. it had been moved to some archive until December, darn!

Upstairs was the last part of the museum, an exhibition about childhood in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s that was a lot of fun: cool old kids' toys, scary Stalin posters for the kiddies to have on their schoolroom wall, and some very Soviet music playing to add to the atmosphere! One of my favourite things was a "Calendar of Revolutionary Names," a list of names invented by the Soviets after the Revolution for people to use instead of the traditional names like Pyotr, Ivan, Pavel that were associated with the saints or other elements of the backward and bourgeouis Russian past. They were hilarious and show the absurd Soviet love of abbreviations (remember 1984 with Minitru for the Ministry of Truth? Well here's were Orwell got it all). Imagine naming your child, for example:

Krarmiya (Krasnaya Armiya - Red Army)
Luidzhi (Lenin umer, no ideyi zhizye - Lenin had died, but his ideas live on)
Vil (Vladmir Ilyich Lenin)
Loriks (Lenin, October Revolution, Industrialization, collectivization, socialism)

All in all, a great little gem of a museum - well worth seeing, if you're ever in Petersburg! And for once, the babushki were very friendly too.

The Soviet experience

Sometimes things get so stereotypically Russian - so inefficient, so illogical, so plain rude - you just can't help but laugh. It's easy to imagine the bad old days of the Soviet Union, when endless lines, "service with a snarl," and shortages of everyday goods were the order of the day, because it's often still like that today! A good example was our experience on Sunday when a group of us thought it might be fun to go ice skating...

We decided to go to a rink on Petrogradsky Island - later on in the year its possible to go skating outdoors on the Neva River, which will be really neat! After taking the Metro for about 45 minutes we arrived and had just walked through the door when a guard came running up and told use that the rink was closed! What a total waste of time we thought and, thoroughly disgusted with our lack of foresite, started to leave when Ina suggested that at least we might ask him when it was open, so that we'd know for next time. The answer: 30 minutes. ARgh, thanks for telling us in the first place mister, we almost went straight home!

So we waited around and ate soggy fries and suspect sausages from the concession while a lineup formed out front for buying tickets. We probably should have just waited in line, because it soon stretched longer then a Soviet bread queue and it was a wait of a good 20 minutes til we were at the kiosk, whereupon they let three of the five people in our group buy tickets before announcing that the arena was now completely full and everyone else would have to wait 2 hours for the next session! The grim babushka ticket master refused to let in Ina and I who hadnt got our tickets before the line was closed until, begging and cajoling with the help of one of the other rink employees who say what had happened, we finally managed to convince the old crone to open the gate and let us in with our friends! Ahhh so ridiculous.

Little did we know that the fun had just begun! We now had to get into another long line to rent ice skates! 10 minutes later we were just about to pay and take our skates when the women behind the glass sternly informed us that rental was "impossible" without anything less then a passport! For ice skates?? Granted that we are exceedingly suspicious-looking foreign types, this still seemed a bit much especially since I'll bet that in Russia you probably dont even need a passport to buy a submachine gun! Of course no-one had thought to bring their passport skating - Aurelie looked ready to throttle the old woman. Thank goodness Joka happened to have her Belgian passport at the bottom of her purse, or that unmoveable old crone would have been the end of our skating debacle! By then, we'd been through so much hassle and nonsense it was hardly surprising when their picked-over selection of worn skates turned out to be sparse as the shelves of your typical Soviet department store; Ina was the worst off and was forced to wear boys' skates because the closest they had to her ladies' size 33 was a solitary pair of 40s! She was just livid and I was trying hard not to laugh! You can't help but laugh at how absurd things here are sometimes and I think its the only way to survive in such a country!

Having run the gauntlet, our now exasperated and bitter little group finally got on the ice. We actually ended up having fun, despite the best efforts of the establishment! I brought shame to our country that day, I'm so abysmal at ice skating, though on the bright side I didn't once fall, an improvement on the last time I was skating some ten years ago! Good thing too, because at my height it probably would have been fatal.

Darn language...

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday! I still can't believe I'm 22, somehow it seems so much older than 21, its kind of scary! I had a great birthday; my delightful European friends showered me with presents (my advice: make friends with Belgians as you're sure to get tons of Belgian chocolate on your birthday) and took me out for dinner at a very tasty Indonesian restaurant. Somehow I never expected to ever be celebrating my birthday at an Indonesian restaurant in snowy Russia, but hey it was alot of fun!

I just realized that I've almost been in Saint Petersburg two months now. I really havent said much here about how my classes and how the struggle to learn Russian (the official reason for me being here after all!) has been going. Well.. basically its been alot more difficult than I had expected. Before I came I thought that just by living in Russia and being immersed in the language, I would somehow just pick it up by osmosis or something! Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work like that for me, its a lot of hard work!

Although I've learned alot since I've been here, I've made a lot less progress then I expected to in this amount of time! The more I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to know. It's such a fiendishly difficult language, not because of the crazy-looking alphabet (thats easy, and so much fun to write!) but rather because of all sorts of positively horrific grammar treats like 6 cases, perfective and imperfective verbs, and declineable numbers; doesn't sound like much if you've been lucky enough to never have dealt with such things, but if you have, you'll know what a perfect nightmare they can be! Even if Russian didnt have such complex grammar, it would be difficult enough to learn simply because there is so little in common with English - its not like French or German where a lot of words are the same or similar to English or where you have a good chance at guessing at their meaning. Oh no, this is afterall the language where something as simple as the verb "to travel" turns into the rambling monster "pyutyushestvovat." Help! Why didnt I decide to take German instead??

Mabye if I was actually immersed in Russian all the time I would be much better by now, but the problem is I'm not; my friends here are from all over Europe - the UK, Belgium, France, Norway, and Germany - and we always speak in English, not Russian because none of us are very good at Russian and our conversations would be pretty stunted if we tried! I speak a little Russian everyday with my host mom, but we're pretty limited by my micro vocabulary so we do ALOT of talking about the weather and how university is going.

My classes are great for practicing speaking in Russian and building confidence, as the teachers really concentrate on developing our speaking skills and the class is small enough (usually 5-10 students) for lots of personal interaction. I have two teachers, Nadezhda and Ina, who both insist on speaking only Russian in the classroom, which is good, though at first it was totally terrifying! Sitting in my first class, not comprehending a word of what was being said, I quickly realized I had forgotten the tiny bit of Russian I'd learned back in first and second year at UBC! Class is only 3 hours a day, but that's enough as I dont think it would be possible to do much more because I'm usually just exhausted after three hours of intense concentration. You cant slack off for a moment or you'll be completely lost!

I really get the feeling that Russian is something that you just can't hope master in 6 months alone, I dont even know if 6 years would be enough! Luckily I dont think I have to master Russian to be a Russian history grad student and mabye later on a prof, but everything I learn will help. I'll keep plugging away at it.. it is rewarding when you learn something new and can read a sign you couldnt before or actually start to understand what people say to you!

Day of Unity

Tomorrow's my birthday, fun fun! November 7th, anniversary of the October Revolution and up until recently a national holiday in Russia, meaning I would have had the day off to celebrate! Unfortunately (for my birthday plans) the Soviet Union fell apart and they scrapped the holiday, replacing it two years ago with a new one on November 4 called Day of National Unity or something wishy-washy sounding like that, not half as cool as Day of the Revolution. I got the feeling that no-one really does much for this holiday, since its so new and doesnt mean that much - no impressive military parades through Red Square with masses of flag-waving troops and tanks marching past Lenin's Mausoleum like the old days...

Unfortunately November 4th seems to have become a rallying day for ultra right wing groups in Russia, who tried on Saturday to gather together and hold marches in all the major cities to protest immigration of non-Russians into their country. The marches were banned by the authorities so they were trying to organize them covertly - earlier in the week I'd noticed propaganda stickers all over the Metro inviting local facists to join the protest, some with images of Nazi banners and a towering skeleton in a coal-scuttle helmet, rather scary. I've heard Saint Petersburg is supposed to be the most racist city in Europe and certainly there has been a history of racially-motivated violence here in recent years, almost exclusively against people from Africa or Central Asia. The latest big event to hit the news was the murder in September of an Indian medical student who was studying in Petersburg and stabbed to death just outside his dorm late one night. I think I would be very worried living here if I looked different then everyone else, there are so few non-Russians here it would be easy to be targetted.

I havent seen any real acts of racism myself (thank goodness), though there's an awful lot of racist grafitti scrawled on buildings around town, like the giant slogan "Russia for Russians!" daubed on a billboard just outside the city's only mosque. As is appropriate for our computer age, alot of the grafitti are internet addresses for the websites and chatrooms of local fascist groups like the NBP, who seem to have a particularily active advertisement campaign in the area where I live. Interestingly there's also a lot of grafitti by anti-racist, anti-facist organizations like the student group Antifa, who go around painting "No fascism, No fascists!" and "Antifa" where groups like the NBP have made their mark. These anti-fascists also take a more active stance, as on Saturday when they violently confronted the ultra-nationalists. Despite the official ban on the protest march, about two thousand people showed up, the strangest mix of racists, from your typical skinhead types to ultra-conservative Orthodox faithful and even priests, who marched beside the neo Nazis under a banner depicting Christ! The anti-facist counter protesters intercepted the marchers and things turned violent, dissolving into a vicious street brawl I watched that night on TV. In Moscow, a similar rally was broken up by force by police. Racism is a big problem here in Russia, and isn't something thats bound to go away while most people remain poor and resentful.

Rude Russia

Grrr must rant a little. It's incredible here how you'll be waiting in line for something and if your attention strays for even a moment, someone is bound to immediately budge in right in front of you, the impudence of these people! You really have to be perpetually on guard in lineups to make sure not even the smallest space opens up between you and the person in front or some bold Russian will simply cut in front. It's usually so shocking it's almost funny, as no one would dare be that rude back home! You see it everywhere - cars running red lights and cutting off pedestrians at top speed, no-one offering up their seat to some little old pensioner who just got on the bus, or the almost absurdly terrrrible service you sometimes get in bars and cafes, where the staff dont even bother to hide their hatred of you for setting foot in their establishment! It seems that there's generally a real lack of politeness and even common courtesy in Russia (at least compared to dear old polite Canada!) - the stereotype of rude Russians holds true to some extent! I've gotten used to it somewhat and dont get so mad as I often did when I first arrived but sometimes I can't help but think, what's wrong with the lot of you!?

Helen attributed the selfish drive of the ordinary Russian on the street to the harsh climate; in a country where it gets down to -40C, you just cant afford to develop such luxuries as manners and common courtesy because you'll end up freezing to death if you don't concentrate on your own survival, elbowing that little old babushka aside as you struggle your way onto the bus first for example! Mabye she's on to something there.