Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 6

 

[Part 6 of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” is the last installment of my account of the high school journey I took to the Soviet Union.  I pick up the chronicle with the entry for 21 April 1965 and follow my steps through the final ramifications of my visa SNAFU with Hungary and my ultimate departure from the U.S.S.R.

[Because the journal actually ends with my arrival in Vienna, Austria, I’ve added a coda that takes me from Vienna  to Bonn, Germany, and on to Geneva. Switzerland, in order to finish out the whole voyage east. 

[As always, I recommend that readers who are just encountering this chronicle go back to 23 May and start with the first installment and then pick up Parts 2 through 5, posted on 26 and 29 May and 1 and 4 June, before continuing with this final section.  You’ll find many identifications and explanations that will pertain to this installment but which I haven’t repeated.]. 

Wednesday, 21 April – 2:50 p.m. – Kiev/Vienna, Austria

I thought everything was settled, but when I arrived at the [Kiev] airport [probably Boryspil, but I’m not sure], and tried to change my rubles, I then realized that I had no [currency-exchange] declaration slip or money slip.  In other words, I was stuck with ₽16 [officially $17.60] that I could not take out of the country.  I had the choice of spending it [in the airport] or leaving it and being able to retrieve it in three years—when I returned.  I ended up buying two bottles of vodka and one of [Russian] champagne.

[As I reported earlier concerning Polish zloty (see Part 1, entry for 12 April 1965), exchanging Western currency outside government-run exchange offices was illegal in communist Eastern Europe.  Holding rubles without receipts for their official exchange invited confiscation and more.] 

In addition to having no declaration slip, I was not allowed to have dollars, but [the customs officials] waived that and did not confiscate my money.

I had tried to sell my rubles to some people traveling to Moscow, but then they would have my problem as well—a lack of dollars with no declaration of change.

Then, of course, they went through all my bags, and almost took my [phonograph] records.  I was almost screaming! 

VIENNA, REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA

The plane trip was awful.  The landing was so rough, I thought I was going to be sick!  [I don’t get motion sickness as a rule.]

Finally we landed—and was I glad.  I can’t express how happy I am to be out of that place.  I’m almost glad to miss two more days behind the [Iron] Curtain.

Then, here, I began to worry about a room and money.  But that was little trouble.  It’s only costing me 80 schillings [about $3 in 1965, about $27.53 today], which I have, to stay a day here [Hotel Schönbrunn, named for the main summer residence of the Habsburg monarchs; the name means ‘beautiful spring’)].  I will eat my dinner out.

I noticed a strange thing, not very important, but funny in the light of everything that’s happened.  The [hotel] porter put me in the wrong room, and no one noticed until I told the receptionist.  They changed me.

I sent a telegram to Mr. Brunst, ℅ the Hungarian travel agent.  I hope he gets it.  I also hope it’s not expensive, though he may pay for it.

I reconfirmed my ticket for Bonn, so at least that’s settled.

I keep feeling that I’m not going to have enough money.  I hope I make it, or it may prove troublesome.  I must find out when I have to vacate the room in order not to pay another day.  I must also buy breakfast and lunch tomorrow, but I can do without much.  This is really growing out of proportion.

Since it’s stopped raining, I will go out and find a Stube to eat in; it’s probably less expensive out than in the hotel.  [A Stube in this context is similar to a pub or saloon, a small restaurant that principally serves beer (Bierstube) or wine (Weinstube) and plain, simple food.]

*  *  *  *

[That’s where my journal of my 1965 trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ended.  In Part 5 of “Going to a Swiss International School,” I recounted the final leg of the journey, from Vienna to Bonn, Germany, for the last days of the spring vacation, and back to Geneva to finish the second semester of my senior year in high school.

[In order to wrap up the entire voyage, I’ve decided to append the last paragraphs of the 11 May 2021 post to the transcription of the journal.  I’ve edited them lightly.]

RETURN: VIENNA – BONN – GENEVA

I had reservations on a direct flight to Vienna at noon on 21 April.  At the Kiev airport, I went through the check-in procedure without a hitch—after all, I had my very own Intourist minder with me!  Then I asked about exchanging the 16 rubles I had left for Austrian schillings (about 440) or dollars ($17.60 – worth about $157.27 today).  

My minder advised me that I’d have to spend them in the airport or surrender them at customs.  The Kiev airport in 1965, however, didn’t have a shopping concourse or anything like a duty-free area—it would be bourgeois and capitalistic—so I was relegated to cruising the snack bars and souvenir stands.  I was on my way to my parents’ new home in Bonn, so I ended up buying a bottle of Russian champagne (shampanskoye), two bottles of vodka, and a couple of jars of caviar (ikra). 

When I got to customs, after the Intourist minder had left me, the environment changed.  The agents went through everything.  I suspect they saw my official passport and decided to be hyper-diligent.  They made me open every bag, including my camera bag.  I smoked a pipe in those days, and they not only opened my tin of tobacco, but actually rooted around in the tobacco itself.  (Maybe I had diamonds or microfilm in there!)

In Leningrad, readers will recall, I had bought “lots of” propaganda posters as souvenirs (see Part 4, entry for 17 April 1965) and they were rolled up and wrapped in brown paper by the store clerk.  The customs agents made me open the roll and unravel every one of the posters. 

They had words over them, as if they had to decide if I should be allowed to take the posters out of the country with me.  As if the store hadn’t sold them to me openly and legally!  What?  I was smuggling anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-Nazi propaganda into the West?

The customs guys examined the classical records I had bought for my father as well.  I guess they suspected I might be secreting coded messages in the music or something.  The camera bag got the same level of scrutiny; thank goodness they didn’t expose all the film I had—just out of orneriness.

Well, I made it out of the Soviet Union, which I was never sure I would.  I had visions, not so much of being stuck in the airport in some kind of limbo (like Tom Hanks in 2004’s The Terminal), but of being hauled off to a jail in Kiev or some place and forgotten forever.    

(I had read George Orwell’s 1984 and about two years before this trip, I’d participated in a high school production of Darkness at Noon, adapted from Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel by Sidney Kingsley in 1951.)

The group’s visit to the Hungarian capital was overnight, so I arrived in Vienna before them and was on my own for several hours.  I arrived about 1 p.m. on the afternoon of the 21st and went to the Hotel Schönbrunn where the Ecolint group was supposed to meet me on the evening of the 22nd.

I was relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and, as I’ve said, I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people.  I still had almost no cash, however, until the group arrived in town some hours after I did.  So I walked around Vienna this time and sang “Hard Day’s Night” some more!  To this day, I can’t hear that song—which I still love like most Beatles tunes—without flashing back to that spring trip to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.

The Ecolint group arrived at about 7 in the evening and joined me at the hotel.  The trip ended as planned and we all went our separate ways to finish up the spring vacation.  The group took the train back to Geneva by way of Zürich on the evening of Friday, the 23rd; I flew home to Germany to spend the rest of the break with my folks.

I flew into Cologne Bonn Airport on the 23rd where my parents met me.  As readers know, I’d arranged before we left Geneva to fly home from Vienna instead of going back to Geneva with the group.  We drove to Bad Godesberg, the district of the West German capital of Bonn where many foreign embassies, including the Embassy of the United States, were located, and our new residence.

This home wasn’t the house in Koblenz where we’d been living since my father started this assignment in Germany in 1962.  (Looking back, I was a little like the kid who comes home from summer camp and finds that his parents had moved.  Except, of course, that I knew this was going to happen.) 

In late March 1965, Dad had been transferred from the Amerika Haus in Koblenz to the U.S. embassy in Bad Godesberg.  From Information Center Director, Dad was now Cultural Affairs Officer, informally, the Cultural Attaché. 

Our new home was a three-bedroom apartment in the garden-apartment complex in Plittersdorf, a section of Bad Godesberg that was the site of the U.S. embassy residence compound.  When we arrived at the apartment, my parents had to attend a function and they left me to unpack and rest until they returned in the early evening. 

The apartment was festooned with hand-made banners and other decorations to welcome me home.  I put the champagne and caviar in the fridge and put the vodka in the freezer (Russians drink vodka literally ice cold from a little glass called a ryumka, a bit larger than a shot glass), and waited for my folks to get back.  

When they got home, we had a little celebration en famille and I told them about the trip east.  I had called them from Vienna, so they already knew about the adventure in Kiev; of course, they’d also known about the visa problem when it surfaced while I was still in Geneva.

There wasn’t much left of the vacation, so I was soon on my way back to Geneva by air on Monday, 26 April, for the remainder of the spring term—the end of my last semester in high school.  With my dad’s new job, he also shifted from the Consular Corps to the Diplomatic Corps (we all got those black-covered Diplomatic Passports—mine came in July).  

After graduation in Geneva on 6 June, my parents, my brother, my maternal grandmother, and I took a trip through the Loire Valley, ending up in Paris.  Then, in August, Dad took home leave and my family and I sailed on the SS Independence out of Cannes, France, for New York City so my brother could start his junior year at his prep school and my folks could deliver me to start my freshman year as a college student.  

That was the first time I used my new dip card.  In September 1965, I would start commuting between Bonn and Virginia for college breaks on a fairly regular basis.  I now had diplomatic immunity—not that I ever invoked it, but it was neat to know I had it.

[Transcribing these old journals has been a peculiar experience for me.  (I’m including the two previous transcriptions: “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” 11-23 July 2021 and 2-20 August 2021; “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980,” 24 December 2021-5 January 2022.) 

[That’s been especially true of the Russia journal, which was an exceptionally memorable experience.  This was both because of the Hungarian visa matter and because I was so young.  This was only my second experience visiting a land that was entirely alien to my experience; the first was my arrival in Europe the first time at Christmastime 1962.

[(Before that visit to Germany and Paris—see “An American Teen in Germany”—my only experience with foreign travel was a skiing trip my family took to Sainte-Agathe, Quebec, when I was probably 8-10 years old.  Otherwise, I’d never been off the East Coast of the U.S.)

[The trip to the Soviet Union also reaches way back into my past (almost 60 years as opposed to 40+ for the subjects of the two newer journals) and it was a world that’s completely disappeared.  It felt very strange, revisiting all that.  I’d be very curious to hear what anyone else felt about this account.]

Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 5

 

[Below is the fifth part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” my account of a trip I took with my high school 57 years ago.  This installment covers my arrival in Kiev, then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the original constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. 

[(Today, despite the unprovoked invasion by the Russian Federation that started in February 2022, Ukraine is a sovereign and independent nation and the capital city is now called Kyiv, its Ukrainian name rather than its Russian one.)

[Part 5 of the journal starts with the entry for 20 April 1965, our arrival in Kyiv from Leningrad.  I cover the continuation of my visa problem with Hungary and a meeting two of my friends and I had with the pen-pal of one of them.  I also report on some of the historical and cultural sights we visited in Kiev.

[At the end of this section, I sum up my impressions of the Soviet Union and its people—from the perspective of a teenager in 1965.  It was not only a world very different from ours today, but one that no longer even exists.

[Any readers of ROT who’ve just joined this thread are urged to go back to 23 May and start with Part 1 and then pick up Parts 2 through 4, posted on 26 and 29 May and 1 June, before continuing with this section.  You’ll find many identifications and explanations that will pertain to this installment but which I haven’t repeated.]

KIEV, UKRAINIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC (U.S.S.R.)

Tuesday, 20 April – 1:55 p.m. – Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic [now Kyiv, Ukraine]

[Historical Notes and Current Events: When I visited Kiev, now officially called Kyiv, the Ukrainian spelling, since 1991, it was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Indeed, with the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), the Ukrainian SSR was one of the first republics to establish the U.S.S.R. in 1922.

[In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and Russian SFSR formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, the replacement of the defunct U.S.S.R.  (Ukraine largely ceased to participate in CIS in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea, and withdrew representatives from all statutory bodies of CIS in 2018 as a result of the war in Donbas.)

[With the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian insurgency in Donbas, both in 2014, tension between Ukraine and the Russian Federation since the second presidential term of Vladimir Putin (2012-present) has steadily increased until on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

[The Russo-Ukrainian war was actually unprovoked, but Putin’s propaganda offered justification by, first, denying the existence of Ukraine as an independent nation and declaring that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and, second, asserting that the elected government of Ukraine must be overthrown on the pretext that it was run by “Nazis” (see my remarks on the longstanding paranoia of Russia above in the entry for 17 April in Part 4).

[I’m not even going to address the absurd notion that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (b. 1978; 6th President of Ukraine, 2019-present), who’s Jewish, and his government are Nazis.  As far Putin’s second “argument” to justify his invasion of Ukraine, however, the statement he made on 12 July 2021, that Ukraine isn’t a legitimately sovereign state was such an obviously made-up story that no one could take it seriously, but one fact kept repeating in my head.

[Leaving aside for the moment anything concerning Ukraine’s history, its status as a nation and a people is supported in large measure by the fact that the Ukrainian language is different from Russian.  Not only are the vocabulary, spelling, idioms, and grammar different—it’s not just a matter of accent and pronunciation like Siberian Russian, say—but the two tongues have different alphabets.

[They’re both Cyrillic—but, then, so are Bulgarian and Serbian.  Ukrainian has some different letters than Russian.  (That’s why the Russian name for the capital city is Kiev (Киев. pronounced KEY-ev) and the Ukrainian name is Kyiv (Київ, pronounced KEEV).  In the two languages, the names don’t look alike; one of the four letters in the Ukrainian name doesn’t even exist in the Russian alphabet.

[Insofar as the history of the region is concerned, the people who became the Slavs of Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia (now Belarus) were the Kievan Rus, a Norse people who swept down from northern Europe starting in the 9th century and established a realm in the area around what is now Kyiv before spreading north to what became Belarus and east to Muscovy/Russia.

[In other words—and I know I’m being simplistic here—if Ukraine was never a state, then neither was Russia since it was formed by the people of the Kievan Rus, the original eastern Slav realm.  (I don’t know who the Norsemen displaced in what became the Kievan Rus, probably nomadic tribes, assuming anyone lived there, but I don’t know their origins/ethnicity.) 

[In any case, modern-day Russia is historically an offshoot of modern-day Ukraine, not the other way around.  When Moscow was founded in 1147, Kyiv was already 665 years old!  Ukrainians were erecting magnificent churches when Muscovites were building rude little wood huts.]

I am now sitting in my room [at the Hotel Intourist] in Kiev.  The group has left [for Budapest by train at 12:26 p.m., arriving at 10:58 a.m. on the 21st]; I will pick them up again in Vienna [they were due to arrive by train at 7:55 p.m. on the 22nd].  I fly there tomorrow [the 21st] at 12:00 [noon].

[Intourist (Интурист, a contraction of иностранный турист [inostrannyi turist], ‘foreign tourist’) was the official travel agency for foreign tourists in the Soviet Union from 1929 until the fall of the communist regime in 1992.  It was privatized that year.  It ran hotels in most Soviet cities, eventually owning over 100.]

We arrived in Kiev yesterday [Monday, 19 April] late morning [actually, at 1:05 p.m., according to the trip itinerary], and had lunch.  After lunch, we had a short tour of Kiev.  I got all the mess of my visa as cleared up as I could—arrangements to fly to Vienna.

Kiev was much too rushed.  We saw the Saint Sophia Cathedral and Aleksandrovsky Park with its view of Kiev, the monument to the unknown soldier, and one to the revolutionists.

[Named after the 6th-century Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Istanbul (then Constantinople), Saint Sophia Cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, a concept in Christian theology, rather than a specific saint named Sophia.  The foundations were first laid in 1037 or 1011, but the cathedral took two decades to complete.

[An architectural monument of Kievan Rus and a Ukrainian heritage site, in 1934, Soviet authorities confiscated the structure from the church and designated it as an architectural and historical monument-museum.

[Now, I had a little difficulty reconciling what I wrote next above and the facts on the ground.  There doesn’t, in fact, seem to have been an Aleksandrovsky Park in Kiev in 1965 (or anytime in the city’s history).  No variation of that name appears in any reference I found.  I even looked for parks or gardens whose names changed after 1992.

[Aleksandrovsky is a Russian name—and there is an Aleksandrovskiy Park in Saint Petersburg and several other Russian towns.  But in Kiev, there is an Oleksandriya Arboretum (or Dendropark Oleksandriya) on the outskirts of the city.  Oleksandriya is a Ukrainian name derived from Aleksandra (in Ukrainian: Oleksandra)

[Ukraine’s largest landscaped park, it’s dotted with glades, bridges, cafes, gazebos, ponds, and sculptures.  (At 495 acres, the Oleksandriya Arboretum is a little smaller than the Principality of Monaco, or about three-fifths the size of New York City’s Central Park.)  The arboretum, laid out in the middle of the 18th century, derives its name from Countess Aleksandra Branitskaya (1754-1838), a lady-in-waiting to Empress Catherine the Great.

[Ukraine’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dedicated to the soldiers of the Red Army killed in World War II, is inside the Park of Eternal Glory.  The tomb was opened on 6 November 1957, on the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. 

[The Monument of the Great October Revolution was a Soviet monument located in what in 1965 was called Kalinin Square (now Independence Square).  It was dismantled in 1991.]

In the evening, before dinner, we discovered that [my schoolmate] David’s correspondent, whom he was supposed to meet in Moscow, had followed him to Kiev (near where she lives).  We met her and talked about everything from literature to Khrushchev and everything in between.  I hope we cleared up some things about the States, like the charity lines of the unemployed collecting their few pennies and the children working in factories from a very early age.

We arranged to meet again before dinner, and went again to Aleksandrovsky Park [Oleksandriya Arboretum?].  We saw another incident of hoodlumism there—a girl and boy having a fight; she had a black eye.

[David was among my schoolmates at Ecolint, the son of the Indian ambassador to Ghana.  David was studying Russian on his own—like me at the time—and had a Russian pen-pal, a student at a Moscow university; I forget which one now, as well as what she was studying.

[In Moscow, my Ecolint roommate, Mark; David; and I were supposed to meet David’s pen-pal, but our schedule kept changing and we couldn’t connect.  (The changing schedule was a tactic the Soviets used to keep Westerners like us from making contact with local citizens.)

[In addition to our sightseeing in Kiev, David worked at making contact with his pen-pal.  This time, he was successful—she lived near Kiev and had taken a break from her university in Moscow—and the three of us went off to meet her before dinner the evening we arrived, Monday, the 19th. 

[We met at the apartment of a friend of hers.  This whole episode was unusual because, not only did we contrive to meet, but we were successful and we met at a private residence.  How we, a trio of foreign teenagers, managed to accomplish that, I have no idea.  I suppose it was just a matter of dumb luck: we didn’t know any better, so we just did it!  

[David’s correspondent and her friend—and, I recall, another young man—and the three of us sat in the apartment living room and after introducing ourselves, we started talking.  The conversation was in English; all three students had been learning English—practically a requirement for Soviet university students in those days.  

[We started off talking about literature—I don’t recall the topic—Nikita Khrushchev, who’d been deposed as Soviet leader just the previous October, and a range of other subjects.  Then the questions we fielded got far more curious than any casual conversation we’d been having.

[The first thing that David’s correspondent brought up was the social situation in the U.S. as they had learned about it.  “Is it true,” she asked, “that there are lines of unemployed in all the cities where the workers collect their few pennies?”  They also asked about the children as young as 8 working in the factories.

[Mark and I practically gasped!  This is actually what she and her peers were being taught in school—including university.  We explained that her image was from the Depression, 30 year earlier.  She had probably been seeing old newsreels or movies like The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and been told they were current events! 

[I don’t know if she believed us or dismissed our explanations and protests as propaganda and the naïvete of youth, but we moved on.

[Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential candidacy in 1964 had worried Europeans of all stripes.  Soviet university students were no exception.  The first thing they wanted to know was how a man could be nominated by his party like Goldwater (1909-98; U.S. Senator from Arizona: 1953-65, 1969-87) and then not win.  They literally couldn’t comprehend the U.S. political system, especially the notion of primary elections and party nominations.

[The Soviet system, of course, was different from both ours here in the States and the one common to parliamentary democracies.  Almost all European democracies had parliamentary systems in which the country’s head of government takes office when her or his party wins a majority in the legislature.  

[In the communist world, no candidate was named unless chosen by the central party establishment.  There was no opposition party to put up a rival candidate, and if there was any opposition within the ruling party, it was settled out of sight of the public.

[The Soviet premier, usually the same as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, wasn’t elected at all, not even in a show election.  I mean, of course, a “popular” election; the Politburo selected the country’s leader, sometimes ousting the existing leader (Leonid Brezhnev [1906-82] succeeding Khrushchev in 1964) and sometimes after his death in office (Yuri Andropov [1914-84] succeeding Brezhnev in 1982).

[In other words, there was no such thing as a losing candidate, since the election’s outcome was predetermined and only one candidate was on the ballot.  So how could a Barry Goldwater even exist?  We tried our best to explain how this worked, but I didn’t know how successful we were.  

[It didn’t help, I’m sure, that we were all only about 17-18 years old—and only two of us were American—so none of us was even eligible to vote.  (The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed 18-year-olds to vote in federal elections, wasn’t ratified until 1971.)  Besides, anything we told our friend’s pen-pal could be written off as propaganda.

[If it hadn’t been so absurd—less Kafkaesque, perhaps, than Beckettian—it might have been frightening.  I mean, here were three university students, presumably members of the Soviet intellectual elite, believing things that weren’t only untrue but based on a 30-year-old catastrophe—what’s more, a worldwide catastrophe that affected even Europe.]

I just had lunch with some guides (I think), one of whom spoke English.  They talked mostly among themselves, but they asked me a few questions.

[When it came time to leave Kiev on the 21st, things got sticky for me.  I remind readers again that I was all of 18 and spoke a tiny bit of Russian and no Ukrainian.  With no more luck with the Hungarian visa in Kiev than we had in Leningrad, the Ecolint group had no choice but to get me on a plane non-stop to Vienna so I could leap over Hungary. 

[With the intervention of Intourist, which was responsible for all such tourist matters, I had a seat for the day after the group left by train for Budapest early in the morning of 20 April. 

[While I had an Intourist agent to look after/keep tabs on me in Kiev after the school group left, I’d be solo in Vienna.  That didn’t faze me because, first, I was used to traveling in Europe on my own by this time, I wasn’t a little boy, and I spoke German by this time.  In addition, should the need arise, I could always go to the U.S. embassy in Vienna and have them contact my dad at the embassy in Bonn, where he was by this date posted (explanation shortly).

[There was little I could do in Kiev for the half day or so when I was on my own.  The Intourist agent didn’t stay with me; she just checked in in the morning and made arrangements to pick me up that afternoon to get to the airport for my flight.  So I just walked around in the area of the hotel.

[Window shopping was all I could do because the first consequence of this ad hoc plan became clear almost immediately.  I had little pocket money.  After purchasing the plane ticket, Mr. Brunst collected all the remaining rubles—they wouldn’t be needing them anymore since they couldn’t take them out of the Soviet Union and, even if they did, they couldn’t spend the rubles since no one in the West accepted Soviet Bloc currency, and they couldn’t exchange them for schillings (Austrian currency until the introduction of the Euro in 1999) or any other Western money—and turned them over to me.  But it was just a few rubles, enough for me to buy some lunch and something to drink later while I was waiting for my plane.

[So I wandered around and amused myself—or assuaged myself, if you prefer—by singing the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” over and over to myself.  The movie had only been released in Europe in July 1964, less than a year before the trip to Eastern Europe.  The songs from the film were in all our heads—probably with the help of Keats French and his rock ’n’ roll guitar.]

It’s fitting that on my last day in the U.S.S.R. I should put down my thoughts on the Russian people.

These people are poor.  That’s no bull or propaganda.  It is the truth.  They are equal, but poor.  Of course, no Russian would say so, because they believe they are not poor, and by their standards, they’re not.  But it is true.  Facts from a Russian herself: the average monthly income is ₽60-80 [$66-88 at the official rate]—that’s only a little over the point at which Americans pay no taxes: $50 a month.

Their clothes are, in my mind, horrible.  It’s mostly true in women’s clothing and men’s shoes.  Some manage, by taste alone, to fix up a little, but it’s not easy.  The best-dressed people in the U.S.S.R. are the cops.

The manners of these people are nonexistent.  Not only do they push and shove in crowded places, but on the street they refuse to move for anything.  If I were to walk a straight line down a sidewalk, I would run into someone, because they won’t move.  And they look right at you, and cross in front of you only in time to make you pull up abruptly—staring at you the whole time.

And  staring: even the Germans are more discreet!  Everyone stares at me in this place.  One man even turned completely around while following me with his eyes.

And they don’t bother to wait for someone [ahead] to go through a door first—they try to go through with them.

And one thing which has nothing to do with my being a foreigner: every one spits in the street!  Everyone.  Ptui—big gobs of it all over the sidewalk.  One man almost spat on me.

[We saw a similar phenomenon in China (see “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980 – Part 3,” 30 December 2021, entry for 26 December 1980); however, respiratory problems were rampant there—and the Chinese supplied spittoons at sidewalk corners all over the cities.]

Another thing: I don’t know how these people know where to go for something in a store.  When they say “department store,” they mean not a store with separate departments for each [type of] good, but a big store divided into “departments,” but everything is spread out everywhere anyway.  For instance—shoes may be on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th floors—the same shoes.  And this is true in food stores as well.

Of course, the people have no money to spend on anything anyway, so why worry?  Just one example: a TV set cost ₽180 [$198 at the official exchange rate], but the average [monthly] wage is only ₽80 [$88] at most anyway, so they scrimp and save for a while to buy a TV, and [then] start on something else.

Of course, their money is a mess, too.  On the official rate, 1 ruble [₽] is worth $1.10 approximately, but it has only the buying power of 1 franc Swiss [about 23¢ in 1965].  Screwy, n’est-ce pas?

In general, the people here are not as bad off as some newspapers imply—they are not starving in the street, but they are not as well off as they would have us believe.

[The next and last installment of my chronicle, “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 6,” will be published on Tuesday, 7 June, beginning with the entry for 21 April 1965.  That picks up with my departure from Kiev and the Soviet Union and all that that entailed; my arrival in Vienna, Austria, to await the rest of the group from Budapest, Hungary; my flight home to Bonn, Germany; and my return to Geneva, Switzerland.

[I invite ROTters to come back for the conclusion of the account next week and read the wrap-up of what I still feel, nearly three decades later, was an extraordinary experience.]

Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 4

 

[This is the fourth installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” continuing my coverage of my visit to Leningrad.  It includes the latest repercussions of my visa problem with Hungary as well as tours of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Hermitage Museum, and some souvenir shopping.

[ROTters who haven’t read the first three parts of the Russia journal are urged to go back and pick up Parts 1 through 3, posted on 23, 26, and 29 May respectively, so that you catch all the definitions, identifications, and explanations included in the first half of the chronicle.]

Saturday, 17 April – 11:05 [a.m.] – Leningrad

The ballet (see Part 3) was good [i.e., artistically], but I didn’t like it personally.  [I’m not a fan of dance.]

Right now I’m waiting for a call from Moscow.  I forgot to check for my Hungarian visa [while we were in Moscow (see Part 1)], so we are calling the embassy in Moscow as I may have to fly to Moscow and pick it up and fly on to Kiev to meet the group.  I also may have to miss Budapest if I don’t get the visa.

Meanwhile, I’m missing Pushkin town where the palace of Catherine II is.  It’s too bad, because it’s supposed to be interesting.

[What I didn’t get to see that morning was the little town of Pushkin, until 1918 named Tsarskoye Selo (‘tsar’s village’) and then Detskoye Selo (‘children’s village’) before being named in honor of Alexander Pushkin on 10 February 1937, on the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death.

[Tsarskoye Selo (Царское Село) was, during the empire, just what the name implies: an exclusive imperial residence.  The imperial household would move from the Winter Palace out to the countryside 19 miles south for the summer. 

[The palace in question is the Catherine Palace, built in 1717 as a two-story wooden structure for the future Catherine I, then wife of Peter the Great.  It was rebuilt as a stone palace in 1723 and has been rebuilt and enlarged many times until 1770, when it became the summer residence of Empress Catherine II. 

[Additional palaces were built in Tsarskoye Selo for other monarchs over the decades, but when the German forces retreated in January 1944 after the siege of Leningrad in World War II, they deliberately destroyed the Catherine Palace.  Soviet architects reconstructed the palace starting in 1957.]

The call came through—it looks like I may have to skip Budapest—or go to Moscow; which is difficult now.  This is one hell of a mess!

Looks like I miss Budapest.  I’ve got to stay in Kiev an extra day instead of going to [Budapest].  What a crapped-up job!

This afternoon was fairly interesting—we saw the Peter-Paul Fortress across the river.  We saw the Peter and Paul Cathedral inside the fortress and the dungeons, or prison where people like [writer Maxim] Gorky and Aleksandr Ulyanov [Lenin’s older brother] were imprisoned.  The cathedral [at the time of my visit] holds the tombs of all but three tsars.

[The Peter and Paul Fortress was the first building constructed in Saint Petersburg, started, as a star fortress of earth and timber, in 1703.  It was rebuilt in stone from 1706 to 1740.  It stands on Hare (Zayachy) Island, in the Neva River across from the Winter Palace.

[The fortress, aside from being the symbolic birthplace of Saint Petersburg, is a stand-out architectural sight in the city.  This is principally because the Peter and Paul Cathedral, a Russian orthodox church built within the fortress between 1712 and 1733, has the tallest bell tower in all Orthodox Christianity.  Painted gold and reaching a height of 404 feet, it can be seen from vantage points all over the city.  

[Today, only Peter II and Ivan VI aren’t buried there.  Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great who’d moved the capital to Moscow, is buried in the Cathedral of Michael the Archangel in the Moscow Kremlin; Ivan VI (1740-64; reigned: 28 October 1740-6 December 1741) was executed in the Fortress of Shlisselburg near Saint Petersburg and buried there.

[Tsar Nicholas II, Russia’s last emperor, and his family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918, were finally laid to rest, after the discovery and identification of their remains, in the cathedral on 17 July 1998 (80 years after their deaths—and a little over 33 years after I was at the cathedral).

[A museum since 1924, the Peter and Paul Fortress served as the home of the city garrison (a defense against a feared attack by Sweden—which never came), but around 1720, it also began to function as a notorious prison for high-ranking political prisoners. 

[(A note about the planned defense against a Swedish attack: in the early days of Russian history, going back to the Grand Duchy of Moscow [1263-1547; see Part 5, entry for 20 April], Russia’s most constant threats were Sweden and Finland.  Russia was either at war with one or the other of the Nordic nations or preparing to defend against it.  Now, 300 years later, Sweden and Finland are preparing to join NATO in anticipation of hostilities by Russia, a move that echoes one of Russia’s age-old fears.)

[The first prisoner to escape from Peter and Paul Fortress, which became known colloquially as “Russia’s Bastille,” was the anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921; imprisoned, 1874-76; see my profile, “The Anarchist Prince,” 13 and 16 June 2020). 

[Another significant prisoner was Lenin’s brother Aleksandr Ulyanov (1866-87).  (Lenin’s birth name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.)  Aleksandr Ulyanov was a leftist revolutionary in his own right and on 13 March 1887 (NS), he and his comrades conspired to assassinate Tsar Alexander III (1845-94; reigned: 1881-94), the day of the sixth anniversary of the murder of Alexander II (1818-81; reigned: 1855-81). 

[Ulyanov and the other conspirators were arrested and tried.  They were held at the Peter and Paul Fortress for two months in solitary confinement.  In May, Ulyanov and four comrades were transferred to Shlisselburg Fortress and hanged on 20 May (NS).  His brother’s fate was a strong factor in Lenin’s motivation to pursue revolution avidly himself.

[Other illustrious detainees included:

•  Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich (1690-1718), Peter the Great’s son and father of Tsar Peter II (imprisoned, 1718; he died there soon after)

•  Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817), Polish military leader who became a hero of the American Revolution, during which, among other contributions, he designed and oversaw the construction of state-of-the-art fortifications (imprisoned, 1794-96)

•  the Decembrist revolutionaries (see Part 3)

•  writers Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81; imprisoned, 1849), Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76; imprisoned, 1851-54), and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936; imprisoned, 1905)

•  Leon Trotsky (1879-1940; imprisoned, 1906), Marxist revolutionary and a leader (with Lenin) of the Revolution of 1905 (see Part 3)

•  Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980), Yugoslav communist revolutionary, World War II leader of the Yugoslav Partisans, and president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (imprisoned, 1917).]

Then we went shopping—I bought  two records, one for Dad, and lots of posters.

[I don’t remember what the records were, except that they were classical music, of which my father was a big fan.  One may have been Rachmaninoff, but that’s just an impression I have.  I’m sure they were all Russian composers, in any case.  

[(After my dad went into a nursing home and Mother moved into a smaller apartment, she downsized and sold or donated books, records, and Dad’s wardrobe, except a few items I took, and the Russian albums weren’t saved.)

[One thing about the records, however, I do recall with absolute clarity: they were recorded on only one side of the LP!  That’s right: one side had grooves and the other was smooth.  All the records in the store at which I looked were like that.  I never found out why, but I suppose it was a way of keeping the cost down—like selling American cigarettes in Western Europe in packs with 12 cigarettes and a styrofoam filler for the missing eight butts—to make the imported packs cheaper, especially for the vending machines.

[The record store was also a music store, so of course Keats French, the Elvis/Roy Orbison wannabe, looked at all the guitars—acoustic, of course; I don’t think electric guitars were available in the Soviet Union since rock ’n’ roll music was banned—and they were odd, too.  

[Standard Russian guitars had seven strings instead of six.  I don’t know enough about music or guitars to know what the extra string is for, but after that, I noticed that all Russian guitars were seven-string models.  I’m not sure, but Keats may have bought one.

[Also on display were all sizes of balalaikas, the ubiquitous Russian three-string folk instrument with the triangular body.  Needless to say, we heard a lot of balalaika music while we were in Russia and the Ukraine.

[The poster store was fascinating.  I no longer recall if the store sold other kinds of posters, but we spent about an hour looking through the propaganda ones.  I ended up buying three or four as souvenirs and though I no longer have them—I don’t know what became of them; they were too wonderful for me to have just thrown them out, so I must have lost them in one move or another in the ensuing decades.  (They’ll turn up again in this chronicle when I leave the Soviet Union near the end of the trip.)

[I can recall pretty clearly at least two of the ones I brought home.  One was an anti-religion poster showing a church from above, with the roof removed.  (All the artwork was Socialist Realism, the approved graphic style in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s rule.)  

[Worshipers are sitting in the pews, row after row, and the giant image of a priest is looming over the church.  He’s counting the worshipers and as they recede toward the back of the church, their heads morph into the beads of an abacus.

[Most small shops in Russia still used abacuses for toting up a bill for a customer; cash registers were uncommon even in stores like GUM.  The message of the poster was that the church looked on worshipers as a source of income, not as souls to be guided, and the more congregants the church gathered, the more income the priests accumulated.

[The other poster I remember has echoes today and I’ve been reminded of it constantly during this Russian war against Ukraine.  It was a poster warning against the return of Nazism—20 years after the end of World War II.  (These were all new posters, not antiques or left-overs from the ’40s.)

[The main image in this poster was a huge Wehrmacht helmet, the iconic helmet we’ve seen in every WWII movie about the war in Europe.  The helmet’s cracked and out of the crack is emerging a snake.  As it crawls away from the cracked helmet, the snake’s body turns into the word REVANSHIZM in Russian letters (РЕВАНШИЗМ). 

[Revanchisme is a French word that means a policy of revenge (revanche in French) and retaliation.  The poster is a warning that Germany, the former Third Reich, was bent on avenging its defeat at the hands of the Red Army in World War II (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War) and regaining its territory and its power.

[What was remarkable to me then was the sense of paranoia expressed for a defeated enemy of two decades earlier.  What’s remarkable to me now is that Vladimir Putin (b. 1952; President of Russia, 2000-08, 2012-present) is invoking that same fear again when he tells his citizens that his invasion of Ukraine today is to fight the return of that same enemy, now in the guise of the Ukrainians, over 75 years after they were defeated soundly.

[Of course, both instances are distinctly Orwellian, right out of 1984 and Big Brother.  I’m sure the 1965 incarnation, as manifested in the poster, was cynical and blatantly propagandistic.  I assume that Putin’s present protestations are as well . . . but, well, I’m not entirely sure that he isn’t unbalanced enough actually to believe what he says.  In any case, his frequent repetitions of his anti-Nazi mantra have brought back the memory of that propaganda poster from 57 years ago.

We tried to go to a cafe where young people are, but we couldn’t find [it].  We ended up walking down Nevsky Prospect and back again, with a detour to the Evropeiskaya Hotel.

When we stopped at a restaurant, a student came up to me and asked for a cigarette, and began a conversation—in Russian.  Then we tried to get him to guide us to a café, but he couldn’t.  We tried French, but he didn’t speak it.  We latched onto a phony-French-speaking Russian who only wanted to speak French but not help us.

I have come to the conclusion that Russians don’t believe in manners or lines, and don’t have either!  The only reason they are ahead in the space race, is they pushed!  In every crowded place, they push and butt in instead of lining up.

Right after dinner we tried to go into a bookstore, which was closed.  We passed a music store and went in.  They were playing a tape with the Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.  They told us they got it off records [almost certainly bootlegged and/or smuggled].  Other than that, they were not very communicative.

Sunday, 18 April – 9:45 [a.m.] – Leningrad

This morning we went to the Hermitage museum—the old Winter Palace and four other buildings.  It was a museum of foreign art, including Rembrandt [van Rijn; Dutch (1606-69)], [Vincent] van Gogh [Dutch (1853-90)], [Peter Paul] Rubens [Flemish (1577-1640)], Titian [aka: Tiziano Vecellio; Italian (Venetian) (c. 1488/90-1576)], and others.

[The Hermitage (in Russian: Эрмитаж – Ermitazh) was founded in 1764 when Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from a Berlin merchant.  The largest art museum in the world by exhibit space, it’s been open to the public since 1852.  Comprising over three million items, the collections now occupy six historic buildings altogether, including the Winter Palace.

[It would take a visitor weeks to months to see all the exhibits, which display only a fraction of the museum’s holdings.  In addition to those I named above, the artists represented include Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519), Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520), Diego Velasquez (Spanish, 1599-1660), Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903), and Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973).  There are also collections of gold, silver, textiles, weapons, coins, and stamps. 

[One collection was the most intriguing to me.  It’s a collection of works by the Impressionists and early 20th-century artists, particularly Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso, but much of it was kept hidden during the Soviet era because it was regarded as decadent and bourgeois.  We got to see some of it and two things astounded me.  Well, three if you count the effect the art itself had on me; this is the art period that I love the most, from the Impressionists through the Post-Impressionists to the early 20th-century moderns.

[The other two facts of this collection that struck me were, first, that it existed, that the stolid, artistically hide-bound Soviet Union owned such a collection of magnificent art.  (Back in the ’30s, Stalin’s government sold off many pieces from this period, including about two dozen works to Andrew Mellon, 1855-1937, who later donated them to form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., established in 1937.)  

[I don’t know how many pieces of art were in this secret stash—we only got to see a small selection of the hidden art—but it was a stunning collection.  The hidden art contained, alongside paintings by Matisse and Picasso, works by Gauguin, van Gogh, and others.

[Striking fact number two: this art, as wonderful and moving as it is, was hidden away from public view, and had been for decades.  (It was finally put on public display in 1995.)  Of all the atrocities of the Soviet regime, this one was probably not very consequential, but it was still painful to contemplate—saddening and disheartening.]

After lunch was free, and  we went shopping.  I bought another poster, and Mark [Dyen] bought some propaganda books, one called A Visit with Uncle Sam in Russian, which we will try to translate.  [I don’t recall that we ever attempted to do so.  In fact, I don’t remember anything about this book at all.  I tried to look it up, but I couldn’t find anything with that title, either in English or translated back into Russian.]

After dinner we had an opera—Princess Turandot—but we left early and went to an ice cream parlor for a while.

[The opera—like ballet, I’m not a big fan of opera, either—was obviously Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot; Princess Turandot is the title character of the 1926 piece, based on the 1762 play by Carlo Gozzi.  Set in China, the opera, as I recall, was very colorful with respect to the scenery and, especially, the elaborate costumes. 

[I didn’t make a note of the company performing the opera or the theater where it was staged.  Since we saw the ballet at the Maly Theater (see above, entry for 16 April, Part 3), though, I’ll guess the opera was presented, counterintuitively, at the Kirov Theater.

[As I mentioned earlier, however, Russian ice cream was excellent, even if the flavor selection was minimal.]

In the afternoon we went to a self-service cafe, and they practically threw us out.  The first counter wasn’t serving anymore, and the second one ignored us first, and finally, when we ordered coffee, we were told that there was no sugar, and I asked what was on the counter, being sugar, and that shut up the waitress for a while.  We then left.

On the way back we ran into a bunch of young hoods [what the Russians called ‘hooligans’ (хулиганы – khuligany)].  One was rather forcibly grabbing a girl by her arms, at which point what seemed to be the boyfriend tried to break them up, and a third boy had to break them up.

[Part 4 concludes my visit to Leningrad; in Part 5 of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” which will come out on 4 June, the group moves on to Kiev, the capital city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  (Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the city’s name was officially changed to Kyiv in its romanized spelling.)

[Please come back on Saturday for the continuation of my account of my trip through the Soviet Union, starting with the entry for 20 April 1965.  It covers my last day in the Soviet Union and the penultimate episode of the Hungarian visa saga.]

Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 3

 

[This is the third installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” covering my arrival and first day in Leningrad, the former imperial capital during the tsarist era when it was named Saint Petersburg—and which has been renamed Saint Petersburg now that the Soviet Union is no more. 

[Before introducing some of the city’s major historical sights—more will come in Part 4—I give a brief overview of the founding of Saint Petersburg by Tsar Peter the Great.  On our first evening in Leningrad, we also saw a performance by the internationally praised dance troupe, the Kirov Ballet.

[To those of you who are just coming on board the “Travel Journal,” I strongly recommend that you go back and start with Part 1, posted in 23 May, and catch the 26th’s Part 2 before encountering this installment of the chronicle.  I define and explain things in the journal as they come up, and I don’t reiterate the comments when the references show up again, so things will make much more sense if you read the journal in order.]

LENINGRAD, RUSSIAN SFSR (U.S.S.R.)

Friday, 16 April – 6:00 [p.m.] – Leningrad, Russian SFSR, U.S.S.R. [now Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation]

The plane trip was very interesting.  We met an ex-Russian from Moscow, now a New Yorker, who started a conversation with us and a Russian [Soviet] soldier.  [I have no recollection what we talked about!]

In Leningrad, after lunch, we went sight-seeing.  [Lunch was at our hotel, the Evropeiskaya in the center of the city at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Brodsky (now Mikhailovsky) Street.  Opened in 1875, the hotel, now called the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, has 266 rooms and suites.] 

We saw, from the outside, the Winter Palace and Hermitage, the fortress across the Neva River [the Peter and Paul Fortress; see 17 April, Part 4] and the stock exchange complex, the [Decembrists] Square, the Palace Square where the revolutions started, Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, the sport complex [probably the Kirov Stadium], the Admiralty Building, and Headquarters Arch.

[First, a quick overview of the city’s history.  Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, founded the city on the banks of the Neva River in 1703 as his “Window to Europe” (Окно в Европу – Okno v Yevropu).  The city was named for its founder: Saint Petersburg; Tsar Peter moved there while the city was still being built around him. 

[(The tsar lived in a single-story log house built for him in 1703 in the center of what would be the great city.  Later, he’d bring his bride, Tsaritsa Catherine [1684-1727, m. 1707; future Empress Catherine I; reigned: 1725-27], to live there with him.  It’s said that Catherine, born a commoner, cooked and cared for the children during this time.  The cabin [Домик Петра I – Domik Petra I] is preserved, encased in a brick pavilion near the Winter Palace.)

[In 1712, Peter declared Saint Petersburg the capital of Russia.  It became the center of the nation’s commerce, science, literature and the other arts, and architecture.  The city served as the capital of the Russian Empire, from 1713 to 1918, except for a short period between 1728 and 1730 when it was replaced by Moscow. 

[In 1914, to obliterate the Germanic-sounding original name (“Sankt-Peterburg” in Russian: Санкт-Петербург), the city was renamed Petrograd (“Peter’s City”; -grad is a shortened form of gorod [город], which means ‘city’ or ‘town’).  After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow and in 1924, after Lenin’s death, renamed the city once again to Leningrad.  The city’s original name, Saint Petersburg, was restored in 1991.

[A peculiar fact about Leningrad:  It’s the only city I can think of where someone could have been alive for all of its historical names.  If a man was born in, say 1906, he’d have been born in Saint Petersburg.  If he lived till he was 85, he’d have lived in Petrograd after he was 8; then Leningrad when he turned 18; and finally Saint Petersburg again on his 85th birthday.  That’s three name-changes over a lifetime.

[The Winter Palace (Зимний Дворец – Zimniy Dvorets) was the residence of the Tsars from Peter I through Nicholas II (1868-1918; reigned: 1894-1917), the last emperor of Russia—with the exception of Tsar Peter II (1715-30; reigned: 1727-30), who moved the court to Moscow from 1728 to 1730; it was returned to Saint Petersburg by Empress Anna (1693-1740; reigned: 1730-40), a niece of Peter the Great.  The current building was built in 1762.

[After the 1917 revolution, the Winter Palace became the seat of the provisional government of the Russian Republic.  Later that year, the Bolsheviks seized power, deposed the democratic government of Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970; Minister-President of the Russian Republic: September-November 1917), and sacked the palace.  In 1918, Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and the Kremlin.

[In October 1917, the palace was declared to be part of the Hermitage public museums.  I’ll detail the Hermitage and its collection below (see 18 April, Part 4) when we actually went inside the museum.

[The Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange (Санкт-Петербургская Биржа – Saint Petersburg Bourse) was constructed between 1805 and 1810.  Inspired by the Temple of Hera at Paestum, Greece, it’s situated in an architectural complex located on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island. 

[After the 1917 revolution and Russia came under the communist economic system, the building ceased to function as a stock exchange; since private ownership of a business, or of a share in a business, was prohibited, there were no longer stock exchanges in the Soviet Union. 

[In 1939, the old Stock Exchange building housed the Central Naval Museum until 2010.  When the Naval Museum was moved to a new location, the building was transferred from federal to city ownership and as of 2013, the exchange building has become part of the Hermitage Museum complex to house the heraldry collection.

[On the Neva, opposite the exchange building, is a semicircular overlook with circular ramps descending to the river.  The ramps are framed by two Rostral Columns centered on the front of the Stock Exchange. The columns are made of brick coated with red stucco and decorated with bronze anchors and four pairs of bronze ship prows, known as rostra.

[Decembrists Square, called Senate Square from 1763 to 1782 and Peter’s Square (because of the erection of a bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as the Bronze Horseman) from then to 1925, was so named to honor the memory of the Decembrist revolutionaries who on 14 December 1825 staged a revolt against tsarist autocracy, which was brutally suppressed by Nicholas I (1796-1855; reigned: 1825-55). 

[The uprising, perpetrated by some 3,000 military officers who supported the succession of Grand Duke Constantine (1779-1831) to the throne of Alexander I over the Grand Duke’s younger brother, Nicholas, took place before the Senate on Peter’s Square.  It was immediately suppressed and the conspirators were hanged, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia.

[In 2008, the square reverted to the name Senate Square.  (The senate referred to in the plaza’s name is the so-called Ruling Senate of the Russian Empire; the upper house of the modern Russian legislature, the Federal Assembly, is the Federation Council.)

[Saint Petersburg was frequently the scene of major revolutionary events.  I’ve already mentioned the December 1825 abortive uprising of the Decembrists against Tsar Nicholas I, which took place in what later became Decembrist Square.  Palace Square was the site of the inception of several later uprisings and revolts.

[On 9 January 1905, some 3,000 to 50,000 demonstrating workers marched peacefully to the Winter Palace to present Tsar Nicholas II a petition for several desired reforms.  The Imperial Guard fired on the marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday (Кровавое Воскресенье – Krovavoye Voskresenye); 143-234 demonstrators were killed, 439-800 injured, and 6831 arrested. 

[Bloody Sunday began the Revolution of 1905 (1905-07), sometimes called the First Russian Revolution, which resulted in the defeat of the revolutionaries, Nicholas II keeping his throne (until 1917), the enactment of a constitution, the passage of some reforms, and the establishment of the State Duma (legislature).

[The Revolution of 1917, which also started in what was by then Petrograd, was really a series of two revolutions and a civil war.  During World War I (July 1914-November 1918), in which the Russian Empire was an ally of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, an apparently spontaneous uprising of an uneasy alliance of republicans and socialists began on 8 March 1917. 

[Known as the February Revolution (because it took place in February under the old, Julian calendar still in use in Russia at the time, designated Old Style or OS), it ended on 18 March (according to the Gregorian calendar, used by most of the rest of world, New Style or NS) with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of the Russian Republic under the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

[On 6 November on the new calendar (NS), corresponding to 24 October (OS), Lenin arrived in Petrograd and the next day declared that his Bolshevik (‘Majority’) arm of the Communist Party had usurped the power of the Provisional Government.  On Lenin’s orders, the battleship Aurora opened fire on the Winter Palace, signaling the soldiers and workers to storm the palace, initiating the October Revolution (so called because of the Old Style dating system). 

[The Russian Republic would become the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in July 1918, but the October Revolution simultaneously started the Russian Civil War, the struggle between the Reds (communists) and the Whites (a loose confederation of anti-communist forces that included monarchists, capitalists, and social democrats).  The Civil War lasted until 1923, culminating in the communist victory and the establishment, in 1922, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[Saint Isaac’s Cathedral is the fourth consecutive church standing at this spot.  It’s dedicated to Saint Isaac the Confessor (4th century CE), a patron saint of Peter the Great, who was born on the saint’s feast day.  The Soviet regime turned it into a museum in 1931 (though religious services have been held in a side chapel since the 1990’s).  Located on Saint Isaac’s Square (just west of Senate Square), the current cathedral was built by Alexander I from 1818 to 1858.

[I didn’t note the sports center we visited on the 16th; there are two in the city.  One is the Mikhailovsky Manege (so named because it was a riding academy for a time in the early 19th century) that became the Winter Stadium (Zimniy Stadion) in 1949.  It served many functions over its history, but I think the place we visited was the Kirov Stadium, a multi-purpose stadium and one of the largest anywhere in the world.

[Located on Krestovsky Island on the coast of the Gulf of Finland in northwest Leningrad, the stadium was built starting in 1932 and opened in 1950.  It held 100,000 people, including 16,000 standing places.  The Kirov Stadium was demolished in 2006 and the Krestovsky Stadium was built on the site and opened in 2017.

[The Admiralty Building, one of Leningrad’s oldest and most important buildings, is the architectural center of the city; it sits at the point where Leningrad’s three main streets, Mayorov (now Voznesensky) Prospect, Dzerzhinsky (now Gorokhovaya) Street, and Nevsky Prospect, converge like the center of a star’s rays.  With its gilded spire topped by a golden weather vane shaped like a small sail warship, it’s one of the city’s most conspicuous landmarks.

[Situated on the south bank of the Neva between Palace Square to the east and Decembrists Square to the west, the Admiralty was built in 1706 by Peter the Great as the fortified shipyard that built the nascent Russian Navy.  The original structure was made of wood, eventually replaced by masonry buildings; the current edifice was constructed during the reign of Alexander I between 1806 and 1823.

[Shipbuilding was moved to another location on the Neva by the 1840s and the complex was taken over by the navy.  It was the Ministry of the Navy until 1917 when it served as a rallying center for the tsarist forces during the revolution.  It’s the current headquarters of the Russian Navy.

[On the south side of Palace Square is the monumental General Staff Building (built in 1819-29).  It’s constructed in two wings which are joined by a triumphal arch called the Headquarters Arch adorned with a bronze statue of a Roman racing chariot drawn by four horses.]

Tonight we go to a ballet.

[The ballet we saw—I kept the ticket stub!—was Seven Beauties (Семь красавиц – Sem’ krasavits) by Soviet Azerbaijani composer Gara Garayev (also spelled Kara Karayev; 1918-82).  It was presented by the world-renowned Kirov Ballet (now renamed the Mariinsky Ballet) at the Maly (Little) Theater of Opera and Ballet.

[Sidelight: Back in the Soviet times, the official Russian names of institutions—of any kind, not just arts organizations—were often immensely complicated on political grounds.  The dance troupe known to the world simply as the Kirov Ballet was formally the Leningrad Order of Lenin State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named after S(ergei). M(irinovich). Kirov (Ленинградский государственный ордена Ленина академический театр оперы и балета имени С. М. Кирова). 

[The Order of Lenin was the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union.  Institutions and organizations that received the order incorporated its name into their official titles.  “Academic theater” was an honorary title awarded to the biggest and oldest state theaters in the Soviet Union; it’s still used today in Russia and other former Soviet states. 

[“State theater” was the designation of a theater authorized by the Soviet state and regulated and subsidized by the government.  Today (and in tsarist Russia before the revolution), there are independent and municipal theaters, but even during the Soviet era, a small number of independent theaters sprang up, often associated with university student groups, and allowed to operate under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Culture and the security police. 

[(Such independent theaters could be awarded state status and receive a government subsidy, either as a reward for following ministry guidelines successfully or in order to bring them under the control of the government [see the early history of the Nikitsky Gate theater in “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020].  Along with the subsidy came continued strict censorship, and the de facto selection of the theater’s leadership by the culture ministry.)

[The name-change to Mariinsky Ballet in 1992 was made because Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), having no connection to dance or the arts, was a hero of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and a personal friend to Joseph Stalin.  His assassination in 1934 was Stalin’s excuse for the Great Purge of 1937.

[Composed in 1947-48 to mark the 800th anniversary of classical Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), Seven Beauties is based on the 1197 narrative poem of the same title.  The story’s on a popular theme in Islamic poetry, the ill-starred lovers, and shares many plot elements with both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk.]

[The fourth part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” will come out on Wednesday, 1 June.  It starts with the entry for 17 April 1965 and the return of my Hungarian visa problem (see Part 1).  We visited Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral, as well as doing some souvenir shopping of a very Soviet nature.

[Please come back to ROT for the continuation of my account of my high school trip through the Soviet Union.  In addition to the historical sights and the shopping, we also paid a visit to the world-famous Hermitage Museum and had a chance to see a very special collection of European art.]