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.]