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.]