A Tale of Three Cities (Part I)

Well, St. Petersburg mouse has been a very bad mouse indeed. She is dreadfully sorry to have been so delinquent in her updating!

A lot has been going on lately round these parts – in addition to all of the adventures I’ve been having, which hopefully will be related to my dear readers in due time, depending on the extent to which I get my act together for my last three weeks in Russia, by the way, how do you feel about summer updates?, the semester is coming to a close at last, which means I’ve been busy with studying for finals, writing final papers, etc. Also, after some issues with my host mother, the details of which we don’t really need to get into, I finally struck out on my own and rented an apartment which I moved into Wednesday. I still haven’t finished unpacking yet, doubtless shocking to all concerned, but I’ve really been enjoying my new place. A great grocery store is a 10 minute walk away, and I start every morning with a 15 minute walk through a beautiful park on my way to the metro. I have a roommate named Dasha, who is very nice, although we pretty much just keep to ourselves, and neither of us is here very often, but cooking for myself and not having to answer to my stereotypically overbearing and perhaps not a little bit crazy Russian grandmother has been a huge relief.

Anyway, now to the juicy stuff: over the last, erm, embarrassingly long and to remain unspecified span of time since my last letter, our group has left familiar (gasp!) St. Petersburg and gone on several excursions to some other Russian cities: Moscow, Velikij Novgorod, and Vyborg. Now, I’m not going to deny that I might have some slight issues with long-windedness, so we’ll try to get right to the meat and make this as painless as possible!

Новгород

There are two cities in Russia by the name of Новгород (Novgorod – we’ll say this means Newtown) – Великий (Velikij – great, as in size and importance, not as in groovy) and Нижний (Nizhni – let’s translate that as “lesser”). We took an overnight trip to Velikij Novgorod, and let me just tell you right now, Velikij it ain’t. Now don’t get me wrong, at one point in time, Novgorod was quite the place to be for forward-thinking individuals. Founded in the ninth century, it was Russia’s first (and arguably only?) successful democratic society. The city is built around the original Kremlin (the Russian word кремлин, kremlin, literally just means “fortress.” Every city has one, not just Moscow. Think of the walled-in cities of Western Europe and you’re on the right track.) At it’s heyday, inside the city walls was what was, at least by 9^th century standards, a pretty bustling city, replete even with a city square, where the townspeople met to discuss the goings-on of the town, in organized town-meeting style. The movie Alexander Nevskij opens in Novgorod and all of the townspeople stretch their democratic legs in this very square in one of the opening scenes as they discuss what to do about an impending enemy invasion. Eventually they decide to call Alexander Nevskij, who in the movie is busy fishing. You should watch this movie. Anyway, that was the Novgorod of yore. But let me backtrack a bit and switch to a more chronological style.

Our Novgorod adventure began with a bus ride. I was really excited by the prospect of this bus ride, as it was to be the first time I was going to leave the city and actually see some Russian countryside. After we finally left St. Petersburg, we drove through some forest. Not really through the forests exactly, but along the highway you could see forests off in the not-so-distant distance. For a long time you’ll see nothing but this forest and the field between you and it, and then you come to a village. The villages we saw all consisted of maybe a dozen or two pre-fab looking, brightly-colored, absolutely falling apart huts, all crowded together and separated by chain-link fences. Also there was the odd garden plot and abandoned and scrapped rusting car. I don’t remember seeing any people walking around in the villages, but just these random little collections of huts at random intervals along the highway. The huts definitely looked Russian – with the trimmings along the windows and roof, and the sorts of pastel colors I was expecting. But when I say falling down, I mean it. Caved in walls, sagging roofs, boarded up windows. I wish I knew more about post-collectivization/post-fall-of-Soviet-Union life in the Russian village, so I could say something insightful, but alas I don’t and thus can’t. But that’s my impression, anyway. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, and it was rather sobering. Also, I imagine that there must be more prosperous villages in Russia, and they just don’t happen to be roadside.

When we arrived in Novgorod, we took a walking tour of the Kremlin. The highlight of this tour for me was simply the fact that I was in a city that was 1100 years old. As far as I could gather, the Kremlin walls are mostly original, so that was really neat. Again, they themselves aren’t that neat, but the fact that they’re a good 3 times as old as my entire country is neat to say the least. There was also a giant and beautiful bridge across the river whose name I should but don’t remember. Also within the Kremlin are an endless number of churches. I can’t even begin to pretend to count the number of churches I’ve toured in Russia. Too many. Maybe if I knew anything about Russian Orthodoxy, or anything about architecture, or anything about icon painting, I’d have something to say about these churches. I apologize for my utterly abhorrent skills at putting my reader in the action, but there were just a lot of churches and we looked at all of them and that was that. The final point of our tour was the Russian millennium monument, which was really cool. It’s like a giant bronze layer cake, and on the outside are depicted if not all, then at least a whole bunch, of Russian historical figures. One panel depicted Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et al schmoozing in somebody’s drawing room. Another depicted a bunch of soldiers defeating one or another Scandinavian army sometime in the middle ages. It was all of Russia’s history in one giant mob of a sculpture, and it was great. I was able to identify a goodly amount of the characters and the scenes, but it made me realize how absolutely massive Russia’s history is, and how absolutely massive is the amount about it that I don’t know. In case you missed this: it’s called the millennium monument. As in a millennium of Russian history. As in 1000 years. As in whoa.

After our walking tour, we attempted unsuccessfully to check in to our hotel. The reason for our lack of success? (Now might be a good time to run to the bathroom, maybe get a cup of tea, put on your slippers and take the phone of the hook. I’m about to let you in on the intricacies of Russian immigration bureaucratic red tape, and it will be rather a scary ride if you’re not comfortable and prepared.) To come to Russia you need a visa. That’s an unspeakable mess, but we’ll assume for the sake of everyone’s sanity that that just happens. Visa in tow, you arrive at the airport or train station or border or whatever and are given an immigration card. When you get to your destination city, you have to register yourself and have your registration papers. Mind you, you’re registered for the particular city. If you want to go to a different city, you have to re-register when you get there. Our group came into Russia on single-entry three-month visas, meaning we could only come into Russia once (i.e. can’t travel to Finland and expect to come back). The plan was, once we arrived in Russia, to change these into multi-entry visas that would last longer. When we applied to do this, they invalidated our single-entry visas, meaning that our legal status in the country while our multi-entries were pending was dubious. However, we were all registered in St. Petersburg, so it wasn’t really a problem.

Again however, when we attempted to register in Novgorod, it became a problem. Thing is, we didn’t realize until we got to Novgorod that our visas had been invalidated and our immigration cards confiscated. Why didn’t it occur to us that the Russian government would invalidate our visas and confiscate our immigration cards, both of which are required to be on our person at all times in order to be considered legally in Russia? Hmmm… Anyway, so there we are, illegally in Novgorod, and ambiguously legally in Russia at all. So our tourguide takes us all to the police station. At the station, we are all herded into a room that looks exactly like what you would expect a big room in a Russian immigration control office to look like. Cement floors, harsh fluorescent lighting, and a bunch of those desks where the back of one bench is the desk that the people sitting on the bench behind you write on. So we all sit in those desks, and are given paper and pens. We sit there for awhile, and our tourguide comes back. We have to write explanations of why we’re in Novgorod illegally. They have to be officially worded, and they have to be written in our own handwriting, so we can’t just sign something. So we all sit there, and she dictates to us what the paper is supposed to say, and we attempt to spell everything correctly, which is no mean task considering that we don’t know what over half of the words being dictated to us even mean. Eventually we finish our little task, and are let free into the city. This was a good thing.

However other than the Kremlin, which we had already seen, Novgorod really doesn’t have much to offer. There’s a Baskin-Robbins. A couple of small grocery stores. We were told that there was one night club, but that we shouldn’t go to it because we would get beat up because we’re foreigners. (Think of a foppish French dandy at a barn rave in North Dakota.) So we walked around the, erm, city, a bit more, then just hung out all together in the hotel, the sights having been seen. Not exactly as velikij as one might hope.

The next day things picked up, as we left Novgorod. The day began with tours of two monasteries. This was interesting, but for me it was mostly interesting because we were out in nature and I could look at trees and smell fresh air and that was nice. We learned a little bit about the multiple incarnations of the monastery spaces under the Soviet Union, but mostly we just looked at the churches. I won’t lie – I was a little underwhelmed by the whole experience. But then came the event that made the whole Novgorodian ordeal worth it: the wooden architecture museum.

Please don’t read any sarcasm into this, because this remains probably my favorite part of my trip to Russia so far. The wooden architecture museum is a huge tract of land, on which are built a bunch of recreations of traditional Russian wooden village architecture. Most of the buildings you just looked at from the outside, but they were all really cool. There were churches and houses, and if Russian villages had buildings with other functions then I’m sure they would have been there, too. But some of the houses were open, and had been set up to look like Russian peasants lived there. So you enter through the barn, and see all of the 19^th century farming equipment. (See previous entries: given my limited knowledge of the history of Russian agriculture, I’m pretty sure that I could use the phrases “19^th century farming equipment” and “15^th century farming equipment” to mean pretty much the same thing.) Then you climb some stairs into the main house (read: room), and they have a traditional Russian stove, and all of the accoutrements necessary to a traditional peasant household, including a table, some benches for the family to sleep on, and a few cooking utensils. The Russian stove is a giant contraption, that takes up about half the room. In Russian fairy tales the lazy brother always “sleeps on the stove,” which should be taken literally, because there’s room for about three lazy brothers to warm up and loll about on these things. Our tourguide told us that the way the stoves worked involved the mother of the household waking up at 3 am and starting the fire. She then waits for the entire house to fill with smoke. Then open go the windows, the smoke flows out, and the room begins to heat up, just in time for pa and the boys to wake up and demand breakfast before heading out to the fields. Central heating is over-rated.

So, with the endlessly notable exception of the architecture museum, our Novgorod excursion wasn’t exactly something to write home about. (Ooops!) But it was a really cool feeling to return to Petersburg and have it be familiar, and to actually think of ourselves as coming “home.”

I just wrote four pages on the least interesting of the three cities I wanted to write about. Hooo boy. Okay, I abort. I’ll try to get to Moscow and Vyborg soon, as they were both infinitely more fascinating. But hopefully those four pages will give you something to chew on for a bit. I hope all is well with all of you, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Love,
Annie