A decade ago today: from a journal (Pics: Zimniy dvorets (Winter Palace), Aleksandrovskaya colonna (Alexander Column) through the arch of the General Staff building; and with Stanislav Tuksar, Vjera Katalinic and host Vladimir Gurevich) To Russia [from Schiphol] The sun, as we rose into the air, was low in the sky. We had faced the western wind, climbing and circling back eastwards over the coast and above the clouds, and on over Hamburg and southern Sweden (so we were informed). I dozed. Probably over Estonia, there were gaps in the cloud and high smoke-stacks came into view spewing forth white steamy smoke. It looked cold. The outside temperature at Amsterdam had been, apparently, 12 degrees C. Now, beginning our descent, the usual statistics were given about conditions to be expected on the ground: there had been a light snow at St Petersburg, and the mercury, at mid-afternoon, stood at -6 degrees C. Descending through cloud, a very different landscape declared itself: white and cold and bleak! Industrial areas, railway lines, warehouses, thin stark birches in stands. It all appeared very severe. And different. Upon touching down the predominantly Russian passengers clapped their gratitude - for a safe flight, their return home. To one side, as we taxied in, an abandoned circa 50s/60s-vintage airport building, bristling with old radio antennae - what Soviet era histories had hinged or unfolded there, one wondered? Alongside it, a clutter of broken helicopters. Sundry jets and helicopters on the apron. A snow-scraper on stand-by to keep the run-way clear. A jet-liner with its Cyrillic name emblazoned along the fuselage roared off, possibly to one or another of the States of the Federation. Once more we ported against one of those manoeuvrable passage-ways that guided passengers straight into the airport building. The latter was a few degrees cooler than the plane had been, for sure. Signs in Russian and English herded us in the direction of the Customs and Passport Control - where a rather stern uniformed young woman behind a glass partition looked me up and down and unsmilingly granted me access to her country. Having retrieved my suitcase from the baggage carousel - another of those global features associated with international flight - I headed out into the cavernous reception area which was the last buffer against the now darkening cold that was, finally, Russia. Here innumerable individuals stood with placards bearing the names of people they were meant to meet - these being no doubt tour operators, couriers for hotels, and the like. Perhaps an attache for the Americans - or were they possibly headed straight off south on a connecting flight to Kiev? (Where elections were in the process of going awry). I hadn’t my spectacles and briefly panicked at the array before me. Fortunately, close to hand, a big, hatted man held a piece of paper that was quite different from the rest - cleverly and unexpectedly it bore a picture, the only known likeness of our ancestor, Giornovichi, and, beneath it, the wording “JARNOVIC CONFERENCE”. This was Prof Dr Vladimir Gurevich, organizer of the bicentenary events. Sankt Peterburg - Ponedelnik (Monday) With a bold and generous handshake, Vladimir’s welcome (to “our conference”) was enthusiastic, if conveyed in somewhat broken English. Fetching up one of my bags, he led the way briskly into what could not be mistaken for cold! It was literally a shock to the system! (In Johannesburg I had put on a vest; and an anorak was near to hand for arrival here - not altogether adequate, but a help!). Thick muddy snow under foot, specks of white descending, the light failing rapidly (it was only 4 pm). Having located the car - a chauffer-driven black Merc (early 90s vintage?) apparently belonging to the Soyuz kompozitorov (Composers’ Union) - or was it just a taxi (I was not sure) - we sped into town along sludgy brown-looking roads, joining rush-hour traffic down Moskovsky prospekt. Some rudimentary knowledge of Greek characters gets one half way towards being able to read Cyrillic - which one tries to do, as if coming to grips, somehow, with the place. Pi, lambda and rho are the same, more or less. C is S; P is R; H is N; B is V; and a sort of a small b is, in fact, B. And then a few more characters have to be learned. N backwards is I; a kind of an upside down M is Sh (as in Shostakovich). A backwards R is Ya - and is the first letter for Jarnovic in Russian. But in a fast moving car the signs defy decipherment. The Prospect is a broad boulevard, with a tramway running up and down the middle island, flashing sparks in the dusk and snow. Coated, fur-capped figures huddle awaiting a tram; or a trolley bus - for there are trolley buses as well, sharing part of the lattice of overhead cables. Vast blocks of apartments flank the road. The occasional square. A park-like space, frozen with bare trees to the right was, I later learned from Vladimir, one of the huge cemeteries where lie the war dead and those starved or frozen to death - in mass graves - victims of the nearly 900-day Siege of Leningrad. 670 000 people perished. An impressive statue of Lenin dominates a square, in front of the monolithic House of Soviets, further in towards our destination; and on the left the huge new Russian National Library with great domes of glass and huge columns, unashamedly modern, but blending well with the historical architecture of the city. At some point we skirted anti-clockwise around the Moscow Triumphal Arch, a vast cast iron monument erected in the 1830s to commemorate victories during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. In 1936 it was dismantled and put into storage on Stalin’s orders, but got out in bits, the huge iron plates stacked as anti-tank obstacles, during the Siege. It was restored and re-erected here in 1961. The inner eighteenth century part of St Petersburg, to which we were heading, is characterized in tourist literature as an ‘open air museum’ - and so it is. But the term might be applied more widely, for the city had spread historically in concentric arcs - so that from the outside one traverses inwards between the massively plain buildings of the paranoid sixties and fifties (in the wake of Zhdanov’s purge, no hint of bourgeois frivolity in these gigantic piles); and pre-war blocks, almost as gaunt, ordained under Stalin, now apartments of some worth, by no means within the reach of any citizen. In due course the early twentieth century gives way, spatially, to the nineteenth; and at length, within the delta area, across the River Fontanka, and the Moyka, one is in amongst the proud palaces and mansions of the aristocracy and the wealthy city dwellers of former times. On 16 May 1703, by legend, Peter the Great declared: “Here shall be a town”, and hence was founded St Petersburg. It was a strategic spot - but not much else could be said for it: stone for building was not readily to hand in the swampy Neva delta, frozen in winter: the making of the city would be costly in materials and human life. What arose, by imperial decree, was that earlier ‘New Russia’ that was founded and ostentatiously marbled and bronzed and gilded by Peter I and his Romanov successors and their circle. This was the show-piece, the spectacle, gateway to the west, the outward and visible manifestation of eighteenth century imperial Russia’s might. “I love you, Peter’s creation,” wrote Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), “I love your severe, graceful appearance...”: “...your tall and graceful palaces and towers cluster; ships from all the ends of the earth hasten in throngs to the rich quays; the Neva has clothed herself in granite; bridges hang above the waters; her islands have become covered with dark green gardens; and old Moscow has paled before the younger capital, like a dowager clad in purple before a new empress.” (Prologue, The Bronze Horseman, 1833). To this day, it is said, Moscow, conservative, Russian, traditional and Slavic, presents a severe face to the liberal, European, avant-garde, artistic, cosmopolitan city that is St Petersburg.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 08:54:34 +0000