Vyborg: A Place I Now Have Been

Last weekend I had the tremendous pleasure of visiting Vyborg on the American students’ excursion. I have heard many things about Vyborg, most notably that it is very nice in the summer, a popular day trip spot, a “European-style” city with a castle, that it is Karelian, that it is Finnish and Russian and Swedish? German? Anyway it’s basically on the Finnish border/on the gulf. It’s famous for having a mix of architecture because of all the different countries that possessed it at one time or another. Also, it’s Vyborg! A vacation spot just a short commuter-train ride away!

To go to Vyborg, we departed on an 8am bus, which caused me and most other people to wake up at 5:45, because the bus left from the last stop on a metro line that was 50 minutes away. Ah the Parnas metro stop–imagine, a space-age metro station plopped down in the middle of a swamp/sewage discharge lot/wild dog meet and greet/decrepit bus resuscitation center/mud pit/plot of asphalt in the middle of nowhere seemingly serving no purpose, with one of the world’s largest IKEAs within view. Plus, it is dawn. Russia is full of visions of dystopia.

Anyway, Vyborg made me question why I had been so excited/adamant about going on the excursion. First of all, no longer being forced to go on excursions, I forgot how much I don’t like them and how apparently short my attention span is. I got bored of listening to our guide, despite his charming quirks (few remaining teeth, told some Russians we were all from Las Vegas, given to proud and belabored proclamations–“These cobblestones are the same cobblestones you find in Red Square in Moscow and in Palace Square in Petersburg! Because those are Vy-borg cobb-le-sto-nes.” “Only seven cities in the world have exhibits from the Hermitage! And what is one of them? Vy-borg!” “Never forget, you are eating lunch in a basement that dates from the fourteenth century! This basement is unique to us, is only in Vyborg!”).

I also felt antagonized by the weather. True, readers of my blog are no doubt by now aware that I am very easily antagonized by the weather, but it’s really spring now in Petersburg–impossibly sunny skies, jacket-weather, extremely long days. Paradise, in short! In Vyborg, which is on the water and further north, it’s still winter. Or rather, some post-winter terror-zone where everything is slush, dog shit, mud and garbage. It was cold and raining. My feet rapidly lost feeling. And I must add that the trip got off to an ambivalent start for me when I paid 75 cents to pee in a hole in the ground.

Also, it was Easter. Not sure how that relates, but it was weird.

Anyway, due to my loss of interest in the excursion, I took a lot of pictures of things that may or may not be sights, which I will post here for your consumption. Vyborg appeared to be on the brink of total collapse. Maybe when the ice and everything is gone, before the tourist season, they’ll spruce it up, but seriously, at least half the old down part appeared to have recently seen the wrecking ball. Naturally, that’s the part I took pictures of, on one occasion inciting the anger of a local who insisted that I should not be taking pictures of such garbage, Russia has better things to offer. But even some of the Russians on the trip were surprised/embarrassed by the condition of Vyborg and of the suburbs we traveled through to get there. In their words, “Russia is the least presentable of all the European countries.” All of the stuff was in the tourist center of a touristy city though, it’s not like I went looking for rubble or gaping holes in the ground.

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Here you can see a picture of Vyborg in all its summery splendor: Here

One note: the picture with the moose. According to our guide, the moose was the biggest/only? bronze statue of a moose in the world. Only in Vyborg! Taking a picture with it is good luck. Not taking a picture–bad luck.

Moscow Subway Bombings in the Press

Hopefully everyone is aware of the terrible bombings that occurred on Moscow on Monday. Everyone is shaken up by it, even here. There is a lot more terrorism in Russia than in the US, and most of it is concentrated in the Caucasus–site, of course, of the seemingly endless yet ever-ending Chechnyan war–and in Moscow. In the first part of the decade there were several completely awful terrorist attacks in Moscow, including a several-day long hostage situation in a theater. There were metro bombings at that time too. In the last few years, there has been comparatively little terrorism, until in November, you might remember, a train was derailed between Moscow and Petersburg.

People are afraid that, as threatened, terrorism will increase in the big cities, particularly the metro, which is the major artery of Moscow. It’s as much a symbol of the city as New York’s subway–except larger, more efficient and way fancier. It serves 5.5 million people a day–that’s as much as the entire population of New York. I heard (from an unscientific source) that at any given moment in Moscow, 2 million people are underground. It’s a testament to how important the metro is as well as the attitude toward terrorism and mourning here, that the affected stations were re-opened the same day that the bombings occurred, although the marble facades were pocked with holes from shrapnel.

Given the complexities of the issue of terrorism in Russia, I was disappointed to say the least when I read the New York Times’ coverage of the event yesterday. In an article that has since been removed from the site it seems (I found it reprinted in other papers online here), the paper falls into the insane kind of communist-baiting that I have complained about on this site before. Observe:

Some onlookers today said it was clear what was needed — a crackdown. Tamerlan Khaloyev, 69, a retired teacher who is from the Caucasian region of North Ossetia himself, stood in the teeming square and mourned the iron order of the Soviet Union.

“In the Soviet time there were no suicide bombers,” he said. “Stalin took care of all them. They did as he said.”

Then he turned regretfully to the hump of land in the middle of the square, which for decades housed a towering statue of Feliks E. Dzerzhinksy, the founder of the Bolshevik secret police.

In 1991 a cheering anti-Communist crowd pulled down the monument. If it was still standing, Khaloyev said, “none of this would be going on”.

The toppling of the Dzerzhinsky statue in front of Lubyanka (former KGB offices) was an extremely important moment in post-Soviet consciousness that symbolized the end of repression. (Though in 2002, Luzhkov tried to return the statue to the Lubyanka Square, liberals and people with common sense prevented him.) To put it briefly, Dzerzhinsky is not a popular man. He is one of the founders of communist terror, a expert practitioner of torture who prided himself on controlling people through fear.

Though certainly shaken by the attacks, this man’s opinion is absurd. Dzerzhinsky practiced a form of terrorism on a massive scale against his own people, and created a system whereby his successors did the same for a few decades. In what way would that be preferable to what occurred yesterday?

Most importantly, this is not the opinion of most Russians. The New York Times and other Western journalistic organizations use quotes like these for seemingly no other purpose than  to shock and rattle American readers. Yes, there are some Russians (most of them 60 year old retirees like this guy) who are nostalgic for life under the Soviet regime, sometimes because their standard of living has drastically decreased and as they are have grown older, they miss the social safety net of the USSR. Some people do indeed admire Stalin. Some people march around the Red Square in communist memorabilia in commemoration of the USSR. Those people are a minority. Russians are not so lost in the grips of Soviet nostalgia that they long for a man whose very name is synonymous with ruthlessness. It’s simply irresponsible journalism to focus on these people’s opinions. They do it for shock value, which is ridiculous because there are equally shocking yet more important perspectives on such issues. Like, for instance, the ever-more-popular neo-fascist nationalist movement, who will probably be taking their anger over the attacks to the streets.

Much more interesting are the words of this student,

“You know, I don’t think [the violence] ever actually stopped,” said Aleksandr Zharkov, 22, a graduate student in mathematics, standing near one of the bombing sites. He said he had sought out information on the Internet about fighting in the Caucasus, and been surprised by how much was still going on.

“As long as it’s still going on there,” he said, “it can happen anywhere.”

This guy is not wishing for the KGB to swoop in and save Russia. Rather, he is noting that 1) information about the war is heavily censored and 2) there is a reason these attacks occurred. Surely those perspectives are much more interesting, much more worthwhile to explore than deliberately alarming people over the lingering Russian passion for communism.

Why, New York Times, why? I would expect such foolishness of the pitiful rag I write for, not you!

Moscow Part 1: Red Square

So last weekend I was in Moscow. Because I thankfully managed to avoid dying in a tragic train derailment on my way back, I can now share more photos with you than you will be interested in seeing!

St. George, patron saint of Moscow, slaying the dragon...on top of a gigantic stained glass globe, on top of a gigantic mall!

I got to go on this trip at last minute, thanks to someone from the American study abroad program dropping out. Also, it was free! Totally great.

We left on Thursday night on the train. Mostly everybody takes the train from Petersburg to Moscow. It leaves at like 11 or so and gets in at 6:30. If you are a student, this is the perfect interval to get really superdrunk and completely avoid sleeping, even though you get to sleep in a bed on a train, like you’re in some kind of old fashioned movie! Because I am not a student anymore, but am now an adult, beds are more of a novelty to me than alcohol is, so I didn’t party all night.

Which was a good thing! The trainladies wake you up at 5:45 or so to get ready to arrive. That is one early hour. We took the Famous Moscow Metro to our hostel, dropped our bags off, and to the great surprise to all the still-intoxicated students, went  straight to breakfast and a walking tour because on no planet can you check into a hotel at 7am.

Number one surprise of the walking tour: Moscow has hills. How long has it been since I’ve walked up a hill?  Nearly three months. Got none of those in Petersburg, got plenty of them in Moscow. Luckily, I still knew how!

Moscow is actually a really nice city for walking in. It grew, like most European cities, in concentric circles defined by the city walls. Now those walls are gone and have been replaced by boulevards with parks in the middle. There are dozens of churches hiding everywhere in the city center and in general they look quite different from Petersburg churches, which might as well be Catholic by the looks of them. We went into one of these churches to discover that they were actually having, you know, church in there, which was a sort of amazing thing to see. Thus ends my two-year quest to see an Orthodox service (sure it could have ended earlier–its not like I’ve ever lived anywhere far from an Orthodox church). Also: it was the first time I’ve ever seen an actual religious service.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the  Red Square and surrounding areas:

Marx Monument. Every red square's gotta have one.

The back of the Historical Museum (or some military building?) and a statue of a WW! (?) General, Zhukov (I think?)

Oh, hey, what's through that little archway?

Lenin's Mausoleum: Inside you can see Lenin's embalmed corpse, although it was a subject of debate whether any actual flesh remained. Apparently he looks very waxy.

I didn’t go into the Mausoleum. The hours are very limited, though I can’t figure out why. Don’t they want people to see him? Behind the Mausoleum there are many Soviet leaders interred in the Kremlin Wall, including Stalin, for whom that was a serious post-mortem ego-blow.

St. Basil's. Also didn't get to go in here due to weird hours.

They were building a gigantic New Year's Tree and ice skating rink that morning.

They’ve done this all over St. Petersburg too, in addition to putting up fancy lights on every streetlight and across all the major streets. According to Hardie, there’s a law that says the city must have finished New Year’s decorations by December 1st. It’s sort of surprising to me that they’d get on it so early, being as New Year’s isn’t for over a month still, but who am I to complain about the holiday spirit?

GUM - Gosudarstvennyi/Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin

The mini-GUM-like red roof below is part of the skating rink. GUM (pronounced G OOO M, not like gum) was the main department store in Moscow until the revoltuion, when it was nationalized and became known as the GUM which stood for State Department Store. As the GUM, all of its stores, in Soviet style, could only sell one thing pretty much, so there was like, a sheet music store and a science book store, but none of the glamorama of today (this according to Bryan). It was one of the few places you could actually buy things in the ’50s and beyond and had extremely long lines. Also, it briefly served as an office building and after Stalin’s wife Nadezhda committed suicide, it was used to display her body (ref Wikipedia).

Stuck in the GUM

It is the epitome of turn of the century opulence in architecture. After the fall of the USSR it was privatized again, as the Main Department Store, so conveniently it could still be called GUM!

Nearby there is another old department store called the TsUM, probably for Central (Tsentralnyi) Department Store (imaginative!). Bryan said he worked on their website years and years ago when they were just going online. Apparently, they mis-transliterated their own name and bought the domain http://www.cum.ru, perhaps thinking it would be more friendly for Western audience.

One more for good measure. New Years Tree completed! I also love that right across from Lenin's tomb there's a gigantic department store that's bigger than everything else on the square.

Also, I autocorrected all these pictures and iPhoto made it seem like the weather wasn’t as completely miserable as it was. It seems in these pictures like it was 3x sunnier than it actually was. It was fucking freezing! Of course in Petersburg that weekend there was a warm spell…

More on Moscow to come!