It’s now a month since we returned from a very busy 6 days in St Petersburg and Moscow, so a blog post on the subject is long overdue. At first the writer’s block was simply physical, as I was just a teeny bit delicate after the aptly named On The Go Tour Company’s “Vodka Shot” tour, but then lethargy and Christmas/New Year got in the way! It’s hard to encapsulate the whirlwind six days into a few paragraphs because we had such a great time – our little group of 7, including our guide, managed to fit in all the iconic sights in the two cities, plus an overnight train ride between them as well.

As you know, I’m not big on the minute by minute travelogue format for blog posts but hey, just this once….here’s a quick summary of our itinerary followed by an attempt to draw a few comparisons with the last time I was in Leningrad and Moscow, in 1980, when they were of course in the USSR.

The Itinerary….
Day 1 – arrive by air in St Petersburg (in about 4 feet of snow by the way). Late dinner and a couple of vodkas, in bed by 3am.
Day 2 – City Tour including St Isaac’s Cathedral, The Hermitage Winter Palace, Nevsky Prospect, and the Bronze Horseman. In the evening, a night at the ballet “Raymonda” in the Mariinsky Theatre. Dinner afterwards, in bed by 1am.
Day 3 – the Peter & Paul Fortress, The Church on Spilled Blood, then a self guided walking tour including the Admiralty, and the palace where Rasputin was finally killed. Back to the hotel for dinner, then to the station for the 0040 departure to Moscow. In bed, in the open sleeper “cabins”, by about 2am.
Day 4 – in Moscow at 0953, off to our hotel for breakfast, then by Metro into the city for a walking tour including Red Square, St Basil’s Cathedral, GUM, Bunker 42. In the evening a Moscow By Night bus tour complete with vodka shots concluding with midnight in a very cold Red Square before back to our hotel for a nightcap or two, then bed by 3am.
Day 5 – tour of the Metro stations (which could double for Art Galleries), then a tour of the Kremlin in the snow. Farewell dinner and drinks at night, bed by 4am.
Day 6 – visit to the souvenir market, transfer to airport, home to London, then after tube, train and bus trip back to our camp, bed by 10.30pm (which is 2.30am Moscow time!).

The Changes??
Names: the most obvious change was simply where we were for the first three days…..St Petersburg. It was Leningrad when I first visited, so that’s two names for one place but I’m sure there was someone out there who could have visited 4 times last century, to the same place but with a changed name each time: St Petersburg until 1914, Petrograd until 1921, Leningrad until 1991, then St Petersburg again. To the locals, it’s simply Санкт-Петербург (as you knew…)

Temperature: it’s much much colder these days….but to be fair, I did visit the USSR in mid-summer and came back to Russia in mid-winter, which makes quite a difference! To stand in a couple of feet of snow beside the almost frozen-solid Neva River in St Petersburg, as perfectly symmetrical snowflakes fall from a leaden sky onto your outstretched (gloved) hands, and to know that the temperature has already passed the expected low for the day of -8 degrees is quite something. Then to go to -11 at midnight in Red Square in Moscow, which in the 10 days or so after we left got down to -26 (and that’s a daytime reading too, not overnight!), is something else again. Carting our bags which seemed unnecessarily laden down with winter clothes in the +35 degrees heat of SE Asia and Africa all became worthwhile, when we donned hats, coats, scarves, gloves, thermals, additional jerseys, thermal socks, boots etc., just to survive outside!

Daylight: in a similar vein to the previous paragraph I suppose, but the point needs to be noted….the days were so short! In complete contrast to my previous summer visit, and also to the White Nights we enjoyed in Scandinavia just a few months ago, the sunrise (if it could be seen at all behind the snow clouds) was around 10.30am, and before 4.00pm, night had come again. Imagine coming downstairs in your hotel at 10.00am, having skipped breakfast and not having bothered yet to look out the window, stepping outside to the tour van, only to find yourself on the icy footpath in pitch black darkness!!

Shopping: in 1980, there were lengthy queues for everything from bread to cars. (If you were privileged enough to be ordering a car, by the way, you didn’t enquire what day it might be delivered, nor even what month…..but what year in the future it might turn up was a pretty important thing to know! Especially if that was the year you’d booked the plumber to come and fix your toilet!). But no matter what the people wanted it was invariably in short supply….and queuing was just a way of life. And then there was GUM – a huge store on Red Square, right across from the Kremlin. A department store really, and one which I’ve spent the last 32 years referring to as “gum” (as in chewing) whereas our lovely Russian guide Natasha Romanov (no relation to the Tzar apparently) now tells me it’s pronounced “goom”! Anyway….what’s different about it? Absolutely everything!
~ In 1980, the GUM shopping process went like this: you saw what you wanted in the small display windows on the outside…..you went inside to the ground floor which was, I’m sure I recall, the only floor open to the public and found a counter in the right department….you described the item to a clerk who filled out a handwritten docket in triplicate, keeping one copy and giving you two….you then eventually found a payment counter at which to hand your dockets over, along with your money (cash only) and that clerk receipted the payment, and returned one copy of the docket to you….you then searched for yet another counter where you handed over your receipt and waited an age while the third clerk went out the back somewhere and eventually came back with an item. Not necessarily the exact item you’d ordered, but one that was close enough for you to accept rather than argue the toss and spend another half a day in queues…..
~ In 2012, GUM has been completely transformed. If there was any doubt that Russia has embraced capitalism, then this place blows that all away. The same silly little display windows still exist but today they have everything from Apple to Zara on show, as well as all the labels in between. And inside it’s an ultra-modern retail mall with every outlet known to woman, plus quite a lot that were new discoveries, and all 3 (or was it 4?) levels jam packed when we were there with Christmas shoppers flashing their platinum cards, jostling for attention and searching for non-existent bargains in an extremely costly environment. It’s as far from the bad old days as you can possibly imagine.

Souvenirs: for most of the 20th Century, the most popular souvenirs on sale were fur hats (no change there), vodka (ditto), wooden toys (still going strong), and Babushka or Matryoshka wooden stacking dolls. Nothing much has changed although I did notice a lot more Hammer and Sickle type cap badges now seem to be on sale, as well as previously unimaginable things like clocks made from the instruments out of mothballed MIG fighter planes, and the stacking dolls are no longer restricted to the standard Russian peasant girl design. There are heaps of different designs now but my favourite, and there’s a set in my box of things to come home, is the Lenin doll, inside which is Stalin, then Yeltsin, then a tiny Medvedev, and then an even tinier Putin! Just appealed to my sense of humour….especially the bit where mighty Mr Putin is reduced almost to insignificance.

Lenin’s Tomb: in the old USSR, they had Lenin floating round in formaldehyde in the depths of a granite tomb on Red Square. In the new Russia, they have Lenin floating round in formaldehyde in the depths of a granite tomb on Red Square. In 1980, I didn’t see him because I couldn’t be bothered joining a queue that was hundreds of metres long….and in 2012, I didn’t see him because, believe it or not, the place is closed for refurbishment until April! I’m not 100% sure whether they are refurbishing the mausoleum, or Lenin himself.
But credit where it’s due – Lenin has survived (so to speak) many other leaders of his country. There are still statues, mosaics, friezes, paintings and so on of him everywhere, most notably in the amazingly grandiose Metro stations in Moscow, but there are none whatsoever of the likes of Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev nor, as far as I could tell, of any of the more recent leaders from Andropov and Gorbachev onwards.

Secret Bunkers: we spent a most interesting afternoon about 70 metres below street level in Bunker 42, one of the Soviet Union’s then-secret Cold War locations where hundreds of personnel could stay for weeks on end if necessary, to hopefully ride out a nuclear attack, whilst launching their own on the USA. There were a lot of similarities to our KGB Hotel tour in Estonia back in July (except for the obvious one that the KGB Hotel was 23 floors above ground….the bunker is about the same number of floors below the ground, under what are just normal houses and apartments whose occupants, had they dared to ask what was going on when the bunker was being built, would have been told it was tunnelling for the Metro). The best thing is the Russian ability to laugh at themselves and have a little bit of fun with what is otherwise a hugely interesting, but deadly serious topic. I mean, that was just a fake scenario when I was volunteered to push the launch button on some ICBMs pointed at Washington DC! It was, wasn’t it?? And the comparison with 1980? Very simple – back then, secret bunkers were exactly that….secret!

I’m sue that’s enough for now! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed a few snippets of life in Russia today – if you ever get the chance, and can be bothered wading through the red tape that surrounds the visa application process (that is definitely one thing that certainly hasn’t changed!), then go for it. You won’t regret it!!

There’s a few photos to be found here if you’re interested….