November 2nd, Petrograd

Let me begin by apologizing for not posting new pictures but I have to pay for Internet and it is not cost-effective to spend an hour uploading images. I'll post them when I get home.

So:
November 2
We began our first full day in St. Petersburg on the bus driving up Nievsky Prospect to the statue of Peter the Great given to him by Catharine the Great. This statue, called the Bronze Horsemen, represents Peter astride a large and wildly lunging horse. The horse, meant to represent Russia, is being controlled, only just barely, by the might Peter with his one hand while his right hand gestures towards the horizon. Peter, dressed in Roman clothing and a laurel looks solemnly to the west. This is an important statue in many ways. St. Petersburg was the creation of Peter the Great. He, as a young man, became the first Tsar to ever leave Russia. He chose to travel and study in the west, in Europe. And it was a result of these travels that he became a bit westernized. He returned to Moscow with a mustache instead of the traditional full beard and instantly ordered that all Russian men shave off their beards. He liked things to match the rest of Europe and as such, went to war with Sweden (I think, could be Finland) in order to capture a pathway to the west. Previously, Russia had no western seaport, so after taking this area of swampy land, Peter had it drained, and built St. Petersburg in it's place. The next step was to move the capital here, where he could always be closer to the western world he held so dear. IT is for these reasons the imagery on the statue becomes western in detail: the roman clothes, the non-Cyrillic inscription on one side, and of course the overall image of Peter riding a wild horse into the west. All in all a pretty impressive statue that has been written about many times, most famously, however, in Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman. Worth the read.

We stopped to look briefly at St. Isaac's which sits opposite the Bronze Horseman before getting back on the bus to continue our tour. The next stop took us to the Peter Paul Fortress and Cathedral. This was the first western style church many Russians would have ever seen. The renaissance styling and of course the presence of a clock make it all very strange to any Russian of the time, but again, it was Peter's wish. Inside the cathedral are the sarcophagi of ALL the Russian Tsars from Peter the Great on. We then exited the church and looked out over the water before heading to the House of Political Prisoners.

The House of Political Prisoners was a bit of a switch since it was the newest building we stopped at so far. Being built in 1927, it was used not to house enemies of the communist regime, but rather those people who had been imprisoned for championing communism prior to the 1917 revolt. This was, quite literally the first communal building in the world.

The next stop was a beautiful church called the Church of the Spilled Blood (not the nicest name but certainly a pretty place.) And then on to lunch.

In the afternoon we took a walking tour of Dostoevky's Russia and saw not only where he lived but the places mentioned in Crime and Punishment. This was a real treat because I could suddenly picture the scenes more clearly. Almost as if when you see a movie first and then read the book, the characters in the book appear to be the actors from the film, seeing the area in which Dostoevsky wrote gave a hard context to the novel. We even got to walk in Roskalnikov's footsteps as he plotted the murder of the pawn broker.

Our final stop of the day was the St. Nicholas Cathedral, a Russian orthodox church.