ARUSSIAN REVOLUTION YOUSIMPLY CAN’TMISS
See St Petersburg and weep at its beauty, tragedy and history
In terms of emotional travel experiences, it certainly comes in my top ten. OK, so it’s not quite up there in the flowing-tears stakes with my couple of hours spent in Auschwitz. Or a few years earlier, with my experience of watching an elderly man, on a stick and wracked with pain, making his way to kneel and pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Peering into Nelson Mandela’s tiny cell on Robben Island was pretty overpowering too, knowing that this physical giant of a man had spent 18 years, awake and asleep, in this tiny, confined space.
And when I visited the St Peter & St Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg in 1999, while I didn’t dissolve in tears, it was definitely lump-in-the-throat stuff. Not because of the cathedral itself, but because of the small side chapel that held the reinterred remains of Tsar Nicolas II, his wife Alexandra and three of their children.
Nicolas, the last of the Romanovs, was a complete waste of space, of course. But the brutality of his death, executed alongside his wife, five children and some household staff in Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, was an affront to humanity. Shot and bayoneted, their remains were then partially burned before being dumped in a forest in the Urals, where they lay for decades before discovery.
When I visited St Petersburg in 1999, the Romanovs had only been reinterred the previous year and although my memory tells me that all five children were commemorated on plaques around the walls of the chapel, only three were buried with their parents, the remains of Maria and little Alexei (aged just 13) not having been verified yet.
This year is a big year for Russia as it decides exactly how to mark the centenary of the Revolution. For how, indeed, do you celebrate something that you have since turned your back on? The answer, I presume, is that you don’t so much celebrate it as commemorate it.
While the 1917 October Revolution is the one most remembered, the Tsar was actually gone from power months earlier and it was 100 years ago this month that the whole revolutionary process really began.
Whatever your views about Putin and his acolytes, it’s still a great year to visit Russia, to stand in the stunning Winter Palace in St Petersburg (part of the Hermitage museum), the very place stormed by the revolutionaries that October. And to see the battleship Aurora, the one that fired the opening shot that autumn, now returned to its moorings and operating as a museum after a couple of years of restoration work.
Take a stroll from the river Neva, walking to St Isaac’s cathedral. Cross the road from there and head into the historic Astoria Hotel for a coffee. Now part of the Rocco Forte hotel portfolio, when we stayed in 1999 it was still independent, with a wonderful air of faded grandeur and famous as the place where the American journalist John Reed was staying when the October Revolution started.
There’s so much history to soak up in St Petersburg and so fitting therefore to take a trip there in this significant centenary year.
One final word – don’t miss a visit to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. Used as a morgue during the Siege of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called), it is, without question, one of the most spectacular sights in this city of spectacular sights. Approach it by walking along the banks of the Griboedov Canal.
Your first view of the church is one you will never forget.