A particularly exciting day today as we saw Vladimir Putin. Well actually we didn’t, but our guide was fairly cyonvinced that he was in one of the line of 15 or so blacked-out Mercedes which streamed last us as we did our tour of the Kremlin. Apparently, he normally lives around 40 minutes away and, because of the terrible Moscow traffic, he commutes into work in the Kremlin by helicopter. However, today is a Saturday and so he was driven in in a motorcade of black cars to lay flowers at the tomb of the unknown soldier to mark ‘Defender of the Fatherland’ day. This was originally celebrated in 1919 and marks the date in 1918 when the first mass draft into the Red Army took place. Today was an important celebration as it marked 100 years since the original holiday.
This all happened as part of our tour of the Kremlin in Moscow. We started the morning with a visit to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This is the tallest Russian Orthodox cathedral in the world at 103 metres in height and is certainly impressive. The first impression is that the church emanates a sense of history and appears to have stood for centuries. The original cathedral was in fact commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I to celebrate the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow in1812, but building didn’t actually start until 1839. It took quite a time and wasn’t completed until 1860. Appropriately, it was the site of the 1882 world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.
Stalin, however, had other ideas. Not being a great fan of religion (or apparently people given how many he finished off), he had the church destroyed in 1931 to make place for a garment ‘Palace of the Soviets’. Though the palace was started in 1937, building stopped in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and it was never holy. Putin, never one to miss a trick, had the cathedral rebuilt between 1995 and 2000. An incredible achievement and the inside simply takes your breath away. It was apparently originally modelled on Haghia Sophia in Istanbul and it is easy to see similarities.
The view from the Patriarch’s bridge outside is the classic view we often see of the Kremlin and the Moscow skyline and from there we then went on to do our tour of the Kremlin.
The Moscow Kremlin is the original fortress of Moscow and includes five palaces (occupied by the Romanovs) and four cathedrals. Cathedral Square is the heart of the Kremlin with three cathedrals, but the principal one is the Cathedral of the Assumption where the Years were crowned. This is regarded as the mother church of Muscovite Russia.
From there we headed out into Red Square, past Lenin’s Tomb and past a demonstration by the Russian Communist Party who were laying flowers by Lenin’s mausoleum. Apparently he is not currently in residence as he is being restored – nearly a century of lying there has taken its toll on him. However, he will be coming back in April this year!
After lunch we headed for the station to board our Trans-Siberian train. We even got a send off from a small band – good to see a tenor sax among their numbers, though how he played it in the temperature on the platform, goodness knows …….
