May 29 – Saint Petersburg, Russia. Today is turnover day for the ship. The guests from the Moscow to St. Pete are getting off and the guests going from St. Pete to Moscow are boarding. We have scheduled a car, driver and guide for today and will be going to see places that we have selected. We've only done this once before in Lisbon and it worked out very well. We didn't have to pay for that one so this will be our first experience with this and we are looking forward to it.
We were getting ready in our room when the phone rang and the front desk informed us that someone was in the lobby to see us about 20 minutes early. That's great!! We went down to meet Boris, our guide. Our boat is triple parked so we had to cross through two other ships to get to the pier. Parked at the top of the ramp was a red Mercedes-Benz van and a lady driver, Tamara. Boris joked that we had things backward. Usually it's a lady guide and man driver, as he put it.
I believe Boris is retired and just takes individuals on tour. His English is wonderful and he proved to be extremely knowledgeable. I found out something new. In Russia guides are licensed by site and you can't guide there if you don't have a license. We have arranged for another guide, car and driver tomorrow and I asked if he would be back. He said no because we wanted to visit the Russian Museum and he was not licensed for it because so few English speaking tourists want to go there. He asked why we wanted to go there and, since I could already tell that he had a good sense of humor I told him that we're a little crazy. He laughed and said that more Americans should see the Russian Museum but they don't stay long enough in Saint Petersburg.
We are headed to the Alexander and Pavlovsk Palaces. It was a nice drive out to Pushkin. Although we'd been there when we visited Catherine's Palace everything looks different from the front seat of a car. Plus the second time you take a route you have time to notice details. When the Germans were conducting the siege of St Pete they occupied Pushkin and this trip I noticed a row of old Russian artillery at the side of the road. Boris told me that they were on the place where the Russians made a stand against the Germans. Past them was no-mans-land until you go to where the German line was at kilometer marker 23. These tall granite markers were set up when the Summer Palaces were built to let them know how far they had to go and also mark the way when the snow got deep. Originally named Tsarskoye Selo (Tsar's Village) when the royal residences were built, eventually a town built up around them. After the Bolshevik uprising it was renamed Children's Village and in 1937 became Pushkin Village in honor of the 100th anniversary of his death.
We arrived before the palace was due to open so we walked down to the gate of Catherine's Palace to take a look at the side gates. On the way we passed another statue of Pushkin, this time shown seated on a park bench. He always looks so melancholy in his statues. Just down the street is the building where Pushkin went to school. We walked onto the grounds of Alexander's Palace and up to the front façade. It's a large yellow building with white accents. The structure is U shaped with substantial wings on each side of the main building. About ¾ of the way down the side buildings and about half way between the wings and the main entrance two shorter wings extend forward. These short wings are joined at their ends with a colonnade. The columns are two stories tall and before you get to them you must ascend a staircase that extends down from the center two columns. Each of the shorter wings terminates in a large covered portico with curving drives on each side. Carriages could discharge their passengers here in a rain storm and they wouldn't get wet. Since each wing has one two carriages could be served at one time.
It got to be time to open so we all walked inside. The guard gave us a strange look and told Boris that the museum was closed for the day. Well I did say we were early, I just didn't know it was a whole day early. Disappointed but undaunted we reformulated a plan on the fly, or rather Boris did, and we headed off to our second scheduled destination, Pavlovsk Palace.
Pavlovsk was built by Paul I in the 1700s and after his death it was the home of his widow, Maria Fedorovna. In 1777 Catherine the Great gave almost 2,500 acres of woods along the Slavyanka River to her son Paul I in honor of the birth of their first son, who would become Tsar Alexander I.
Originally they built two homes, one for Paul and one for Maria that were about a kilometer apart. Now that's civilized. In 1780 Catherine the Great, Paul's mother, loaned him Scots architect Charles Cameron to build their palace overlooking the river. Cameron used a design by Palladio, an Italian architect from the 1500s, as the basis of the Pavlosk Palace. He selected it from a print in Palladio's book. Thomas Jefferson used this same print when he was designing the University of Virginia.
It has a rectangular, 3-story central building with a short dome. A 2-story curved, open colonnades, with green grills forming the second floor arches, extends from each end of the central building, connecting it to the 2- story outer buildings on each side. Each of these outer buildings has a curved 2-story annex extending from its outer wall. Once again the complex has the shape of a U, except the U shape curved inward at the top. Sort of an open ended O actually. Once again, except for the green grills on the second floor of the colonnades the color scheme is yellow with white trim.
Now this is a great story. In 1781, during construction of the palace, Paul and Maria went on a trip incognito posing as "The Count and Countess of the North". In their travels to Austria, Italy, France and Germany they visited palaces and gardens which would influence later decisions about Pavlosk. The bought painting, furniture and statuary for their palace. They ordered sets of porcelain ware. King Louis XVI gave them four tapestries and Marie Antoinette gave Maria a 60 piece set of valuable porcelain. They acquired more furniture , commissioned paintings bought 96 clocks, has custom chandeliers made for each room.
Eventually a rift developed between Cameron and Maria. Cameron was used to Catherine the Great's unlimited budget for building; Paul could not afford that extravagance. He was ticked that he was not consulted about the furniture and décor items to be used in the palace. Cameron favored bright, multi-colored motifs whereas Maria preferred lighter colors. Paul didn't like anything that resembled the style of Catherine Palace and in 1786 Cameron went back to Catherine to build her a palace somewhere else. He had finished only the entry way and five private apartment rooms. An Italian architect was hired to continue the work.
Vicenzio Brenna, from Florence, used a style that was more compatible with Paul's taste for Roman classicism. He use the idea of a Roman temple to complete what is now called the Italian Room and Maria's bedroom was patterned after the state bedroom of the King of France.
When Catherine the Great died Paul became Emperor and had a more lavish budget so he decided to enlarge the palace ad build a church onto the South Wing. Paul's reign was short lived. He managed to irritate his nobles and became increasingly paranoid. Maybe it wasn't paranoia as he was murdered by members of the court in 1801 and his son Alexander became Emperor. The palace passed to Maria, the mother not only of Alexander the I but also Nicholas I both Tsars.
One of my favorite rooms is the semi-circular library in one of the curved wings of the building. John Quincy Adams, the first American ambassador to Russia visited Maria here. Maria's descendants respected her wishes and turned the palace into a family museum.
As the political situation deteriorated, Prince Jean and his wife Helen, Queen Olga of Greece and Constantine Constantinovich were living in the palace. They fled and left the house in the care of Polovtsoff, the director of the Art Institute and Museum of Applied Arts in St. Petersburg. This proved to be a stroke of genius. When the Bolsheviks, through Lenin, seized power Polovtsoff immediately went to the Winter Palace and found Anatoly Lunacharsky the Commissar of Enlightenment and demanded that Pavlovsk be saved as a museum. Lunacharsky agreed and also made Polovtosoff the new Commissar Curator of Pavlovsk. So in one stroke they saved the house and got the director a cushy job. Beautiful. When he was sure that he had saved the palace Polovtsoff, not being a dummy and able to read the writing on the wall, quietly took his entire family and belongings and snuck across the border into Finland and then moved to Paris. Genius!
The building was nice and there are some wonder items of furniture inside. The clocks were beautiful as was much of the furniture. Several things caught my eye. A set of gold accented tableware with Roman figures on some of the serving plates, a set of three gold, blue and white urns and the small iconostasis of the palace church
We left the palace and Pavlovsk for Saint Petersburg. We're heading downtown to see the Museum of Political History another place American tourists rarely go. It's in an art nouveau mansion built for Mathilda Kshesinskaya, a prima ballerina at Saint Petersburg's most prestigious venue, the Mariinskiy. She was the mistress of Nicholas II before he became Tsar. Oddly enough the men who would eventually have his entire family slaughtered took over Mathilda's mansion and made it the central offices of the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Lenin rallied his close supporters in the downstairs main room and then went out on a second floor balcony to give speeches to the people gathered in the park across the street. It became the Museum of the Revolution in 1957. When communism fell out of favor in the 1990s and the revolution became redefined as an uprising or coup d'état the museum was renamed the Museum of Political History, and the displays were radically reworked to reveal much of the secret history of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on finally telling the truth about history.
They have a lot of interesting artifacts. Lenin's typewriter, the video camera used by Mikhail Gorbachev to record his messages to the nation during the August Putsch of 1991 and a piece of the Berlin Wall as well as communist propaganda posters and caricatures of Lenin that at one time could have gotten the artist shipped out to the gulag. I thought it was a great place to visit. Boris is getting smarter all the time.
Right down the street is a brick structure that protects the cabin of Peter the Great that served as his first Saint Petersburg palace. It was built in 1703 and moved here in 1711 and had the brick building built around it for protection at the direction of Peter in 1723. The image of the cabin was reproduced on a Fabergé egg made to celebrate the city's bicentennial in 1903.
It was a very nice day, Boris is a great guide and Tamara was an excellent driver. They delivered us safely back to the ship at about 3PM.
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