Is Russia a third world country?

5 workers - 1 working 4 watching - a common site in Moscow

5 workers – 1 working 4 watching – a common sight in Moscow

Both of us grew up during the cold war, and the Soviet Union was the enemy with 10,000+ nuclear weapons and thousands of tanks stationed in East Germany. The Soviet Union was a strong powerful country.

Russia, which is 75% of the former Soviet Union, seems a much poorer country. Russia’s GDP per capita is about a third of Australia’s. Russia’s total GDP is about 15% to 33% bigger than Australia’s but for 143 million people versus Australia’s 21 million. I suspect it will not be more than 5 to 10 years before Australia’s GDP exceeds Russia.

We see so much inefficiency here. Unemployment is meant to be similar to Australia’s, around 6%, but there are so many people employed in meaningless jobs. We went to a supermarket today (not a very big one) with not one, but TWO security guards. Every supermarket has a security guard, and sometimes someone watching video surveillance full-time as well. We pass a shop selling kitchen goods in the mall up the road which has two shop assistants and the shop is the size of a large walk-in robe. Next door there is a jewellery shop with four shop assistants, and no customers most of the time. There are shopping areas about 750 metres away from us that are full of tiny little stores (3 metres by 2 metres) that sell hardware, fruit and veg and similar. There must be 50 stalls, and again almost never any customers. There is a market next door with a couple of dozen little stalls selling fruit and veg, all similar, and most of the time with no customers. There are supermarkets everywhere, there must be ten supermarkets  of various sizes within 1 km of our apartment.

There are tiny little shops in many subway underpasses. Really tiny, 2 metres long by a metre deep, selling everything from shoes to taps. Shopkeepers eking out a living.

There are police on every metro station (usually at least 3) plus people monitoring video surveillance.  At the train stations and other places there are many examples of security theatre.  At Saint Petersburg station there were body metal detectors that people had to walk through. Of course the metal detector went off all the time, because ordinarily people are carrying metal all the time (coins and phones etc). The guards did nothing when the alarms went off, and to make it more ridiculous Saint Petersburg station had several entrances that you could go through without going through any detectors. We went through a metal detector at an entrance to a shopping centre yesterday, and as usual the metal detector beeped, but the guard did nothing.

At the main shopping area near us some workman have been replacing some paving with new paving. This has been going on since before we got here on Saturday. It is so pathetically slow. I am sure an Australian paving crew would have had it all done in 3 days, but this drags on so slowly, with lots of workers standing around and hardly anyone working.

It rained heavily yesterday (and the day before), a tropical-like downpour that lasted maybe 15 minutes. The roads flooded, but because there is almost no drainage, the water just sits in deep pools on the road, until it evaporates. Thefootpaths are bitumen, but so uneven and not built with a slope so the water drains, and the footpaths are covered with deep pools of water as well.

Russia just seems so third world in some respects. It seems to have more in common in our experience with Vietnam – a third world country – than a poor European country like Portugal. This is our experience in Moscow, the rich capital where people are so much wealthier. It’s going to be interesting in the poor parts of Russia.

 

 

 

Moscow

We arrived in Moscow on Saturday morning, having caught a 4-hour fast train from St Petersburg at 6.45am. Navigating our way on the Moscow metro has been a bit challenging as there is almost NO English script anywhere, it’s all Cyrillic. Greg has the Moscow metro map on his phone, plus a neat little app that lets us know where the nearest metro station is, and we’ve used it a few times already. We got to the station nearest the apartment we’re staying at, then spent a frustrating 90 minutes trying to meet up with the person who was handing over the apartment keys and showing us where it is. Somehow the guy who was organising it all managed to forget that the subway station has 4 exits, and it apparently didn’t occur to him to mention that we should wait by the exit that was just outside the big shopping centre. It also didn’t occur to the guy we were meeting that he should check the other exits for 2 bedraggled tourists with backpacks and a huge duffle bag. We finally met our man and by that time he was furious and so were we, the difference being that we had forked out $550 to be stuffed around.

Anyway, we’re all settled in now and I’ll write more about our 1960s Soviet style apartment in another post. We spent the rest of the day checking out the local area and doing a few chores – washing, shopping, catching up on sleep. There are at least 4 little supermarkets in the 3 blocks between our apartment and the shopping centre near the metro, plus a slightly larger one in the shopping centre. And Greg went for a walk in the other direction this morning and found several more. The ground floor of a lot of the apartment blocks around here are devoted to lots of little shops, there are 2 floors of upmarket shops in the shopping centre, plus more tiny shops outside the metro station. Yesterday as we went past an Apple reseller in the shopping centre, we counted 6 staff … and one customer! Lots of shop assistants, not many customers.

So yesterday, Sunday, we got out and about. In typical J&G travel style, our first destination was a produce market. Beautiful fruit, vegetables, spices, dried fruit, smallgoods, meat and a baker selling a naan-type breads that they were baking in a tandoor-style oven. We bought a fresh chicken and vegetables that we’ll roast for dinner tonight, plus some dried fruit, fresh raspberries and a couple of varieties of the naan-type bread. It seemed very quiet at the market, some stalls were closed and the rest of the stall-holders were very keen for us to buy their wares. In the afternoon, we did a walking tour along the Moscow River, starting at the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It was originally built in the middle of the 19th century to celebrate Russia’s victory over Napoleon, then destroyed by Stalin, then rebuilt to celebrate Moscow’s 850th birthday in 1997. We wandered over a pedestrian bridge across the river, with great views of the Kremlin wall and St Basil’s Cathedral (which must have at least 5 or 6 bouncy castles if Greg’s theory about colourful cupolas is correct), across to the former Red October chocolate factory – now an arts precinct – and a very impressive statue of Peter the Great, which is apparently twice as high as the Statue of Liberty. We walked along the other side of the river for a couple of kms to Gorky Park, which used to be an amusement park but is now a place to have a picnic, roller-blade, ride bikes and just hang out. In winter people go ice-skating and cross-country skiing there.

At one point while we were walking beside the river, we found a whole lot of metal sculpture trees that were all completely covered in padlocks. We have seen variations of this in other places we have visited. Couples put their names on the lock and then lock it to something (a fence, a bridge, a railing beside a motorway) and then that means they will stay together forever. There were 25 of these metal ‘trees’ along the river, each with hundreds or more likely thousands of locks, and then on the footbridge nearby there were more, newer trees that people had just started putting locks on.
And something else that stuck me while we were walking through a small park with colourful flower beds planted in interesting patterns. Remember the spectators using coloured boards to make pictures at the 1980 Moscow Olympics? The floral garden designs reminded me of that, for some reason.

Today we went to Real Russia, the travel agents, to collect our train tickets and to get them to register our Russian visas. We travelled on 3 metro lines to get there, and our tickets were all ready for us to pick up. The travel agent told us that as we aren’t spending 7 or more days in any one place in Russia, we don’t need to register our visas … I hope she’s right and we don’t have any trouble leaving the country! We had lunch at an Italian-style restaurant nearby – the business lunch was around $8: soup, pizza/pasta and a drink, then headed into ‘town’ to have a look at the Art Deco Metropole Hotel, the Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square. There is a huge temporary fence around Lenin’s mausoleum and Red Sq, and a stage is being built but I can’t find out what it’s for. We’re hoping that access to Lenin’s mausoleum is from inside the Kremlin, which we’re planning on visiting tomorrow – we have already seen his comrades Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao, so Vladimir Ilyich will make the trifecta for us! I know, it’s a bit weird, visiting embalmed dead guys in (formerly) communist countries, but everyone needs a hobby.
We spent a while walking in the direction of the White House, where Prime Minister Putin has his office, but we seemed to walk for ages and not really get any closer, so we gave up and came back to the apartment in time to miss the afternoon peak hour metro rush, and so we could roast our chicken for dinner! It is now raining hard – hope it’s all finished by tomorrow morning!

On the fast train from Saint Petersburg to Moscow (sort of fast only 170kph)

On the fast train from Saint Petersburg to Moscow (sort of fast only 170kph)

Russian beer and dumplings - Russian beer in a 1.5 l plastic (PET) bottle for A$3.50

Russian beer and dumplings – Russian beer in a 1.5 l plastic (PET) bottle for A$3.50

blogging in the Soviet-era apartment kitchen

blogging in the Soviet-era apartment kitchen

Moscow market

Moscow market

Moscow traffic on a Sunday evening, there is lots of traffic in Moscow even though lots of its 11 million inhabitants do not have a car

Moscow traffic on a Sunday evening, there is lots of traffic in Moscow even though lots of its 11 million inhabitants do not have a car

Lock Trees

Lock Trees

Peter the Great sculpture

Peter the Great sculpture

Bolshoi

Bolshoi

Saint Basils (in the background!)

Saint Basils (in the background!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out and about in St Petersburg

We arrived in Moscow yesterday morning, but before we start sharing our adventures here, I want to write about our last full day in St Petersburg before I forget what we did and where we went.

Greg wrote about visiting the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in his last post. We took the subway there and back and oh my gosh the subway is a long way underground. It must be halfway to China, or maybe even Australia. When we stood at the top of the escalator going down, it was impossible to see people getting off at the other end, that’s how long it was.

We had lunch at the shopping centre near the Akademicheskaya metro station (filled pancakes from a Teremok fast food place, and I tried Kvass, which I thought was a fruit drink with mint and is actually a fermented rye bread drink.  There’s another drink made with cranberries but I can’t remember its name. Will look for it and try it when I find it), then we caught the metro back to Nevsky Prospekt and did the Lonely Planet’s recommended walking tour, which took us along some of the many canals and past more fascinating buildings between Nevsky and the river.

Starting off at the magnificent Singer Building, which now has a large bookshop and cafe (and probably no sewing machines!), we nipped into the bookshop for a quick browse. I found a full set of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks plus a few of Gordon Ramsay’s in Cyrillic, and most surprisingly, a Cyrillic language version of Bourke Street Bakery, which is a Sydney-based bakery. I sell the English language version. We wandered along one of St Petersburg’s many canals to the magnificent Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, where Alexander ll was blown up by a terrorist group in the 1880s hence its catchy name. Greg reckons there’s a bouncy castle in the highest cupola, but we didn’t go inside to check. We kept on walking along canals, past the now-ruined Court Stables and Pushkin’s last home, now a museum. We saw 4 of 5 bridal parties while we walked – Friday afternoon must be wedding time in Russia.

We wandered along a canal by the side of part of the Hermitage Museum to the Bolshaya Neva River, then along the back of the museum to the Alexander Column and the large square at the front of the museum. Crossing Nevsky Pr, we wandered through some side streets to the Faberge building which is still a jewellers but sadly there were no eggs anywhere. We caught a trolley bus just around the corner from the Hotel Astoria and I caught a glimpse of No 13 Malaya Morskaya, where Tchaikovsky died in 1893.

Greg went to the railway station to buy a luggage trolley for our still-enormous duffel bag – we’re hanging on to a few things we think we may need when we’re at Lake Baikal for a few days in the middle of our Trans-Siberian train trip. We had dinner at one of the many Coffee House cafes near Nevsky Pr – they seem to be Russia’s answer to Starbucks (which are also here, but not as common). A young waitress practised her English with us. It was … okay, she told us she had done a 7-day course.

saint-petersburg-canal

the Singer Building - now  bookstore

the Singer Building – now bookstore

wrought iron gates

wrought iron gates

church-sacred-blood

 

Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery

The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery  is a monument to the Leningrad siege and contains the graves of 500,000 people.

We found a post on trip advisor that gave directions to the cemetery. So we took the metro (our first time, up to then we had used buses) and headed north. We emerged from the Metro to find ourselves in suburban Saint Petersburg. We then found the right minibus, paid our money and hoped that the driver would drop us off to the right place. Due to some mistranslation of Cyrillic he dropped us off past the memorial and we had to walk back about 1 km,

There were not many people at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, It is surprising as it is the most important event in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) history. The siege of Leningrad by the German Army and the Finns started in January 1941 and lasted 872 days. Approximately 1.5 million inhabitants died from starvation, and the bombardment by the German Army. 500,000 of those who died are buried in mass graves at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. Compare this with UK and USA deaths in World War 2 which totalled 800,000.

It is a very moving place.

 

Just some of the many mass graves at  Piskariovskoye. Each are marked by the year they are from.

Just some of the many mass graves at Piskariovskoye. Each are marked by the year they are from.

mass-graves-2

Some of the Individual graves, with names and year of death

Some of the Individual graves, with names and year of death

How to get there:

We got instructions from Trip Advisor, these are the slightly amended instructions-

Take the Red Line (#1) subway to the Akademicheskaya stop on the north side of town (28 Rubles) . Exiting the metro go straight across the plaza, cross the side street (to the right that runs between the metro plaza and the shopping centre) and look for an appropriate bus. Take either a private bus K172 (Mini bus 35 Rubles) or 178 (25 Rubles) to the memorial. Just pay the driver the Mini-bus (K172) the 35 rubles , On the way back, there is bus stop directly in front of the memorial. You will be let off across the main street from the subway. If there is no conductor on the 178 bus pay the 25 rubles to the driver (just put the money on a tray through the little window near the driver) when you LEAVE the bus.

the name of the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Cyrillic. If you can copy thsi to your phone you can show it to the bus driver.

the name of the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Cyrillic. If you can copy this to your phone you can show it to the bus driver.

the route the K178 bus takes from the Metro to the Cemetery, the bus continues on past the cemetery.

the route the K172/ 178 bus takes from the Metro to the Cemetery, the bus continues on past the cemetery.

 

 

The State Hermitage Museum

On the first Thursday of the month, admission to the State Hermitage Museum is free. As luck would have it, we visited the Hermitage on Thursday August 1st. I’m not sure whether that was good or bad – the queues to get in were long, and even longer by the time we left, but at this time of the year there would always be a long queue, free tickets or not. At some of the popular exhibits (Da Vinci’s Madonna and Child, and some of the Rembrandts), we had to wait till the crowd thinned to see the painting. But the museum’s crowd control was pretty good – they are obviously used to getting a lot of people through as quickly as possible.
The Hermitage Museum is huge, opulent, impressive, bewildering at times, easy to get lost in and a fine tribute to the excesses of Tsarist Russia. I couldn’t help thinking of how many of Russia’s poorer classes would have paid for those artworks with their blood, their sweat and their lives. The collections are displayed throughout the Museum, which itself comprises the Winter Palace, the New Hermitage and a couple of other buildings. In addition to the main exhibits, it is possible to buy tickets to see other collections including the Porcelain, Gold and Diamond rooms. We only saw a small sample of the main collection, and apparently what is on display in the museum is about 1/20th of the whole collection.
It took us about an hour to get into the museum and while we waited we watched some workmen replacing cobblestones around the edge of part of the Winter Palace. Well, 2 were working and 3 were supervising. We got our free tickets, took our bags to the cloakroom, went through metal detectors and headed straight to the Egyptian Room which has a great display of sarcophagi, jewellery, assorted artifacts and a mummy. Unfortunately there were no English translations for any of the display headers, so we couldn’t really work out what, when or where the exhibits were.
Then we headed up the magnificent Jordan Staircase in the Winter Palace to the Imperial staterooms and apartments, many of which had photos showing how the rooms were furnished during the last Tsar’s rule. We were following our Lonely Planet Guide which had a suggested half-day tour plan, although their map wasn’t all that easy to follow. We wanted to see the Da Vinci, the Monets and the Van Goghs, all of which we saw – a room full of Monet paintings, 2 rooms of Picassos plus one of Rembrandts. I know, all very mainstream, but the vast range of what was on display was pretty overwhelming for non-museum goers like us.
After the Picasso rooms we decided we’d seen enough – by then we had probably walked through at least 150 rooms spread across 5 buildings and 3 storeys, so we went to find a late lunch and a trolley bus back to the hotel.

the one hour long queue into the Hermitage

the one hour long queue into the Hermitage

The Hermitage from the plaza

The Hermitage from the plaza

the crowd at Da Vincis Madonna and Child

the crowd at Da Vinci’s Madonna and Child

the Jordan steps

the Jordan steps

hermitage-hall

 

Hermitage crowds

Hermitage crowds

 

 

Saint Petersburg

Well, we’re not in Scandinavia any more, and I’m not sure what is the most confronting – the masses of people everywhere, the huge volume of traffic, the scammers, the almost total absence spoken and written English language or the strange (Cyrillic) script. The most obvious is the Cyrillic script. In countries that use the Latin alphabet, I can usually have a go at working out what’s written, but not here. We’re staying just off Nevsky Prospekt, the main historical (and touristy) part of St Petersburg, and there are bits and pieces of written English around, and we haven’t got hopelessly lost or ordered the wrong thing off a menu …. yet!

We got into St Petersburg airport late on Tuesday evening and I made the stupid mistake of assuming the guy standing next to one of the official taxi booths was a taxi driver. Well, he had a Taxi ID card around his neck and a Taxi sign on his car …so he drove us to the address we had for the hotel we’d booked and then demanded 4 times the official fare. A bit of back and forth – he refused to let us get our bags, we refused close the car door and wouldn’t pay him any more money. He eventually gave up, let Greg grab the bags while I waited in the car, then he jumped out, grabbed his magnetic Taxi sign off the car roof, ripped the home-made Taxi card from around his neck and zoomed off. At least he did drive us to where we wanted to go. But then the real fun began. The hotel’s address was Apartment 65, 136 Nevsky Prospekt. We had the right number, but where the hell was Apartment 65? We wandered up and down the street for a while, hoping it would magically appear. A young man coming out of a nearby shop asked us if we needed help – why, yes we did! He was from Siberia, but was visiting a friend who lived locally and they took us down a long courtyard/lane to the street behind NevskyPr, into another courtyard and showed us where to ring the bell for the hotel. We would probably still be hunting around, 2 days later, if those young people hadn’t helped us.

So, we’re staying down one end of Nevsky Prospekt, and at the other end of the road is the Hermitage Museum, almost 4kms away. In between is one of the main railway stations, quite a few monuments and places of historical interest and many grand-looking buildings which have shops on the lower and ground floors, and then either more shops or apartments on the upper floors. A century ago, NevskyPr was a long, wide boulevarde, and those grand-looking buildings were huge private residences. I can imagine horse-drawn carriages and the well-heeled classes of Petrograd promenading along to the theatre or to an audience with the last Tsar in his Winter Palace, which is now part of the Hermitage.

We went to the railway station to organise our train tickets to Moscow (fast train on Saturday morning), then continued walking up NevskyPr, marvelling that even the McDonalds, Subway and Burger King signs are in Cyrillic. There is a lovely small park with a statue of Catherine the Great, and the flower beds are at their best at the moment – floral designs planted out with begonias, verbena and other bedding plants. The National Library is next door, but it didn’t seem to be open to the public.

We wandered off Nevsky in search of lunch and found a little cafe that had a selection of hot dishes keeping warm behind glass. We hung back to work out how to order, then as luck would have it the customer before us ordered what we wanted (shaslick and potatoes) so we just made gestures that we’d have what he was having. It came with cold cucumber soup, salad and a cup of hot water with 2 sugar cubes. It all tasted good and we were feeling pretty happy that we had successfully ordered our first meal in Russia when I got stung by a wasp that had somehow crawled down the back of my t-shirt. Ouch! I wasn’t really feeling up to much more sightseeing after that, so we hopped on a trolley-bus back to the hotel, calling into a nearby supermarket for a packet of frozen peas (to use as an ice pack on my wasp sting) and some medicinal beers.

Later on, we went and ordered pizzas from a little place near the hotel, and more beers. The local water has traces of giardia in it so we’re drinking and cleaning our teeth in bottled water. And drinking bottled beer!

McRussian - McDonalds on Nevsky Prospect

McRussian – McDonalds on Nevsky Prospect

Catherine-gardens

 

Nevsky prospect

Nevsky prospect

Catching a Trolley-Bus on Nevsky prospect. The Trolley Buses get power from overhead electric lines

Catching a Trolley-Bus on Nevsky prospect. The Trolley Buses get power from overhead electric lines