The Winter Palace, completed in 1762, was the fourth royal palace the Romanovs built on the spot. They were standing at a former pivot point of empire. Sometimes I saw newlyweds by the statue popping corks as an icy wind blew in across the Neva River and made the champagne foam fly. Petersburg, I often passed Senate Square, in the middle of the city, with Étienne Falconet’s black statue of Peter the Great on his rearing horse atop a massive rock. Here and there, rogue footprints crossed the ice expanses with their brave or heedless dotted lines. In each of the cities, ice topped with perfectly white snow locked the rivers. Petersburg, where traces of the revolution are everywhere. I visited my son in Yekaterinburg, I rambled around Moscow, and I gave the most attention to St. Things that happen in a place change it and never leave it. My way to travel is to go to a specific place and try to absorb what it is now and look closer, for what it was. In February and March I went to Russia to see what it was like in the centennial year. (All this information will be useful later on.) The Bolshevik government changed the country to the Gregorian calendar in early 1918, soon after taking control. In 1917, Russia still followed the Julian calendar, which lagged 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in the world. Though it’s called the Great October Revolution, from our point of view it happened in November. Today many of the city’s inhabitants simply call it “Peter.” Or consider the name of the revolution itself. In 1924 Petrograd became Leningrad, which then went back to being St. Petersburg, whose name was changed in 1914 to Petrograd so as not to sound too German (at the time, Russia was fighting the Kaiser in the First World War). For example, a question as straightforward as what to call certain Russian cities reveals, on examination, various options, asterisks, clarifications. I see I will never stop thinking about this country.Īs the 1917 centennial approached, I wondered about the revolution and tangled with its force field of complexity. Then, two years ago, my son moved to the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains, on the edge of Siberia, and he lives there now. A harsh kind of capitalism grew democracy came and mostly went. During the 1990s and after, the pace of change in Russia cascaded. With the fall of the Soviet Union, areas previously closed to travelers had opened up. I first began traveling to Russia more than 24 years ago, and in 2010 I published Travels in Siberia, a book about trips I’d made to that far-flung region. I just try to love it and yield to it and go with it, while also paying vigilant attention-if that makes sense. The way to think about Russia is without thinking about it. I know that almost no conclusion I ever draw about it is likely to be right. Now I’ve traveled enough in Russia that my affections are more complicated. I can’t explain the attraction, only observe its symptoms going back to childhood, such as listening over and over to Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” narrated by Peter Ustinov, when I was 6, or standing in the front yard at night as my father pointed out Sputnik crossing the sky. I think everybody has a country not their own that they’re powerfully drawn to Russia is mine. I used to tell people that I loved Russia, because I do. The Russians themselves aren’t too sure about its significance. Today, a hundred years afterward, we still don’t know quite what to make of that huge event. Then it leapt into a revolution unlike any the world had ever seen. For a hundred years before 1917, it experienced wild disorders and political violence interspersed with periods of unquiet calm, meanwhile producing some of the world’s greatest literature and booming in population and helping to feed Europe. Just when you decide it is the one, it turns around and discloses the other. Russia is both a great, glorious country and an ongoing disaster.
0 kommentar(er)
