Street performers in Moscow

Shot this video in the moscow metro underpass. Its AMAZING!! TURN UP THE VOLUME!!

NOVYIE IZVESTIA

Taken off the IHT website 11 Sep07:

RUSSIANS READY FOR CONCEPTION HOLIDAY:
The city of Lenin's birth is preparing to celebrate the first annual "Day of Conception," as residents have termed the new government-sponsored holiday created to help relieve Russia's demographic crisis. By order of the governor, all residents of Ulyanovsk will stay home from work on Wednesday and concentrate on increasing the nation's population. Any mother that gives birth nine months later on June 12 will be awarded a new car: a UAZ Patriot in honor of Patriots' Day.

source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/10/news/10russiapress-review.php

Stalin's Tipping Point

The battle for Moscow—the biggest, bloodiest clash in human history—helped turn the tide against Hitler. But the Soviet leader came closer than most realize to defeat

By Andrew Nagorski
Newsweek
Sept. 10, 2007 issue

By mid-October 1941, most of Moscow's residents were convinced that their city was about to be overrun by the Germans. The NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was then called, had prepared the first of what promised to be a series of pamphlets. "Comrades! We left Moscow due to the continuous attacks of the Germans," it declared. "But it's not the right time for us to weep." The "Underground Party Committee" that signed the statement vowed that Moscow would be liberated. Since the city held out in the end, this admission of defeat was ultimately buried in the NKVD's classified files rather than distributed. In fact, much of the story of how close Moscow came to falling—a defeat that would likely have transformed the course of the war—has been obscured by decades of deliberately distorted history. Now it's a story that can be told.

The battle for Moscow, which officially lasted from Sept. 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, pitted two gargantuan armies against each other in what was the greatest clash of arms in human history. Seven million men were involved in some stage of this struggle—twice the number who would later fight at Stalingrad, which most people erroneously believe was the bloodiest battle of World War II. The losses were more than twice that of Stalingrad; during the battle for Moscow, 2.5 million were killed, missing, taken prisoner or severely wounded, with 1.9 million of those losses on the Soviet side.

For the first time a Hitler blitzkrieg was stopped, shattering his dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union. The defeat was also the first signal that Germany would lose the war. As Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a German officer who later joined the conspiracy against Hitler, explained, it destroyed "the myth of the invincibility of the German soldier." And yet the battle for Moscow is now largely forgotten.

This is no accident. Any honest account of the battle for Moscow would undermine the Soviet story line of "The Great Patriotic War." Those sanitized versions, now reinforced in the era of President Vladimir Putin, portray Joseph Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. (It's no coincidence that Stalin's reputation plummets when there's a period of liberalization in Russia and rises when there's a new clampdown.) But it was Stalin's blunders, incompetence and brutality that made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow—and to kill or capture so many Soviet troops along the way.

Boris Vidensky was a cadet at the Podolsk Military Academy when the war started and was one of the lucky few of his class who survived when they were thrown, thoroughly unprepared, against the advancing Germans. He went on to become a senior researcher at the Military History Institute in Moscow. In retirement, he recounted that after the war, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the legendary Red Army commander, ordered his deputy to roughly calculate the losses of his troops near Moscow. When the deputy showed him the number he came up with, Zhukov quickly barked out an order: "Hide it and don't show it to anybody!"

It wasn't just the human toll that was embarrassing; after all, Stalin always considered his soldiers—and anyone else—to be expendable. He never flinched at sending millions to their deaths. More unsettling was that fact that, while some troops fought heroically from the start, hundreds of thousands surrendered to the enemy at the moment of the country's greatest peril. And many civilians panicked, engaging in looting and other forms of lawlessness that were normally unthinkable in Stalin's police state. No wonder that Soviet histories preferred to move on quickly to talk about other battles.

Those Muscovites who remember Oct. 16, 1941, the day when everyone assumed the Germans were about to arrive, still speak about it with a sense of astonishment. Dmitry Safonov, who was working at an artillery factory near Moscow that was to be evacuated to the Urals, had returned that day to pick up some belongings. "All of Moscow seemed to be streaming out somewhere," he recalled. Cars and trucks were loaded down with personal belongings, and at the railroad station Safonov saw suit-cases, bags, clothes, lamps, even a piano, all abandoned by those who were trying to board anything that was moving out. The train platforms were jammed with people. "I hardly recognized the city," he said.

Looters attacked food stores, factory workers went on strike, and angry crowds blocked those who were trying to flee in cars, pulling them out, beating and robbing them. Other residents tore down their posters of Marx and Lenin, stuffing them and other communist propaganda into garbage bins outside. That would have been an unspeakable crime before, but no one was enforcing the old rules. Thick black smoke arose from the chimneys of the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters, as the secret police hastily burned their files. Much of the Soviet government, along with foreign diplomats and journalists, had just been evacuated by rail to Kuibyshev, the Volga city about 600 miles away that was supposed to serve as the new base for the government once the capital fell. And Stalin was expected to join them within a day or two. A special train was already waiting at the station, along with his personal Douglas DC-3 and three other planes in case he had to make an even hastier exit.

Stalin's policies and gross miscalculations had led to this near disaster. His wholesale purges of the Red Army in 1937 and 1938 deprived the military of many of its most experienced officers. Among the first victims: Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the aristocrat turned Red Army commander who had predicted that Germany could attack without warning and that the result would be a long, costly conflict. "What are you trying to do—frighten Soviet authority?" Stalin demanded. The Soviet dictator then had him tortured and executed for allegedly plotting a coup with the help of German fascists. Thousands of other senior officers met a similar fate.

After he made common cause with Hitler by agreeing to the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of Aug. 23, 1939, Stalin refused to heed countless warnings from his own spies and Western governments that the Germans were about to invade. He did not allow his military leaders to put their men on alert, which led to the initial string of German victories. The invaders killed or captured huge numbers of Red Army troops, and seized weapons caches that had been left near the border area. As a result, many Soviet troops were sent into battle without guns. Ilya Druzhnikov, a book illustrator dispatched to the front, recalled that there was only one rifle available for every 10 men in his unit. This meant that unarmed soldiers trailed each armed man, waiting for him to fall so that one of them could pick up his weapon.

Stalin was ultimately saved by Hitler's even bigger blunders. The German dictator sent his armies into Russia in late June 1941 without winter clothing: the Führer was convinced they would triumph before the weather turned.

By mid-July, the Germans had advanced to the Smolensk region, and Hitler's generals, like the panzer commander Heinz Guderian, wanted to keep driving due east to Moscow, only about 230 miles away. But Hitler ordered them to turn south and take the Ukraine first. They did, losing precious time in the process. Once "Operation Typhoon" was launched against Moscow on Sept. 30, the roads quickly turned to mud during the rainy season and then the temperatures began plummeting. Wrapping themselves in anything they could steal from the civilian population, the Germans still froze—and their bodies were often left stacked like firewood since they couldn't be buried till spring.

Soviet resistance noticeably stiffened. Hitler's insistence on launching an immediate reign of terror in the occupied Soviet territories and the merciless treatment of Soviet POWs, most of whom perished, proved a boon to Stalin's efforts to rally his troops. But he wasn't taking any chances. "Blocking units" were set up behind Red Army lines with orders to machine-gun any soldiers who tried to retreat. The delay of the German drive to Moscow also provided Stalin with time to redeploy about 400,000 troops stationed in Siberia, once he became convinced Japan wouldn't attack from the east. These troops, equipped with full winter gear, soon began to score victories against the overextended, exhausted, freezing Germans.

On Oct. 16, the worst day of the panic in Moscow, Stalin was not yet confident of such an outcome. An Air Force officer saw him sitting at his desk asking himself again and again, "What shall we do? What shall we do?" Two days later, the Soviet leader went to the station where his special train was waiting. As Pavel Saprykin, who was part of the work detail that prepared the train, recalled in his old age, he saw Stalin walk up to his carriage, then pace the platform beside it. But he didn't board it. Instead, he left the station. It proved a fateful decision, signaling that all was not lost.

Vowing to remain in Moscow, Stalin suddenly took charge again, reverting to the tactic he had always relied on—brute force. He declared martial law on Oct. 19, and NKVD units were ordered to shoot looters along with almost anyone who looked suspicious. Surviving members of those patrols, such as Yevgeny Anufriyev, are cautious in describing what they actually did. "We had an amazing order to shoot spies and deserters on the spot," he said. "But we didn't know how to figure out who was a spy." However many Muscovites were shot, the looting and the unrest stopped.
But the memories of the breakdown of law and order, and how close Moscow came to falling, remain sensitive to this day.

Stalin's mistakes were never mentioned in the official histories. Nor do those accounts admit that if it weren't for Hitler's even greater mistakes, Stalin wouldn't have been able to save his capital—and, quite possibly, might never have prevailed in the larger struggle.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

Article was taken from Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20546330/site/newsweek/page/0/

I have heard of the Battle of Stalingrad & The Leningrad Blockade, but never the battle for Moscow. In Moscow itself, there were no memorials commemorating this part of Russian history, of the millions of lives sacrificed in this battle. Russia... what can I say.

The Leningrad Blockade

Excerpt from the instructions of Hitler’s high command on the destruction of Leningrad, dated 29 September 1941:

"...2. The Fuehrer has decided to wipe the city of St Petersburg from the face of the earth. We have no interest in the preservation of even a part of the population of that city

I first read about The Leningrad Blockade last year while preparing for my trip to Russia. It's a piece of Russian history that I will forever remember. The 900 days Blockade was undoubtedly the most tragic period in the history of the St Petersburg (then known as Leningrad). Around 1 MILLION people died from bombings, starvation & diseases. Yet the spirit of the people of St Petersburg refused to surrender. Heroism lived on.

The Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany on 22nd June 1941. In less then 2.5 months, German troops were already approaching Leningrad. The Red Army was outflanked and on September 8 1941 the Germans had fully surroundedthe city & the siege began. The Germans had intended to starve and shell the city to death.

The siege lasted 900 days, from September 8 1941 until January 27 1944. The city's almost 3 million civilians (including about 400,000 children) refused to surrender & endured the hardship & suffering. Food was practically non-existent. At one point, the city's food rations reached an all time low of only 125 grams of bread per person perday.

By the winter of 1941-42 there was no heating, no water supply, almost no electricity and very little food. People ate their pets, even rats & birds disappeared from the city. The paste behind wallpapers was scraped off & eaten, leather belts were cooked until chewable. In the final stages of the famine, parents kept a close eye on their children lest they be kidnapped; the "meat patties" that were sold in Leningrad's slum quarter, sometimes contained human flesh.

People literally fell over dead on the streets, sometimes their bodies lay untouched for weeks. When they were finally hoisted onto trucks, they were so frozen that "they gave a metallic ring." In just two months, January and February of 1942, 200,000 people died in Leningrad of cold and starvation.

Meanwhile, the city lived on. Concerts & plays were performed in candle-lit halls, lectures given, poetry written, orphanages opened, brigades formed to clean up the city. Dmitry Shostakovich wrote his famous Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony & it was performed by the Leningard Philharmonic, broadcasted nationally over radio from the besieged city.

In January 1943 the Siege was broken and a year later, on January 27 1944 it was fully lifted

Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad: unveiled in the 70s to commemorate the heroic efforts of the people & soldiers of Leningrad during the The Leningrad Blockade.

I visited the monument on my last day in St Petersburg. Almost gave it a miss as I was so tired after a full day of sightseeing at Petrodvorets. I am SO glad I didn't. To borrow the description from Lonely Planet - "AWE-INSPIRING"

08 Sept 06: The Hermitage

Woke up to a wet dreary morning. Perfect day for the Hermitage Museum.



Front view of the Winter Palace. Also main entrance to the Hermitage museum.


View of the Winter Palace across the River Neva.


HISTORY OF HERMITAGE
Set mainly inside the Winter Palace, (which used to be the official residence of the Russian Tsars) the State Hermitage Museum is one of the most oldest, largest & most famous museums in the world. Its vast collections are displayed in 5 linked buildings: The Winter Palace alone has 1057 rooms & 117 staircases!!
The baroque/ rococo Winter Palace was commissioned from Rastrelli in 1754 by Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great).

After Catherine the Great took power, the empress ordered the construction of a "Hermitage" next to the Winter Palace. She started the Hermitage's famed collection in 1764 by purchasing more than two hundred paintings in Europe.

Trivial: HERMITAGE literally means "the dwelling of a hermit" - Catherine called her art gallery "hermitage", as very few people were allowed within to see its riches.

Spent a mind boggling 4.5 hours in the Hermitage & I think I covered like 1% of it's incredible collection. But this 1% is more than enough for me... I have seen enough priceless art to last a life-time.


FATCAT'S FAVOURITE PARTS OF THE HERMITAGE:

1. The Loggias of Raphael (The New Hermitage)
supervised by Christoph Unterberger in 18th century

Loggia: architectural feature originally of Italian design, which is often a gallery or corridor
definition courtesy of Wikipedia

This gallery/corridor is a reproduction of Raphael's celebrated Loggias, erected in the Vatican Palace.


Check out the DETAILS in the Fresco's!







2. The Large Italian Sky-light Hall (The New Hermitage)
designed by German architect Leo von Klenze, mid-19th

Owes its name to the vaulted ceiling with glass skylight windows. Features works by the famous Italian artists of the 17th and 18th centuries.
more

3. Painting of Pieter van de Venne and his family
Oil on canvas 1652
Dutch Baroque painter Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613-1670)
Look at the incredible details on the painting - the texture of the man black clothes, the folds on the woman's dress... on an oil painting!



4. Unknown Marble Statue

It's a statue of a woman holding her child... You can see the tender expression on her face.

The pureness of a sleeping child, perfectly captured



5. The Armorial Hall (Winter Palace)
designed by Vasily Stasov in the late 1830s

This very room was featured in an episode of The Amazing Race (I think it was a Road Block?)


Before I visited this place, the Hermitage was like in such a mysterious, far away land... almost a myth...
I marvelled at it in travel programs & told myself that one day, I WILL see this place for myself.

I DID IT!!!!!

Catherine the Great

Peter the Great founded St Petersburg. But the city gained much of its grandeur & splendour under the rule of Catherine the Great. St Petersburg is filled with stunning palaces, government buildings & churches, many of which were commissioned by her. It was her that transformed St Petersburg into one of Europe's grandest capitals.


Statue of Catherine the Great


At her heels are some of her renowned statesmen.. & 3 of her lovers. No kidding

Catherine was the daughter of a German Prince. At age 15, she went to Russia to marry PeterIII, the nephew & heir of Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great) Catherine = Grand niece-in-law of Peter the Great.

The marriage proved unsuccessful — due to PeterIII's impotence and mental immaturity (he may not have consummated it for twelve years?!) While Peter took a mistress, Catherine carried on liaisons with a few nobilities of the Russian Court. She also became friends with the sister of her husband's mistress, who introduced Catherine to several powerful political groups that opposed her husband.

6 months after PeterIII ascended the throne, she overthrew him in a coup led by one of her then lovers. Poor PeterIII was then murdered shortly after.

Catherine the Great then ruled Russia for 34 years until her death at age 67 (longer than any Russian emperor) - the longest reign after the establishment of the Russian Empire in 1721. She was considered to be one of the greatest art collectors of all time. Her vast collections of painting forms the core of the present-day Hermitage collection.

AH FAT SALUTES HER!!

reference: Lonely Planet Russia & Belarus, 3rd edition

GETTING LOST

I love getting lost in a foreign land. I love the feeling of not knowing what to expect. The sights & sounds I come across never failed to amaze me.
Here are some gems that I stumbled upon while I was “lost”. After some intensive research on the internet, I managed to figure out what most of them are...

11 SEPT 06: ST PETERSBURG
On my way to look for the Transfiguration Cathedral (which i never found)

1. Narva Triumphal Arch
(http://www.saint-petersburg.com/monuments/narva-gate.asp)




2. Unknown Church
After all the gold & glitter of the St Petersburg churches this simple, understated church was like a breathe of fresh air.



Unfortunately, in spite of my best efforts, I never managed to get the name of this church.


15 SEPT 06: MOSCOW
On my way to look for this:
Church of the Trinity in Nikitniki




At times, I walked around in circles hopelessly lost & had to hop into trams to seek shelter from the bitter Baltic winds.

sidetrack: most of my photos looked nice & sunny but there were times when the clouds conquered the sun & everything looked like this:


Anyway... as rewards for my suffering, I saw these:

1. Watermelons!


2. Kotelnicheskaya apartment block
One of Stalin's "Seven Gothic Sisters"




3. View of the Kremlin from across the Moscow River


4. The St George's Church
Almost mistook this for the Church of Trinity in Nikitniki


5. Children's World!!



20 SEPT 06: BERLIN

Couldn't decide where to go so just walked around aimlessly & found:
1. Random residential building


Looking for the H&M boutique. Instead stumbled upon...
2. The Berlin Zoo
It's a REAL zoo - Right in the heart of the city!

The sights here were just a small fraction of what I saw while "lost"... Moving forward, I hope that each time I travel, I will have the opportunity to get lost again & again & again...

Disclaimer: I do not like getting lost while lugging a 10kg backpack & trying to locate a hostel or train station at the same time. Apart from not being able to fit into my pants due to too many potato chips, this is one of the shittest things one has to experience.