On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
ChasM
Following University, four friends and I did the European Backpack Tour thing. Mike, one of my oldest friends, was kind of a Russophile, spoke the language fairly well and had already been to the Soviet Union once or twice at that point, so we decided to route through there first. Following a couple of days in London and a Midsummer’s night in Helsinki, our first stop was Leningrad. We met our fist minder, had our passports taken and were driven to our accommodations, the aptly named Leningrad Hotel.
No, that’s not the Hotel Leningrad. I don’t know what this building is, so I’m just going to tell stories that aren’t about the pictures. Our very first meal in the USSR taught us a very valuable lesson about Getting Things Done Soviet Style. The service was bad. Like didn’t even see anyone come out of the kitchen for 35 minutes bad. It became apparent that at least one of our crew was an Ugly American. I won’t recount the whole experience, but the lesson learned was: bribery. At your very first meal in a new hotel, give your waiter a pack of western cigarettes upfront. This will make you his best friends so just be sure to get his shift hours, or to hook us up with a cool waiter for dinner.
Men playing chess in the park. The gloom is palatable.
We stumbled on some kinda military parade on the most random, narrow street and my buddy Mike was really impressed by all the medals these gentlemen were wearing.
The hair poofies were big on girls under 12. I had another shot of some girls wearing poofies. I cry every time I think about. I’m crying now. We were in the square at the Winter Palace, which is now the Hermitage, and some lines of schoolchildren were moving thru. I managed to skip backwards alongside two adorable little girls in their uniforms and hair poofies and got the perfect, cutest photo ever.
Now, in those days I was constantly switching back and forth between B&W negs and Kodachrome slides, a lot of times mid-roll. Like I’d shoot eight shots from a color roll, then wind it back making sure to stop before the tab goes into the can, then switch to a B&W roll and use a sharpie to note how many shots had been taken. So, yea, too many times I ended up not counting right, or the sharpie rubbed off or whatever and I double exposed one or two or a lot of frames. So it was that the cutest, bestest most award winning social doc picture ever taken in the history of the world was lost when I shot the Eifel Tower over it a couple of weeks later.
The thing about St. Petersburg is that the buildings are massive. Not tall. Just huge, block sized ornate buildings filling all of it. And it feels oppressive in ways different from say, New York City, because while there are architectural details up close, the heavy, stone monotony feels carved in place.
Like this cast-iron/stone combo on a bridge support is all at once absurd and incongruit, yet enduring and inevitable.
I’d never seen swarms of flies inside an airplane until we flew Aeroflot. Nor live chickens.
Anyway, Kiev really is a beautiful city, especially after the oppressiveness of Petersburg. Green, ornate in the most Czarist way. I wish I had more pictures to share. This is one.
And this is the other. I’m sure they’re Royal someplaces or other. Mike could tell you. I don’t feel like looking it up. I take pictures, not do research.
I’ll have two more posts in this series, one on Odessa and one on Moscow.
Cheers!
PS: okfine, this is Mariyinsky Palace
raven
Why do hair poofies make you cry?
Buckeye
The top building looks like St. isaac’s Cathedral.
And the hair poofies were still a thing in July 1988 when I was there for a couple of days.
raven
@Buckeye: Did they make you cry?
J_A
The bottom picture in Kiev is the Mariyinsky Palace, formerly the imperial residence in Kiev, now the Ukrainian Presidential Palace.
And, yes, the top picture is St. Isaac’s dome.
Ken
Not the greatest idea for an ad campaign, but a good agency could do something with it.
The USSR was in many ways a Third World country with nukes.
sab
@Ken: Hey, those flies are flying, much like the plane.
Ken
@sab: But does the plane weigh more, less, or the same when the flies are in flight, versus when they settle? (Old puzzle which causes nearly as much argument as the plane on the treadmill.)
MelissaM
You may have lost the bestest picture of girls with hair poofies, but I think that one of the hair-poofy girl among the soldiers (? police?) is remarkable.
Interesting pictures, thanks.
No name
I am so looking forward to the rest of your series not just for the pictures but the wry commentary.
eclare
Interesting observations and photos, thank you
Benw
This is some good shit. Looking forward to pts 2 & 3
lou
That first photo is indeed St. Isaac’s, once known under Soviet rule as the Museum of Atheism and Religion. I assume it’s back to being a church.
Two Aeroflot memories: One is flying in the 1980s to USSR on Aeroflot. Back then, smoking was allowed on planes and Aeroflot had non-smoking and smoking sections. As soon as the plane was in the air, the Russians bounded out of their seats, lit up and walked up and down the aisles waving their cigarettes and socializing. Some Americans were not amused. The flight attendants rolled their eyes at the complaints.
The other, in 1993. We flew from St. Petersburg to Odessa on Aeroflot. A general and his aides were on our plane (and the seats, frighteningly enough, were easily mobile). The general had a big briefcase. He left it on the plane. My husband caught it and brought it to one of his aides. I always wonder if the general had deliberately left it for an American spy.
JanieM
The gloom certainly comes through. The little girl amongst the soldiers is touching and also mysterious. What on earth is she doing there? Even assuming she’s the child of one of the soldiers next to her, her presence makes it hard for them to seem as … serious? … as they would without her.
Interesting observation about the heaviness of the architecture. I’ve always loved names like “The Winter Palace” and “The Hermitage,” but the reality behind them isn’t so whimsical.
Cool pics.
Chas M
Thanks for all the kind replies.
I meant “palpable”.
I did look up the identity of Mariyinsky Palace after I posted, thanks for ID’ing the first one as St. Issac’s.
Enjoy the weekend!
dr. luba
The hair poofies are called bantyky, and were mandatory parts of any Soviet schoolgirl’s uniform. Non-negotiable. I remember back in the very late Soviet era being at the Kyiv (the preferred Ukrainian spelling) TsUM (big Soviet department store); there were shortages of everything then. The dry goods section of the store had nothing but shelves full of these bantyky, one deep on the shelves.
Bantyky are still worn by young schoolgirls, less frequently than they were, but they are still a thing. And the “first bell” tradition continues–children and their parents come on September 1 to school, everyone dressed up, to hear the ringing of the first school bell and to brings gifts (usually flowers) to the teacher. Nowadays the children wear embroidered shirts on this day rather than uniforms, but many of the girls still sport bantyky.
And the gorgeous blue church tower–that is St. Andrew’s, which stands at the top of Andrew’s Descent, a road that passes through a historical district from upper Kyiv down to the old town on the banks of the Dnipro. Per Wikipedia, it is currently one of four architectural landmarks of Ukraine, which were put down on the List of Mankind Treasures of Five Continents by the world society
Mike in NC
On our Baltic cruise in 2014 we spent a couple of days in Saint Petersburg. My wife attended art school and was blown away by the Hermitage. I remembered some phrases from the Russian course I took in college 30 years earlier. Loved the boat ride we took that went up and down the many canals.
Another Scott
@Ken: In the late ’90s my J and her twin sister went to Ireland on an Aeroflot flight. They had seats in the “no smoking section”. Everyone around them was smoking. They asked the stewardess –
“We’re supposed to be in the no smoking section?!”
“Yes, your seats are the no smoking section.”
:-/
J also said that while they were waiting to take off, the floor under their feet was really, really hot…
:-/
The flight back was delayed an hour or more, while the airline staff rounded up all the drunk Russian businessmen to get them on the plane…
Fun times!! :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
I love this place, experts in every field of human endeavor, that kick in their knowledge when appropriate! From medical statistics, Russian culture, insurance! and so forth. Plus art!
And On the Road, where you can visit anywhere on the planet for a click or two.
Thanks for sharing!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@JanieM: I know, the names are so evocative of Romanov splendor (and the underlying misery of the Russian people). I’ve never been to Russia, but I clearly remember when I first saw Versailles (fabulous!) and understood the origins of the French Revolution.
Origuy
Thanks for the glimpses of the Soviet times. Kyiv and Saint Petersburg are two places I want to visit. I’m looking forward to your pictures of Moscow, since I was there in 2013, when it was very different. The TsUM store in Moscow had a used Bentley dealership in the basement, for example. I’m planning another set of pictures for OTR, coming soon.
SteverinoCT
My 90-yo MIL had 24/7 home aides; most were recruited from Brooklyn and were mostly from the former Soviet -stans, but one was from Russia itself. She said she missed Russia: before the breakup she was content and secure. Now she has to baby-sit crazy old ladies (I’m sorta extrapolating what she meant). One of the aides had been an interpreter for the US Army.