Autobiographical

In the previous entry, I intimated that we were going to Saint Petersburg. Of course back in 1984 it was known as Leningrad. The city had initially been called Sankt Petersburg after Saint Peter by Tsar Peter the Great in June 1703, becoming the capital of the Russian empire in 1712. A little over 200 years later it was renamed Petrograd (city of Peter) by Tsar Nicholas after the start of World War I with Germany in order to remove the German words Sankt and Burg. And in 1924 it was renamed Leningrad after the death of Vladimir Lenin. It was also termed the Northern Capital of Russia and was the second largest city after Moscow in terms of population (approximately 4.8 million), albeit the country’s smallest division by area – 1,439 square kilometres. A port city situated on the River Neva, it is also home to countless palaces and museums, a legacy of the time when the royal court and parliament were based there.

Departing Voronezh for a week in early November 1984 where it was minus 2°C, the pilot announced at the time of our descent that it was minus 19°C. Initially, we all thought that this was a weak attempt at humour. Soviets didn’t joke about the weather, unfortunately. I had never known such bitter cold or icy conditions. 

Although to be honest, after the disappointment of Moscow and Voronezh, this was the only negative. Nothing matched the beauty of the official buildings there, in particular the State Hermitage Museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of paintings – 3 million items, although naturally only a tiny percentage are exhibited at any one time. Similarly the Kirov Theatre was recognised internationally for the quality of its operas and ballets. The tours organised by the state tourist monopoly Intourist did deliver on their promises. 

We also found from English students based in the city one place where the food was amazing, compared to the fodder we had been living on – the buffet at the Hotel Evropeiskaya, now known as Grand Hotel Europe. So we were regular visitors during the week.

The atmosphere was also much freer, no doubt as it was no longer the capital and also due to the city’s proximity to Finland, attracting a significant number of Finnish tourists throughout the year. We were invited by one Russian couple to their flat in a suburb where we were treated to an inordinate number of pancakes with various fillings, including caviar which was cheap back then. It has to be said that the blocks of flats looked dreary, but you could probably say the same name for a number of countries in the early 1980s. 

At the same time, however, the housing was virtually identical to similar accommodation in other parts of Russia, indicative of the tight control of the Soviet state on architecture when Leonid Brezhev had been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (from 1964-1982). 

This peculiar aspect is reflected in one of the best Soviet tragicomedies from the late 1970s, Eldar Ryazanov’s The Irony of Fate, played on TV every year on New Year’s Eve, where the hero gets totally inebriated in a bath house on New Year’s Eve and is mistakenly put on the plane to Leningrad in place of one his friends. Drunk, he takes a cab to a flat that has an identical address to his mother’s pad in Moscow and ends up falling for the actual resident, a stunning actress who was actually Polish – Barbara Brylska.   

So Leningrad was a breath of fresh air. And then after that welcome break for a week, we headed back to Voronezh, then Moscow, and the UK. While we were glad to be returning home, we all had mostly good memories of our time in the Soviet Union. And in future I would go back there for both a short and long stay. But that is another story.