Category: Travel
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Brezhnev's Rolls Royce & Stalin's ZiS
I took a trolleybus out to the delightful Riga Motor Museum. This hosts a fine collection of historic vehicles, but most famous is their exhibit of classic Kremlin cars, acquired back when Latvia was still an SSR. Their finest piece is probably the preserved wreckage of Leonid Brezhnev’s beloved Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. (Apparently there…
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Tretyakov Sculpture Garden
Moscow’s Tretyakov Sculpture Garden (aka the Art Muzeon Sculpture Park) hosts a wide variety of modern sculptures, including a number of abandoned Soviet statues. These statues appear to be consciously presented as debris from a past life – this doesn’t seem like an attempt to glorify the Soviet past, but merely to record it. It…
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Astana's Cosmonauts
Astana takes pride in being Kazakhstan’s visionary new capital. But in the older parts of town there are also many traces of the Soviet past. My favorite of these is a fine Soviet era mosaic outside the train station, showing a spectacled engineer and a waving cosmonaut. A nice reminder of Kazakstan’s broader role in…
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Vladivostok and the Pacific Fleet
When I was a lad, Vladivostok was impossibly exotic, remote and inaccessible. It was a closed city, the home of the jealously guarded Soviet Pacific Fleet, inaccessible to regular Soviet citizens, let alone wicked foreigners. Well, nowadays a standard Russian tourist visa will let you enter Vladivostok and you can wander at will around the…
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A Day in Transdniester
On my way from Chisinau to Odessa, I passed through Tiraspol, the capital of the strange territory of Transdniester (aka Transdniestr, or Transdnestr, or Transnistria, or Transdniestria). This is a narrow slice of Moldova with an ethnic Russian majority. Back when the USSR was dissolved, these good folk were alarmed to discover that Moldova was…
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Zoroastrian Yazd
The city of Yazd is the main remaining Zoroastrian center in Iran. Zoroastrianism is (along with Christianity and Judaism) one of the three recognized and protected religious minorities under the Islamic Republic’s constitution. So worship and pilgrimages are officially tolerated, although probably not exactly encouraged. I hired a car and guide for the trip out…