The city is North of the Arctic Circle, so the sun never actually rises in mid-winter. I had been vaguely expecting that I would be encountering a 24 hour night, but no, the sky was actually a bright twilight from about noon to about 4:00pm, as the sun lurked just over the horizon. In mid afternoon, the rosy fingers of a false dawn even made an appearance to the South, before gently fading out again.
“Alyosha”. Still guarding Murmansk.
Murmank hosts a fine resolute Lenin, the charming Museum of the Northern Fleet, and a strangely poignant 30 meter high concrete statue of a Soviet WWII soldier, nicknamed “Alyosha”, still resolutely watching the skies for German bombers.
I had arrived by train from St Petersburg and I took a local minibus over the border to Kirkenes in Norway. The Norwegian border officials asked various slightly strange questions (“Where is your Norwegian exit stamp!?”) and did a particularly thorough search of my pack. I only realized later that they had assumed I must be returning from a short trip from Norway into Murmansk and so they became very suspicious when I denied having any Norwegian exit stamp. Sigh. Normally entries to Western Europe on a UK passport are easy, so this caught me by surprise.
On my way from Vladikavkaz to Astrakhan, I stopped off in Grozny. I’m not sure what I expected from Chechnya, but it wasn’t this.
Almost all the buildings in central Grozny are new, built after the devastation of the second Chechen War. But there is now another enormous new wave of construction under way, with several multi-storey towers and many, many blocks of new low rise buildings. I wandered through what felt like an endless construction zone. It isn’t all prestige fluff either – there seem to be many well constructed new apartment blocks too.
People in Grozny seemed slightly surprised to see a tourist, let alone a foreigner from exotic “Shotlandiya”, but they also seemed pleased and welcoming.
The city has a very different feel from most of European Russia. This is definitely an Islamic city, with most women wearing headscarves and many men wearing muslim caps. And on Friday afternoon there was a large crowd coming out of the grand new mosque.
Chechnya, and Grozny in particular, seems to be going through a relatively stable period at the moment. (The key word being “relatively”, there are still periodic incidents.) There is a lot of armed security sprinkled around the city, but it is generally low key. The city feels bustling and prosperous.
Practicalities: I came in by marshrutka from Vladikavkaz via Nazran and took the very slow 602C train out to Astrakhan. (Note that at Nazran the Grozny marshrutkas arrive/leave at a separate bus stand about 1 km South of the main bus station.) I stayed at the pleasant and friendly Hotel Arena City.
Hotel Arena City – Night Watchmen
I checked out of the Arena City before dawn, so I got to meet two of the night-time security team. They had stopped in for a quick tea break while two more armed guards patrolled outside. While Grozny is mostly stable these days, this is still the North Caucasus, so I guess a little extra security isn’t too surprising.
I’m in Vladikavkaz (“Lord of the Caucasus”), North Ossetia, Russian Federation, where Stalin lurks.
I was visiting the fine WWII memorial park “Monument to Glory”. And there he was, posed casually in front of a giant historical mosaic.
The most surprising part is that the bust is new, added in 2009 by the local Communist Party. Presumably with the assent of the city government.
According to the Lonely Planet Russian guide, there are at least a couple of other Stalin busts lurking around North Ossetia. Lonely Planet asserts that there is a local fondness for Stalin due to ethnic politics: in the 1940s, Stalin left the Ossetians in place but deported their hated ethnic enemies, the Ingush, en masse. Hmm. It’s possible, but it seems a stretch.
As it happens, the memorial park also has a small, touching memorial to the 2004 Beslan tragedy, when Ingush and Chechen terrorists attacked a North Ossetian school.
Also in Vladikavkaz I spotted an unexpected billboard. At first I thought it must be an advert for the Russian equivalent of the History Channel, or suchlike. But no, it’s quite serious. It’s from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the message is “He was a communist! Come join us!” Interesting! No hint of ambiguity or historical reticence there.
I’ve bagged Lenins by the dozen. And even a couple of Stalins.
But a Brezhnev? In the wild? Now there’s a real rarity. But there he was, striding casually down the street in downtown Novorossiysk. So I nabbed him.
This isn’t the doddering, geriatric Brezhnev of the 1980s. This is the rising apparatchik, posed with a hint of rebellious informality, a loosened tie and a jacket casually slung over one shoulder. Not the wooden politburo veteran, but the younger man-of-the-people getting ready to grab power. The Brezhnev who recklessly sped in (and sometimes crashed in) high-end foreign cars.
The most amazing thing about the statue is that it was erected in 2004, long after the fall of the USSR, paid for by local public contributions.
Why does Novorossiysk love Leonid Brezhnev so? Well, Brezhnev liked to emphasize his heroic war record, centered on the Northern Caucasus, including Novorossiysk. As Brezhnev rose in power, so did his remembered heroism and so did the remembered importance of (among others) the heroic battle of Novorossiysk. And so in 1973 Novorossiysk was awarded the prestigious Soviet title of “Hero City”, one of only a dozen such. And the citizens are no doubt grateful for this favor.
The city was formerly host to the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. After 1991, the fleet was partitioned between Ukraine and Russia and both halves are still based at Sevastopol, although most of the warships I spotted had Russian ensigns.
Like Vladivostok, Sevastopol was a closed city during the Soviet era, so it feels strange to be able to wander freely and admire the once guarded fleet. I kept expecting the heavy hand of Soviet Power to suddenly grab me by the shoulder.
The city also hosts an eclectic mix of memorials from the Crimean War, WWII and Soviet periods.
Crimean War Cannon, Malakhov Mound.WWII Artillery, Malakhov Mound.
I was at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to watch the Soyuz TMA-20 launch. It was spectacular. I strongly recommend it. (Tour Logistics.) (More Baikonur photos.)
I found myself in a tour group of six: our guide told us we were all the tourists visiting the launch. There were also some press, and various Roscosmos/ESA/NASA guests, but it looked like there were still well under 200 observers in total. So it was a much more intimate event than a shuttle launch at Kennedy.
Before the launch we got to see lots of cool toys from the Soviet space program, including a lot of the machinery for the Energia/Buran shuttle. This included sitting in the pilot seats of a full-scale Buran mock-up, clambering over a giant Buran transporter vehicle and then waking around a launch pad. The transporter and launch pad felt like relics from some alien civilization: enormous, exotic, and standing mysteriously abandoned.
Our hosts still suffered from a little Cold War competitive spirit: we were vigorously assured that the N1 rocket was the most powerful launcher ever, and that Buran was much larger/better than the shuttle. (This is not quite how Western sources see it!)
They let our little group into the Soyuz assembly building, so we got to see some Soyuz boosters and then a complete Soyuz launch vehicle up close. A lady guard wagged an indulgent finger when I dared to reach over and touch an engine.
The TMA-20 launch itself was striking. On the pad, the Soyuz sits slightly below ground level, with about half of the first stage boosters below ground. So we couldn’t directly see the initial ignition, just a sudden out-pour of smoke and spreading fire across to one side, which for a fraction of a second made me fear an accident, but no, the craft started to rise and then abruptly there was an intensely bright flame, presumably as we could now see the engines directly for the first time, a dazzling bright fireball, rising very quickly into the sky. Then a few second later a very loud rumbling sound arrived. After we first saw the engines, I never saw the craft itself – the engines were far, far too bright.
It was spectacular. Much more striking than the STS-129 shuttle launch I saw, probably both because we were so much closer (0.9 miles versus 6 miles) and because this was a night launch.
They let us visit close to the launch pad (which was the original Gagarin pad!) about an hour after the launch. So we could see the re-assembled launch gantries and the launch pad itself up close. But they wouldn’t let us into the flame pit, so we couldn’t actually feel the residual launch heat. Drat.
If you are a space buff, I highly recommend this tour. I’ve posted a page on Baikonur Logistics to provide more information on entry formalities, flights, tour companies, etc.
