The political history museum may be my favorite museum I’ve been to thus far. This past Saturday, instead of doing my homework I decided to restart Nicholas and Alexandra from the beginning. One of my favorite things about this book is that I feel as if I can open it up at any page and continue on from there, but I wanted to start at the beginning and read all the descriptions of St. Petersburg with a different perspective now that I’ve been here for almost two months (WHAT). I can’t tell you how wonderful a feeling it is to read about a place that you have experienced first hand after having conjured up a thousand different impressions prior to. It’s just so cool to go through every page and to be able to recognize and to put an image to all the streets or monuments that are referenced. Ah! It’s almost as if it’s all some sort of mirage; history, that is. Anyways, I brought this up because as I was reading about Nicholas’ early life in the first few chapters, I made a mental note that I wanted to find Mathilde Kschessinska’s mansion while I was here. Mathilde Kschessinska (can YOU pronounce her name?) was the prima ballerina at the Imperial Ballet, and she and Nicholas were an item before he married Alexandra. It just so happens that one of the buildings of the political history museum is the mansion that used to belong to Mathilde Kschessinska! Ohh how I just LOVE the way the world turns (most of the time).
The mansion/museum is located right across from the Peter and Paul fortress, and it is exactly a mansion (not a palace, if you can distinguish the two). The museum consists of a bunch of large, open rooms that are each devoted to a certain period in Russian history of particular political importance. The first hall that Jackie and I entered (my faithful museum-goer) was the pre-revolutionary room, and the first thing that caught my eye were photos of the Ipatiev house basement, which is where my favorite Romanovs were shot, beaten, and ahh, bayoneted in July 1918. Next to the photos was the framed description of the murder of the Romanovs by Yakov Yurovsky, the guy in charge of their imprisonment in Ekaterinburg from 1917-1918, and the same asshole who passed on Lenin’s order to have the last royal family shot. I couldn’t believe I was actually looking at his note! It’s moments like these, when I find myself in front of a REALLY important political document, that I wish my Russian was far more advanced than it is now. Forget knowing how to ask for directions to the nearest metro station, I want to know what that decree says word for word!
Moving on, next to this document was a huge painting of Nicholas himself, but what was extra cool about this painting was that there were long, jagged slashes through the canvas and through Nicholas’ red uniform. Apparently, when revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917, they bayoneted this painting of Nicholas. CHILLS.
After that I followed the exhibit and into a room on a platform that had a wooden desk with an old chair, and on that desk were a few telegrams written to or from Nicholas, as well as a journal entry or two. What looked like the original abdication document was hanging on the wall above, and to its right were pictures of Alexandra smiling, and that really famous picture of Anastasia and Alexei hugging in a chair. On another wall was a video showing a clip on repeat of Nicholas and Alexandra’s children playing in the water at a beach (at Livadia in the Crimea, I assume?). At one point I realized that I was probably standing in a replica of the room on the train where Nicholas was when he signed the abdication.
This section of pre-revolutionary Russia contained a range of different documents, photographs, books, models, swords, suitcases, paintings, and diagrams. There was a section on Rasputin and another on the Duma and the October Manifesto, which was really frickin’ awesome to see given the fact that I spent last summer researching the October Manifesto and the creation of the Duma, and now I had the chance to see the original in person (is this how marine biologists feel all the time when they get to swim with the creatures they read about? Or how a surgeon feels when they finally get to operate on a real body after years of studying and practice on cadavers?)! There was another section on Bloody Sunday, and one on revolutionary parties. Next (well, we went back in time), I got to see Alexander II’s Emancipation of the Serfs document (HOW UNREAL). There were also documents from Catherine the Great’s time (the kind of documents I have to write papers on for class), and I read a section of a journal entry from an individual who participated in the 1825 Decembrist uprising, in which, crazy enough, he mentioned Galernaya ulitsa, which is the name of the street where Smolny is located (I walk on Galernaya EVERYDAY, and apparently it was an area of serious revolutionary activity in 1825). Hot damn.
The next hall was devoted to Stalin. There were propaganda posters everywhere (Russians do their propaganda posters well), official documents, uniforms (one of a NKVD [pre KGB] agent, another of a gulag prisoner), photographs, old pistols, plates, books, etc... The other halls, which went in chronological order after Stalin, contained all these types of articfacts, of which it would take weeks to read and go through it all. There were replicas of a room in a typical kommunalka apartment, a barrack (a gulag barrack? Jackie and I couldn’t decipher the exact meaning), a typical politboro member’s office, etc... There were models, videos, voice recordings, first drafts of the most celebrated literature (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Dr. Zhivago, etc...), passports, identification documents, more uniforms, a wall dedicated to Yuri Gagarin, etc... Huff, I’m getting exhausted just remembering all the items I saw.
I think I’ve been to more museums since arriving here in St. Petersburg than I have in my ENTIRE life. I will admit that Russians certainly know how to create a good museum. Similarly, they also know how to make good use of an old palace. Hmm, what should we do with this palace on xx ultisa? I don’t know... Turn it into a museum? Splendid idea! (That is how I imagined most museums were created in this city).
I walked through the exhibitions and, like the Museum of the Leningrad Blockade we visited on Sunday, I wished that I had Sam Murphy by my side to see all the Soviet propaganda and Red Army garb. Actually, I wish I had both Sam and Forest with me too (until they would both gang up on me about some petty nonsense, as usual), because I know that they would have melted if they saw all the different rifles, bullets, shards of planes, bombs, etc... that were present in both the museum of political history and the museum of the blockade. There are too many hammer and sickles for my taste, but I know Sam would have gotten such a kick out of it all (you ignorant, commie-loving stupid boy, you [I love you]).
Jackie and I were only in the museum for two hours, but by the last exhibit we were speed walking just to make sure that we had seen it all. We were fading fast, but luckily the museum only costed us “Russian students” 30 rubles (hollaaaaa). There is just so much to see it's not even funny. Part of me wonders if Russians just went through their attics and put anything remotely historical they could find behind glass shelves and called it good enough for a museum. You know, I’ve seen so many plates, spoons, medals, pins, maps, books, folders and just a lot of nick-nacks in general in these museums which just had the fortune of belonging to someone who changed history. I’m not complaining whatsoever, but it’s a little bit funny how easy it is in a sense to take whatever you can find from someone famous and put it in a museum. Like I said, Russians know how to do museums well.
Oh my god. My brain feels melted. Sensory OVERLOAD. I think this warrants some mindless activities... Pintrest? Facebook? House of Cards? All the above ✓
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