Crosses

This entry is long, because this has been one of the more interesting weekends. (Judging from a sample size of three, as I am occasionally forced to remind myself). Chin up, what?

There was, unfortunately, no experimental Jewish music concert on Friday. I’m not sure whether this was because we couldn’t get tickets, or because the weather was terrible; it was a little disappointing either way. Instead I attended the last segment of the NYI Cogfest (back-to-back five-minute summaries of complicated linguistics papers, not always much more comprehensible for being in English), and went home. At about 10:30 my host mom came in out of the rain and poured out a couple shots of vodka—one for her and one for me, probably because vodka is the prescribed remedy for being caught in the rain and it’s better not to drink alone. There’s no telling, though.

Saturday we went to Yusupovsky Palace. The Yusupovs were a very wealthy family (ducal, I think) whose art holdings formed a substantial portion of the Hermitage’s initial collection, and their palace is (by a kind of bureaucratic luck) one of the best-preserved in Russia. The Soviets gave it over to some sort of teachers’ association for use, so the interiors and even most of the original furniture are still in great condition. I think it would be a more tolerable living place than, say, the Winter Palace—most of the rooms are almost normal-sized, and it looked like if you had to you could get up and walk to the bathroom in only, say, five or ten minutes. Oh, and Yusupovsky Palace is the place where Rasputin was murdered.

The story surrounding Rasputin is…interesting. He was very popular with the tsar’s family (and the tsar), but most people thought he had too much influence with the tsar, and that this made the tsar look weak. So the Russians pretty much hated him. Eventually, the aristocracy decided he needed to be done away with, so they conspired to kill him. Felix Yusupov invited Rasputin to meet his wife Irina, who was cousin to Nicholas II. Irina was having a party, though, so Felix kept Rasputin entertained while they were waiting for Irina by feeding him poisoned cakes and poisoned wine.

Well, actually Irina wasn’t there at all; they just had four or so other conspirators upstairs pretending to have a party. After a couple of hours this began to wear pretty thin as an excuse, but at that point Rasputin was still inexplicably not dead. (We were told that he had eaten enough cyanide to kill seven men). So Felix went upstairs to get a gun, came back down, and shot Rasputin in the back (abdomen wound—maybe not immediately fatal, but generally mortal). After a couple minutes of lying on the ground bleeding, Rasputin apparently got up, tried to strangle Felix, and then ran back outside. Then the conspirators, you know, shot him in the back three or four times, drove him to the other side of Vasilevsky Island, and dropped him in the Neva. And killed Felix’s dog, so that they could claim it had gone mad and explain to the police why shots had been fired and there was blood all over.

The qualification to all this is that it’s not really accurate to say that there’s an interesting story surrounding Rasputin’s death, since that implies a kind of unity to the accounts that just isn’t there. For one thing, all of the conspirators’ memoirs say different things. For another, Rasputin had clearly been beaten before being thrown in the river (not the kind of thing one would have expected from these gentlemen), and he somehow got shot square in the forehead, even though everyone was firing at his back. And so forth. Even a cursory search (which is what I’ve performed) reveals variations; this is just the version I heard.

So much, more or less, for Saturday. Sunday we went to the prison Kresti (Crosses), which took much longer than anticipated. We waited for about an hour for our bus to arrive; eventually we gave up on that and decided to go in gypsy cabs. No, really. Julia or Nastya or Olya (our coordinator and assistants) waved down cars, negotiated fare, and sent us off in groups of [car capacity]. That went on until an empty minibus from a hotel stopped, and the rest of us rode on that.

Gypsy cabs; ok. But who ever heard of a gypsy bus? Even Nastya and Olya were impressed by that.

Once we got to the prison, we had to wait for about another hour to arrange to get in. The bureaucracy is…significant. It gave us time to go around back, though, where we discovered that there was a kindergarten next to the prison.

I’m not kidding. I took a picture, and in the same photo you can see children playing on the slide, and barbed wire. If the quality were a little better, you could also see the sign that says ‘kindergarten’.

I don’t have any pictures after that, because no cameras and no digital devices of any kind are allowed in the prison. It was probably one of the least pleasant places I’ve ever visited. All of it is very run down, and the entire time we were there, there were inmates peering out of the windows and the peep holes of the cell doors at us, or crouching down in the corners of the courtyards to watch us go by. The cells, by the way, are probably about five feet by ten, and hold three to six people. They also have rooms with cages in them where the more dangerous inmates can consult with advocates, and little boxes that have only a bench and a single hole above the door and enough room to sit, where inmates can be confined—though never for more than an hour at the very most.

There was also a museum, which had things like photos of tattoos the inmates had done themselves, and a display of radios they had managed to construct and hide in books, and devices they had made out of newspapers to smuggle cigarettes and toilet paper between cells, and a case full of various kinds of shivs.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a very long tour.

Still with me?

Once that was done, some of us went to buy tickets to Moscow for next weekend. This process actually took two days; Saturday we harassed the people at the information windows (rotating to prevent them from becoming too exasperated), Saturday evening we double-checked, and Sunday we bought tickets—after we harassed the information people again for a while. The result, though, was good—we now have tickets to Moscow (in third class on Friday from 1:00 to about 9 or 10), and tickets from Moscow (in a compartment on Sunday from 8:00 to about 4 or 5). All of this cost only 1853 roubles a person (about $75). That doesn’t include any kind of accommodation on Friday or Saturday nights, though, so it should be interesting.

Ok. That’s all for now.