Ticket prices for Petergof, the spectacular tsarist park and palace grounds outside St. Petersburg famous for its fountains, will increase 50 percent this year. After the park starts its summer fountain season on April 23, the full admission price for foreign visitors will jump to R700 (around $10). The price for Russian citizens will rise from R300 to R450.
Moscow has restored the giant haut-relief by Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich representing the Soviet people, which was boarded up in the 1960s and forgotten in a pavilion of VDNKh, the Moscow park dedicated to glorifying Soviet achievements. The massive work, which depicts some 1,500 people, was uncovered in the summer of 2014 during restoration work in the park, decades after it was considered lost.
The work was hidden away under Khrushchev for not being in tune with “the new Soviet aesthetic.”
Titled “Glory to the Soviet People, Bearer of the Banner of Peace!” the haut-relief was completed in 1954. Aside from showing a crowd of people from various professions and nationalities with a flag and portrait of Vladimir Lenin, it portrays various Soviet landmarks, like the Dnieper Hydropower Plant and Moscow University’s towering Stalin-era main building. For a time Vuchetich’s work was the main feature at VDNKh’s Pavilion #1, once called “USSR in the Struggle for Peace throughout the World.”
Meanwhile, Moscow City Hall announced it is looking for people who posed for the sculpture. So far the identities of only three persons are known: Academician Ivan Pavlov, actress Alla Tarasova, and Uzbek cotton picker Nazarali Niyazov.
Russia’s State Tourism Agency is contemplating lowering the price of foreigner’s entry visas from $100 to just $20-30. “This is a very high price,” said agency head Oleg Safonov. “We are keeping out a large number of foreigners who would like to visit our country.” Lowering the price, the agency predicted, could increase foreign travel to Russia by some 40 percent.
Parisians have commemorated the Russian nun known as Mere Marie, naming a street in the 15th arrondissement after her. Born Elizaveta Pilenko, she grew up in southern Russia, where her father retired after a career in law. After his death, she participated in poetry circles in St. Petersburg, where she became friends with Alexander Blok.
She later joined the Socialist Revolutionary party, served as the head of the town of Anapa, fled from the Bolsheviks to Europe, lost two children, then became a nun in Paris and was involved in the French Resistance, which ultimately led to her death in the Nazi’s Ravensbruk Concentration Camp in 1945 at the age of 53.
Rue Mere Marie Skobtsov is located not far from the building on rue de Lourmel where she ran a women’s shelter.
Moscow will launch a new urban rail service along the long-neglected and barely used Moscow Railway Ring Line, or MKZhD. Sweeping around the capital in a wide circle outside the third ring road, the MKZhD is being called a Moscow S-Bahn, and will accept regular Moscow metro passes for payment. Moscow authorities said at press time that the first trains will be tested in April and by September commuters will be able to use the system.
Once the system is functional, people living farther from the center would not necessarily have to take the metro into central Moscow in order to reach other outlying neighborhoods. They could just hop on the train to travel, for example, from the Leninsky Prospect neighborhood to City, the capital’s business hub, and then ride to the Botanical Garden after work for a stroll, all without having to use metro lines in Moscow’s overloaded central stations.
The MKZhD was built in the early twentieth century and some of its stations have historic significance. Yet the railway network never became a passenger artery and was used only rarely to transport cargo around the capital. With the city continuing to grow and its commuter networks stressed to the limit, its original purpose may now be implemented.
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