Travel Notes

River Revamp

Moscow has announced a massive plan to reinvigorate areas along the Moscow River, integrate its largely lifeless embankments into the city, and clean it up sufficiently to make it safe for swimming.

The capital’s architectural committee noted that the waterway that bears the capital’s name stretches 83 kilometers through urban Moscow and could be put to better use as a symbolic and transportation artery for the city.

The architectural team that won a contest for the best river redevelopment concept will build some forty river hubs, to include bridges, river ports, cultural attractions, and restaurants.

It is hoped that seeing the river as a transportation artery will help to relieve the city’s chronic congestion and connect neighborhoods on opposite sides of the river.

The Last Emperor

The Far-Eastern city of Khabarovsk is considering restoring a house that served as a temporary home for Pu-i, China’s last emperor, as a site of interest to Chinese tourists. Pu-i was captured by the Soviet army in 1945 and lived in Russia for several months before he testified at a military tribunal in Tokyo and then returned to China.

The Chinese consulate has asked Khabarovsk to restore the house and has offered to help pay for the renovation.

Research on the emperor’s brief stay in Russia has been compiled by local amateur historian (and retired FSB officer) Alexander Lavrentsov, who collected photographs and accessed archival materials, even mapping out the emperor’s vegetable garden. He now plans to share his information with the new museum.

After the emperor left the city, his small house outside Khabarovsk, and the land it sits on, was turned into a Pioneer summer camp.

Runway Read

Travellers departing from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport can now visit a virtual “library” and download a book for their flight. A Russian online bookseller has put up a mock bookshelf with painted books. To “check out” a book, one scans a special QR code with a smartphone app, which then downloads the book onto the device. Several such “shelves” are located beyond the passport checkpoint in Sheremetyevo terminals and contain classic literature, children’s titles, fantasy, popular science, and even an encyclopedia of human anatomy. All the books are in Russian. The bookseller, LitRes, plans to expand the service to other airports.

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Vysotsky Street

Moscow has officially unveiled a new Vysotsky Street, commemorating the great Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky, who died 35 years ago in July. The street comprises two dead end streets known as Upper and Lower Tagansky, which were only recently connected. It is adjacent to the Taganka Theater, where Vysotsky acted, and a museum named for him is located on the street.

Church vs. State

The Russian Orthodox Church is asking St. Petersburg’s secular authorities to hand over two of Russia’s most famous tourist attractions: St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. Both are currently museums and are two of the city’s most visited sites. Local lawmakers and cultural officials who oppose the change have begun to gather paperwork for a local referendum.

Over three million people visit St. Isaac’s each year, and, according to museum Director Nikolai Burov, admission fees provide jobs and taxes. The Church argues that the building is its rightful property and that its dual role as a museum, which allows for only occasional religious services, does not work.

St. Isaac’s has been a museum since 1991, and it is the largest Orthodox cathedral in the city. Built in 1858 by Auguste de Montferrand, it took 40 years to complete. In secular Soviet times, it housed a Foucault Pendulum.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, narrowly survived a 1930s decision to tear it down, saved by the arrival of World War II. During the war it housed a morgue and later was a storage facility for the Maly Opera. It became a museum and opened to visitors after nearly 30 years of meticulous restoration. It has a parish, yet is still run as a museum affiliated with St. Isaac’s Cathedral.