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Left: Winter Palace,
Saint Petersburg.
Right: Saint
Basil’s Cathedral,
Moscow. Above:
Pavilion Hall of the
Small Hermitage,
Winter Palace,
Saint Petersburg;
Top right: Church
of the Saviour on
Spilled Blood, Saint
Petersburg. Bottom
right: bayan player,
Moscow. Opposite:
Top: soldiers by
the State Duma
building, Moscow.
Left: the Winter
Palace, Saint
Petersburg.
notes of Tchaikovsky’sSwan Lakedraw
to the stage a cast of long-limbed
dancers in white tutus from the
theatre’s own company, and we watch
as the story of doomed love unfolds
between Prince Siegfried and Odette,
the swan maiden. I think of it as a
profoundly Russian tale, because
embedded in the ballet’s tragic story
is an implicit celebration of the Slavic
soul, the cardinal points of which are
pride, perseverance and discipline.
And so, as often happens at the
beginning of a great trip, I find the wick
of my journey – the chance it will offer
to fathom the uniquely intense and
complex Russian character.
Peter the Great built his magnificent
Saint Petersburg in the 18th century,
on the marshy delta of the Neva river
where it empties into the Baltic Sea, to be Russia’s
window on the West. Our 13-day cruise will take us
deep into the countryside and then to Moscow, the
citadel of Russian power and pride. There’s a refrain of
discovery on the journey between these two cities as we
match reality to places we’ve only ever seen on maps or
read about. We’re all surprised by the enormousness of
Lake Ladoga, for example, and later by the similarly
unexpected beauty of the 11th-century city of Yaroslavl,
built on a bluff overlooking the Volga.
Since the allure of a trip to Russia is decidedly
cerebral compared with that of Mediterranean
destinations, Viking River Cruises arranges tours and
lectures tailored for a well-informed and intellectually
curious audience during our four days in Saint
Petersburg. There’s a private-access visit to the
Hermitage, one of the world’s great art museums, and
I join an excursion to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin,
a daytrip south of Saint Petersburg, with its Amber
Room rightly described as the “eighth wonder of the
world”. On a sunny afternoon, a daytrip to Peterhof
Palace, the country estate founded by Peter the Great
in 1709 on the shore of the Baltic Sea, is dazzling; its
gravity-powered Grand Cascade and Samson Fountain
were inspired by those at King Louis XIV’s Château de
Marly. But almost more compelling than these splendid
encounters with imperial grandeur are the intimate
glimpses of modern Russian reality that we get during
a range of encounters and home visits.➤