Today was Valeria Day, the day we got to see our dear friend Valereia Klimova who lived with us for four months in Long Lake when she was a student at Orono High, graduating in 1996. We visited her once before in June of 2001 when we were in St Petersburg with Judy’s mom for our riverboat cruise. Now, 18 years later, she’s happily married to Sergey, a Grand Master chess professional who competes and teaches chess in four or five languages. By lunchtime it felt like 22 years had melted away and Valeria was the same girl we knew back then. Today was the highlight of this trip, for sure!
Not only did we get to see Valeria but we went somewhere few tourists visit – certainly none on the Viking tours: Constantine Palace, today called the National Conference Palace but what some call Putin’s Palace. Indeed, it function’s of the Russian Federation’s President’s official residence in St. Petersburg.
Originally, Peter the Great started construction of the palace at about the same time as Peterhof, which is just down the road a few miles. It always played second fiddle to Peterhof; Peter the Great passed it on to Empress Elizabeth and eventually it became home of the Konstantinovichi branch of the Romanovs. It was finally completed in 1805 but fell into disuse after the revolution in 1917. Nazi occupation completely gutted the palace and it wasn’t until 2001 that the newly elected President, Vladimir Putin, started reconstruction. It served as the headquarters for the St. Petersburg’s 2003 tercentennial celebration, hosted a G8 summit conference in 2008 and most recently was the meeting place for Putin’s talks with France’s President Macron and Japan’s Abe on May 24. Instead of seeing where history was made, Peterhof and the rest, we saw where history is being made.
And what a place it is. Our tour was totally in Russian with Valeria providing some whispered translation, but we didn’t need words to describe the elegance and grandeur of this palace. This isn’t your typical 17th/18th/19thCentury palace either. It’s totally up-to-date. The artwork includes 19thcentury and current Japanese sculpture and other art objects and more recent paintings and sketches from European and Russian artists. It has gardens that seem to rival Peterhof and Versailles (albeit without the fountains). Any Russian would be proud of Constantine Palace as a symbol of the new Russia.
We next went to a typical Russian restaurant for a 3 PM lunch. No, not that kind of Russian restaurant, the ones where they take the tourists. This is a casual dining chain called Tokyo City (with the y in Tokyo replaced with a Cyrillic backwards N). I likened it to an Applebee’s but with a more open and spacious interior, plush sofa-like seats and a much broader menu that included sushi and other Japanese dishes. Judy and I had borscht; she had a chicken Kiev and I a hunter’s stew. Valeria had pasta. It was really fun to eat at the kind of establishment Valeria takes her family for dinner out.
Valeria has a heart of gold and on the way to the cruise ship we stopped at her mother-in-law’s flat to clean out her personal effects so others could move in. Sergey is in Stochi on the Black Sea at a chess event. His mother has recently moved to a nursing home. It was sad to think of her leaving her place of independence, even though we don’t know her. She was a singer and performed at St Petersburg’s Mariinski and a beautiful women judging from the pictures in her flat.
On the way to the cruise ship terminal we commented on how much more prosperous St. Petersburg seems today compared to 2001 – lots of brand new apartment buildings, late model European and Japanese cars (she drives a Volvo SUV). She said, “Yes, Vladimir Putin, when first elected, said he would make Russia “normal,” i.e., more prosperous for the average Russian. And he did.”
Tomorrow it’s back to the usual: a bus tour to Peterhof and an afternoon “panoramic” (i.e., bus tour) of downtown St. Petersburg – just to refresh our memories from last time. Then tomorrow night we weigh anchor (ok, throw off the lines) and head for Helsinki.
