Tom and Karissa in Morocco: Tom goes to Russia

Last week I felt pretty lucky. In other years I’ve gotten to take students on field trips to theater performances and to conferences, but this year I was asked to chaperone a weeklong trip to St. Petersburg Russia with my IB seniors. (Unfortunately Karissa had to remain behind to teach, though it is likely that she will get to take choir kids on a free trip to Spain later this year.)

There is a lot of paperwork that goes into a trip to Russia, and a lot of money, so I was glad that the school took care of both! Moroccan visas to Russia cost around $30US, whereas US visas cost $300. Moroccans list a few details about their travels on the paperwork to Russia, whereas I had to forfeit every piece of personal information I knew to the Russian consulate, including the names and contact information of supervisors at all of my previous jobs. Likely the KGB is stealing my identity as I write this, but hey…free trip to Russia!

We arrived in the airport in St. Petersburg to the sight of snow. The kids huddled together and shivered as they would do all week, but for me it was a wonderful break two months of unchanging heat. Over the week, we explored palace after palace, museums, prisons, and stunning cathedrals. The city itself is beautiful, having been planned by Peter the Great to look like the most beautiful European cities he had seen. Canals and rivers crisscrossed the city, and every building face seemed like a piece of art. Shopping centers had carved marble statues bigger than me built into the walls, as if holding the weight of the building upon their sculpted muscular shoulders. Gardens were everywhere, thick with leafy trees and bushes.

The palaces from the imperial days were stunning examples of beautiful excess. Each had far more rooms than the White House, and every room glowed with gold, which snaked up each wall in Baroque florid engravings and which gilded columns and chandeliers. There was an entire room covered in a solid mosaic of precious amber, accented with patterns of gold. In the light of the chandeliers, every wall glowed. Every ceiling was hand painted, and every surface seemed covered by the work of artists. I had learned a little of the history of the conditions of the serfs at the time, so my reaction was a mix of amazement at the level of self-serving materialism as well as simple awe at the beauty and artistry that filled the place.

The churches, also, were works of art. After leaving the first cathedral we entered, filled floor to ceiling with paintings and golden sculptures depicting sacred imagery, and filled also with the sounds of a small choir singing part of an Eastern Orthodox Mass in Russian, one student remarked that he wasn’t spiritual at all, but it was hard not to be in such a place with such music. My favorite church was The Church of the Spilt Blood, constructed after the assassination of a Russian Czar. From the floor to the ceiling, hundreds of feet above, every surface of the church was covered with pastel mosaics. For twenty-five years during construction, artists pieced together the mosaics using tiles the size of my thumb. The effect was amazing and beautiful. I felt so small surrounded by such immense artwork which flooded the senses.

We learned also of the brutal history of Stalin’s time. I stood inside the cold concrete prison cells which held prisoners as they awaited transit to the Siberian work camps of the Gulag. We saw the memorial to the 1.5 million Russians who had died in the two-year siege of Leningrad in WWII. Our tour guide told the story of the starvation in the city and the attempts to escape over the water at night as one who’s father had lived through it, and as one who’s grandfather and aunts all succumbed to starvation.

It was a trip I will never forget, and it was a powerful experience for students. I’ve included just a few of the pictures, though it was hard to capture the immensity of the places I tried to photograph.

Tom