The monument in the photo on the left is good, because it gives the monument in the photo on the right a little competition as the most notable tourist draw in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Russia!, which is known to be just a wee bit um... sarcastic from time to time, runs a story called Paul McCartney, come to Yekaterinburg already!, about the monument at left, and how it "took six years to produce and coordinate with the local government."
Compare with the monument at right, commemorating an event arguably of a wee bit more historical import, the murder of the Romanov clan, the event for which Yekaterinburg is primarily known.
Read a story about our short visit to Yekaterinburg after the jump.
(Left photo via Russia! blog, right photo from the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
Our trip to Yekaterinburg, 1991: If you don't speak Russian and if you decode Cyrillic gingerly, one letter at a time, it’s not completely effortless to come up with bottled water in Ekaterinberg, but it is possible, and I bought six litres.
The kiosk, alongside a tram stop, was just big enough to be a walk-in affair, not big enough for four, let alone our steamy tensome. The boys in front argued over what beer and candy to order one each of. I motioned for six litre-sized bottles way up high on a shelf and all kinds of consternation rippled through the mottled impatience behind me.
In a few hours Mirja and I would be climbing aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. We’d be a week en route, so we needed stuff.
In a snap, though, I quickly calculated we could get everything else at the train station. Six litres of water is heavy.
Today was Labor Day in the U.S. On the edge of Siberia, autumn held full sway. E-kat's denizens plodded by cold and damp in an insistent, heavy shower. A lot of the older folks wore long coats. The rain beset.
Passing the afternoon waiting to climb aboard the train, a cheerful Novosti TV story captioned “Dagestan” showed pictures of exploded railroad track.
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Every account of coming upon the Ural mountains speaks of disappointment, and the Urals really are underwhelming, at least at Ekaterinburg. They’re just hills, really, and Ekaterinburg nestles just beyond their eastern slopes.
The Atrium Palace Hotel Ekaterinburg looked so nice on the internet that we mused back home that it had to be either German or mafia. Well, it wasn’t German. It was E-kat’s only “5-star,” with glass elevators and snuggly, fluffy Scandinavian bedding and BBC World on TV.
Still, it had its Russian characteristics: There was the hourly rate: Rule #2: If you stay for less than six hours, you are charged for twelve hour accommodation.
And Rule #7: “The guests who troubled a lot before can not be allowed to stay at the hotel.” Hard to know if the guys in track suits grouped around the lobby drinking coffee were part of the problem or part of the solution.
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Mid-rises glowered down on ancient Siberian carved–wood houses. There wasn’t much spring in E-kat’s civic step. Down Ulitsa Malysheva, a second-tier comrade (maybe it was Malysheva) stood statuary guard near a canal, the flowers at his feet having long since conceded to summer weeds.
Old and dusty women tended the old and dusty local history museum. They turned the lights on and off as you moved through the rooms. The Communism section was closed.
During the revolution, in July 1918, The entire family of deposed Czar Nicholas was shot while holed up at the home of a merchant named Ipatiev here in Ekaterinberg - then called Sverdlovsk - and some days later the beseiged Bolsheviks burned and buried the bodies outside town.
In 1977, local Sverdlovsk party boss Boris Yeltsin ordered the Ipatiev House destroyed. Fourteen years later Yeltsin, then in the Kremlin, financed exhumation of the bodies from the burial pit, and exactly eighty years after their murder, on July 17, 1998 the bones of Russia's last Czar were laid beside the bones of previous Czars in the crypt of St Petersburg's St. Peter and Paul Cathedral.
Here in the museum, black and white pictures of Nicholas and Alexandra were pinned up alongside diagrams of skeletons.
In a dainty candle-lit Orthodox church-let, hardly big enough for the two ancient women inside, Mirja and I bought a tiny cross and a few icons. With a glass, the women inspected the back of each, like kids examine trading cards, and they proclaimed one Nikolai and explained of another, “Blogodot Denyaba.”
E-kat's youth did a kind of country swagger beneath a huge billboard for “Ural Westcom” Cellular – written in Latin, not Cyrillic. Every kid in town walked up and down the sidewalk drinking big brown half litre glass bottles of beer. Maybe it was because they could.
If your baseline was vodka, pivo (beer) was positively a soft drink in comparison. None of these young people – old enough to aspire to fashion and to drink and flirt and smoke – none of them remembered the days of vodka-and-The-State. They were all eight or twelve at the Soviet Union’s demise.
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