Rusmania • Deep into Russia

26/02/2022

18/02/2022

With the start of the pandemic, the closure of borders and the development of domestic tourism, over the past two years a huge number of glamping sites have sprung up over Russia from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. But like many things here, glamping in Russia is interpreted in many ways, and the quality of such accommodation varies from really luxurious to ordinary campsites in the woods. In addition, the cost might not always be justified, with poor service, shared toilets and showers, and insufficient heating in winter. The main reason for the large variation in the quality of glamping in Russia is the low entry threshold into the business, so many owners of such accommodation came from other sectors and with no previous experience in hospitality just to make quick money. The main complaints of Russian glamping guests are the mismatch between price and quality - not many people are willing to live in cold tents with shared toilets and showers for the price of a four or even five-star hotel.
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11/02/2022

As of December 2021 booking.com has abolished price parity in Russia. What does this mean?
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Previously, hotels were forbidden from selling rooms at less than the price published on the aggregator's website. At the same time, hotels had to pay a commission to booking.com of 15-25%.
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The Russian antimonopoly service has ordered the price parity clause be removed from the contract and fined booking.com USD 17 million.
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Hotels are now not obliged to publish lower prices on booking.com than on their website. However, booking.com is likely to downgrade such hotels in the search results and show hotels which offer lower prices on the aggregator than on its own website first.
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The second big hotel news this year is the departure from Russia of another major aggregator hotels.com owned by expedia.com. From 1 April 2022 it will be impossible to book hotels in Russia through hotels.com. Hotels.com is a popular aggregator in the USA, but in Russia its share is insignificant compared to booking.com (which has up to 80% of the market share), which was one of the reasons for its exit.
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03/02/2022

Russia is not immediately associated with golf, but the number of golf fans in the country is growing rapidly and new golf courses are being built, although their number is of course still very modest - about 30 golf clubs compared to approximately 18,000 golf clubs in the US and more than 2,500 in the UK. Difficult climatic conditions and the short season impose significant limitations on the spread of golf in Russia. For example, only one golf course in the country is open all year round - the Gelendzhik Golf Resort on the Black Sea coast.

Most golf clubs are located in central Russia. The easternmost golf club included in the golf association is in Krasnoyarsk. But golf is played even further east - winter golf is popular on frozen Lake Baikal, which has its own golf association and even an annual ice golf championship. The course naturally cannot boast a variety of landscapes - the game takes place right on the ice of the lake. There are also other challenges - the surface is very slippery, distances in a large open space are distorted, and the bright winter sun can be blinding. The winner must complete 9 holes in no more than 42 strokes. This year's championship takes place on 5-6 March.

One of the best courses beyond the Volga is Pine Creek in the Urals, near Yekaterinburg. The course was designed by English golf designer Paul Thomas - lawns and the terrain follow the relief and reveal to the players the beauty of Ural nature.

This all means that while travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railway, you can always stop and play a round of golf in unusual locations.

28/01/2022

The city of Kurgan is located on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but on the southern branch of the route which passes through Kazakhstan, This means that foreign tourists would need a transit visa to travel on this section and so they tend to stick to the other branches, bypassing Kurgan altogether. In any case, Kurgan is not even that well-known among Russians.
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The city is called Kurgan for a reason – the word is used to denote huge burial mounds that were common among seminomadic pastoralist cultures who lived on the Russian steppe in ancient times. Kurgan's kurgan was almost 100 metres in diameter and thought to have been built during the Bronze Age on the burial site of a nobleman. The mound was not studied until the Soviet era, but as it was looted soon after its construction, almost none of its content survived. It was eventually completely flattened and an ordinary residential district was developed here. Only the city's name, the depiction on the coat of arms and the odd photo recall its existence.
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The historic centre of the city is a grand Soviet-era building in the style of the Stalinist Empire – surrounded by large squares and wide avenues. Some earlier 19th century wooden houses have also survived, and several of the Decembrist revolutionaries were exiled here.
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14/01/2022

Vorkuta is a Soviet town in the very north of the Komi Republic, 200km from the Arctic Ocean. You cannot come here by car as the city is not connected to the rest of Russia by road - a train or plane is the only option. The famous Russian meme "Don't try to leave Omsk" suits Vorkuta better, where all roads around Vorkuta literally lead to nowhere or back to Vorkuta.
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Surrounding Vorkuta are several suburbs that were built next to mines. 13 mines were in operation during Soviet times, but now only two remain open. All the suburbs are linked by a ring road approximately 50km long. The road mostly runs through tundra passing ghost towns that look particularly depressing in winter. Several times a day a bus still runs between the still occupied villages, but not around the whole ring.
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You can also see some memorials on the way - for example, a monument to Lithuanians who died in Vorkutalag, an eerie cemetery with crosses protruding from snowdrifts, or a memorial to miners who died in a horrific accident in the Severnaya mine.
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07/01/2022

In the Russian Orthodox Church, Christmas is celebrated on 7 January, meaning that Christmas falls after the New Year in Russia. This is because when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church retained the Julian Calendar to determine holy dates (Russia still marks “Old New Year” which is the date New Year falls on using the Julian Calendar).
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Christmas in Russia predominantly remains just a religious holiday and Orthodox Christians start celebrating at a midnight service in church on Christmas Eve. Many of the traditional Christmas customs (Christmas trees, present giving and a big festive meal) were made part of the New Year celebrations during the Soviet period, as religious celebrations were not allowed and the Soviets wished to create a nationwide secular celebration. Today New Year celebrations are still much more popular in Russia than Christmas.
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25/12/2021

Merry Christmas from Moscow!

17/12/2021

The most famous and unusual house in the Urals is the traditional wooden house of the blacksmith Sergey Kirillov in the small village of Kunara, which looks like a real gingerbread house with an enormous amount of decorations, details and ornaments.

Sergey spent13 years decorating his once-unremarkable house and completed it to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967. It is decorated with happy children, doves, the sun, bogatyrs, pioneers with Soviet slogans, and phrases from songs, along with many other symbols of the Soviet Union. In the centre there is a profile of Vladimir Lenin, while ornaments and flowers are the most common decorations.

For most of the time the house stood quietly in a remote village in the Urals, and only in the 1990s, when the speed of information increased rapidly, the fame of the house quickly spread, first throughout the Sverdlovsk Region, and then all over Russia. All the more so because the village of Kunara is only 20km away from one of the most famous landmarks of the Urals, the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk.

The blacksmith died in the early 2000s, but he had already made a grave for himself in advance (as is customary among Old Believers) in the same style as his wooden house.

02/12/2021

The Annenkirche is one of the most unusual churches in St Petersburg as this functioning Lutheran church doubles up as a concert venue attracting many interesting artists, directors and musicians.

The Annenkirche was built in the late 18th century, under Catherine the Great, and before the revolution, it had about 12,000 parishioners. Later the Annenkirche, like many other places of worship, was closed and in 1939 it was converted into a cinema where masterpieces of world cinema were shown with subtitles. In 1992, Sunday services were resumed in the Annenkirche, but the cinema continued to operate and a rock-club was even opened here. It was the venue of performances by famous Russian bands Grazhdanskaya Oborona and Leningrad. Later a bar was opened and the first floor was occupied by slot machines. There were plans to create a nightclub, but in 2002 the city authorities returned the church to the Lutheran community. However, a fire then broke out in the church. The facade was restored, but the interior still bears the fire damage.

The shabby, burned-out, and almost post-apocalyptic interiors create an unusual atmosphere of mystique and gloom, especially when there are candlelit concerts. The church holds concerts, exhibitions, film screenings and lectures in the halls and there is even a coffee shop. At the same time, a small room is still available for worship.

16/11/2021

Dotted all over Europe and Asia, from Cornwall to the Korean Peninsula, are mysterious stone structures called dolmen that date from the Neolithic Age, some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Although it is generally believed that these are megalithic tombs, their exact function is still debated among experts. In Russia, there is a high concentration of dolmens on the Black Sea Coast from Gelendzhik to Sochi. In total there are around 1000 of various stages of preservation. They are often located deep in forests or even up the top of mountains, so a lot of effort must have gone into their construction.
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The form of dolmens vary drastically, but the ones in South Russia are, on the whole, rather more complex in design. While some dolmens merely take the form of a stone table with one large rock rest on two smaller ones, the Black Sea Coast ones often consist of a cubic structure of four sides and one top stone, with a hole in the centre of the front stone. Again, it is not sure the significance of the hole, but it is believed that it was there to allow the soul to leave and to allow relatives to continue conversing with their loved one.
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29/10/2021

After being closed for seven years due to extensive restoration work, the Alexander Palace in Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) outside St Petersburg has finally reopened to tourists. The construction of the palace was commissioned by Catherine the Great in 1792 to serve as a residence for her grandson Grand Duke Aleksandr Pavlovich (who later became Emperor Alexander I). In 1905 it became the permanent residence for Emperor Nicholas II, who was born in this palace, and it served as their family home, where they spent most of their time. The family were put under house arrest here in 1917 before later being exiled to Tobolsk and then onwards to Yekaterinburg, where they met their deaths.
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During the Second World War, almost all the interiors and most of the decorations of the palace were destroyed or looted, with the palace being used as headquarters for German troops and the Gestapo. Restorers used old photographs of the palace interiors to recreate the original appearance of the rooms.
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Thirteen rooms are now open to the public: two Library rooms, the Corner Room, the Maple Room, the Rosewood Room, the Lilac Room, the Bedroom, the Suite, Nicholas II’s Reception Room and Study, the War Room, the Moorish Bathroom and the Chamberlain's Room.
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The most interesting rooms are:
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"Alexandra Feodorovna's Maple Drawing Room" - this was the empress' living quarters and five o'clock tea was served here, and the imperial children played and did their homework here.
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The "Lilac Study" looks more like a doll's house and it was a family favourite where they read, played music, did needlework and drank tea.
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"The bedroom" is where the imperial family’s first daughter, Olga, was born. At the head of the bed is an altar of icons - about 700 in all.
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The "Moorish Bathroom" of Nicholas II with a huge pool.
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The "Study of Nicholas II" is where the emperor received ministers, listened to reports and worked.
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# Alexanderpalace