With a history like theirs, Russians should never have to fear the future

THERE’S a prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg.

It’s an old prison, used nowadays as a museum, called the Trubestskoy Bastion. In pre-revolutionary days in Russia, people convicted of political crimes endured all the usual hardships of prison in the fortress and the bastion, made worse by terrible winters. Peter the Great built the fortress, and had his own son incarcerated and tortured in it.

The bastion itself became known as the Russian Bastille, because of the number of political prisoners it housed. Dostoevsky served time there, as did Lenin’s older brother Alexander. Shortly before the Russian Revolution in 1917, Tito, who went on to become the leader of Yugoslavia, spent three weeks in the Bastion on a political charge.

After the revolution, the new provisional (Communist) government used the Bastion briefly to lock up politicians and bankers who had worked for the corrupt regime of the Tsar. Reading the inscriptions on the wall of the prison, you discover that some of these later prisoners were charged with the most intriguing crimes. Among them were “economic treason” and “financial sabotage”. I have to admit that even though I wouldn’t wish for prison conditions like those in the Bastion to be inflicted on anyone, it does seem a shame that we’ve done away with some of the more useful crimes to charge people with!

That was only one of the fascinating discoveries I’ve made in the last week or so. As you read this my missus and I are on our way back (volcanic ash permitting) from 10 days in Moscow and St Petersburg, courtesy of our daughter Emma. Emma works for a multinational company in Moscow. She has fallen in love with Russia and the Russian people, and wanted us to share some of the things she has discovered.

And what a week to try to discover something about Russia. On Sunday night, the 65th Anniversary of Russia’s victory in the Second World War, a million of us (that’s what it seemed like, anyway) gathered to watch a phenomenal fireworks display over Red Square. Earlier in the day, we had lined the pavements of the immense Tverskaya Street to watch a display of Russia’s awesome military power, as tank after tank rolled through the streets of the city, followed by enormous lorries carrying what looked like enough rocketry to destroy the western world. Again, millions of people turned out to watch and cheer this scary demonstration of Russia’s willingness to take on the world.

Everywhere we went during the week, it seemed clear that over the last hundred years, two great events have defined the character of the Russian people. I’ve always thought I understood the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and what a change it made, not just to Russia but to the world. But I never realised how central and important an event the Second World War was to Russia.

Most Russians, in fact, seem to regard the Second World War as their war with Germany and their ultimate victory over Hitler. Most of us were brought up to think of that war as being fought by the western allies, led by Churchill, Roosevelt and Eisenhower. In our history classes we learned about Russian participation, and about the millions of Russians who died. But in the last week I’ve certainly learned to see a different perspective.

For example, I never knew that the Nazis had laid siege to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) for 900 days. In the entire length of the Second World War it is estimated that Britain and the USA lost about three-quarters of a million people. In the Leningrad blockade alone, almost a million Russian people died, most of them from starvation. And yet they never gave up, their sheer courage and tenacity enabling the city to hold out until eventually the Red Army arrived to rescue them.

At the other end of the country, at the start of 1942, 250,000 German soldiers invaded and almost took control of Stalingrad. If they had succeeded they would have controlled most of the strategic supply lines into Russia from the south. Desperate defence, often manifested in vicious hand-to-hand combat in the streets, prevented the Germans from taking control of the city until help arrived. Then a long and immense battle, costing nearly two million lives, lasted for nearly a year. Stalingrad was the longest and deadliest battle of the Second World War, and the defeat of Germany in the battle changed the course of the war.

The war is still remembered today in every household and every family in Russia. In this week, which is known throughout the country as Victory Week, you see elderly men and women everywhere proudly wearing their medals, and often carrying the flowers that strangers give them on the street. It’s a strange and touching sight.

But stranger still is what happens in the circus. The night we went, everyone – jugglers, trapeze artists, high-wire walkers, gymnasts – was dressed in Russian army uniforms, complete with guns, crutches and bandages, and the entire show was a re-enactment of a WW II battle. Only the circus clowns were exempt, and they were seen as entertainers who had come to cheer up the troops. At one point a villainous looking Nazi, complete in black uniform with a swastika on his elbow, appeared from the crowd and fired at the high-wire act, before being “shot” himself by the soldiers gathered in the ring, who then celebrated with a dazzling juggling display.

BUT I have to say that discovering this different perspective on the way we look at history and the way it affects us, was only one of many discoveries in a fascinating week. We spent several days exploring the astonishing beauty of St. Petersburg, wandering in amazement in the palaces built by the tsars. We spent a day in the country with some friends of Emma’s, experiencing the joys of a Russian dacha (most Russians live in cramped high-rise apartments – but 80% of Russian families also own a little house in the country, called a dacha, to which they escape most weekends of the year). And when they’re there, as we discovered, they welcome visitors with astonishing generosity and warmth.

Most of all, we spent a week wandering the streets and parks of Moscow, one of the busiest, liveliest, and most energetic cities I’ve ever seen. It would take three or four columns to even begin to come to terms with the size and scale of this city, which seems in itself to encapsulate all the change that Russia has gone through. But you’d have to say, if Moscow is anything to go by, then the future of Russia is bright. It’s a city and country that contains far too much uneven division of wealth, and that is still struggling with massive corruption and inefficiency.

But in Stalingrad and Leningrad, and long before that in the dark and lonely cells of the Trubetskoy Bastions, Russians have proved for generations that they are indomitable, afraid of nothing, never defeated for long. A people with a history like theirs need never be afraid of the future.