Sunday – 30 June 2013 – Archangel, Russia
Things are not as they seem, or even what they tell you they are if they try to tell you at all. We tied up at the Archangelsk downtown passenger ship terminal shaped like a ship at 6:30 am this morning for a short morning only stay. This is the most southerly extent of the cruise, but we are still less than 150 miles or so south of the Arctic Circle. Since we are a three hour sail up river, south from the White Sea, the ocean's influence on the weather is much less than the other Russian ports we visited. It's now 11 am and it's already 75 degrees (F) out with a forecast high in the 80s. I just put on shorts. Finally! Back towards rainy and cold Norway when we sail soon enough.
The four hour "Archangel City Overview" excursion left promptly at 7:30 am this morning (and returned at 10:45 am. Time sometimes moved quickly on a ship's tour. Sometimes very slowly. Ya never know.) There has been no explanation either from the ship's staff so far as to why this Sunday morning stop and departure had to be so early as we were to sail at 1:30pm. My guesses were in less likely order: 1) tides in the river, 2) Russian authorities being what they are, and 3) the Captain of Silver Cloud trying to save a few hundred pounds of bunker fuel. It was hard getting up for the early tour as we had not quite gotten over the two hour time change of a few days ago. The life of the pilgrim is never easy, as I say to my fellow passengers when they gripe about anything, like the ship now charging for special orders of caviar.
The tour was the only one of three offered here that presented a good orientation to this surprising city. The others were specialized: one of an old White Russian family wood workshop and the other to a distant wood craft museum. I guess there are lots of forests around. But what Archangelsk (the preferred English spelling and pronunciation) had to show us was that this city of 350,000 has money. No, it ain't Paris, but neither is Paris anymore I suppose. Despite some Soviet era hammer and sickle buildings--note the "CCCP" on a building at the port--and the main street named for Lenin, this place had some ornate original wooden buildings, decent looking apartment structures that look nothing like the falling apart Soviet era blocks one sees in just about every other Russian city, and a bunch of public parks with well maintained cultivated flower beds. There was many architectural delights reflecting the ship building industry that was Peter the Great's motivation for funding the city in the 17th Century. (See picture of the passenger ship terminal above.)
Uniquely for Russia, there were a bunch of statues that were not just soldiers and war memorials, but seemingly unique whimsical public art of artists and poets and even a "mascot street person", as described by our guide. One guest told me he saw a bunch of automated street sweepers on this early Sunday morning. Of course, some of the infrastructure was less than perfect. This is Russia. The electric bus line catenaries had fallen apart and the electric city buses replaced with oil burning diesels. The guide said the electric buses were removed because, "The streets are so narrow." This is Russia, and straight answers are not always forthcoming.
I asked the ship's political destination lecturer, Mark, who had come along on our tour where this civic wealth came from. Just about every city I've been in Russia, including at St. Petersburg where even the Hermitage is in disrepair, are gray, dingy, dirty, and the best that they have to offer is either a separately run tourist attraction (e.g. the Summer Palace outside of St. Petersburg) or a sad but sincere effort like the "Oceanarium" trained seal show in Murmansk. Unlike Murmansk, however, Archangelsk's harbor is frozen for months each year and only usable when one of atomic powered ice breakers gets through, and the city is very isolated as it is surrounded by thousands of acres of dense forest. The rain line is more tenuous than that of Murmansk, and there is little manufacturing or even significant fisheries.
Mark said he honestly didn't know and went to our perky guide. (The female tour guides in Russia all seem to be perky as well as reciting a fixed kind of recorded like narration. More on this below.) She said that she didn't think that her city was well off, even when we told her how poor and dirty Murmansk seemed. She apparently didn't know the answer to my question either. Her only comment was that she agreed that Murmansk was awful but not as awful as her native Archangelsk. Of course, feeling sorry for oneself is a Russian thing, but not exclusively a Russian trait nowadays.
Our sleepy Tour Bus #2 went immediately after leaving the port to the "War Memorial Cemetery" where stones commemorate Allied soldiers from WWI who are buried elsewhere in Russia. The adjacent Russian cemetery was much more interesting, but some of the ornate burial sites were decaying due to the practice of leaving the maintenance of the plots to the children of the dead. That tradition, of course, has an intrinsic flaw. The guide proceeded to point out various buildings, monuments, and cultural centers (I conjectured as to what goes on in the "Children's Cultural Center"), always drawing our attention to, say, the right side of the bus when another war memorial or hammer and sickle appeared on the left side. She even missed the nude beach, quite a remarkable sight at north 64d 31m latitude.
We enjoyed seeing some of the other touristic sights in the sleepy Sunday morning lack of traffic including a very well maintained museum built in a 1600s fortress merchant market warehouse(!) The museum was as well done as any in the Western world, but each sentence of the local docent had to be translated into English by our tour guide. Thus, the time in the museum was exactly twice as long, but it wasn't really enough time to check this place out and maybe get some insights. The museum was fascinating as it covered most of the history of deep Northern Russia.
Lecturer Mark and I never did figure out where all the wealth comes from in this major city almost 1000 miles north of Moscow and further north than Fairbanks. My guess is that Archangelsk has found the American secret to making money: shuffle paperwork—preferably paper money and equities—around and do lots of import and export trading. Manufacturing and agriculture now may not be the way to wealth, although someone somewhere has to do these things. Maybe in Murmansk with predictable results. But Archangelsk does have those millions of acres of forest to the south.*
*Later in the afternoon during my elegant al fresco lunch (where I turned down the fish cakes when told they were a commercially frozen product—frozen fishcakes on Silversea? Not a good sign) I asked the ship's destination lecturer, Corey, why only Archangelsk of the Russian cities I've visited appears to have a developed real middle class and some civic pride. There obviously was money being spent here, by citizens and government both. His answer was that unlike the less than 100 year old Murmansk (which was dictated to exist by the Soviets), Archangelsk was founded over 400 years (as dictated by Peter the Great). As far as it goes that doesn't really answer the question, but as we sailed out we saw dozens of huge, really huge, saw mills, endless piles of saw dust, and gigantic floats of logs. Clearly Archangelsk's lumber industry is one big part of the answer, but I will try to confirm my theory after we're home that the city's prosperity is because now it's the "business of business"—banking, inport/export, and investment--that funds the happy sail boaters and beach goers we saw along the river and the dozens of folks on the pier enjoying the one of three warm days of Summer, 2013.
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