Good Morning, Mr. Lenin

Woke up quite refreshed and ready to go!  Breakfast in the hotel was quite good, in fact I am fairly sure it was the largest and most complete one I have had since our hotel in London’s amazing English breakfast.  We set out by Metro to the Kremlin once again, but not before I noticed a memorial in the station, which when I later looked up was there because the station was the scene of a terrorist bombing in 2004.  This represents one of the saddest parts of modern Russian and a serious problem faced by the rest of the world.  However such concerns were far from our minds, and those of the nearly 3 million people who ride the metro every day.

LENIN

We made our way to the Kremlin’s metro station, which was lined with several rows of quite impressive bronze statues commemorating the soldiers and workers of the Soviet Union during World War II.  Your first stop of the day was to see the Mr. Bolshevik himself, Lenin’s preserved body in Lenin’s mausoleum.  It is only open infrequently so we had to get in line for it rather early and since it is still a very important historical place in Russia, security was rather tight.  So tight in fact that despite my best efforts to remove all metal from my pickets and wrist I still succeeded in setting off the metal detectors and even with a handheld wand the soldier at the security post could not figure it out.  Eventually he gave up and I was allowed in.  But now I can say I aroused the suspicions of a Russian soldier ON RED SQUARE and lived to tell the tale!  Before reaching Lenin’s body we walked past the graves of other famous Russian communists who are buried in the Kremlin’s wall.

Actually going in to see Lenin’s body was quite odd and a bit disorienting.  You walk from the bright light in Red Square to the near total darkness inside the building.  It does not help that the floor, walls and ceilings are painted black and you must descend two staircases to see his body.  I still think it is quite odd to have Lenin’s body on display and he looked quite ghastly lying in a glass enclosure.  I am quite happy that there is a movement to move his body and bury it in St Petersburg according to his original intentions.  After leaving Mr. Lenin to rest in peace, we passed the graves of Soviet premiers and Communist party secretaries, in fact with the cemetery yesterday; I have now seen the graves of every Russian leader who has died since the fall of the Tzars.