BY CRAIG STOLTZ
Washington Post Service
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP
A soldier marches past a monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg.
``Cover for me,'' my son Jordan whispers.
We are in Hall No. 19 of the Kshesinskaya Mansion in St. Petersburg, Russia, a faded beaux-arts pile built as a private home but seized in 1917 for use as headquarters of the nascent Bolshevik government. Today it is the Museum of Political History of Russia. Hall No. 19 was once the nerve center of the new regime.
It features a desk lined with neat stacks of bundled documents, a wonderful old telephone, a small bookcase and, in the corner, a blood-red banner drooping between two wooden poles. Jordan intends to creep beyond the rope for a closer look.
I slyly return to the adjacent room to distract the drowsy museum attendant. I figure that asking a question in English will keep her tied up for a couple of minutes at least.
But suddenly an alarm's shriek breaks the silence. The guard slowly pushes herself to her feet. By the time she reaches Hall No. 19, Jordan is back on the lawful side of the rope, his face bearing the internationally recognized look of feigned innocence. The babushka points to the motion sensor on the wall and scolds him in a Slavic flurry. We retreat peaceably.
UNCLE YAKOV
So ends our closest Russian encounter with our great-great-great uncle Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, the man who from this very room commanded the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party of Bolsheviks -- which is to say, ran the party that brought Communism to the country and launched the USSR. Jordan was hoping to sit in Uncle Yakov's chair and get a closer look at what was on his desk.
Jordan and I have traveled 5,000 miles for our long-planned visit to the Motherland. After learning about this Bolshevik Big Dog in our gene pool about a dozen years ago, we've adopted Uncle Yakov as an unlikely Red patriarch, regarding him with a distinctive, and perhaps characteristically Russian, mixture of family pride and remorse. Both of our sons have studied Russian in high school, and I have become proprietor of what is certainly the only collection in the world of Sverdlov memorabilia assembled entirely via eBay.
Vladimir Lenin's right-hand man, director of the Bolshevik Revolution, author of the Soviet constitution, legendary organizer of the peasantry and the party and (deep breath) . . . the guy who delivered the order for the brutal basement executions of the Romanov family in 1918, Uncle Yakov nonetheless remains fairly obscure in Soviet history. That is because he was lucky enough to die of Spanish influenza in 1919, thereby avoiding the fate of most Old Bolsheviks who were still around when Josef Stalin seized power. As it happens, their fate was not all that different from the Romanovs'.
RUSSIAN IMMERSION
But Jordan and I were not in Russia to revise Soviet history, rehabilitate Sverdlov's reputation or even conduct any serious research. We came to visit the country of our heritage and provide Jordan with an immersive language experience, perhaps helping him figure out whether to study Russian in college.
No English-speaking guides or bilingual teachers, no Bolshevik history experts, not even a Russian fixer to help us navigate a country notoriously hard on unassisted American travelers. We'd go it alone, father and son, following the trail of Uncle Yakov around today's Russia: the land of Putin, petroleum and urban sprawl, of mendacious oligarchs, an emerging free-enterprise proletariat and a remarkable abundance of stunning young women wearing boots with four-inch heels.
And, mixed in throughout, powerful echoes of a Soviet past.
Moscow is said to be one of the most expensive cities in the world. Though I can't verify that claim, I can say that after seeing hotels near Red Square going for $350 to $600 per night I decided to use a Russian travel agency that rents out small apartments.
Our flat was in the Kropotkinsky neighborhood, located, maddeningly, just beyond the edge of Moscow tourist maps. It was therefore nearly free of other tourists or English speakers, creating the perfect environment to stress-test three years of high school Russian. Jordan was able to ease us through the many small-shop transactions that provided breakfast and snacks: instant oatmeal of indeterminate flavor, small foil tubs of sweet frozen cream, bottles of the national soft drink, kvass. (It tastes like liquid pumpernickel.)
To sustain the theme of our trip, I tried to view things in the context of Uncle Yakov's life. For instance, it appeared to me that our third-floor apartment had been built around the turn of the 20th century, a period when Sverdlov was organizing workers, getting exiled to Siberia, returning to organize workers, again getting exiled to Siberia. The graceful-if-shabby apartment house across the street was probably built during the years when he was communicating secretively with Lenin, who was hiding in Finland.
But by the time the neighborhood was filled in with cinder-block-and-pressboard public housing units the color of a smoker's lung, Uncle Yakov had already appeared on a 40-kopek stamp.
UNDERGROUND
To get anywhere, we had to negotiate the Garden Ring, a circular highway that marks the former location of the fortified walls of the city. The stretch we encountered was 16 lanes wide, buzzing 24-7 with small foreign vehicles and boxy trucks governed by strictly Darwinian road rules. The only way for pedestrians to cross is by underground tunnels, which are lined with vendors selling pastries, sodas, magazines, fresh flowers, makeup, cigarettes and women's underthings.
To get to Red Square we took Moscow's famously efficient Metro system. Much is made about how the Stalin-era stations are cavernous galleries of Soviet public art. Our neighborhood station was fairly plain, though as we rushed to transfer lines one day I noticed the brackets that attached the stair railings to the wall were brass sculptures of hands. They were beautiful, rubbed golden by decades of passengers' touch. I'd have stopped to take a picture, but I have to say this: Moscow commuters are relentless.
Our next close encounter with Uncle Y came at the Metropol, a historic hotel just outside the Kremlin walls. Like the Kshesinskaya Mansion in St. Petersburg, the Metropol was an architectural extravagance of the late czarist era that was quickly appropriated by the Bolsheviks when they took over. Once again, Uncle Yakov moved in -- ``virtually living in the hotel,'' as some accounts describe it. From its rooms he directed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the principal organ of the emerging state.
After Uncle Yakov's death, the plaza outside the hotel was renamed Sverdlov Square and featured a heroic statue of him wearing a snappy Nehru-like coat and carrying a briefcase. Sverdlov is said to have been a Bolshevik fashion plate, with stylish eyeglasses, an aggressive bouffant hairdo and a penchant for black leather that was adopted as the style of party leaders.
The statue is gone and the plaza since renamed for the nearby Bolshoi Theater. After the collapse of the USSR, citizens groups decided to send relics of the Soviet era to the dustbin of history. Today the sculpture of Sverdlov stands in Park Iskusstv, a kind of outdoor museum-of-exile for former Soviet heroes.
The Metropol was returned to its original function as a hostelry for visiting dignitaries in the 1930s and restored to its art nouveau grandeur in the late 1980s, so there's little left of the areas where my late great-uncle lived and worked. A plaque on an outside wall -- the one facing a dramatic statue of Karl Marx, as it happens -- describes the role Sverdlov played in establishing the government there.
ST. PETERSBURG
To continue our family tour we took the overnight train to St. Petersburg, traveling second class. That meant Jordan and I shared a tiny but handsome sleeping compartment with two others.
Our draw was a pair of Russian yuppies, men in business suits who were clearly headed for morning meetings in St. Petersburg. There was no conversation throughout the night and only a nod of goodbye in the morning.
St. Petersburg is a spectacular pulsing historical diorama, constructed from the ground up in the 18th century by Peter the Great as Russia's answer to the grand capitals of Europe. With its canals and splendid boulevards, profligate mansions and stunning cathedrals, the city was so flagrantly Continental that the Bolsheviks decided to return to the original Russian capital, Moscow, to establish the new Soviet state.
Our apartment was on Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main artery, a street rich with history, coursing with more of those glamorous pedestrians and lined with sushi restaurants, blini joints and banks.
First on our itinerary was the Hermitage. Everything you've heard about it is true. One of the biggest museums in the world, it is built around a collection of art begun in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has grown through the acquisitions of successive czars and, later, the Soviet government. Its collections span prehistory to the middle 20th century and include works by the names around which museum blockbuster shows are built: Titian, Matisse, Rembrandt, El Greco, da Vinci, Cezanne and those ancient nameless artists who etched running animals on stone. There are two rooms full of nothing but early Picassos.
But we were there to see parts of the building itself: the Winter Palace, the home to the czars and, after the Romanovs were evacuated, the seat of the nation's flimsy Provisional Government. It operated there for several months while Sverdlov and others worked from the Kshesinskaya Mansion across the river, organizing the overthrow. The Bolsheviks' seizure of the Winter Palace in late October 1917 marked their symbolic victory.
But in fact the insurgents had essentially already taken control of the government, and by the time the Red Guard bombarded the Winter Palace, the building was home to a few Provisional government holdouts guarded by a dispirited, disorganized, poorly armed militia. The Reds entered the Winter Palace against little opposition and sacked the place.
Today the Small Dining-Room, the place where the Red Guard finally arrested the hiding Provisional leaders, is preserved largely as it was on that day. Bone-white and lined with tapestries, it is indeed small as imperial dining rooms went, with an elegant table and numerous chairs backed against the walls. The hands of the clock show 2:10, marking the time of morning on Oct. 26 when the Bolsheviks took command.
Several other rooms of the Hermitage preserve the salons of the imperial family, providing a glimpse into how the czars lived. Most of them face the Neva River, from which the bombardment of the palace began. As Jordan and I looked around, April icebergs drifted along the river.
Nicholas II's English Gothic-style library, the dazzling Golden Drawing Room, the breathtakingly gilded Malachite Room -- the galleries are stunning in their abundance and beauty. Depending on one's viewpoint, they represent either the apogee of imperial craftsmanship or sufficient justification for a revolution.
Which makes the white-and-gilt October Staircase so strangely affecting. It's the route the Reds used to get upstairs when they attacked. You can imagine the soldiers taking a good look, catching a deep breath and plunging through the portal, utterly clueless about where it would lead. Not too far from the Winter Palace is the Field of Mars (named for the war god, not the planet). It features the Monument to Revolutionary Fighters, a tribute to fallen members of the Red Guard.
Regardless of cause or ancestral connection, it's hard to resist feelings of reverence in the presence of an eternal flame and low stone slabs bearing names and dates. And Lord knows there is plenty to mourn about the history of Russia: not just the whole horrific mess wrought by Lenin, Sverdlov and the rest of the Bolsheviks but events that occurred long before the revolution and those that played out long after, up to today.
And so it's worth noting that on their wedding day, some Russian couples visit the Field of Mars right after the ceremony.
There's something inspiring about the thought of young people breezing by the flames of the past on the day they embark on their future.
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