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Bedales students History Tour of Russia

The History Department Goes East
by Jonathan Selby

The History Department has recently returned from a Tour to Russia in connection with the A level course of 110 years of Russian History that A level students follow in their last year. The tour began in Moscow and included access to the inner sanctum of The Kremlin, and the fabulous gilded State Rooms of the  Grand Kremlin Palace, whose refurbishment under Yeltsin has never been costed (and was the subject of major scandal).This not normally open to tourists.

Lenin’s tomb was unfortunately closed whilst his embalmed body underwent ‘treatment’ but Red Square impressed us all and led to a re-enactment of a soviet joke ( A man is hopping across Red Square with one shoe on. Someone asks,”Comrade have you lost a shoe ?”  The reply : “No I’ve found one.” If you don’t get it, it is a joke about consumer shortages in Russia in Communist times). In Moscow, we visited the New Tretyakov Gallery ( with its Socialist Realist Art from the Stalin era), the ballet and the circus. In the latter, unlike Britain, trained animals are a major attraction and a sketch which involved dressing monkeys up as Jews was deemed acceptable.

In the Novodevichy Cemetery we saw the graves of Khrushchev ( designed by an artist whom Khrushchev had rudely insulted) Gogol ( buried alive) and Shostakovitch amongst many. From Moscow, the 30 students took an overnight sleeper train to St Petersburg, the centre of The Russian Revolution we had studied back in Petersfield. Here we visited the Hermitage with its extraordinary and very large collection of paintings from Delaroche’s picture of executed Charles The First ( AS History Course focus) to Impressionist and Classical Art. A  tourist highlight of Proletarian Culture is always provided by the evening of traditional Russian Folk Music and Dancing (“Feel Yourself Russian”) and on the evening Toby Denton and Ashton Thorp were lucky enough to be called on stage. The audience loved it even if they did not.

The Peter Paul Fortress (burial place of all Tsars since the seventeenth Century, including the last Tsar and his family), The Palace or Revolution Square ( site of Bloody Sunday in 1905) also featured on our tour alongside less frequently seen sites such as Kirov’s Apartment (Kirov was Party Chief in St Petersburg until he was assassinated in 1934. His cap with the bullet hole is proudly displayed) and The Smolny Institute which was the centre of Revolutionary Organisation in 1917. Students stood and spoke from the podium where Lenin had announced the Revolution on October 25th 1917. During the week we also savoured Borstch and Stroganov and Cabbage Pie and drank teat from a Samovar.

We saw aspects of the whole of our syllabus, from the Cathedral of Spilled Blood where Alexander the Second was assassinated at the start of our course, through Lenin’s Revolution to Khrushchev’s almost silent ending ( he merited one line, ‘Comrade Khrushchev died yesterday’ in Pravda) where our course ends. Seeing what has been studied made the tour especially focussed and absorbing and the significant contrast in culture made for constant surprise.

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