For our second day in St. Petersburg, we had secured a private van for the eight of us. We processed through customs at about 8:15 AM and met our guide, Sophia, who held a sign with our name on it. Right from the start, we could tell this was a great idea, as Sophia was very personable and knowledgeable. She had an excellent command of the English language and a wry sense of humor.
Our primary destination would be the Hermitage, which had been the Winter Palace of the tsars and now is one of the greatest museums in the world. Brooks and Darlene came on this cruise primarily to visit the Hermitage, and on the previous day, they had taken the ship’s tour there. They found the same crowds and lines that we encountered at Peterhof.
Since the Hermitage opened at 10:00, we drove around St. Petersburg, seeing the university, canals and other sites. On the Kissing Bridge, Julie and I kissed, as we had twice the previous day. Sophia frequently mentioned sites associated with influential writer Alexander Pushkin. Amy had read one of his poems aloud on our tour bus ride back from Peterhof the day before and received a Russian chocolate bar with the picture of a baby on it as reward.
We stopped occasionally for photos, including at the Church of Our Savior On the Spilled Blood, which according to Sophia was a building more typical of Moscow.
As you may have noticed from the anecdotal stories about Russia’s royalty, unlike the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, there often seems to be no moral to their biographies. Upon the death of Nicholas the Conqueror, his son, Emperor Alexander II, ascended to the throne and began to institute radical reforms, including reorganizing government administration, weakening the feudal system of noble landowners controlling peasants, and developing Russia’s natural resources. He began developing an extensive railway system to exploit those resources and improve Russian defenses. In 1861, Alexander the Liberator, as he came to be known, freed the serfs, who had essentially been Russian slaves working the land of the nobles. He definitely moved the country in the right direction.
The change wasn’t enough for far left revolutionaries, who believed the teachings of a new philosopher, Karl Marx. They made several assassination attempts, including an explosion on the new railway and a bomb at the Winter Palace. They successfully killed Alexander the Liberator in 1881. First, a bomb was thrown under his carriage by one terrorist, but the bulletproof carriage protected Alexander. When he got out, a second assassin threw another bomb at him, and this one did the trick. A third bomber was standing by in case the second failed. The communists, however, would not take control of Russia yet.
On the spot of the assassination, as you probably guessed, the Church On Spilled Blood was built, financed by the imperial family and thousands of contributions. When the Bolsheviks decided to wipe out religion by destroying churches throughout Russia, they fortunately only closed this beautiful church rather than destroying it.
