From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

From the boundary between Europe and Asia the train takes us onwards past Ufa to Samara. The hills of the Urals become lower and the country flattens out again. Snow lies everywhere in a continuous sheet, and peasants are seen on the roads with sledges laden with hay, fuel, or provisions. At Batraki we pass over the Volga by a bridge nearly a mile long. The Volga is the largest river in Europe; it is 2300 miles long, and has its source in the Valdai hills (between St. Petersburg and Moscow) at a height of only 750 feet above sea-level. It flows, therefore, through most of Russia in Europe, traversing twenty governments. The right bank is high and steep, the left flat; and at its mouth in the Caspian Sea it forms a very extensive delta. The Volga is navigable almost throughout its length, and has also forty navigable tributaries. The river is frozen over for about five months in the year, and when the ice breaks up in spring with thundering cracks it often causes great damage along the banks. Crowds of vessels, boats, and rafts pass up and down the sluggish stream, as well as passenger steamers built after the pattern of the American river boats. By the Volga and its canals one can travel by steamer from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, and from the Caspian Sea by the Volga into the Dwina and out to the White Sea. The Volga is not only an important highway for goods and passengers, but also an inexhaustible fish preserve; indeed the sturgeon and sterlet fisheries constitute its greatest wealth.

PLATE XXIII. THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

When the train has rattled heavily and slowly over the Volga, it proceeds west-north-west into the very heart of holy Russia, and late on January 7, 1909, we roll into the station of Moscow, the old capital of Russia.

Moscow is a type of the old unadulterated Russia, a home of the simple, honest manners and customs of olden days, of faith and honour, of a child-like, pure-hearted belief in the religion of the country, the Catholic Greek Church. In its crooked, winding, badly-paved streets swarm Tatars, Persians, and Caucasians, among Slav citizens and countrymen, those inexterminable Russian peasants who suffer and toil like slaves, look too deep into the vodka[20] cup on Saturday, yet are always contented, good-tempered, and jovial.

The town stands on both sides of the small Moskva River, which falls into the Oka, a tributary of the Volga, and is inhabited by more than a million souls. The Kremlin is the oldest part, and the heart of Moscow (Plate XXIII.). Its walls were erected at the end of the fifteenth century; they are 60 feet high, crenellated, and provided with eighteen towers and five gates. Within this irregular pentagon, a mile and a quarter in circumference, are churches, palaces, museums, and other public buildings. There stands the bell tower of Ivan Veliki, 270 feet high, with five storeys. From the uppermost you can command the whole horizon, with Moscow beneath your feet, the streets diverging in every direction from the Kremlin like the spokes of a wheel, and crossed again by circular roads. Between the streets lie conglomerations of heavy stone houses, and from this sea of buildings emerge bulb-shaped cupolas with green roofs surmounted by golden Greek crosses. Large barracks, hospitals, palaces, and public buildings crop up here and there. Right through the town winds the Moskva in the figure of an S, and the walls of the Kremlin with their towers are reflected in the water.

In the tower of Ivan Veliki hang thirty-three bells of various sizes. At its foot stands the fallen "Tsar" bell, which weighs 197 tons and is 65 feet in circumference. In its fall a piece was broken out of the side, and it is therefore useless as a bell, but it is set up on a platform as an ornament.

Within the walls of the Kremlin is also the Church of the Ascension of the Virgin, which is crowned by a dome 138 feet high, with smaller cupolas at the four corners. Standing in the centre of the Kremlin, this church is the heart not only of Moscow but of all Russia, for here the Tsars are crowned, while the bells of Ivan Veliki peal over the city. The interior of the cathedral presents an indescribable effect. The light from the narrow windows high up is very dim, and is further dulled by gilded banners with pictures of saints and crosses. The temple nave is crammed with religious objects, iconostases and icons, sacred portraits of solid gold with only the hands and faces coloured. Wax candles burn before them, from which the smoke rises up to the vaulted roof, floating about the banners in a greyish-blue mist.

To the orthodox Russians the Kremlin is almost a holy place. They make pilgrimages to its temples and cloisters with the same reverence as Tibetans to the sanctuaries of Buddha. "Moscow is surpassed only by the Kremlin, and the Kremlin only by heaven," they say.

Perhaps no year in the history of Moscow is so famous as the year 1812. Then the city was taken by Napoleon and the Grande Armée. The Russian army abandoned the city, and the citizens left their homes. Napoleon entered on September 14, and next day the city began to burn. The Russians had set fire to it themselves in several places. Three-fourths of the city lay in ashes when the French evacuated Moscow after an occupation of five weeks and the loss of 30,000 men. The remembrance of this dreadful time still survives among the populace.