Alexey Smirnov's blog

I have visited Moscow last week to do some business. Luckily I got things done at half past 10 in the morning and had plenty of time to enjoy Moscow attractions.

I have visited Christ the Savior Cathedral which happened quite randomly. I walked into a tourist booth and found out that a guided tour to the top of the church was just beginning. Because of the stunning view that opens from there I decided to join the tour. Taking pictures from above was free of charge and I used my iPhone to take pictures and Microsoft ICE to build a 360-degree panorama. Here it is:

In fact, the guided tour began inside the Cathedral with an explanation of the wall paintings. They are amazing! The name of the artist who painted many of those is Nikolay Muhin. The Cathedral contains many interesting icons and remnants of Saints. Then we used the elevator to get to the roof and enjoyed views of Moscow. Then we went down to the ground floor and visited a museum also located in the Cathedral. A number of old icons are located there.

Then I went to a museum of Ilya Glazunov located next to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Earlier I have read his book that describes life of his family over the last two centuries (19th and 20th) and how events in Russia were tightly intervened with lives of his relatives and his own. The museum is absolutely fantastic. It has four floors and many halls. Sometimes it seems that many people worked on those paintings, not just one person because they are dedicated to various themes: from Russian history to works of Dostoevsky to more or less modern art that depicts events in Russia in late 1980s.

I have bought a photocopy of this wonderful painting. After visiting the museum I went back to the railway station and left Moscow on an afternoon train to Nizhny Novgorod. I went in a sitting cabin which had 6 chairs but only 2 people were there so our trip was quite comfortable.

Also, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior I bought a few books including life of Sergey Radonezhski. I want to read them but only after I finish reading History of Serafimo-Diveevsky monastery, an amazing book that describes life of Serafim Sarovsky and related events. Overall, it seems to me that Moscow is looking a lot more like Russian-Orthodox capital because of various events and exhibitions dedicated to Russian history and culture. I enjoyed my trip to Moscow.

In August lots of forest fires were burning in Russia. Luckily, I spent this time in countryside far away from any fires. But to begin with, here is a video that describes the situation. Basically, this is what it looked like in our region of Nizhny Novgorod even though I guess the video was shot in south of Russia.

On July 29th I went with my parents to a summer camp at Vetluga river, approximately 150 km north-east of Nizhny Novgorod. Because it felt extremely hot in the city because of the heat wave that stayed in Russia for 3 months, it felt very refreshing in the camp. We have enjoyed our stay in the wooden houses during those two weeks when people in cities and certain villages suffered a lot. Every morning we were swimming in a lake and then after breakfast in Vetluga. Road trips were another activity that we enjoyed.

The summer camp is situated near Varnavino, a small town nowadays which was a monastery in 1600s. St. Varnava has founded this monastery. I guess it was rich and joyful area before October revolution. But then lots of destruction happened and people fled away. What is remaining nowadays are either ruins or stones which are put in place of destroyed churches.

It is quite unusual that despite the wide-scale efforts to restore old churches and monasteries in Russia, there are still lots of ruins in this particular area. I guess this is because it is quite far away from the center of our region and not too many people are living there nowadays. However, this area looks so beautiful that it is possible to justify restoring the destroyed buildings, for example to attract more tourists. There are lots of abandoned homes in the villages, there are also lots of homes that were acquired as summer homes of people living in cities. To me it seems that life there has not recovered yet after Big Bang of the revolution, almost 100 years after it happened. I don’t have the pictures of abandoned country-side life there but it looks very impressive and makes you think of those people, their lives, and what happened to them.

We have visited Svetloyar lake which is famous for its invisible Kitezh town. The story goes that there was a beautiful town 1000 years ago. However, it has collapsed into the lake to prevent its capture when Mongols have approached it during their conquest of Russia. There are a number of theories nowadays of how the lake was shaped, from volcano to meteorite strike to who knows what.

The people’s belief is that you have to walk three times around the lake praying to get your sins forgiven. In other words, this remote place is deeply connected to our history and culture. But we have not walked around the lake, instead we were only swimming there. Also, there are a number of trails out there going to the burial site of three monks respected for their saint lives. Also there is a stone which the saying goes has a footprint of St. Virgin Mary.

There is a village Vladimirskoe next to the lake. It has beautiful museum where local craftsmen are building beautiful things. I have noticed that this whole area of north-east of our region is abundant with crasftsmen – for exapmle Khohloma in Semenov, ceramics in Svetloyar, etc. To me this culture looks like traces of old civillization that we have so little evidence of nowadays. We can only come more often and try to learn more. It is because of the significance of this area that great Rimsky-Korsakov has written opera dedicated to this area.

This summer in Russia is one of the hottest in a century. Already lots of forests and fields are burning. The amount of crops that it is still there to harvest is decreasing rapidly.

We have been walking a lot, one of our favourite routes is that to Oka river on which our town is situated. I have taken a few nice pictures of insects which there are plenty of in the fields.

The pictures have been taken by my Panasonic DMC-FZ8, a camera with a 12x optical zoom and lots of automatic modes to take pictures in. One of its coolest features is its ability to take RAW images but I should confess that over the period of two years I have never used this feature! Otherwise, I enjoy the responsiveness of the camera, its flexibility in controlling shutter speeds and ISO levels.

But I still wonder whether the cameras are at the bleeding edge of software technology. I mean, there is lots of post-processing that we often do in Photoshop or the like which we could do in the camera. Apple is working in this direction – a number of applications have been written that allow to adjust various parameters of a picture after you take it on your iPhone. Therefore, iPhone is the first computational camera or in other words a camera whose software you can tweak in arbitrary ways.

In particular, I would love to have the following two features in my camera:

1. High Dynamic Range imaging. Imagine you take a picture in a room with a bright light coming from window. Obviously, traditional camera allows you to see either inside or outside but not both. The reason is the limted range of light that it can absorb. The key is to take a number of pictures with different exposure levels and combine them. So simple but would make lots of people happy! Available on iPhone (proHDR).
2. Making panoramas – that is, stiching a number of continuos images together. Available on iPhone (PanoLab – FREE!!!)

But there is another way to make panoramas – use cool software called Microsoft ICE. It makes very nice panoramas and can save it as either JPEG or upload to Photosynth, a web site for sharing 3D models.

A couple of weeks ago we have visited my cousin’s family in Semyonov, a small town in the north of our region. My cousin moved there after he got married.

Semyonov is known for its craftsmen. The whole northen area of the region hosts Khohloma painters in numerous villages. The idea behind Khohloma is to show the abundance of forests and fields of this part of Russia, various kinds of grass, flowers, and birds that are living here. However, Khohloma is known to exist in other parts of Russia as well but this medieval craft has survived only in this remote area. It is well known that the forests at the north of our region were home to various kinds of religious groups that separated from the official church during the reformation of 17th century.

Semyonov is known for its museum of Khohloma. The museum as well as Khohloma shop are located in a two-storied building. The earliest works in the museum are related to 19 century which is not necessarily very old. But the most impressive part of the museum is not Khohloma history but rather Khohloma present. There is one room in which every piece of furniture is painted in Khohloma. It looks gorgeous!

We have also visited cultural and church fair that was happening in Semyonov. A number of monasteries and religious organizations were taking part in it, including even representatives of Old Believers. Btw., there are still lots of Old believers in Semyonov, a very rare branch of Orthodox Church elsewhere. One of the most interesting parts of the fair was where they were selling books. I have noticed that last Tzar’s family is attracting lots of people, new books are published quite often. The attention to the Family grew when their remnants were found in Siberia in 1990s and then transferred to Saint-Petersburgh, even though their authenticity is still questionable. The books related to the Family that are published nowadays deal with historical evidence of various people who got to know them. I was more interested in the books that deal with Church directrly. I bought the following books: life of Patriarh Kirill, history of Diveevo Monastery, and Old Russian architecture.

As usual, I read a few chapters from each book only to tease myself. I will read the books after finishing few other books which I am reading now. I will also remember the amazing craft of Khohloma. In the museum we were told that it is possible to order anything we have seen. I wish I could get that wonderful Throne!

When I lived in Finland I visited every castle it had: Hameenlinna, Savonlinna, Turku Castle, and Suomenlinna. I liked those trips a lot because every castle had a museum which always mentioned connection to Russian history.

Nowadays I am living in Russia and therefore I used an opportunity to visit a monastery located on the other bank of Oka river on which our town is situated. In order to get there I got an inexpensive boat for only 2,500 roubles (approximately 70 USD). It is funny that all the other boats of similar size costed three times as much! The name of the boat is Challenger 2.

Oka is a wide slowly moving river with almost no boat traffic. It is funny that we had some kind of cruise boats until very recently when the river transporation in Dzerzhinsk was apparently stopped. Quite sad, but the river looks nowadays as wild as it probably looked in 15th century when the monastery was built.

Previously I visited the ruins of the monastery when I was in high school. Back then the frames of 17th century buildings were still there but the interiors were destroyed as a result of October revolution of 1917. The actual destruction was happening probably later on, in the end of 1920s. After years of oblivion, the rebuilding of monastery began in 2000s.

The monastery is located in the middle of the hills which are approximately 150-200 m in height and are quite steep. The horizontal area in the middle accomodated three churches as well as entrance gates and cemetery. It was a very densely packed area. But nowadays only one church has been rebuilt along with a bell tower. During last few years I have visited a number of monasteries many of which have been destroyed during Soviet era. It keeps me wondering over and over again that what was destroyed during a couple of days takes decades to rebuild.

I have looked at old photographs of the monastery. It turns out that the new white building on the photograph above is actually smaller than its predecessor. In particular, the old building was 3-storied whereas the new one has only 2 floors. I was suprised when I discovered what I thought was negligence to the history but then my mom exlained to me that they don’t have enough donation nowadays to build as large a building as they did in 1600s. It is a worrying sign that back then one merchant called Dudin donated enough money to build the whole monastery but these days Russian people as a whole are not willing to donate as much.

But still, it is good that such a large-scale effort is going on. The rebuilding of monastery has a few additional tasks associated with it such as building a road to this remote area. It turns out that this sparked intense discussion in the media because the machines used in this process have excavated the ground and part of an old cemetery. Now I think that it is a good idea to perform a careful examination of the soil which contains 600 years of Russian history. If a team of archeologists attempted to do a field trip to this monastery I think they would find lots of artifacts.

On my way back I discovered another artifact on the shore of the river which I cannot think the meaning of. To me it looks like organ pipes but obviously Catholic Church never managed to get that far. Therefore, the pipes pictured above have some technical meaning. To summarize, Dudin monastery is a great remote place. Every human will find interesting stuff here, either historical or technical mysteries.

This spring was quite unfortunate for our family: after long fight with pancreatic cancer my grandmother died on March 30, 2010.

She was born in 1917 in a Siberian village of Pivkino. It is impossible to imagine that in 1917 the last Russian Tzar Nicholas II was alive. However, the interim government was already in power, therefore we cannot say that my grandmother lived in Romanovs’ Russia. But anyway, she has lived through the Soviet Union from its beginning to its end.

While growing up in a Siberian village, communists arrived there in early 1930s and recruited many young people to build factories in growing industrial cities of western Russia and Ukraine. This is how my grandmother moved to Gorky to participate in the construction of the GAZ automobile factory.

But then World War II broke out. Gorky was under heavy bombardment of Nazi Germany armed forces. Needless to say, my grandmother has put her life in danger numerous times while working there during WW II. When we were growing up we liked to listen to her war stories when she was recalling how she managed to escape another Luftwaffe attack. My grandmother got a truck driver’s license during the war because obviously too many men went to war and women had to drive the trucks.

After the war has ended my grandmother gave birth to three wonderful children one of whom is my mother. Then a short interval of happy life began. But another trouble was round the corner: in 1964 my grandmother’s husband has died when she was only 46 years old. Left alone with three children and with small salary which she was getting as a teacher, my grandmother faced toughest times of her life.

I cannot imagine what kind of strength it takes not to give up in such situation. Obviously, my grandmother had a choice of going back to Siberia to get help of her parents and siblings there. But she made a tough decision to stay in Gorky alone in expectation of better life for her children. Well, those expectations became a reality. All her children were doing exceptionally well in school and got university degrees. They all had children as well: as of now there are 5 grandchildren and 5 grand-grand children (the latter number will increase I believe).

My grandmother died after 46 years of living alone after her husband’s death in 1964. I have noticed that her life was made up of two periods of equal duration: the first one of building a family and the second one of raising the family and grandchildren. I guess my grandmother did not have a single day of leisure in her entire life. She was very active until nearly the last days of her life. In January of this year she was still taking long walks. But in February she suddenly felt sick and was rushed to a hospital, the first time in her entire life. Then she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and her life expectancy was 3 months.

My grandmother possessed an enormous will for life: she never said that she had pains when her health started deteriorating very rapidly. It is well known that there are big pains in the terminal phase of pancreatic cancer. Instead, she was making up plans on what she would do after her health improves.

With the passing away of my grandmother we have lost our connection with the past. My grandmother was a historical personality with many unique qualities which are very rare in today’s people: kindness, willingness to fight with difficulties, and honesty. We will miss you a lot, dear grandmother!

I have completed a long trip. But not using skates or skies or just bare feet. I went on a short trip to Russia for a number of personal reasons.

It is funny that a plane ticket costs less than train ticket nowadays. So I left Saturday morning on a Finnair flight to Moscow. I arrived at 1PM and went to pick up a car that I booked at Sixt. I was driving an almost new Ford Focus and I liked it a lot. The weather in Moscow was quite nice, around -10 centigrade and clear. But I had to spend lots of time in a traffic jam near Moscow. In total, it takes 12 hours to get from Helsinki to my home town Dzerzhinsk out of which I have to spend 4 hours or 1/3 of the time in a traffic jam.

I was surprised to find out that the highway is in a good shape and quite clean. But the surrounding areas look a bit deserted. Obviously, the financial downturn had a negative impact on Russian economy. It just occurred to me that in Russia there is no network of restaurants located along a road. There are smaller cafes here and there but they do not belong to a single owner. For example, in Europe there are lots of McDonalds along major highways, they are easy to spot because of their masts up in the sky.

I arrived to my home at around 8PM. On Sunday we were visiting various relatives and supermarkets where I got a few history books:

Then on Monday at 3AM I drove back to Sheremetyevo airport. It was a chilly morning with temperatures around -20 centigrade. There were a few police patrols near Moscow but I was lucky to not get caught because I had plenty of time and thus was driving slowly. Another funny thing was that when I got to the final stretch of my journey a snowstorm began. It would increase my travel time dramatically if I got into a snowstorm at least half an hour earlier. After I dropped off the car I realized that flights will get delayed because of the snowstorm. It was partially true because the boarding delay was only half an hour and then we spent another hour on a tarmac.

I arrived back to Helsinki at 2PM and went straight to office. Then I did a bit of coding and went home later than usual. However, on Tuesday I left office as usual only to fall asleep at 6PM. I slept a whopping 12 hours and woke up 6AM Wednesday and finally unpacked my luggage.

I have read another book in the series of New Chronology. This one deals with the history of Russia of XIII century. According to the traditional history Mongols conquered it and imposed a severe tax. However, the authors claim that Russia and Mongols was the same country which population included people living permanently at one location as well as nomads or Tatars.

If Russia and Mongolia was the same country and there was no fighting between them then it was quite a powerful empire because its area exceeded today’s Russia. Thus, it could threaten Europe and even conquer it which the authors claim was indeed the case.

The authors analyze the state seal of Tzar Ivan Grozny. It mentions several areas, for example Perm and Vyatka. However, in XVI century when the State Seal was used these towns simply did not exist yet! What a contradiction in the modern history which was obviously distorted. According to it, Perm and Vyatka at their present locations were only founded in XVII century as small wooden towns. On the State Seal of Ivan IV these towns are depicted as big castles that were conquered with a big effort. Therefore, the State Seal mentions totally different Perm and Vyatka as we understand them nowadays. The authors say that those cities were in fact strongholds of Western Europe. In other words, Romanovs’ historians reflected the map of Europe around a vertical axes going through Moscow to make it seem as if their predecessors were fighting long wars with Siberians. Needless to say, Siberia was not populated during those times at all, stone castles never existed there.

The locations of other cities were also moved when Romanovs’ deposed earlier Russian-Mongol kings. The authors claim that earlier Empire was the center of civilization which owned and connected Europe with Asia using the Silk Way.

Authors make an interesting observation. In Europe only very noble people had silk cloths. In Russia every soldier had a silk shirt. In both cases its purpose was to protect the human from insects as silk is known to repel them.

Russia-Mongolia got enormously rich because of their conquests and trade taxes that they imposed. For example, a 15-20% silver tax was widely used in Russian markets. Europeans brought their big silver coins called talers and received local currency kopeika which was much smaller. Only local currency was allowed in Russia.

This model actually correlates very well with Russian mentality. If you think of Russians as slaves who worked from dawn to dusk to pay the huge Mongolian tax then how would you explain the traditional Russian laziness which is so widespread in Russian fairytales? It is known that Russian people were spending half of their lives lying on their warm stoves. This is because there always was a stable source of income which was the silver tax they received from Europeans.

But after a while Europeans got tired of the ever increasing taxes that Russians demanded and staged a coup to replace Russian-Mongol king with pro-Western Romanovs. This theory looks very plausible.

To summarize, another great history book which sheds light on Russia-Europe relations and explains Russian mentality. It explains lots of historical mysteries as well. The history demystified.

Information in English: Fomenko, Nosovsky. New chronology.

This is an amazing book that sheds light on the true Russian history. Its main idea is that the official Russian history was created when Romanov dynasty came to power. As usual, it presents its predecessors as total barbarians and claims that they are the only legitimate rulers of the empire. The authors claim that the official history is totally wrong.

Why should one trust the authors of the book who describe such an unusual version of Russian history? To start with, the authors are world-known mathematicians who at least have common sense and posses logical skills. Second, the Soviet history of Russia taught us an important lesson when all the Romanovs’ history was denied and Tzars were described as barbarians. Therefore, Romanovs could have done the same. Finally, the authors unveil lots of contradictions between the official Romanov history and the artifacts of that period, for example widespread usage of arabic languages and muslim worships in Russia.

The authors give one example which explains why we should challenge the official state of history of any country. There was an exhibition of golden artifacts whose age was estimated as more than 2,000 years. The exhibition was held in one of the most respected Russian museums so it is likely that many professionals have evaluated the items on display.

When the authors visited the exhibition they spotted a message. They asked the organizers which language it is written in. The answer was that that is an old forgotten language. But the authors looked carefully at it and realized that it was written in Russian as it was in 17th century! The message was describing the owner of the item. Therefore, an item presumably 2,000 years old was only 400 years old! Would not that change the history of the whole period that the artifact belongs to? Is it reasonable to suspect now that the events of that period were taking place not 2,000 years ago but only 400 years ago?

The book starts with analyzing a well-known Dark Period of Russian history. The authors reconstruct the heritage tree of those Tzars and conclude that Dmitri was a legitimate Tzar and that Romanovs were not legitimate.

Then the authors analyze what happened after Romanovs got to power. There were a number of peasant uprisings. But never ever in Russian history were peasants that well organized to pose a threat to Tzar. In 1917 those were soldiers that suffered a number of defeats in WW1, not peasants. The authors conclude that those guys were soliders as well, but they belonged to a different country that Romanovs were trying to destroy. That other country was Mongolia, the authors claim that before Romanovs become Tzars this was a united Russia-Mongolia country with a capital in Astrahan, nowdays a city in delta of Volga river.

The books describes an enormous amount of work that the authors did with artifacts many of which had arabic messages. Romanov history simply ignores all those artifacts! Indeed, according to the official history Russian Orthodox Christianity was the only religion and Cyrillic was the only language.

The authors claim that Muslim religion as well as Arabic language was one of the state languages in Russia until 17th century. One explanation of this phenomenon is that Russia and Turks were friendly countries, not bloody enemies as Romanov history tries to persuade.

The amazing results that authors achieved using just common sense and logic have changed my attitude toward various kinds of Russian history exhibitions. From now on I will look carefully at every artifact and try to recognize Arabic text in them which I am sure I have seen a lot. It just never ocurred to me that the official history was so misleading.

I am very impressed with this book even if what is says is not totally true. I do believe that a large percentage of what the authors claim is true. This is a book that will change your perception of the official history of Russia as well as many other countries.

It has been a week after I returned from vacation. However, I was busy with relocating to Helsinki which I will describe shortly. Now I got spare time to write a trip report on my vacation to Russia where I stayed the whole July.

As I have not been in Russia for a year and a half except a short visit last summer I found out that lots of things have changed. In particular, the street on which I grew up has been improved a lot. New apartment buildings were constructed as well as few supermarkets. Here are the pictures of so to say modern Russian architecture.

After staying in my home town Dzerzhinsk for a week I went to Nizhny Novgorod. I wanted to go there earlier but surprisingly I had lots of things to do such as reading books and watching TV so the visit has been postponed. I have described my visit to Nizhny Novgorod in the previous post.

During my stay in Russia we had two wonderful field trips to historical monuments. One of them is Makarjevskij monastery established in 1415. It is located on Volga river, nowdays nuns are living there. The amount of work that they are doing is impressive. But there are lots of things to do to restore the old image of the monastery after destruction it had undergone through during Soviet times. Here is a Photosynth of a part of the monastery.

Another visit was to Suzdal established in 1024, what was claimed in Soviet Union as a historically preserved town. In fact, half of it was destroyed during October revolution and once again there is a lot of work to do to truly restore its old glorious image. Suzdal was an important city of ancient Russia. Here is a Photosynth of Suzdal’s Kremlin.

During my stay in Russia the weather was surprisingly hot. In the evenings we used to go swimming in a lake. Also, I have read two books: the diary of Dostoevsky which I call his blog even though there was no Internet at that times and diary of Bunin.

After visiting several bookstores I have bought the following books.

Also, I have watched the History of Soviet Union, a multi-episode TV show that a prominent Russian journalist Leonid Parfenov has created. It is called Namedni 1961-2003.

We have also visited quite a few relatives. It was a lot of fun to see them after so long.