history Archives - Kidding Herself

The Museum of Telephone History Moscow is not phoning it in

Sometimes even Papa gets lost when trying to find an obscure Moscow courtyard.

Which is disconcerting enough, but what is particularly odd when you do finally locate it, this spot in the capital city of Russia, is being greeted by some bright red British telephone boxes. Just sitting there. All innocent-like.

British red telephone boxes outside the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

However, that’s what happens when you go to the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow.

On the one hand, so bizarre. On the other hand, another day, another museum of a Russian businessman’s personal collection. Vitaly Ezopov, CEO of Mastertel, a telecommunications company big in St Petersburg and Moscow, and sponsor of the Moscow Telephone Museum project, in fact.

Mama didn’t know the Museum of Telephone History’s Moscow branch was only two years old and a private enterprise before we arrived, which is one reason why she let me stay at home. She wasn’t sure quite how much fun I would have staring at some dusty, out of date technology, dead inside a glass case, which was how she conceived it was going to be before she, Papa and my Wired Up Big Brother went along.

Bust of Edison and a display of his telephone equipment at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

This may have been a mistake.

It turns out that Moscow’s Museum of Telephone History knows that a large number of its audience is suspicious of tales of not being reachable by phone beyond the length of a wire that disappears into a wall, and wonders why someone would bother to call, anyway, when they could just WhatsApp instead.

(Please don’t write in and tell Mama that actually, all the cool kids are now not even using words and are communicating via the medium of interpretive TikTok clips, and even that is due to be old hat in 5…4…3…2…1. She is aware. She is just determined to remain behind the curve).

The Museum of Telephone History also understands that when it comes to technology, even moribund technology, what everyone actually wants to do with it is have a go.

So their tours are very much built around explaining to the next generation the evolution of mechanical communication, and the museum is not afraid to get out the plastic cups attached by string to help it do so. Or teach everyone a bit of Morse code so they can laboriously spell their name in telegraph speak. And even send their mobile phones though a pneumatic tube for the sheer exotic hell of it.

Shhhpoooooooooook! Ppphhhhhhoooooop. Cooooooooooooool.

Many of the prettier, more historic or celebrity connected phones are locked away from questing hands, of course. But it’s a pretty eclectic mix of the aesthetically interesting, such as this rather elegant model.

And then there is the curious.

The sinister black phone with only one number, for example.

Single number black telephone at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

Observe the British class system at work via the telephone labeled with the rooms of a huge stately home.

White telephone from a stately home for summoning staff with a photo of Winston Churchill

And an early payphone.

Early payphones, black candlestick model with a box to take coins on the side in a case with other vintage phones

It also has a lot of fan girl appeal. Phones used by ABBA!

A photo of ABBA holding telephones, and the same model telephone at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

Yuri Gagarin!

White freestanding Ericsson phone handset used by Gagarin in a glass case. at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow.

Gorbachov!

And look! An early example of IKEA mentality with a put-it-together-yourself phone kit!

A box with bits of an old fashioned telephone in that you were supposed to assemble yourself.

But you also get to play with the phones on the walls during the tour of the Museum of Telephone History Moscow, while the guide demonstrates how you stand (with your elbow helpfully propped up on the special elbow rest). How you actually place a call. How the bell summons you. How lots of bells summon you. Ooooh, what does this one sound like? Ahem.

Very early telephones on a wall at the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow

They also demonstrate how switchboards worked.

Two early telephone switchboards in front of a photograph of women operating them at the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow

And so on.

Gzhel porcelain figure of a lying soldier and communications equipment

Mama particularly enjoyed the exhibit which reproduces not just the feel of different dials but also the noise they made. Mama and Papa, in fact, had a bit of a cross cultural exchange as they tracked down the sounds of their respective yoof at the opposite ends of Europe. Ah, bless.

Telephone dials mounted on the back of a display case for visitors to touch and operate

Anyway. Let’s just say it was a lot more interactive and a lot more interesting than Mama was expecting.

You don’t have to go on a tour (although as you can see Mama recommends it, assuming you speak Russian). There is an audio guide provided via Q codes too (how modern, says Mama, who is determined to show her age today). Possibly in English. Possibly even in other languages. The museum seems keen on French. The have souvenirs in French!

Lots of old telephones hanging on a wall.

And!

The Museum of Telephone History is yet another museum tantalising Mama with the seductive smell of coffee from the cafe area in the corner!

[Actually Mama has just realised we haven’t gotten around to writing about the first one that did that yet. Oooops. Watch this space. *Waggles eyebrows mysteriously.* Although if y’all just followed me on Twitter you would already know.]

The Museum of Telephone History, then, is a small but well appointed museum, and well worth a drop in for Moscow residents, telephone enthusiasts or people who need to explain why we say ‘dial’ a number to their kids. Recommended.

More information

The Museum of Telephone History Moscow’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about mysteries of the telephone explained.

Address: 19 bld. 2, Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya St., Moscow, 123001, Russia

Opening: Tuesday – Sunday, 10am to 6pm (on Thursdays it opens at 12 noon). Closed Mondays.

Admission: Adults – 200 roubles, kids – 100 roubles. Excursions 1000 – 3000 roubles.

Getting there: The nearest metro stations are Mayakovskaya (green line) and Barrikadnaya/ Krasnopreskinskaya (purple and brown lines). There is a map on the website, which Mama suggests you look at and actually follow. Ahem.

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What to do in Kolomna, Russia in a snowstorm

Our visit to the town of Kolomna in the Moscow region is an object lesson in why you should pay attention to your surroundings in an unfamiliar place, as well as keep your mobile in the back pocket of your jeans and not an outer area of your coat when it is minus 15 degrees.

Because at some point Mama got separated from her party and found herself in the middle of the biggest snowstorm in seventy years in the dark with no clear idea of the direction she should be going in. And her phone had died from the cold.

She could have retraced her steps – we are not talking serious levels of peril here. Mama is not that kind of travel blogger. But she was tired, and was also attempting one of those complicated parental manoeuvres where you and your Significant Other swap over which child you are looking after in the middle of an excursion. Tracking back down my Oblivious Big Brother, happily scoffing pancakes in the warmth of a cafe, would have meant this relay would not have happened.

So she asked the first person she saw for help.

Now the problem with asking a local for help is that they don’t know the name of the hotels.

And although Mama had previously clocked with amusement it was on a street with a very typical name for a street in a town in Russia, she couldn’t at that moment remember what that was. Lev Tolstovo Ulitsa? Leninskaya? Pushkinskaya? Unfortunately, all of these also exist in Kolomna, so this insight was not helpful.

Locals also don’t necessarily know the location of every random museum Mama might have happened to visit nearby to where she was staying. And saying to someone ‘it’s on the street with the really attractive houses’ is really not a helpful thing to say in Kolomna. At all.

But luckily ‘it’s next door to the McDonald’s’ is. Thus, Mama was escorted ten minutes out of the Russian man’s way back to the street Oktyabreskaya Revolutsia, and was able to successfully take over supervision of my ~~pig-headed~~ determined effort to lounge around at the Hotel Kolomna rather than engage in tourism.

Mama thinks I have watched too many episodes of the (admittedly excellent) travel show Oryol i Ryeshka (Heads or Tails), in which one presenter gets to experience a destination in luxury and the other has 100 dollars to spend for three days. I was distinctly more interested in exploring the facilities in our accommodation for the whole of our first day, and decidedly frustrated every time we didn’t get further than the lobby before sauntering back out again to visit some other attraction. Eventually I flatly refused to go anywhere else.

Which is how Mama and Papa came to be at opposite ends of the town in the first place.

Well, to be fair, it was very cold, and a free excursion courtesy of the hotel didn’t really sound that interesting. Mama begs to differ though as she found out quite a lot about the history of Kolomna.

The history of Kolomna and its kremlin

Kolomna is directly south of Moscow and on the Moscow River, and thus of some strategic importance in Moscow’s long struggle for dominance in the area. It was officially first recorded as existing in the 12^th Century.

There’s a socking big statue of Dimitry Donskoi outside one of the remaining walls which commemorates the time he gathered his troops in Kolomna before marching actually some considerable way away to have the battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Which he won, and although it’s one of those victories which has definitely grown in the telling, in the Russia origin story it marks a sort of turning point both in the decline of the power of the Mongols in the area, and also in Moscow beginning to claw its way up, in a sea of competing small Eastern states.

Worth a statue, then. Not that Mama has a photo of it because at that moment in the tour she had lost the feeling in her toes and was wondering if perhaps I hadn’t made the right choice after all.

The Kolomna kremlin is also worth gawping at as it eventually graduated from being a wooden construction to more durable walls a bit more than a hundred years or so later, some of which still remain. Quite impressively.

‘Kremlin’ being, you understand, the Russian word for fortress, not something special to Moscow. There’s a whole set of them scattered along the border of medieval Moscow’s influence, mainly as a protection against the raids of Crimean Tarters.

The next big skirmish Kolomna was involved in was during the Time of Troubles in the 16^th Century, when the succession to the throne was contested by a succession of False Dmitrys pretending to be the son of Ivan the Terrible (the name is a clue that they did not, in the end, win the argument). Maria Mniszech, who was, optimistically, married to both of them, took Kolomna during the fight and harried Moscow from there, until she herself was captured and imprisoned in one of the towers that is still standing. Today it still bears her name. And, apparently, her ghost.

The kremlin walls are incomplete now, not because of their failure to keep anyone out, but because during the 18^th and 19^th centuries the building materials were re-purposed by Kolomna inhabitants for other things. But as well as some walls, there is a gatehouse and those towers to admire, and you can tour the top of the walls too if you join the right excursion.

Gatehouse front and back in Kolomna Russia

There are a number of churches and monasteries inside the kremlin territory or scattered around the town. So if you are into your Orthodox ecclesiastical architecture, Kolomna is a great place to visit.

Churches inside the Kremlin In Kolomna Russia

Church of St Nicholas Posadsky in Kolomna Russia

Mama would like to draw your attention particularly to this church, Krestovozdvizhensky Cathedral, and especially to the splindly red and white towers you see surrounding it. Look familiar? They should if your read our blog as they are by the same architect who was responsible for the Gothic gingerbread palace for Catherine the Great in Tsaritsyno in Moscow (not that Catherine appreciated it).

Krestovozdvizhensky Cathedral inside the Kremlin in Kolomna Russia

Mama, however, was more interested in the wooden village style houses.

Many of which have gone full on quaint, especially if they are near to or inside the kremlin.

Of course, pausing to take another photo every few minutes probably didn’t help the problem she had keeping up with the Russians in her party. Mama is unclear if she is just terminally unfit or has not yet developed enough of an irritation with wading through ankle deep snow to have worked out the best way to do it.

Wooden Houses in Kolomna near Moscow in Russia

Museums in Kolomna and other attractions

Aside from photography there are a number of museums to choose from when you visit Kolomna.

We went to the main Kolomna history museum, which started off in prehistoric times and the natural world and worked its way up from there, as small local museums are wont to do.

Mama has clearly been in Russia too long – she no longer finds the idea of bears, wolves and so on particularly exotic as part of the local wildlife scene. But she did get quite excited by this odd looking creature. It’s a wolverine, apparently.

Anyway, aside from walls, what Kolomna is mostly known for is industrialism, so there are a number of exhibits about that, especially the locomotive factory.

Mama was more distracted by trying to take a photo of the model of the centre of town from every conceivable angle – she was determined never to get lost when visiting Kolomna again – and by the discovery of an English grandfather clock. This shot shows where she was standing while taking the two kremlin wall pictures above. The haunted tower is on the right.

That said, what they do not seem to make much of in the museum is the reason why Kolomna is still not officially on the list of Golden Ring towns – the recommended list of places in the Moscow region which tourists might like to go and visit if they fancy a few days away from the capital. Despite it being super pretty and relatively convenient to get to.

This is that it was a closed town until 1994.

Closed towns were the ones which had some kind of strategic military importance, and so there were restrictions on foreigners visiting.

The strategic importance of Kolomna were the armament factories.

This history is hinted in the Museum of Military Glory (fabulous name. Mama says, dubiously). Observe the diorama of shell making!

The museum is small, but the guide was enthusiastic about pointing out the equal participation of women in the death and destruction industry in the Soviet Union generally, and the Great Patriotic War (World War Two) in particular. Hurrah!

It is also one of those museums that takes a personal approach to history, with most of the exhibits being illustrated by pictures, stories and artefacts of real Kolomna natives and residents.

Mama was particularly determined to draw my attention to the photo and letters of one of the Night Witches. This was a squadron of lady bomber pilots, fabulously nicknamed by the enemy as somehow it was much much worse to be killed by females than by your regular Red Army fly boys. Kolomna has an aerodrome nearby, and the flying club attached to it has a long and venerable history. Currently it has a reputation for being a particularly good place to go and learn about parachute jumping and sky diving. If you are that way inclined.

This is one of the first instructors at the aerodrome.

Female flying instructor Kolomna aerodrome

Of the other places of interest available on your Kolomna visit, the one that was enthusiastically mentioned as a top attraction by everyone Mama spoke to about her trip is the Pastila Factory Museum. Pastila is a fruit sweet, and the museum is very well worth the fuss, being interactive, immersive and ending with a guided pastila tasting and tea. We all echo the recommendation therefore. Here is what we wrote about it in more detail.

Demonstrating how to make traditional Russian fruit pastille sweets

And then there’s the museum to the life and times of the local writer, Ivan Ivanovich Lazhechnikov, who in theory is famous for being one of the first writers of historical fiction in Russia (think Walter Scott).

However, because finding a connection to Alexander Sergevich Pushkin, the (greatest) poet (who evah lived), is a national obsession, much is also made of the fact that he also saved Pushkin from a duel by getting the other guy to apologise.

But didn’t Pushkin die in a duel, I hear your cry? Yes, indeed he did. Just not this one. Clearly toxic masculinity is not a new phenomenon.

The museum is mostly just a collection of odds and ends and a few dressed up dummies in Lazhechnikov ’s reconstructed family home, and Mama did not, if she is absolutely honest, find it all that interesting. But it does have some nice furniture and she has made a mental note to see if there are any translations of the great man’s works.

Other museums that caught our eye were the one about a type of gramophone, the one about life on a communal farm, and also the ones more dedicated to crafts such as soap making, and honey production. Also with very tempting shops attached.

If all of this history, culture, boutique shopping or parachuting palls, you can check out the fancy new sports centre, which is mainly there to house a top of the range speed skating rink. Even if you are not into speed skating, you can hire skates and whiz round the rink in the comfort of indoors.

Or you can do what my Oblivious Big Brother particularly enjoyed, and slide on your tummy down the moat of the kremlin walls. Over and over again. At least someone enjoyed the snow.

There are also a number of pleasant cafes and eateries dotted about, in addition to the MacDonald’s.

But what about the hotel, I hear you cry? Did it live up to my expectations?

Hotel Kolomna

In Mama’s view the Hotel Kolomna was a perfectly respectable three star hotel. The communal areas were pleasant, and they have such facilities as their own gym, restaurant and cafe.

The rooms included sturdy examples of the sort of furniture you usually find in hotel rooms. The beds were comfortable, the en suite bathrooms were fully equipped, and the carpets were thick. Everything was clean.

Check in was smoothly accomplished, and reception was able to lend Mama a charger to revive her dead phone, which she was particularly happy about.

Hotel Kolomna was, in short, a bit better than some of the motel chain hotels she has experienced in the UK and decidedly less grubby and with better fitting windows than a couple of the B&Bs. Also, being a pretty large hotel building and able to do economy of scale, it was also cheaper, especially off peak in a blizzard.

Mama isn’t sure how good anyone’s English is, but she can definitively say they didn’t have any trouble coping with her wayward Russian, which is a good sign. And all of the information, hotel services, rules, general information, comes in English as well as Russian as standard. So they can probably manage foreigners.

In short, Mama quite recommends it, especially as it is within a reasonably short amble of the pretty bits of Kolomna and the station.

On Oktyabreskaya Revolutsia street. Remember this. It might come in handy.

Obviously, other hotels, hostels and sleeping arrangements are available. Not that you absolutely need to make an overnight stay of it.

Getting there

Getting to Kolomna to experience all of these things is simplicity in itself even if you do not have a car as there are regular trains from Komsomolskaya station. You can get the basic local train, the electrichka, which will have hard benches to sit on and stop in more places, or the express, which shaves only a few minutes of the approximately two hour journey, but will definitely have better seats and free wifi as well as a refreshment trolley.

So you should definitely visit Kolomna. Mama thought that the off season in winter was a perfectly reasonable time to go, especially if you like to photograph wooden houses in a layer of freshly laid snow, but doubtless Kolomna will be equally as pretty in full summer. And there will be all sorts of festival-type celebrations for major holidays such as New Year, Maslenitsa, Easter or the May holidays too.

More information

The Hotel Kolomna’s website.

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about the Night Witches, Russian combat pilots of World War Two.

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Kolomna is a town about two hours from Moscow, Russia. It has history, a kremlin, traditional wooden buildings, museums, sky diving and a sweet factory.

Discovering the wooden palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich at Kolomenskoye in Moscow

People in Moscow are always asking Mama for directions and she has a theory about this.

Of course it could be because sometimes she forgets to change her streetside face from the British perpetual half-smile to the less welcoming Russian deadpan stare. But in reality Mama reckons that when you are in a place where asking for directions requires the effort and concentration of talking in a language you aren’t completely comfortable in, you tend to be a lot more conscientious about looking up where you are going, what it will look like when you get there, how much it costs, where the cafe is and so on and so forth than you do when you can amble vaguely in what you assume is the right direction and hail people casually for help if your destination isn’t where you think it ought to be or, indeed, open.

You tend to look confident as you stride purposefully along the streets, annotated map in pocket, and this means that other less well-prepared passers-by assume you are the person to stop and dither at.

They used to bother Papa rather than Mama in London too, for example. Although that might just be because Papa gives off experienced urbanite vibes wherever he happens to be, born and bred capital city dweller that he is.

That said, Mama’s particular downfall when going places in Russia is not so much in inability to get people to tell her stuff but read signage accurately, as demonstrated by our trip to the wooden palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in Kolomenskoye Park this winter holiday.

Alexei Mikhailovich was the father of Peter the Great, and this palace, or rather the original as this is a reconstruction, was where he spent most of his time growing up. It was really supposed to be a summer hangout, but Tsar Alexei liked Kolomenskoye so much he had this giant wooden 250 room construction built, which people told him at the time was the eighth wonder of the world.

As you do, when your Tsar is really really into something.

This seems to have been the sum of Alexei Mikhailovich’s achievements, aside from marrying two women whose families really did not get on, and dying a bit too early. He sounds somewhat wet, in fact, although just progressive enough that you can see from where Peter the Great got his compulsive need to shave off beards and build an entire city on a marsh in the middle of nowhere so he could get to Europe a bit more quickly.

As a spur of the moment trip out suggested by Papa and a place we had already noted as interesting when we came across it one spring, Mama didn’t do any further research other than remind herself of which Metro stop to get off at. She had even had a chat to the woman in the ticket booth last time out about what there was to see inside and everything! Nothing further to worry about!

Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more than one thing to see inside, and all of them needed separate tickets. This was complicated by the discovery that Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s palace was one of the museum buildings offering free tickets during the winter holidays. To some, but crucially not all, of what was on display.

So Mama enrolled the services of Bilingual Big Brother to figure out what we should ask to go and see.

The problem with Bilingual Big Brother is that he is nine and even with Mama’s determined efforts to cram us full of heritage and culture, he probably only had a vague idea of what Mama was after. Translation can only take you so far when you can’t quite conceive of what ‘nice old (replica) furniture and furnishings’ might consist of.

And the problem with the ticket booth that Mama chose to stand in front of this time was that it was only selling tickets for the exhibitions at this end of the complex.

Mama did not realise this, probably because she only bothered to read the first line of the sign that told her about the other ticket booth.

So we ended up touring two (2) exhibitions, neither of which included fancy recreated interiors, before Mama overheard one of the docents telling another visitor that to actually get into the palace proper, they needed the other cashier round the other side of the building.

Which, when Mama studied it properly, did look a lot more impressive.

Mama thinks they should have built the palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich the other way round, given that it is in a different part of the park from the original, so they could have quite easily erected it so that the entrance to Kolomenskoye Park is right next to the front rather than the back.

Although this, of course, is why they put up signs.

Hey ho. We got to see a collection of various typical folk art and crafts such as hinges, enamelled tiles, painted wooden trimmings and icon frames.

Big up for the icon frames from me! They have cartoon-like pictures telling a story round the edges. I was fascinated to realise that the tales are frequently of how the main character is dismembered in different ways. Something I insisted on double checking at length with Mama.

She wonders if my lack of freaked-outedness means it is time to pay much more attention to what I am watching on YouTube.

We also got to see modern artists’ recreations of traditional folk art and crafts in a more 3D format. This consisted of bit less focus on the bloody bible stories and a few more animal carvings, but it was also quite pretty, and largely deserted.

But I was not up for any more. I had already done my bit culture-wise. I had taken an interest. And now I was hungry.

Mama, on the other hand was determined.

I have developed a way to cope with Mama determined, unlike my Bilingual Big Brother who is easy to bribe. I am capable of keeping up a not-quite-subvocal-enough repetitive whine regardless of what Mama promises or threats for literally hours. The scowling is pretty impressive too. She gets her own way, but she doesn’t enjoy it and I live in hope that one day she will just learn that it’s better to cave quickly.

What it meant on this occasion is that we had to take the interiors at something of a brisk trot. Or as much of a trot as we could given that the free entrance meant that there were quite a lot of people inside.

If I had been more in the mood I am sure I would have been delighted by a number of aspects of the fancy-pants wooden palace.

Obviously one of them is that it is indeed wooden. Both inside and out.

Mama, however, was particularly taken by the medieval central heating system, in the form of the beautifully tiled enclosed stoves.

She was also delighted to find that Alexei Mikhailovich had much the same taste in wallpaper as her.

My Bilingual Big Brother was pleased with the lions in the throne room, which roar. These days it’s all done with electricity, but back then there was a much more mechanical way to impress visitors.

The dressed up guides were pretty fabulous, and we got to see a lot of them as the palace was so busy. But obviously not listen to then because I couldn’t be having with that in my state of mind.

What Mama particularly coveted (aside from the wallpaper) was the Royal bathroom/ sauna.

I just wanted the swan in the dressed feasting chamber. Although, as I repeatedly told Mama, it’s not actually real. Neither is the tower and wall cake, Mama says sadly.

Still, all in all worth tracking down. Just make sure you go round to the front of the palace for admission to the reconstructed interiors first or your six-year-old will not appreciate it properly and you’ll have to take her to MacDonald’s after all.

Although admittedly that meant we had to trek right through Kolomenskoye Park first. Which, funnily enough, is a lot less attractive in early January when there is unaccountably no snow, than it was in spring.

Want more ideas about what to do in Moscow? We have a comprehensive guide to the capital of Russia here.

More information

The palace’s page on Kolomenskoye Park’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about children’s treehouses.

Address: Andropova Ave, Moscow, 115487, Russia

Opening: Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 6pm. Closed Mondays.

Admission: 400 roubles for adults for the palace. Kids under 7 are free. Other exhibitions need separate tickets and cost extra.

Getting there: Metro station Kashirskaya (green line) is right next to the entrance to Kolomenskoye Park which is right next to the (back of) the palace. Kolomenskoye metro station (also green line) puts you at the other end of the park, which is a considerable walk away from the palace.

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Gazing upwards at Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, UK

The problem with visiting Anglican cathedrals is that you spend a lot of time bending awkwardly backwards so you can stare at the ceiling. Ely Cathedral is no exception to this, although there is plenty to see at less crippling angles.

Notably the stained glass windows.

In fact, to celebrate this, Ely Cathedral has a stained glass museum. Which we didn’t go to (it cost extra).

The other thing we didn’t do were the Tower Tours (it cost extra. Plus there were steps). This may have been a mistake as it is how you gain access to the upper walkways, bringing you nose to colourful window, and giving you the chance to see the fabulous space that is the cathedral from another angle.

Actually, perhaps with two under tens in tow that’s not such a good idea. You wouldn’t want centuries of craftsmanship to be destroyed by one enthusiastic bounce. The kids might suffer a bit from taking a header through the glass too.

Luckily, Ely Cathedral has other dedicated activities for its younger visitors. Mama tried to interest in us in the quiz, which encouraged us to contemplate key architectural details and their historical significance, but we quickly abandoned this for the sticker scavenger hunt. There is a map. There are locations marked on the map. There are locations marked on the map, which if you can find them, have stickers for you to collect and add to your compendium of interesting things to note about Ely Cathedral. We had a high old time galloping about what is quite an expansive site, and Mama got to take many many photographs in peace while we did so.

The only downside was that when we arrived at the relevant spot the stickers were not actually there. Mama was not entirely sure this was a down side though as it meant that we got twice as much exercise and some useful practice in polite interaction in English, as each time we failed to find our reward we trotted back to the helpdesk to collect it there. Although after this happened for the 200^th time, the very obliging staff did just hand us over the whole set. After which we lost a bit of interest. It’s the hunt that’s the thing, you see. But they did then go round to top up the displays ready for the next underage visitor. You are very welcome.

Mama is welcome too. She lost her purse while in Ely Cathedral. It’s one of those things which marks you out is a tourist is losing key belongings while on a trip out. That and getting pickpocketed. Mama was quite shocked at the thought she might have been pickpocketed inside a religious institution in the UK, but almost as the thought crossed her mind she realised that she had probably just dropped it.

And thankfully for the reputation of respectable cathedral-going visitors in Britain, this was exactly the case and somebody had handed it in, so she got her purse back (if not her dignity) entirely intact.

After which we got back to admiring the building. One of the great attractions of Ely Cathedral, apart from the ceilings, the windows and the stickers, are plaques to the great and the good of Ely and the surrounding area stating their main purpose in life. Apart from dying, which seems a popular achievement to mention, there appear to have been a lot of Cambridge University professors in the area.

Occasionally, you get statues of people sleeping. Why sleeping, I do wonder. Is being good at snoring particularly impressive? Or something that the UK is particularly known for? I think we’d better book my Babushka a place right now because her penetrating buzz-saw whiffling is surely outstanding in its class.

On the other hand, I have no idea what talent this guy thinks he is showing off.

What Mama particularly liked about Ely Cathedral, however, was that it is clearly not just a carefully preserved monument to days gone by, but a working space.

Mama, in fact, spent a happy twenty minutes dragging my Long-suffering Big Brother, who has a much higher tolerance for being lectured at than I do, about the cathedral demonstrating the changing nature of Christian worship in the UK over the last five centuries or so.

Admire the craftsmanship and sheer effort of erecting this huge, gorgeous building in the middle of nowhere at a time when humanity was still constructing everything by hand.

Nothing was more important than God!

See the painstakingly ornate carvings, the colourful windows, the walls which would once have been covered in paint! And contemplate the impact that having a nice place to hang out in once a week and the prospect of a brighter future might have had on the Medieval mind.

Thrill as you recognise the moment when Catholicism gave way to Protestantism in the decision to preserve the figures in the Lady Chapel with their faces smashed off.

Note how the rood screen, with its symbolic and actual separation of the congregation from the place where the most important God veneration used to take place, is now ignored in favour of a nice plain altar on the side where the great unwashed sit.

Talking to God was a specialist job at one time. And people were assumed to need a bit of visual help in interpreting the stories. But now one is supposed to take a bit more responsibility for one’s own post-death safety. And be able to read.

Yet observe the moment that history comes full circle as the modern church decides that contemporary society demands that they try to convey the concept of the divine through the medium of interpretive art.

And of course, there is also the serious business of the flower arranging rota to enjoy. Mama says you couldn’t get any more Anglican unless there was quiche, stewed tea in a tea urn, a jumble sale and people bickering over who gets to babysit the vicar’s son.

And in fact there probably was quiche in the cafe near the entrance, although we opted for the generously sized portions of cake instead. No tea urn though, but then Mama does prefer coffee.

Basically, we enjoyed our trip round Ely Cathedral, which we completed on the same day as we visited Oliver Cromwell’s House Museum. Given that the two buildings are practically next door and all. Definitely a must see for anyone visiting Ely. It’s big, it’s relatively empty, it’s full of welcoming well-meaning people, it’s got lots of interesting things to look at and there are refreshments. What’s not to like?

More information

Ely Cathedral’s website.

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about stained glass windows.

Address: Ely Cathedral, Ely, Cambridgeshire, CB7 4DL

Opening: 7am – 6.30 pm, although the best time to visit is 9am – 5pm Monday to Saturday. Bear in mind that if there is a service going on then access will be restricted. There’s a page on the website where you can check potential closures out.

Admission: 8 GBP for adults with 6 GBP concessions. Kids under 16 are free. It’s 15 (or 13) GBP to add the Tower Tour, and 12 (9) GBP to visit the Stained Glass Museum and the cathedral together. To do it all and get a free cup of tea is 18 (15.50) GBP. People who live in or go to church in the area can get a free pass.

Getting there: Ely is a bit farther north of Cambridge up the A10 or the A14. There’s no dedicated parking for the cathedral, but there are a number of free car parks in Ely and the one we were in was just a few minutes’ walk away.

Ely also has rail connections to Stanstead Airport, Kings Cross London, Birmingham, Norwich and Peterborough. The station is 10 minutes away from the cathedral.

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Musing on Monuments at Muzeon Sculpture Park in Moscow

There were quite a lot of people about when the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Iron Felix, was torn down in 1991.

Dzerzhinsky was the man who set up the CHEKA, the forerunner of the KGB, and he was notorious. Consolidating the Revolution required the arrest and immediate execution without trial of hundreds of thousands of potential threats to the imminent Communist paradise, and Felix was tireless in pursuing this most necessary work.

Not surprising, then, that after he died, from a heart attack following close on the impassioned denunciation of some of his rivals, he got a giant statue. A giant statue slap bang in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow.

Not surprising, too, that this statue was one of the focal points of the pent up rage of the suddenly released Soviet population after the fall of Communism. It was first covered in graffiti, and then removed and dumped elsewhere. There is a monument to those who died in the Gulags there now, although it’s not half as big.

There were a lot fewer people to see Felix Dzerzhinsky put back on his feet again a few years later, but my Papa was one of them. If you ever unearth a picture of the historic moment, you will see a short man with a dandelion clock of floaty hair, and that will be him. Mama says. I dunno. He doesn’t seem to have much hair now. I suppose anything was possible in the 90s.

This event did not take place on a traffic island in Lubyanka, but in what was then a rather scrubby open space off to one side of the Central House of Artists and the New Tretyakovskaya Gallery, opposite Gorky Park, next to the Moscow River.

A number of monuments to fallen heroes had been collected here, and were being put back on display. Stalin, his nose bashed off, was erected, rather pointedly, in the midst of tortured, anguished forms, an installation to memorialise the victims of repression and terror.

But as for the rest, Carl Marx, Leonid Brezhnev, a number of Lenins, a giant hammer and sickle, some generals, a female worker and so on, were just dotted about here and there.

And were soon joined by statues to perfectly innocuous people like circus bears…

…a cloud…

…and a bare-bottomed youth standing on his shoulders.

There’s even an Oriental section.

And a whole square devoted to sculptures made from limestone.

It’s all a bit random to be honest.

Especially the great big fuck off Peter the Great statue down by the Moscow River.

But thus the sculpture park Muzeon came into existence and these days it is a rather trendy hangout.

You can wander around the statues, especially Felix, who is looking quite smart and has had his graffiti quite removed.

You can admire the red squirrels Mama suspects have been specially bred to entertain visitors at Muzeon and Gorky Park.

You can get coffee or some snacks from the plentiful little kiosks. You can even stroll down the river along the newly opened up embankment towards the Kremlin.

Nobody pays much attention to the statues to the dethroned Communist butchers. There’s no egg hurling, spitting, vigils, flags, respraying or chipping bits off now. Although you do sometimes find children wanting to climb on them (cough cough). And someone does seem to have left flowers at the feet of the defaced Stalin. Mama does very much hope this was in support of the 3 million people killed in the Gulags and the larger number killed by state-induced famine, but in 2017 it’s never wise to assume that sort of thing.

Of course, if you are foreign like Mama, you will almost certainly be taking photos. One person’s symbol of oppression overcome is another person’s edgy selfie opportunity, after all.

So what has caused this feeling of creeping irrelevance? Time has passed, and times are different since the heady early days of post-Communist living. The promised land of milk, honey and wall to wall freeeeedom and the Russian way has not quite worked out as expected.

Or it might have something to do with the fact that Moscow today is hardly free from Communist busts, flags, hammer and sickles, and statues. The impact of gathering the statues of the unwanted in one place so people can come and point and laugh is somewhat lost when there’s a huge Lenin at the end of the road, arm outflung as if to show the way to Muzeon (or the road to Communist enlightenment, you take your pick).

This might be why almost from the moment that Papa wandered over on his tea break to see what all the unusual commotion with cranes was about, there have been noises about putting Dzerzhinsky back on his roundabout again. Was there any point to taking him down, the thinking presumably goes? Or possibly, do we really want to encourage more such acts of childish petulance aimed at our (former) glorious leaders?

Hasn’t happened yet, mind you, but anything’s possible.

Mama thinks this would be a mistake though. Just as every memorial ever put up says a lot more about the people and times that spawned them than it ever does about the person (or abstract concept) being remembered, so does the act of removing them.

The fallen monument section of the sculpture park in Muzeon is a reminder that the values our predecessors held definitely need critically reexamining sometimes, but you can never, and probably should never, ignore them.

And it helps us remember that sometimes the best you can hope for is that there will be some relatively blameless child able to eat ice cream and enjoy the sunshine in pleasant surroundings in the future.

More information

The park’s website (in Russian).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and Mama) has to say about First World War Memorials in the UK and their past and present significance.

Address: 10/4, Ulitsa Krymskiy Val at New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 119049

Opening: 8am to 10pm (winter) or 11pm (summer).

Admission: Free.

Getting there: From Oktabrskaya metro station (orange and brown lines) – turn right, cross over the massive seven million lane highway and head left away from the giant Lenin statue down the other massive seven million lane highway. From Park Kultury (red line) – turn right, cross over the Moscow river, cross the seven million lane highway. Muzeon is opposite Gorky Park.

Alternatively, the trolleybus route ‘Б’ stops right outside. This is a circular route, which takes you round the edges of the centre of Moscow and hits a fair number of metro stations on the way. It’s quite a fun way of getting to or from Muzeon.

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How does Russia My History multimedia historical park compare to every other museum we have ever visited?

It’s true what they say about how easy it is to indoctrinate children. Mama would not have said that she displayed a wild sort of enthusiasm for wholesome educational family outings when she was a child, but here she is putting us through the programme she was once made to endure, and enjoying herself hugely.

Family days out are wasted on the young.

What this means, though, is that Mama has spent a lot of time over the years in museums, woman and girl, and she thinks this entitles her to have an opinion. Not to mention the fact that she is both a history graduate and erstwhile history teacher.

And do you know what they make you do at the beginning of a teacher training course in history in the UK? Study the history of history teaching. Gotta love historians. A wee bit obsessed.

Anyway, this is a bit depressing because it basically goes ‘… and then the history teachers refused to teach the type of history politicians think is important and so Margaret Thatcher and every subsequent government set about reducing the hours spent on the subject to its current high of two and a half minutes every other Tuesday in favour of citizenship classes and more remedial literacy’. Oh, and half the time the programme will be delivered by geography teachers, who last studied the subject when they were 13 (if it helps, half the time geography is being taught by historians. Luckily the map of Europe looks a lot more like the 18th century one than it used to 20 years ago).

Mama also learned that it was now very unfashionable to do what she had done at school and take a superficial jog steadily through the list of kings and queens from the start of civilization (Alfred the Great defeating the Vikings sort of thing) to the pinnacle of achievement that is the reign of Elizabeth II and Theresa May.

Which involved learning the dates of important wars, the lists of laws enacted and religious controversies weathered. With, if you were Mama’s history teacher, little stick men drawings of the tortures carried out by the Spanish inquisition to copy into your books. Also good for the messy deaths of royalty in the Wars of the Roses and remembering what happened to Henry VIII’s wives.

No, it changed to being all about lingering on one period for some time and taking a three sixty look at not just high politics but the everyday lives of ordinary people, and thinking about the nature of cause, effect, and consequence, developing the ability to appreciate that there was some logic to WHY ON EARTH people ducked harmless old women in a village pond in an effort to discover if they were witches, and deciding how we can trust anything an eyewitness says when everybody lies, to some extent or another.

All very well and good, but it turned out that what with pupils not having the linear timeline to hook it into, this study of patches of in-depth historical understanding had become so decontextualised that it was causing people to have problems grasping how situations develop over time, how each of these isolated events were connected to each other, and why what we think of as the right way to do kinging today isn’t appropriate as a benchmark to analyse kinging in the middle ages.

What is needed is to make sure that when looking at history, you take both a long term approach combined with carefully chosen case studies. Look out for a teacher who will spend a few lessons doing the WHOLE OF AGRICULTURE FROM PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT before launching into the agricultural revolution is what Mama says. Especially if you are an inner city kid who has never seen a cow in the wild before.

Mama thinks a good museum manages the same balancing act. Particularly important given the aforementioned lack of time for history in actual educational settings.

One of the reasons why she is not keen on the British Museum, in fact, is that in her opinion, it is a bit too full of the glorification of random stuff. And empire.

It reduces things like the Elgin Marbles to the controversy surrounding their acquisition and the fact that we won’t give them back, this being 90% of the background Mama has for them given that there is very little support from the British Museum itself on why she should care about the headless wonders. I mean, yes, thousands of years old, but lots of things in the British Museum are thousands of years old, and some of those statues, notably the ones in the Middle East section, are far more impressive as objects d’art.

If you want to admire historical stuff as stuff, the V&A is much better at it, because the stuff they have picked is stuff which is inherently pretty. No further explanation necessary. If a museum (looking at you, the British Museum) wants Mama to walk though rooms and rooms of reddy black pots, Mama needs a bit of help to understand why they are all on display.

The State History Museum in Moscow and the National Army Museum in London have a lot of initially rather disappointingly unremarkable historical items, but really outdo themselves in elaborating on them well to personalise each item on display. Who did it belong to, what did they have to do with the life and times we are interested in, how is it an interesting example of whatever it is, why, in short, should Mama care?

And, if we are deviating from history for a moment and talking about museum design in particular, the more visual you can make this, and the less reliant in lengthy FUCKING explanatory placards (expletives Mama’s) written in a dense expository style the better.

For example, the Horniman Museum’s natural history section and the Darwin Museum in Moscow make the points they want to get across about classification of animals, the ways animals have adapted to their environment, and the nature of evolutionary change by artful grouping, and to lift the whole thing further off the page, in the Darwin Museum you also have subtle but well chosen video clips of the animals in their natural habitat, and a whole range of fairly vivid and varied paintings to really ram the point home.

But you can do this with history too! In the Museum of London, for example, they have walk through sections where the sights and sounds of some of the periods they display have been brought to life. Mama’s favourite is the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which has little playletts projected onto screens around you to complement the props that are scattered about to make the whole thing more 4D.

In Hampton Court you can attempt to get your head around 16th century boardgames while sitting in an ante chamber and waiting for an audience with royalty. Which you may well get, as gorgeously dressed men and women will wander by regularly and engage you in conversation, convincing children like my Gullible Big Brother (when he was much younger) that they have just met the queen.

And, of course, there are places like the outdoor re-enactments at Beamish Open Air Museum, Ironbridge Gorge, and the Ulster American Folk Park, where that sort of immersive experience is taken to a new level, where visitors are invited to take part, alongside the actors, in the experience of recreating life in a particular place, at a particular time. Whole towns have been rebuilt! There are working candle makers! A printers! Steam trains! A foundry! Pit ponies (plus attached pit)! A sweet shop! And a fairground!

Even commercially-driven enterprises like the London Dungeons have something to recommend them in that, while Mama would say that while they are going for the wow factor than having any true educational value, they certainly do fire up enthusiasm for the dry and dusty subject that wrong-headed people make history out to be. Or in the case of the Dungeons, as it does things like splash warm ‘blood’ in your face in the French Revolution room just as the guillotine goes down, impress with the ghoulish yuck factor.

It’s this, not the popularism, that means that Mama will not be taking us there, or to Lenin’s Mausoleum, any time soon. Spoilsport.

All of which brings us to the new Russia My History pavilion in VDNH. All you really need to know about it is that it has been billed as a multimedia history park, and that the building it is in is huge, as well as the fact that, all the gods be praised, they have a hefty pre-twentieth century focus, and you can imagine Mama’s excitement when she heard about it.

Would she sail the Baltic Sea with Peter I? Would she sit in on pelmeni making on a traditional clay oven? Would she see Ivan the Terrible slaughter his son? Would she get caught up in the duel of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin? Would she drink tea from a samovar in a merchant’s middle class house? Would she meet Catherine the Great walking her dog in the grounds of a palace? Would she take part in a village zemstvo council meeting? She didn’t know but she’s been really looking forward to finding out.

Even so, it was only this last weekend, when the weather took a turn for the worse (no, worse than that there was SNOW on the ground. In May! Yes, I know!), that we actually went. We even took both Papa AND Babushka, it was going to be that good.

We got there – VDNH is less fabulous than normal in the driving sleet, but luckily the new minibus service from Botanicheskiy Sad metro/ central circle line station takes you practically to the back door of Russia My History – acquired our tickets, put our coats in the cloakroom, went to the loo, paused to take our photos with the cardboard cut out medieval bogatyr knights, and gamboled happily into to the first room of the Romanov’s section.

Which consisted of text heavy explanatory FUCKING placards (expletives Mama’s) projected onto the walls, illustrated by a few pictures and flickering flames (we had entered during a war) and…

… nothing else. Except some touchscreens.

With more expository text. On every panel. With a few pictures to illustrate. Some of those spun slowly round and round, admittedly. But that was it. Except…

… the noise of flames.

Papa frowned a bit and disappeared round the corner to see what happened next, while we idly played with stabbing at the computer screens to see if they got more interesting (no).

A few minutes later he was back, with a somewhat horrified look on his face. ‘It’s all like this,’ he said.

And so it was. Rooms and rooms of it, although there were some videos you could watch too. Three minute loops of auditory explanatory FUCKING placards (expletives Mama’s), accompanying a slide show. The voice was very dramatic. The content…

… wasn’t.

But it was all very well-lit.

We carried on round, and eventually made it into the early 20th century expo.

Where the pictures on the explanatory FUCKING placards (expletives Mama’s) were now joined by the occasional film clip of, I dunno, marching soldiers or people waving banners. But the format otherwise remained unchanged.

Although there were a lot of flickering candles to represent people who died. The early 20th Century seems to have been a difficult time for a lot of people.

Although I noticed that Mama had a very raised eyebrow over the fact that an awful lot of them apart from this family seemed to be priests.

It says something when the most thrilling thing about the place were the beanbags in the room with the endless parade of heads of famous Russians of the Soviet period…

…and the discovery of an actual game on one of the touchscreens. You had to drag bits of a tank onto the outline of a tank to make a tank!

Yes, that was the entirety of the whole thing, except that you could also do it with planes, guns and other bits of military hardware.

Now obviously, from Mama’s point of view, it really didn’t help that everything was in Russian. But quite who though that this is what a multimedia history park should consist of she does not know. Especially a multimedia history park which has been extensively advertised and which, being called Russia My History, promises to at the very least get you all fired up and excited about your national story.

Although the advertising hasn’t been quite so extensive recently, Mama notes. Not now that actual people have been inside and seen what’s there. She should have realised when it was sleeting outside on a major national holiday and the place was still largely empty that it was not really going to be as much fun as she had through it would be.

Or any fun at all.

For her or Papa and Babushka. Who, y’know, do read Russian.

I say you make your own fun, and the place was large, the opportunities for dancing around a large space with dramatic colour themed glows and mildly amusing sound effects out of the bad weather endless (eeeeendddleessss says Mama). Plus, I am easily pleased by touchscreens. Stab, stab, stab, stab, on to the next one, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, on to the next one, stab, stab, stab stab, on to the next one, stab, stab, stab, stab. Never gets old. My Gullible Big Brother is less gullible in this way, but then he does like TV a lot, and so managed to hit every of the many many video clips as we went round, although his enthusiasm did wane as it became clear none of them were going to be about animals.

Still, I don’t know. Mama eventually gave in and read some of the text, and she found the ones about when new things were introduced to the country, like tomatoes, tea and peonies mildly interesting.

And there were Putin themed tea bags in the shop.

And TV in the cafe. Which apparently qualifies it to be called a Media Cafe.

But even that and the fact that they had both a free virtual reality experience and a handle the military equipment table in the foyer on the day we went (the national holiday was celebrating the end of World War Two. This isn’t normal), Mama is basically recommending that you go to the Russia My History multimedia history park only if you have been to all of the other museums, art galleries, science experiences, exhibitions, zoos, and aquariums in Moscow. So many times that you can’t face going to any of them again.

And if there is nothing on at the cinema. Or any of Moscow’s many theatres.

And the weather is really really bad, so the park is out, a walk in the forest is out, and you don’t want to go on a day trip to Sergeyev Possard. Or to the dacha.

All your friends are out of town.

You have some kind of aversion to hanging out in a restaurant for the afternoon.

And you don’t fancy using a shopping mall as the way to get out of the house for some exercise.

And even then, she’d probably just recommend seeing what’s on the telly instead.

Because there is overview history focusing on the great and the good, the wars, the turning points and the high culture, and then there is really really really boring.

So, no, she will not be going again to see the expositions she did not get to see because her ticket only gave her access to two of them at a time.

Unless someone tells her they have installed a giant anamatronic Lenin fighting Rurik for Tolstoy’s last pirogi or something. In which case she might reconsider.

More information

The history park’s website (if you must).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about history as a form of knowledge.

Address: Really? Are you sure?

Opening: Tuesday through Sunday 10 – 20.45. Closed Monday. Go on a Monday.

Admission: 300 roubles for one exhibition, and 500 roubles for two exhibitions. This, Mama would like to point out, is a steep entrance price for a museum in Moscow and isn’t letting you look at the whole thing. It’s a bit cheaper for OAPs and school kids, and free for the under 7s. You can get unlimited access for 1250 roubles. Don’t buy that one.

Getting there: Get off at VDNH metro (orange line) and walk up through VDNH to the bit near the back with the full sized rocket. Or get off at Botonicheskiy Sad (orange line and the central circle line and take the 33 minibus route to the Russia My History stop (or walk it). Veer straight past the building and go to one of the other things you can do and see in VDNH instead.

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The Museum of Moscow

Mama spent rather more of her first visit to the Museum of Moscow wondering if it is housed in a former garage than she was expecting to when she saw the outside.

For Mama wondered this not because the building resembles some brutal constructivist concrete box, which in any case Mama, coming from Stevenage and never quite escaping her upbringing, is resigned to finding increasingly attractive as she gets older. No, the Museum of Moscow’s shell is 19th Century and classically inspired all the way.

She wondered this because to get from one exposed painted brickwork and exposed air-conditioning ducts themed floor to another, you travel up and round the sort of concrete ramps you usually only find in multi-story car parks.

Was it really a place to park cars? Or a design statement? Or possibly a nod towards accessibility for all, despite the fact the incline is pretty steep? Mama found it distracting in a space which is not supposed to house modern art.

So it was nice to find out through the power of Google, that in fact the answer is…

…the building was actually used as a military garage for many years. Nice to get that cleared up then.

Particularly as the Museum of Moscow’s permanent galleries are mostly about the capital’s origin story, and so stuck in the middle ages. It is chiefly memorable for the intricate table top models of Moscow in various stages of being built up. They’re great. I was extremely disgruntled to discover I would not be allowed to play with them.

Of course, it’s tricky to find your niche when you are the museum of the capital of a country which has many many museums in the same city dedicated to exhaustively documenting most of the other highlights of Russia’s history. Especially when they cover Moscow’s place prominently in each of them.

Instead, the Museum of Moscow has decided to rock its relatively small size and less established status by using the rest of its space to have regular quirky little exhibitions devoted to other eras or other aspects of the city. We’ve been to three of these now and they seem to be characterised by a desire not to be comprehensive, and possibly not even representative, but to spotlight the everyday rather than the epic.

They do this through really attractive, interesting or iconic objects, the use of historical film footage you might actually want to watch rather than suffer through in an attempt to be informed, genuinely interesting photography, challenging installations set so that you walk through them or skirt closely around them, with the odd touching opportunity thrown in.

The Forgotten Factory

First there was the series of photographs taken in and around the abandoned factory of the legendary former Soviet automobile producer, ZiL.

Fascinating not just for fans of lovingly photographed urban decay, but also because a lot of the machinery was still in situ and was similarly gorgeously spotlit.

Mmmmmmmmmm, authentic industrial chic, says Mama.

But it was the human touches that made it memorable – the factory comes across as being abandoned much like the Marie Celeste, with the workers just downing tools one day and leaving their half drawn designs on the drawing board, their half drunk mugs of coffee scattered around the building and their half smoked packets of cigarettes stuck to the wall. Oddly compelling. Says Mama.

Everyday War

Then we saw the Museum of Moscow’s World War Two displays, which focused mostly on the people living though the war in the capital. As a Brit, Mama’s war story involving everyday people tends to revolve around London, air raids, evacuations, the mild inconveniences of rationing, Dad’s Army and bringing women into the workforce in both rural and urban areas.

Much of the Former Soviet Union has a more… dramatic version ( Mama prevaricates), but Moscow, unlike Stalingrad, say, was never actually invaded and raised to the ground by the fierce fighting from both sides to hold it, and unlike St Petersburg was not besieged for 872 days, causing mass starvation and football fields full of unmarked graves, so the exhibition was not quite as… traumatic as it might have been. But it was a shock to see the preparations the inhabitants had made for either of those possibilities, the very real part that children took in them.

Mama also thought the way the Museum of Moscow exhibition kicked off, with a table of glasses and bread to symbolise the tradition of setting places for fallen comrades when the news of their deaths came though was an appropriately sobering opening, and a statement that this was not primarily an exhibition about the glory aspect of the war (WE WON!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT OUR COOL TANKS!!!!!!!!!!).

People did carry on living during this time, however, and Mama and Papa both had a good nose at the typical living room reconstructed with keys as to why Muscovites were expected to have this or that bit of kit hanging about. Papa felt that the electronic equipment, billed as a radio for listening to the latest war announcements, was of a high enough quality to get you arrested for being a spy rather than being standard issue, mind.

The mock up of the very modest dining room from which the Soviet entry to the war was announced was also, to Mama, fascinating.

Cars! And Dresses!

The last exhibition we attended was one about cars and dresses. An interesting juxtaposition, particularly as Papa was very vocal in his pre visit estimation that ordinary Soviet people in the sixties, the era the exhibition was billed as focusing on most, had neither in any interesting quantities. As it turned out, it was more about the first half of the 20^th century in its totality. Or rather the first half of the 20^th Century with the Revolution, its aftermath and the World Wars left out, which Mama felt was quite some feat.

Probably this explained both the seeming juxtaposition of the first and last decades of the period and the limitation to personal transportation and clothing.

Unless the point was supposed to be about periods of relative prosperity.

It was difficult to tell and Mama never did decide whether this exhibition was a case of style over substance, or just ingenuity born of the determination to give every item in the Museum of Moscow’s storage its day in the sun. But she liked the cars on display, coveted some of the dresses, and again thought that the collection of photographs or people enjoying their leisure time around the capital in all weathers and over a number of decades were particularly interesting, all lacking in the usual Soviet symbols to tell you that this was the USSR instead of, for example, the USA.

Not everything has to be about ideology, Mama thinks.

Some things are about voyeurism.

That and the film clips. Silent movies in Russian being about her speed, linguistically speaking. We were less impressed, once we had realised that the oddly jerky on screen action notwithstanding, it was not going to turn into a cartoon. But we did enjoy giving Mama a heart attack when she rounded a corner having lingered in front of the silver screen and found us with our heads stuck deep inside an antique car after we had wrenched the door open for a better look inside.

Until we informed her that this was what everybody else had been doing before we tried it.

Look for the lack of the little rope barrier, I advise you. Quite why something made out of thin cheerfully coloured material at shin level provokes such fear in adults that they cannot cross it I am not sure, but if an object is in the middle of the floor and it doesn’t have a little rope barrier at the very least in Moscow, it means touching is ON! Mama thinks that there are a number of museums and art galleries in London that should take note of this useful signal for visitors.

Bargain Hunting

However, the main reason we originally went to the Museum of Moscow wasn’t actually historical appreciation of the capital at all.

We were there for the Museum of Moscow’s occasional flea markets. We are big fans of car boot sales and somewhat disappointed that Russians have not, by and large, embraced this particular method of getting shot of the cuddly animal toys they no longer want but we can buy for 20p to take home and add to our alarmingly large collection.

As it turned out, this flea market had more of an antique flavour, which was disappointing for us if not for Papa given that there had been a pretty big queue to get inside.

Not that we were bothered as we got to mess around in the giant piles of snow next to the plaster of Paris replica sights of Moscow in the courtyard of the Museum of Moscow while we waited. Mama would have preferred to hang out in the onsite café, but someone had to stand in line.

Mind you, there was a children’s section, which saw kids taking tables and selling some of their well loved tat. Of course, we were horrified at the idea that Mama might suggest we join in and part with some of our most beloved possessions ourselves and couldn’t even be bothered to haggle.

There was also entertainment laid on. I particularly enjoyed the lindy hop amateur dancing display.

Mama was more interested in the refreshments. Retro soft drinks, soups and ice cream. Very hipster.

So all in all a fun atmosphere if you happen to like shiny old objects, but not really one for those looking for second-hand bits and bobs for your everyday life.

Basically, the Museum of Moscow is one for the locals, who would like something reasonably distracting to look round every now and again when they are in the vicinity of Gorky Park. The Cars and Dresses exhibition is on until 10th May and then the next upcoming one is Moskvovedy, which apparently celebrates the establishment of the history of Moscow as an actual thing. No, Mama doesn’t understand that either. But she has already decided to go anyway.

The Museum of Moscow also, unique among museums and galleries in Moscow so far in Mama’s experience, has a decent shop. Surely a direction that should be encouraged. So go.

Just be sure not to try to park your car on top of the interesting objects d’histoire.

More Information

The museum’s website (in Russian because the English bit is minimal. Google translate exists, people).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about challenging a parking ticket issued in the UK.

Address: 2 Zubovskiy Bulvar, Moscow

Opening: 10am – 8pm Tuesday to Sunday (except Thursday 11am – 9pm). Monday – CLOSED.

Admission: To access all the galleries and exhibitions – adults 400 roubles (£4), children over seven 200 roubles (£2). Individual exhibitions – adults 200 roubles, kids 100 roubles.

By public transport: The metro station Park Kultury (red line and brown circle line) is right opposite. The tolleybus б/ бк, which circles the centre of Moscow also stops right outside, as do other buses.

By car: The temptation might be too much for you…

State Historical Museum, Moscow

Mama firmly believes it wasn’t the State Historical Museum in Moscow’s fault that the time we went there ended with my Imaginative Big Brother declaring it the WORST DAY OUT EVAH!

After all, it’s bang in the centre of Moscow, housed at the north end of Red Square in one of the most entertainingly decorated buildings of a city full of entertainingly decorated buildings. How could anticipation not be high when you spot what you are gamboling towards?

State Historical Museum Moscow — How cool is this?

Similarly, when the interior is also so worthy of the fact that you have schlepped both your and your little sister’s cameras along in your very own backpack, and when the museum assistants are so impressed and appreciative about your choice of soft toy companion for the visit, what’s not to like?

Ceiling State Historical Museum Moscow — Look up!

Plus, we may not be wildly enthusiastic about every last thing in a museum, but we can usually be persuaded to take at least a tepid interest in, I dunno, animal themed knick knacks, random fire extinguishers, or anything which is absolutely not supposed to be touched even if it is within touching distance, as long as Mama doesn’t insist on this happening for too long.

So what went wrong?

Mama, the trained historian with a passing interest in the pitfalls of teaching the subject to children, has a quiet determination (*cough* a bee in her bonnet) about making sure that we do not end up seeing history as a long story of inexorable progress towards the current pinnacle of civilization that exists today. Or rather, because Mama is now over 40 the pinnacle of civilization that existed about fifteen years in the past.

But in her quest to convince us that just because modern human beings have Apple watches it does not mean that we are inherently better than our ancestors, she may have overdone the emphasis on how utterly brilliant, how terribly skilled, how marvelously clever it was that people MORE THAN A MILLION YEARS AGO were already able to invent technology and improve on it in much the same way this generation has done with the humble digital watch, as exemplified by the vast collection of stone age tools and suchlike that kicks off the exhibition.

Flint tools State Historical Museum Moscow — Much much more impressive than a mere Apple watch

At which point, my Imaginative Big Brother demonstrated his admirably increasing awareness of deep time and got the collywobbles. MORE THAN A MILLION YEARS AGO being a lot of grandfathers back, and, and this is the point, representing a lot of dead and gone grandfathers.

An existential crisis not really helped by the fact that when we came to the intriguing stone cave-room painstakingly re-constructed in the halls of the State Historical Museum, Mama enthusiastically told us how many dead people had been found inside (700) and that really history, especially the history of very long ago, is mostly driven by finding caches like this and is therefore based on the stuff that was buried with the dead people.

Well, that and ancient rubbish tips, but by then it was too late for this kind of qualification. Too much information, Mama. We may never be happy about setting foot in a museum again, and certainly took the rest of this one at a fair clip while clutching Mama’s arms and blanching at the thought of ghosts and suchlike all the way round.

Not even the really cool shiny gold and silver items room could entirely placate us although Mama insisted on pausing for long enough to take a photo of the cup made by one of the Tsars himself. With his own two hands. The wooden bit now nearly obscured by layers of overwrought bling anyway.

Wooden and gold cup State Historical Museum Moscow — Someone should probably do this to the deformed clay pots and similar I bring home to Mama

This is the kind of thing the Historical Museum is good at. It’s not just a place which houses props to illustrate an age. Many of the items have historical significance, or at least historical curiosity value, in and of themselves. Non Russian readers may need to pick up the audio-guide to properly appreciate this, although the fact that Mama knows about the cup shows that English language labeling does certainly exist.

That said, some of the props are pretty cool. Mama thinks. The old fashioned carriage which has skis where the wheels should be was almost as entertaining to her as the pushchairs in the shops which have come up with the same engineering solution to the large amount of snow Moscow ought to be able to expect each winter.

Not that she has seen anyone out and about with one here yet, to her frustration and Instagram’s loss. Global warming has a lot to answer for.

Did such fabulous exoticism lifted us out of our doldrums though? No, of course not.

Neither did gawping the splendid collection of swords. Swords are for KILLING PEOPLE to make graves, to provide cannon fodder for GHOULS like Mama – it is possible that Mama should not have suggested that we look at the design of each one and consider how it might have been wielded.

swords State Historical Museum Moscow — When historical instruction goes wrong

In fact, the only thing that cheered my Imaginative Big Brother up in any way, was the hall of fashions and interiors, and that was only because one of the items on display was a hat with an actual dead bird splayed out in a jaunty manner on top. Actual dead birds, unlike hypothetically dead people, he is absolutely fine with. I was too far gone to even vaguely appreciate this, or the very princessy nature of the outfits. Which is unlike me.

Bird hat State Historical Museum Moscow — This dead bird hat is clearly the best thing in the State Historical Museum

But that’s because nothing in the State Historical Museum was really the reason why the day out so traumatized my Imaginative Big Brother. Even if you are having a determined sulk in front of the displays, there are still free doughnuts being handed out on the street, the richest cup of hot chocolate you have ever tasted round the corner, random architectural features to be climbed in the pedestrianised centre, and even pigeons to chase.

No, the reason why he was unhappy was that I hadn’t recovered as much as Mama thought after my epic two week ‘we’ve-moved-countries-and-bathed-in-foreign-germs-from two-different-schools’ virus extravaganza, and we overdid it in the afternoon by visiting the giant toy shop just up the road.

As a result I ended up screaming all the way home. Twenty minutes on the Metro with an inconsolable child. Another fifteen minutes of further transport hell. It would scar anyone.

So. Providing you do not make Mama’s parenting mistakes, the State Historical Museum is definitely worth a ramble around when you are in the vicinity of Red Square sometime. Stay away from the topics of generations of dead people, ensure your children are essentially snot-free and remember the crowd-pleasing designer taxidermy is just round the corner and you’ll be golden.

More Information

The museum’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about Henderson Island and the prehistoric economy of feathers.

Address: 1 Red Square, Moscow,

Opening: Wednesday – Monday (CLOSED on Tuesdays) 10am to 6pm, with later opening on Friday and Saturday.

Admission: Adults: 350 roubles (3.5 GBP), children under 16: free.

By public transport: The connected Metro stations of Oxhotny Ryad (red line), Teatralnaya (green line) and Ploshad Revolutsii (dark blue line) all pop you out next to or nearby the State Historical Museum.

By other means: You’re joking, right?

Museum of London

It’s eerie is walking though the streets to get to the Museum of London at the weekend. Whatever it’s like during the week, on a Sunday morning it’s practically empty with just the sound of ancient church bells on the wind to accompany the slog up from the river.

The Museum of London, you see, is very appropriately situated in the middle of the City of London. Right next to one of the last few pieces of the original wall marking what for a long time were its borders. If that doesn’t bring home to you just how large the place is now, then the very long bus journey from Saaf West Laandaan will. Well, that and the lengthy monologue about the history of agriculture (the whole history of agriculture. Yes, that’s right, *all* of it) Mama had entertained us with on the way.

Did I mention how long the ride was?

Quite why Mama thought farming methods were a good preparation for this museum I am not sure because, apart from the section about prehistoric London when the mammoths and sabre tooth tigers ruled, the history of London is, well, really not terribly rural.

Which is fine by us. We are second generation urbanites and capital city snobs if you ignore Mama’s contributiton our gene pool, which in this case we really really do.

The layout of the museum is chronological – you start at the beginning and progress through sections devoted to particular periods, like Roman times, medieval London, early modern, Victorian, and the sixties and so on, with occasional side forays in the Big London Events like the plague, the great fire and the world wars.

Each of these sections has its own feel and focuses on a different aspect of London life – whatever seems to have been in the ascendancy at the time (kings, commerce, dirt, religion, commerce, ruling the WORLD baby, commerce, commerce, commerce, fashion and the arts) – and is almost like a mini museum within a museum.

This constant rebooting keeps us interested, as does the opportunities for interaction which are not a main focus but present in every period and very varied from place to place from dressing up, to multimedia button pushing, cinematic experiences and interractive dioramas. Our favourites are the twisty luminous blue projection of the Thames where you can catch different symbols and turn them into words showcasing difficult town planning questions (at which point we lose interest a bit), and the one where you can attempt to purge the fetid Thames waters of poo (which doesn’t ever get old).

Some other highlights for us. The Roman area has had some revamping done by a group of teenagers, and is full of films bringing things like gladiatorial matches into the 20^th Century, although Mama enjoyed looking into the cupboards and hearing about Roman cuisine best.

The Victorian section is organised as a lifesized mock up of streets, with shops you can look into and sometimes enter and sometimes even TOUCH THE THINGS.

Not the toy shop though, which is a shame because we insisted on standing there with our noses pressed against the window longingly. But Mama says this is almost certainly what our family would have been doing at that time too, and so approved, from a historically accurate perspective. Good job, the Museum of London for an authentic Victorian childhood experience.

To prevent us getting too frustrated though, there is an area later where we can have a hands on play around with the sorts of toys and watch the sorts of TV shows that Mama and Granny and Grandad would remember. It is surprising, Mama thinks, that after hours and hours of all the shows that Cbeebies can offer to say nothing of our tablets, how popular Bill, Ben and the Weed are with us.

Mama’s favourite bit is the 18^th Century Vauxhall pleasure gardens experience. You can stroll round, admiring the large-skirted high-haired mannequins and watching the little costumed playlettes projected on the walls around you. What she particularly likes is that the skits are not showing wildly dramatic narrative arcs but just designed to make you feel as though you are evesdropping on other visitors to the park as you yourself stroll around. We have to drag her out, usually.

This pales into comparison with the lifesize models of horses unencumbered by any kind of glass or rope barrier though. They are pulling some kind of fancy gold coach but this is not as interesting as being able to get up close and personal with my favourite animal, safe in the knowledge that if I run under their tummies, they will not kick or bite me.

The Museum of London is surprisingly good value for horse spotters, actually. Or at least surprising for someone who hasn’t taken the history of trying to slog your way around the city into account. This is one of Mama’s obsessions, of course. I think we’d better move on before she launches into the history of transport with a side rant about great traffic jams she has endured in the capital.

And what better place to move on to than the café? Which is conveniently situated about two thirds of the way round in a nice large space with plenty of seating and excellent access to toilets and as a result almost impossible not to stop at (well played again the Museum of London).

It’s more of a cake, coffee and cocoa stop than a place for anything more substantial, but there is another one for that near the entrance, and a few, although not many, somewhat less pricy hot food emporiums in the walkways around. If you have bought sandwiches and womanfully resisted the call of the café, it should be possible to use what is otherwise the schools’ lunch room, as long as there aren’t any schools visiting that day of course.

All in all, the Museum of London is one of London’s fullest and most interesting museums for Mama, the history graduate, and luckily well set up for welcoming young people enthusiastically through its doors as well. It’s a tad off the tourist route but also close enough to places like St Paul’s, the Monument and the Tower of London that us Londoners who live in the modern suburbs could find out about our city’s older history and then go for a wander around it all in one day.

And the Museum of London is also an excellent place to take us kids on a rainy day.

This is not because the exhibits themselves are all undercover – although they are – or because the museum is large, and packed with interesting things which will keep us occupied for hours – although it is – but because it is part of the Barbican complex.

What this means is that you get an extensive network of covered walkways extending out around the museum which, once you have finished with history, you can canter joyfully around in relative comfort no matter how much water is falling out of the skies.

Some people might object to the brutalist concrete tower block scenery that forms the backdrop to this, but Mama’s secret ambition is to own a flat in this striking development, so she minds not one bit. She is from the New Town of Stevenage after all. This is the height of beauty for her. And she enjoys the contrast between the architecture here and the much older aesthetic we wandered past on our way in.

You can, of course, also visit the Barbican centre itself. As`well as whatever exhibitions they have on, Mama recommends the toilets on the first floor around lunch time. For some reason you can hear an orchestra practising really really well in there.

So you should visit, especially if you live anwhere in Britain. You only exist to support life in the capital, after all, so you probably should know more about it.

More Information

The Museum of London’s website.

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide has to say about Doctor Who’s guide to London landmarks.

Address: 150 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5HN

Opening: Monday to Sunday 10am to 6pm.

Admission: Free, although some special exhibitions will have an extra fee.

By tube: Barbican (Hammersmith and City, Bakerloo and Circle lines) or St Paul’s (Central line)

By train: Liverpool Street or Farringdon (also on the Hammersmith and City, Bakerloo and Circle lines) or the City Thameslink.

By bus: Routes 4, 8, 25, 56, 100, 172, 242, 521. The museum is on the London Wall at the junction with Aldersgate Street.

By car: If you are tired of London, trying to travel around it by car will not improve matters, and neither will trying to find a parking space you can afford. Or indeed any parking space. As Dr Johnson might have said.