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Moscow and Petersburg in Tolstoy’s Novel War and Peace

• Publication: Social Sciences
• Topic: History , Russia , Society & Culture
• Source: Vol. 53, No. 2 (2022), pp. 145-154
• Author: Viktor Shcherbakov, PhD in Philology, Senior Research Fellow, A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences.
• DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21557/SSC.78295195
• Keywords: Psychology, Soviet man, early Soviet and late Soviet totalitarianism, qualities, characteristics, personality, split.

Abstract : Moscow and St. Petersburg have repeatedly been the subject of comparative characterization in Russian literature. Leo Tolstoy in his novels also tried to outline and compare the characters of the two Russian megacities, which have traditionally been rivals. In  War and Peace,  Moscow is depicted in detail and with love, while St. Petersburg is shown in a schematic and aloof manner. The comparison of the two capitals is extremely contrastive here: aristocratic Petersburg and “folksy” Moscow are presented as antipodes and remain so during the Napoleonic invasion. This article traces the ideological and psychological roots of this mythologeme. It shows that it is based on both objective historical reasons (the vigorous development of St. Petersburg in the 19th century and the lag of Moscow, which at the time had a “provincial” look), and Tolstoy’s deeply personal sympathies and antipathies, to which he strove to impart a universal character.

We know the Petersburg of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Blok, Andrey Bely, Akhmatova… But we do not know the “Petersburg of Tolstoy.” Such an artistic notion simply does not exist. And yet, much of the action in Tolstoy’s novels takes place in Petersburg.

The characters in  War and Peace, Anna Karenina  and  Resurrection  arrive in Petersburg, leave Petersburg, ride through Petersburg’s streets, but they do not see Petersburg. Nor does the reader. At any rate, Tolstoy describes this space in a perfunctory manner. Here is Pierre Bezukhov heading for Anatoly Kuragin’s place: “It was a duskless Petersburg June night” (WaP, vol. 1, part 1, IX; [17, p. 48]). And this is Natasha Rostova going to a Petersburg ball: “The dignitary’s well-known house on the English Embankment shone with countless light” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XIV; [17, p. 471]). A little further there is a mention of Tavrichesky Garden near which lives maid of honor Peronsky at whose house the Rostovs have to make a brief stop. Tavrichesky Garden is again mentioned in the next chapter because Speransky’s house is located nearby (Tolstoy extracted this detail from  The Life of Count Speransky  [6, p. 353]). This is about all that the huge novel has to say about Petersburg.

There is no mention of Petersburg’s sights in  War and Peace -no bridges, spires, churches, palaces or squares. Not even the Neva River. Tolstoy has no interest in Petersburg as an architectural or natural landscape. He does not show it to us, merely using deft touches and patches to create an illusion of a lived-in place with which almost everyone has some personal associations, confidently counting on the reader to fill in the missing details in his imagination.

There is practically no mention of Petersburg landscape in  Anna Karenina,  a novel about Tolstoy’s contemporaries: “a deserted Nevsky Avenue” is mentioned once (part 4, XVII). Vronsky, we are told, had a “large apartment on Morskaya” (part 1, XXXIV), 1  and there is a mention of a large house of Princess Betsy Tverskoy on Bolshaya Morskaya (part 2, VI). Nevsky and Morskaya are mentioned once each in  Resurrection.

Nikolay Antsyferov, an inspired researcher of “the soul of Petersburg,” noted that Tolstoy

has contributed nothing of substance to the description of Petersburg… Constantly choosing Petersburg as the place of action in his novels, he nowhere touches upon the individuality of our city… It remains to lament the fact that we have been left without an image of Petersburg created by L. N. Tolstoy [1, pp. 131-132].

As a source of creative inspiration, Petersburg did not exist for Tolstoy. Unlike Pushkin or Gogol, he had no superlatives for it. For Tolstoy, it is simply a city inhabited by people, and he likes these people less than others.

Among the innumerable subdivisions that can be made in the phenomena of life, one can subdivide them all into those in which content predominates and those in which form predominates. Among the latter, as opposed to the life of a village, a zemstvo, a province, even of Moscow, can be counted the life of Petersburg, especially its salon life (WaP, vol. 3, part 2, VI; [17, p. 726]).

Indeed, in Tolstoy’s works Petersburg is a city of salons, dignitaries, courtiers and balls; the rest of Petersburg-the world of merchants, petty clerks, artisans, cabmen, servants and Petersburg beggars-did not interest Tolstoy and was largely unfamiliar to him. In a rough draft of the preface to  War and Peace  he wrote : “The life of civil servants, merchants, seminarians and  muzhiks  does not interest me, I only half understand it; the life of aristocrats of the time thanks to the artifacts of the time and other reasons, I understand, find interesting and likable” [14, vol. 13, p. 55].

The life of Petersburg’s high society, too, he largely knew as an outsider who had grown up in the province and preferred rural life to city life, although as a man of letters and a count he was well received in some of Petersburg’s drawing rooms, for example, by his relative Aleksandra Tolstoy, a spinster and a lady-in-waiting whose interests revolved around the imperial family and religion. “The five children of Alexander II and Empress Maria Aleksandrovna occupy the main place in my life,” she wrote [13, p. 230]. Aleksandra Tolstoy may have been one of the prototypes of the lady-in-waiting Anna Pavlovna Scherer and in any case she reinforced Tolstoy’s notion that Petersburg was peopled by “phantoms.”

In  War and Peace  Petersburg is the Mecca of career-seekers of every stripe. Of Boris Drubetskoy, that “high-society Molchalin,” as Pisarev aptly called him (“The Old Gentry,” 1868; [8, p 77]), Tolstoy writes: “He loved Petersburg and despised Moscow” (WaP, vol. 2, part 2, VI; [17, p. 382]). Another social climber, Adolf Berg, receives in Petersburg decorations for fictitious military exploits and holds “some sort of especially profitable posts” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XI; [17, p. 464]).

In the lives of the main characters of  War and Peace  Petersburg plays either a harmful or useless role: here Prince Andrey takes part in the Speransky commission and comes to the conclusion that it is “idle work;” here Pierre first attends booze parties, then marries unhappily and then wastes time on symbolic Masonic “works.” “His life meanwhile went on in the same way, with the same diversions and licentiousness” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, VII; [17, p. 451]). The only Freemason whom Pierre respects and loves, Iosif Alekseevich Bazdeev, does not take part in the activities of Petersburg’s masonic lodge and “permanently” lives in Moscow.

The Moscow family of Count Rostov (in many ways copied from the Tolstoy family) feel like strangers in Petersburg.

Despite the fact that in Moscow the Rostovs belonged to high society… in Petersburg their society was mixed and indefinite. In Petersburg they were provincials to whom the very people that the Rostovs fed in Moscow without asking what society they belonged to would not lower themselves (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XI; [17, p. 464]).

The young Count Tolstoy was such a provincial when, at the age of twenty, he came to the capital city intent on conquering it.

At first, the city made a very favorable impression on him. On February 13, 1849, Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergey that he intended to stay in Petersburg “forever,” that Petersburg life was having “great and good influence” on him, making him “accustomed to activity” and order:

Somehow you cannot do nothing; everybody is busy, bustling, and you won’t find anyone to lead a dissolute life with… for him who wants to live and is young there is no place in Russia like Petersburg [14, vol. 59, pp. 28-29].

Young Tolstoy intended to sit for candidate’s exams at Petersburg University and join the civil service in Petersburg, but then abruptly changed his mind about the civil service and decided to become a cadet of the cavalry regiment. At the time, he was prone to change his plans quickly. Eventually he failed to choose a  métier  and left Petersburg after five months of a life of dissipation (gambling, Gypsies, dinners at expensive restaurants) leaving behind huge debts in the amount of 1,600 rubles, including a debt to a fashionable restaurateur (Dussaut) and an equally famous tailor (Scharmer). In a letter dated May 1, 1849, he asked his brother Sergey to sell the village of Malaya Vorotynka so that he could pay off his debts [3, pp. 255, 259]. He led the same dissolute kind of life in Petersburg again in 1855-1856 when he came there as a young officer from Sebastopol. Tolstoy drew on this life experience in describing the young Pierre Bezukhov and his cavorting in Petersburg: “Pierre had not managed to choose a career for himself in Petersburg, and had indeed been banished to Moscow for riotous behavior” (WaP, vol. 1, part 1, XIII; [17, p. 69]).

Tolstoy, who always sought to improve himself, tried to avoid Petersburg as a city of temptations and vices. This is what he wrote to his wife about his son Lev in a letter of November 5, 1882:

I am constantly anxious for him lest he gets misled in this morally despicable city. Here are all the temptations of a luxurious capital… I remember myself as a young man going crazy with a special immoral kind of craziness in this luxurious city without any principles other than depravity and servility [14, vol. 84, p. 168].

After 1861, Tolstoy came to Petersburg only a few times on short business visits. He never had a house in Petersburg. Nekhlyudov’s perception of the northern capital might very well be Tolstoy’s:

Petersburg in general affected him with its usual physically invigorating and mentally dulling effect. Everything so clean, so comfortably well-arranged and the people so lenient in moral matters, that life seemed very easy ( Resurrection,  part 2, XV; [15, p. 394]).

Petersburg in  War and Peace  is a capital city in which people “are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay” (Osip Mandelstam)-without being aware of the vital interests of Russia and without taking its woes close to heart.

The top news in Petersburg are secondary events, such as General Bennigsen’s imaginary victories over Napoleon during the 1807 campaign or the meeting of two emperors. Tolstoy never misses an occasion to make an ironic remark: “In 1808 the emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a new meeting with the emperor Napoleon, and there was much talk in Petersburg high society about the grandeur of this solemn meeting” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, 1; [17, p. 436]).

Even during the Patriotic War against Napoleon Petersburg lives its usual life:

The calm, luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only with phantoms, with reflections of life, went on as of old; and beyond this course of life it took great effort to realize the danger and the difficult situation the Russian people were in. There were the same levees and balls, the same French theater, the same interests of the courts, the same interests of the service and intrigues (WaP, vol. 4, part 1, I; [17, p. 955]).

Tolstoy’s depiction of Petersburg society is always marked by affectation verging on satire. The “enthusiast” Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the weathervane of court opinions Vasily Kuragin and his wayward children (the “idiot” Hyppolite and the adulteress Helen) embody the pointless activities of outsiders who have no strong bonds with their people. News from the theater of hostilities reaches them in a distorted and biased form as if learned from European newspapers. Here they honor Wittgenstein with great pomp and circumstance as  le héros de Petropol  after his success in a few local battles; they read the grandiloquent letter from the Reverend Platon as if it were the Gospel; after the battle of Borodino they discuss the sovereign’s anxieties, the death of Kutaisov and the illness and death of Helen Kuragin. The General Staff sitting in Petersburg makes “useless” plans of defeating the enemy even as impossible or belated orders are sent from Petersburg to the front. Petersburg occupies considerable space in  War and Peace,  yet remains on the periphery of Tolstoy’s artistic vision, and Tolstoy does it deliberately: he thinks of it as a city that exists separately from the Russian people and Russia’s destiny.

Needless to say, this is no more than a mythical-poetic construct which has little in common with the real Petersburg of the early 19th century. Many prominent Petersburgers saw their houses and apartments in Moscow pillaged by the French, all Petersburg youth took part in the Patriotic War, a large militia (16,500-strong) was formed, it being the second such sacrifice (Petersburg had put up an 11,000-strong militia during the second war against Napoleon in 1806-1807), Wittgenstein’s army was engaged in heavy fighting against Marshals Oudinot and Saint-Cyr who were pushing toward Petersburg; during the Patriotic War Petersburg did not feel safe even for a day, especially after the enemy occupied Moscow and there were fears that Napoleon would strike at Petersburg (Napoleon considered this option).

In a word, Tolstoy chose to ignore many important features of Petersburg’s life in 1812 not to compromise his conviction that Moscow bore the brunt of the Patriotic War while Petersburg looked on its woes from outside.

It is telling that Tolstoy’s Petersburg, the most densely populated city in 19th century Russia, turns out to be a city without people: if  War and Peace  is to be believed, its inhabitants are either ladies-in-waiting or dignitaries or guardsmen.

Moscow, on the contrary, is depicted as the focus of people’s life and an arena of mass scenes, be it Alexander I’s appearance before the people at the Kremlin (where people fight over the biscuits he throws to them) or the murder of Vereshchagin, or epic scenes of the Russian army leaving Moscow in which the people is invariably presented as a great ungovernable mass that determines the course of history.

The cold, spare and superficial depiction of Petersburg is in striking contrast with the thoroughness and warmth Tolstoy brings to the description of Moscow:

In Moscow, as soon as he [Pierre] moved into his huge house with the dried- and drying-up princesses, with its enormous staff, as soon as he saw-on driving through the city-the Iverskaya Chapel with countless candles burning before the gold casing, saw the Kremlin Square with its untrampled snow, the cabbies, the hovels of the Sivtsev Vrazhek, saw old Moscow men, who desired nothing and were not hurrying anywhere as they lived out their lives, saw little old women, Moscow ladies, Moscow balls, and the Moscow English Club-he felt himself at home, in a quiet haven. For him Moscow was comfortable, warm, habitual, and dirty, like an old dressing gown (WaP, vol. 2, part 5, I; [17, p. 555]).

As early as 1865, the critic Nikolay Solovyov, discussing the merits of Goncharov’s novel  Oblomov,  wrote:

One wonders, though, why the author has placed his hero in Petersburg and, of all places, in the most crowded Gorokhovaya Street; his proper place is in Moscow in Spiridonovka, everything that seeks rest heads for Moscow. In this mass of small houses and crooked, narrow streets it is easy to get lost and feel protected from everything that worries and nags. You can hardly hole up like this in a provincial town because there everything is in view, people all know one another; and finally, these towns, in spite of their smallness, are sometimes so full of life, such growth that you cannot help feeling invigorated. Likewise, Petersburg, because it is so crowded and cramped, does not offer calm places: not having a single hill, people there live as if they are in the mountains, one above the other; climbing, bumping into each other. You lose your guard for a moment and before you know it you are tumbling head first. Petersburg is largely a seaside city: a city of anxiety and movement. Quick changes of climate, constant diseases, the danger of floods and so on-all this may have formed the troubled, active character of which there is too much in a Petersburg denizen. Petersburg is a totally inconvenient place for Oblomov (The Art Issue. The works of N. A. Dobrolyubov, 1865; [11, p. 440]).

Moscow with its suburbs of wooden houses, measured and unhurried life as it was in Tolstoy’s time was far closer to him, more congenial, more simple to understand and more convenient than Petersburg.  War and Peace,  which brought him great fame, was published in Moscow.  Anna Karenina  was published there too. Tolstoy frequently visited Moscow and since 1882 had a house in Khamovniki, a wooden house with a fruit-bearing garden, which partly reconciled him with the city’s hustle and bustle.

Petersburg, the summit of Russian urbanism, oppressed and repelled Tolstoy. On that point he was on the same page with the Slavophiles. Aleksey Khomyakov wrote: “Petersburg has always been and will be solely a government city… The life of government power and the life of the people’s spirit are separate even in their location” (“On the Old and the New,” 1839; [5, p. 26]). It was not for nothing that the democrat Nikolay Shelgunov described  War and Peace  as “a Slavophile novel” (“The Philosophy of Stagnation,” 1870; [7, p. 359]). At least at the time of writing his epic novel Tolstoy was much closer to the Slavophiles than ever, which was not lost on Nikolay Strakhov, a “native soil” Slavophile who wrote a glowing review of  War and Peace.

Moscow is portrayed in  War and Peace  as the center of the Russian cosmos and a magnet that attracts all the forces of Europe. Napoleon is entranced upon entering Moscow and almost does not believe his eyes surveying its grand panorama from Poklonnaya Hill: “In the clear morning light he looked now at the city, now at the map, checking the details of the city, and the certainty of possession excited and awed him” (WaP, vol. 3, part 3, XIX; [17, p. 891]).

The image of Moscow as seen with the eyes of the conqueror has erotic associations, stressing its femininity: “Napoleon saw from Poklonnaya Hill the quivering of life in the city and felt, as it were, the breathing of that big and beautiful body.” The author then quotes Napoleon’s real sentence in his conversation with captive General Pavel Tuchkov: “Une ville occupée par l’ennemi ressemble a une fille qui a perdu son honneur” (“A capital occupied by the enemy is like a young woman who has lost her honor”). “And from that point of view he looked for the first time upon the Oriental beauty lying before him” [Ibid.].

On the very same page (though not in all the editions) is perhaps the most famous place: “Every Russian person looking at Moscow feels that she is a mother; every foreigner looking at it and not knowing its maternal meaning, should feel the feminine character of this city, Napoleon felt it” [16, vol. 5, p. 79]. 2

In the typesetter’s copy of the manuscript Tolstoy speaks about it at greater length and even more ardently:

Moscow is a ‘she,’ anyone who feels it is aware of this. Paris, Berlin, London, especially Petersburg, are a ‘he.’ Although  la ville, die Stadt  are feminine gender and the word for city (in Russian- V. S. ) is masculine, Moscow is a woman, she is a mother, sufferer and martyr. She suffered and will suffer, she is not graceful, not well-built, she is not a virgin, she has given birth, she is a mother and therefore she is meek and magnificent. Every Russian feels that she is a mother, every foreigner (and Napoleon felt it) feels that she is a woman and she could be insulted [14, vol. 14, p. 370].

As we see, the image of Moscow in  War and Peace  is highly mythologized: Tolstoy’s Moscow, like goddesses in ancient cultures, oozes the symbolism of gender, the maternal element, sexual energy and reproduction of life.

Upon entering Moscow, the unstoppable enemy army is absorbed, diluted and depleted in its huge organism. During the month it stays there, it loses its strength such that it can think of nothing but flight. This was how Tolstoy saw things. From the purely historical point of view this is to a large extent an exaggeration, like Tolstoy’s conviction that the Battle of Borodino had determined the outcome of the war and the fate of Napoleon’s empire. Tolstoy does not even mention the bloody battles of 1813-1815 beyond noting that all of them were the death throes of a beast mortally wounded in Moscow (WaP, vol. 4, part 2, II; [17, p. 729]). In Moscow scenes, Tolstoy comes across as an ardent patriot for whom no hyperbole is excessive.

After the flight of the French the burnt-down Moscow remains as much of a magnet as before. Tolstoy compares it to a stirred anthill, which the industrious insects instinctively try to rebuild seeking to restore the habitual way of life:

Moscow, in the month of October, despite the fact that there were no authorities, no churches, no holy objects, no wealth, no houses, was the same Moscow it had been in August. Everything was destroyed, except for something immaterial but mighty and indestructible… In a week there, were already fifteen thousand inhabitants in Moscow, in two-twenty-five thousand, and so on. Rising ever higher and higher, this number, by the fall of 1813, had reached a figure exceeding the population of the year 1812 (WaP, vol. 4, part 4, XIV; [17, p. 1129]).

Tolstoy frequently used factual material, but in this case, his “figures” are fictitious. No such statistics exist. Indeed, authoritative sources say that the size of Moscow’s population was growing slowly. By the beginning of 1812, Moscow had a population of 275,000, and after the Napoleonic invasion (in December 1812) it had dropped to 162,000. In 1816 it stood at 166,500, in 1822 at 234,000, and in 1825 at 257,700; it was not until 1829 that the population exceeded the prewar mark of 303,600 [4, p. 162; 12, p. 33; 9, p. 9]. Other than that, Tolstoy was right: Moscow did not perish, like ancient Ryazan, 3  and was largely built back by the end of Alexander I’s reign.

The Napoleonic invasion was a watershed event that divided Moscow’s history into “before” and “after” the fire. The flames of 1812 destroyed not only more than two-thirds of its buildings, but in many ways the traditional pattern of Moscow life.

However, in place of burned-out antiquity Moscow got something larger, a second lease of life, a development impetus. After 1812, Moscow lived through a second period of resurgence, which dramatically changed its character and role.

Having lived through a catastrophe and realized the fickleness of all earthly things, Moscow developed an appetite for change. Construction and repair were pursued with a vengeance. Since then for more than two centuries, Moscow has been building and rebuilding itself non-stop, even its historical center has never settled in its architectural forms.

This was remarked already by Vissarion Belinsky in his 1844 article “Petersburg and Moscow”:

Moscow is proud of its historical artifacts, monuments, it is itself a historical artifact in external and internal terms. But like its pre-Petrian artifacts, it is an odd mixture with the new: of the Kremlin only the original drawing has survived, for it is altered every year and new buildings appear. The wind of change is blowing toward Moscow as well, erasing little by little the imprint of antiquity [2, p. 393].

In the 177 years since these words were written the principles of Moscow urban development have remained the same: the historical center (including the Kremlin) was redeveloped under Nicolas I, and again afterward, it was destroyed and redeveloped in the Soviet time, restored and rebuilt in the 1990s and it is being redeveloped today. To be sure, many old landmarks have been preserved, there are churches and monasteries that are older than Petersburg, and there are well-preserved 18th-century townhouses and 17th century chambers, but they do not determine Moscow’s present-day look, antiquities more and more being pushed into the background of modern life or reconstructed to look like new.

Paradoxically, Petersburg, founded 556 years after Moscow, looks like a much older city frozen in its forms because its historical center was much less affected by redevelopment, and indeed the city itself has not been developing so dynamically over the past hundred years. Moscow’s permanent development, in spite of the losses and occasionally ugly extremes of new construction, is living proof of the fact that Moscow is still a vibrant city, which lives more by its present than by its past.

The traditional rivalry between the two capitals resulted in the two cities swapping their places, as it were. While formerly Moscow was the custodian of traditions, today it is Petersburg that is regarded as “the cultural capital.” Whereas formerly Petersburg was the business center of Russia where provincials flocked “to catch their fortunes and ranks” and Moscow was considered by Petersburgers to be a “backwater,” today things have reversed: the government, the bureaucracy and the business elite are in Moscow and today’s provincials usually come to Moscow in search of fortune. No wonder Moscow’s population is growing steadily (even though overall population statistics are not comforting) more than twice exceeding that of Petersburg. 4

The characters of Moscow and Petersburg citizens have also changed significantly over the last 150 years, and again, they have not only changed but swapped places, as it were. Whereas in the 19th century Petersburg citizens were considered businesslike and arrogant, engrossed in the interests of the moment and Muscovites were thought to be slow and traditional, today these reputations are no longer relevant and are barely discernible-in reverse. This of course has much to do with clichés and myths, but there is no denying that today Moscow embodies the political and business Russia, the role Petersburg played in the 19th century.

In the above-mentioned 1844 article Belinsky wrote about the “quiet,  provincial”  status of Moscow [2, p. 413], which shows how much water has flown under the bridge over the last 177 years. Today’s Moscow can least of all be described as “provincial,” “archaic,” and “quiet.” The fact that at the very beginning of the 20th century Chekhov’s  three sisters  longing to get away from a provincial city wanted to go “to Moscow” and not to Petersburg is a telltale literary sign of the changed reality which put the ancient capital to the forefront of Russia’s life.

For three centuries, Moscow and Petersburg have been rivals symbolizing the struggle and unity of opposites. Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky, Herzen, Khomyakov, Evgeny Zamyatin have left vivid comparative descriptions of Moscow and Petersburg. Leo Tolstoy also gave due to this topic, in fact, in  War and Peace  we find not just a comparison, but a stark juxtaposition of the two capitals. This is very much in the spirit of Tolstoy, his antinomy-based thinking and character.

Tolstoy wrote a great deal about  love  (often in the lofty Christian meaning) but himself he was not a source of all-embracing and all-forgiving love. There was much in this world that he did not love and he said so openly. Petersburg was the embodiment of everything Tolstoy  did not love.

1. Antsyferov N. P.  Soul of Petersburg.  St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron, 1922. (In Russian.)

2. Belinsky V. G.  Complete Works.  Vol. 8. Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1955. (In Russian.)

3. Gusev N. N.  Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Materials for Biography. 1828-1855.  Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1954. (In Russian.)

4.  History of Moscow.  Vol. 3. Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1954. (In Russian.)

5. Khomyakov A. S.  Complete Works.  3rd ed. Vol. 3. Moscow: Universitetskaya tipografiya, 1900. (In Russian.)

6. Korf M. L.  The Life of Count Speransky.  Vol. 2. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaya publichnaya biblioteka, 1861. (In Russian.)

7.  The novel  “ War and Peace ”  by L. N. Tolstoy in Russian Criticism.  Leningrad: LGU, 1989. (In Russian.)

8. Pisarev D. I.  Complete Works.  Vol. 10. Moscow: Nauka, 2007. (In Russian.)

9. Sakharov A. N. (Ed.)  History of Moscow from Ancient Times to the Present Day.  Vol. 2. Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1997. (In Russian.)

10. Shcherbakov V I. The War of 1812 in Leo Tolstoy’s Novel  War and Peace. 1812 and World Literature.  Moscow: IWLRAS, 2013, pp. 235-318. (In Russian.)

11. Solovyev N. I. The Art Issue. The Works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov.  Otechestvennyye zapiski.  1865. No. 8, pp. 416-444 (1st pgn). (In Russian.)

12. Sytin P. V.  The Moscow Fire of 1812 and the Construction of the City for 50 years.  Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochiy, 1972. (In Russian.)

13. Tolstoy A. A.  Notes of a Lady-in-Waiting: A Sad Episode of My Court Life.  Trans. by L. V. Gladkova. Moscow: Entsiklopediya rossiyskikh dereven’, 1996. (In Russian.)

14. Tolstoy L. N.  Complete Works.  90 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1928-1958. (In Russian.)

15. Tolstoy L.  Resurrection.  The Floating Press, 2011.

16. Tolstoy L. N.  War and Peace.  6 vols. Moscow: Tip. T. Ris, 1868-1869.

17. Tolstoy L.  War and Peace.  Trans. by R. Pevear, L. Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

1  The reference is to Bolshaya Morskaya Street, often called simply Morskaya in the 19th century.

2  Quoted from the first edition of  War and Peace  [16; Vol. 5, part 1, XIX]. The words about Mother Moscow were deleted from the 1873 edition. The 90-volume  Complete Works  cites “variants” of this passage [14, vol. 11, p. 444].

3  Today’s Ryazan is the former Pereyaslavl-Ryazansky, which in 1778 was named after the ancient Ryazan destroyed by Batu Khan in the winter of 1237. The archeological preserve Staraya Ryazan (Old Ryazan) is located 50 km from the modern Ryazan.

4  12.7 million versus 5.4 million (2021).

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Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman on Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

“ Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur. ”

~douglas smith , author of rasputin: faith, power, and the twilight of the romanovs.

We’re wrapping up National Translation Month with a guest post by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, the translators of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in our Russian Library series. In this post, Kahn and Reyfman discuss the role of the travelogue in the eighteenth century and Radishchev’s motivation for writing this book.

Check out our  National Translation Month overview to read an excerpt and for a chance to win a copy of this!

• • • • • •

“Each person is born into this world the equal of any other.”

This line opens a speech in the court trial of a family of serfs who killed their master in self-defense. This line and other statements about inequality, human rights, and social justice, are of crucial importance in Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790).  These ideas make this travelogue both a work ahead of its time in Russia, published seventy years before the Great Reforms of the 1860s, and a work that is completely contemporary to its time because the ideals expressed by Radishchev’s narrators are consistent with progressive movements of the 1790s. An experienced civil servant, Radishchev could have written out his positions on agrarian reform and serfdom in a treatise or a formal report. Instead, he chose to cast his radical critique in the form of a journey. He published this work on a hand-press with dire personal consequences, facing first arrest and then exile. What may have been explosive then—and what is most relevant now—was not Radishchev’s policies on serfdom (he offered none in this work) but rather the arguments for human rights he espouses.

The eighteenth century was a great age of journeys, real and fictional. Fictional journeys provided defamiliarized perspectives on beliefs, attitudes, and customs as socially constructed. While the Enlightenment generally promoted moral universals, it also relativized social practices, and by experiencing reality first-hand, travelers commented anthropologically on variations of ways of life near and far; dietary practices, marriage arrangements, sexual taboos, and human rights were thrown in the spotlight, indications of local customs that showed differences and consistencies in the application of universal human tendencies. The pioneering work in travel as comparative social science was Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes, 1721), and many later journeys dressed up philosophical enquiry as adventure. The Supplement to the Journey of Bougainville (Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 1796), a masterpiece by Denis Diderot, considers the state of nature in which eighteenth-century Tahitans lived as a society. Polygamous family structures were naturally communist in property sharing, while colonization by outsiders wrought disease and poverty on the native population. Captain James Cook may have been a hero as an explorer, but from another standpoint his settlers had brought destruction. Similar in its use of travel as a vehicle for social critique was Guillaume Thomas Raynal’s A Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies (Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 1770). A tale of travels full of tirades against colonial exploitation, unfair trade practices, and slave rebellions in the East Indies, South America, and elsewhere, the book was banned in France in 1779 and burned by France’s public executioner. Raynal escaped arrest by going first to the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia and then to St. Petersburg where Catherine the Great offered him a warm reception. Raynal’s book was one that Radishchev had in his library and from which he quoted.

“ Fictional journeys provided defamiliarized perspectives on beliefs, attitudes, and customs as socially constructed. ”

In his travelogue, Radishchev followed the example of other distinguished European writers in representing the societal ills and governance issues besetting his country; he uses a mixed form that combines novelistic stories, treatise-like speeches, and allegories in a way that is both specific and universal, realistic and abstract, targeting troubles that existed in one place but could happen in any society. This is the tradition in which Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg should be read. His journey follows along a real postal route, with grumpy stationmasters and insufficient postal-horses lending verisimilitude. His hero offers an outsider’s perspective on local practices and, like Diderot’s naturalist in Tahiti, he is particularly fascinated by the treatment of women, arranged marriages, sexual exploitation, and the ravages of venereal disease. And in the manner of Laurence Sterne (as well as of Nikolai Karamzin, whose work Radishchev may have read), Radishchev’s hero is brimming with virtue and tears. A readiness to weep may look quaint now, but in eighteenth-century literary symbolism, weeping was proof of a human capacity for empathy. Empathy, for the most important social theorists of the period such as Lord Kames and Adam Smith, is the bedrock of natural justice that societies must try to encode in law if they are to prevent discord and rebellion fomented by colonial and internal exploitation.

Yet what was Radishchev’s motivation to write this work? Russia had undergone multiple reforms during Catherine the Great’s long reign. In 1790, however, Catherine was seen, rightly or wrongly, as aged and more vulnerable to court factions and intrigues. Furthermore, there had been no progress on the question of serfdom just as the French Revolution inspired popular movements on a massive scale across Europe and the globe. Under some individual landholders, the plight of the serfs had improved. But for the vast majority of serfs (and we are talking about more than 90 percent of the Russian Empire’s population), economic hardship was constant and unalleviated, exacerbated by other societal woes such as forced conscription and sexual exploitation—all topics that come up in this work.

“ A prohibited book, the Journey ’s radicalism was seen as implicitly revolutionary. ”

A prohibited book, the Journey ’s radicalism was seen as implicitly revolutionary. But this is contestable. Instead, the Journey ’s radicalism might be better understood again in the context of its time. Unlike Captain Cook or Josiah Banks, for example, Radishchev did not write about scientific or exploratory journeys. (His letters from Siberia, however, show how observant he was about local flora and fauna.) His work places him closer to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History in taking a human rights–based perspective, and how Russian serfs are presented as equal members of society is one of the most striking positions adopted in the Journey . Peasants’ lives matter not just out of economic efficiency but because of natural justice, an argument made in the speech of a nobleman who justifies acts of violence as self-defense in the aforementioned trial of the two serfs.

In these lines, at a time when questions of economic equality and race are making headlines across the United States and around the world, one can see the relevance of Radishchev’s work to our present moment, especially in translation. The speech below uses a familiar vocabulary, one that reflects the Enlightenment values enshrined in other contemporary documents such as the American Constitution and the U.S. Bill of Rights:

Man considered, therefore, outside society is a being dependent on nobody else for his own deeds. But he puts a limit on these, consents not to subordinate himself to his own will alone, and becomes obedient to the commands of other human beings, in a word becomes a citizen. For the sake of what cause does he restrain his desires? For what purpose does he set a power over himself? Unlimited in the exercise of his willpower, why does he limit it through obedience?—For his own sake,—says reason.—For his own sake,—says an inner voice.—For his own sake,—says wise legislation. It follows that where it is not in his interest to be a citizen there is no citizen. It follows, therefore, that whoever wants to deprive him of the advantage of being a citizen is his enemy. He seeks in the law defense and retribution against his enemy. If the law either does not have the power to defend him or does not wish to do so, or lacks the power to help him immediately in his present woe, then the citizen uses his natural right of defense, preservation, welfare. For the citizen, insofar as he has become a citizen, does not cease to be a person whose first duty, stemming from his organism, is preservation, defense, welfare.

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The Russian Library

A new English-language series of translated Russian fiction, drama, and poetry from Columbia University Press, supported by Read Russia, the Institute of Translation and additional public and private philanthropies.

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

by Alexander Radishchev

Translated by Andrew Kahn & Irina Reyfman

Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is among the most important pieces of writing to come out of Russia in the age of Catherine the Great. An account of a fictional journey along a postal route, it blends literature, philosophy, and political economy to expose social and economic injustices and their causes at all levels of Russian society. Not long after the book’s publication in 1790, Radishchev was condemned to death for its radicalism and ultimately exiled to Siberia instead.

Radishchev’s literary journey is guided by intense moral conviction. He sought to confront the reader with urgent ethical questions, laying bare the cruelty of serfdom and other institutionalized forms of exploitation. The Journey’s multiple strands include sentimental fictions, allegorical discourses, poetry, theatrical plots, historical essays, a treatise on raising children, and comments on corruption and political economy, all informed by Enlightenment arguments and an interest in placing Russia in its European context. Radishchev is perhaps the first in a long line of Russian writer-dissenters such as Herzen and Solzhenitsyn who created a singular literary idiom to express a subversive message. In Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman’s idiomatic and stylistically sensitive translation, one of imperial Russia’s most notorious clandestine books is now accessible to English-speaking readers.

About the Author

About the Translators

Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur.

Russian Revolution

Vladimir Lenin’s Return Journey to Russia Changed the World Forever

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, our writer set out from Zurich to relive this epic travel

Joshua Hammer

Contributing writer

The town of Haparanda, 700 miles north of Stockholm, is a lonely smudge of civilization in the vast tundra of Swedish Lapland. It was once a thriving outpost for trade in minerals, fur and timber, and the main northern crossing point into Finland, across the Torne River. On a cold and cloudless October afternoon, I stepped off the bus after a two-hour ride from Lulea, the last stop on the passenger train from Stockholm, and approached a tourist booth inside the Haparanda bus station. The manager sketched out a walk that took me past the northernmost IKEA store in the world, and then under a four-lane highway and down the Storgatan, or main street. Scattered among the concrete apartment blocks were vestiges of the town’s rustic past: a wood-shingle trading house; the Stadshotell, a century-old inn; and the Handelsbank, a Victorian structure with cupolas and a curving gray-slate roof.

I followed a side street to a grassy esplanade on the banks of the Torne. Across the river in Finland the white dome of the 18th-century Alatornio Church rose over a forest of birches. In the crisp light near dusk I walked on to the railroad station, a monumental neo-Classical brick structure. Inside the waiting room I found what I’d been looking for, a bronze plaque mounted on a blue tile wall: “Here Lenin passed through Haparanda on April 15, 1917, on his way from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd in Russia.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, joined by 29 other Russian exiles, a Pole and a Swiss, was on his way to Russia to try to seize power from the government and declare a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a phrase coined in the mid-19th century and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of Marxism. Lenin and his fellow exiles, revolutionaries all, including his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had boarded a train in Zurich, crossed Germany, traveled the Baltic Sea by ferry and ridden 17 hours by rail from Stockholm to this remote corner of Sweden.

They hired horse-drawn sleds to head across the frozen river to Finland. “I remember that it was night,” Grigory Zinoviev, one of the exiles traveling with Lenin, would write in a memoir. “There was a long thin ribbon of sledges. On each sledge were two people. Tension as [we] approached the Finnish border reached its maximum....Vladimir Ilyich was outwardly calm.” Eight days later, he would reach St. Petersburg, then Russia’s capital but known as Petrograd.

Lenin’s journey, undertaken 100 years ago this April, set in motion events that would forever change history—and are still being reckoned with today—so I decided to retrace his steps, curious to see how the great Bolshevik imprinted himself on Russia and the nations he passed through along the way. I also wanted to sense some of what Lenin experienced as he sped toward his destiny. He traveled with an entourage of revolutionaries and upstarts, but my companion was a book I’ve long admired,  To the Finland   Station , Edmund Wilson’s magisterial 1940 history of revolutionary thought, in which he described Lenin as the dynamic culmination of 150 years of radical theory. Wilson’s title refers to the Petrograd depot, “a little shabby stucco station, rubber gray and tarnished pink,” where Lenin stepped off the train that had carried him from Finland to remake the world.

As it happens, the centennial of Lenin’s fateful trip comes just when the Russia question, as it might be called, has grown increasingly urgent. President Vladimir Putin has emerged in recent years as a militaristic authoritarian intent on rebuilding Russia as a world power. U.S.-Russian relations are more fraught than in decades.

While Putin embraces the aggressive posture of his Soviet predecessors—the murder of oppositionists, the expansion of the state’s territorial boundaries by coercion and violence—and in that sense is heir to Lenin’s brutal legacy, he is no fan. Lenin, who represents a tumultuous force that turned a society upside down, is hardly the kind of figure that Putin, a deeply conservative autocrat, wants to celebrate. “We did not need a global revolution,” Putin told an interviewer last year on the 92nd anniversary of Lenin’s death. A few days later Putin denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for executing Czar Nicholas II, his family and their servants, and for killing thousands of clergy in the Red Terror, and placing a “time bomb” under the Russian state.

The sun was setting as I made my way toward the bus station to catch my ride across the bridge to Finland. I shivered in the Arctic chill as I walked beside the river Lenin had crossed, with the old church steeple reflecting off the placid water in the fading pink light. At the terminal café, I ordered a plate of herring—misidentified by the waitress as “whale”—and sat in the gathering darkness until the bus pulled up, in a mundane echo of Lenin’s perilous journey.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870 into a middle-class family in Simbirsk (now called Ulyanovsk), on the Volga River, 600 miles east of Moscow. His mother was well-educated, his father the director of primary schools for Simbirsk Province and a “man of high character and ability,” Wilson writes. Though Vladimir and his siblings grew up in comfort, the poverty and injustice of imperial Russia weighed heavily upon them. In 1887 his older brother, Alexander, was hanged in St. Petersburg for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Czar Alexander III. The execution “hardened” young Vladimir, said his sister, Anna, who would be sent into exile for subversion. Vladimir’s high-school principal complained that the teenager had “a distant manner, even with people he knows and even with the most superior of his schoolmates.”

After an interlude at Kazan University, Ulyanov began reading the works of Marx and Engels, the 19th-century theoreticians of Communism. “From the moment of his discovery of Marx...his way was clear,” the British historian Edward Crankshaw wrote. “Russia had to have revolution.” Upon earning a law degree from St. Petersburg University in 1891, Lenin became a leader of a Marxist group in St. Petersburg, secretly distributing revolutionary pamphlets to factory workers and recruiting new members. As the brother of an executed anti-czarist, he was under surveillance by the police, and in 1895 he was arrested, convicted of distributing propaganda and sentenced to three years in Siberian exile. Nadezhda Krupskaya, the daughter of an impoverished Russian army officer suspected of revolutionary sympathies, joined him there. The two had met at a gathering of leftists in St. Petersburg; she married him in Siberia. Ulyanov later would adopt the nom de guerre Lenin (likely derived from the name of a Siberian river, the Lena).

Soon after his return from Siberia, Lenin fled into exile in Western Europe. Except for a brief period back in Russia, he remained out of the country until 1917. Moving from Prague to London to Bern, publishing a radical newspaper called  Iskra  (“Spark”) and trying to organize an international Marxist movement, Lenin laid out his plan to transform Russia from a feudal society into a modern workers’ paradise. He argued that revolution would come from a coalition of peasants and factory workers, the so-called proletariat—led always by professional revolutionaries. “Attention must be devoted  principally to raising  the workers to the level of revolutionaries,” Lenin wrote in his manifesto  What Is to Be Done?  “It is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses.’”

Soon after the outbreak of the world war in August 1914, Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich, living off a small family inheritance.

I made my way to the Altstadt, a cluster of medieval alleys that rise from the steep banks of the Limmat River. The Spiegelgasse, a narrow cobblestone lane, jogs uphill from the Limmat, winds past the Cabaret Voltaire, a café founded in 1916 and, in many accounts, described as the birthplace of Dadaism, and spills into a leafy square dominated by a stone fountain. Here I found Number 14, a five-story building with a gabled rooftop, and a commemorative plaque mounted on the beige facade. The legend, in German, declares that from February 21, 1916, until April 2, 1917, this was the home of “Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution.”

Today the Altstadt is Zurich’s most touristy neighborhood, filled with cafés and gift shops, but when Lenin lived here, it was a down-and-out quarter prowled by thieves and prostitutes. In her  Reminiscences of Lenin , Krupskaya described their home as “a dingy old house” with “a smelly courtyard” overlooking a sausage factory. The house had one thing going for it, Krupskaya remembered: The owners were “a working-class family with a revolutionary outlook, who condemned the imperialist war.” At one point, their landlady exclaimed, “The soldiers ought to turn their weapons against their governments!” After that, wrote Krupskaya, “Ilyich would not hear of moving to another place.” Today that rundown rooming house has been renovated and features a trinket shop on the ground floor selling everything from multicolored Lenin busts to lava lamps.

Lenin spent his days churning out tracts in the reading room of Zurich’s Central Library and, at home, played host to a stream of fellow exiles. Lenin and Krupskaya took morning strolls along the Limmat and, when the library was closed on Thursday afternoons, hiked up the Zurichberg north of the city, taking along some books and “two bars of nut chocolate in blue wrappers at 15 centimes.”

I followed Lenin’s usual route along the Limmatquai, the river’s east bank, gazing across the narrow waterway at Zurich’s landmarks, including the church of St. Peter, distinguished by the largest clock face in Europe. The Limmatquai skirted a spacious square and at the far corner I reached the popular Café Odeon. Famed for Art Nouveau décor that has changed little in a century—chandeliers, brass fittings and marble-sheathed walls—the Odeon was one of Lenin’s favorite spots for reading newspapers. At the counter, I fell into conversation with a Swiss journalist who freelances for the venerable  Neue Zürcher Zeitung . “The paper had already been around for 140 years when Lenin lived here,” he boasted.

On the afternoon of March 15, 1917, Mieczyslaw Bronski, a young Polish revolutionary, raced up the stairs to the Lenins’ one-room apartment, just as the couple had finished lunch. “Haven’t you heard the news?” he exclaimed. “There’s a revolution in Russia!”

Enraged over food shortages, corruption and the disastrous war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, thousands of demonstrators had filled the streets of Petrograd, clashing with police; soldiers loyal to the czar switched their support to the protesters, forcing Nicholas II to abdicate. He and his family were placed under house arrest. The Russian Provisional Government, dominated by members of the bourgeoisie—the caste that Lenin despised—had taken over, sharing power with the Petrograd Soviet, a local governing body. Committees, or “soviets,” made up of industrial workers and soldiers, many with radical sympathies, had begun to form across Russia. Lenin raced out to buy every newspaper he could find—and began making plans to return home.

The German government was at war with Russia, but it nonetheless agreed to help Lenin return home. Germany saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection,” Crankshaw writes.

On April 9, Lenin and his 31 comrades gathered at Zurich station. A group of about 100 Russians, enraged that the revolutionaries had arranged passage by negotiating with the German enemy, jeered at the departing company. “Provocateurs! Spies! Pigs! Traitors!” the demonstrators shouted, in a scene documented by historian Michael Pearson. “The Kaiser is paying for the journey....They’re going to hang you...like German spies.” (Evidence suggests that German financiers did, in fact, secretly fund Lenin and his circle.) As the train left the station, Lenin reached out the window to bid farewell to a friend. “Either we’ll be swinging from the gallows in three months or we shall be in power,” he predicted.

Seated with Krupskaya in an end compartment, Lenin scribbled in an exercise book, expressing views similar to those he had advanced shortly before departure, by telegram to his Bolshevik cohorts in the Petrograd Soviet, urging no compromise: “Our tactics: no support to the new government;...arming of the proletariat the sole guarantee;...no rapprochement with other parties.”

As they rolled toward Berlin, Krupskaya and Lenin took note of the absence of young men in the villages where they stopped—virtually all were at the front or dead.

A Deutsche Bahn regional train second-class compartment bore me across Germany to Rostock, a port city on the Baltic Sea. I boarded the  Tom Sawyer , a seven-deck vessel the length of two football fields operated by the German TT Lines. A handful of tourists and dozens of Scandinavian and Russian truck drivers sipped goulash soup and ate bratwurst in the cafeteria as the ferry lurched into motion. Stepping onto the outdoor observation deck on a cold, drizzly night, I felt the sting of sea spray and stared up at a huge orange lifeboat, clamped in its frame high above me. Leaning over the starboard rail, I could make out the red and green lights of a buoy flashing through the mist. Then we passed the last jetty and headed into the open sea, bound for Trelleborg, Sweden, six hours north.

The sea was rougher when Lenin made the crossing aboard a Swedish ferry,  Queen Victoria . While most of his comrades suffered the heaving of the ship below decks, Lenin remained outside, joining a few other stalwarts in singing revolutionary anthems. At one point a wave broke across the bow and smacked Lenin in the face. As he dried himself with a handkerchief, someone declared, to laughter, “The first revolutionary wave from the shores of Russia.”

Plowing through the blackness of the Baltic night, I found it easy to imagine the excitement that Lenin must have felt as his ship moved inexorably toward his homeland. After standing in the drizzle for a half-hour, I headed to my spartan cabin to catch a few hours sleep before the vessel docked in Sweden at 4:30 in the morning.

In Trelleborg, I caught a train north to Stockholm, as Lenin did, riding past lush meadows and forests.

Once in the Swedish capital I followed in Lenin’s footsteps down the crowded Vasagatan, the main commercial street, to PUB, once the city’s most elegant department store, now a hotel. Lenin’s Swedish socialist friends brought him here to be outfitted “like a gentleman” before his arrival in Petrograd. He consented to a new pair of shoes to replace his studded mountain boots, but he drew the line at an overcoat; he was not, he said, opening a tailor shop.

From the former PUB store, I crossed a canal on foot to the Gamla Stan, the Old Town, a hive of medieval alleys on a small island, and walked to a smaller island, Skeppsholmen, the site of another monument to Lenin’s sojourn in Sweden. Created by Swedish artist Bjorn Lovin and situated in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, it consists of a backdrop of black granite and a long strip of cobblestones embedded with a piece of iron tram track. The work pays tribute to an iconic photo of Lenin strolling the Vasagatan, carrying an umbrella and wearing a fedora, joined by Krupskaya and other revolutionaries. The museum catalog asserts that “This is not a monument that pays tribute to a person” but rather is “a memorial, in the true sense of the word.” Yet the work—like other vestiges of Lenin all over Europe—has become an object of controversy. After a visit in January 2016, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted that the exhibit was a “shameful monument to Lenin visiting Stockholm. At least it’s dark & discreet.”

Clambering into the horse-drawn sleds on the bank of the frozen Torne in Haparanda on the night of April 15, Lenin and his wife and comrades crossed to Finland, then under Russian control, and fully expected to be turned back at the border or even detained by Russian authorities. Instead they received a hearty welcome. “Everything was already familiar and dear to us,” Krupskaya wrote in  Reminiscences , recalling the train they boarded in Russianized Finland, which had been annexed by Czar Alexander I in 1809. “[T]he wretched third-class cars, the Russian soldiers. It was terribly good.”

I spent the night in Kemi, Finland, a bleak town on Bothnian Bay, walking in the freezing rain through the deserted streets to a concrete-block hotel just up from the waterfront. When I awoke at 7:30 the town was still shrouded in darkness. In winter, a receptionist told me, Kemi experiences only a couple of hours of daylight.

From there, I took the train south to Tampere, a riverside city where Lenin briefly stopped on his way to Petrograd. Twelve years earlier, Lenin had held a clandestine meeting in the Tampere Workers Hall with a 25-year-old revolutionary and bank robber, Joseph Stalin, to discuss money-raising schemes for the Bolsheviks. In 1946, pro-Soviet Finns turned that meeting room into a Lenin Museum, filling it with objects such as Lenin’s high-school honors certificate and iconic portraiture, including a copy of the 1947 painting  Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power , by the Russian artist Vladimir Serov.

“The museum’s primary role was to convey to the Finns the good things about the Soviet system,” curator Kalle Kallio, a bearded historian and self-described “pacifist,” told me when I met him at the entrance to the last surviving Lenin museum outside Russia. At its peak, the Lenin Museum drew 20,000 tourists a year—mostly Soviet tour groups visiting nonaligned Finland to get a taste of the West. But after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, interest waned, Finnish members of parliament denounced it and vandals ripped off the sign on the front door and riddled it with bullets. “It was the most hated museum in Finland,” Kallio said.

Under Kallio’s guidance, the struggling museum got a makeover last year. The curator tossed out most of the hagiographic memorabilia and introduced objects that depicted the less palatable aspects of the Soviet state—an overcoat worn by an officer of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD; a diorama of a Siberian prison camp. “We want to talk about Soviet society and his effect on history, and not make this a glorification thing,” said Kallio, adding that business has begun to pick up, especially among Finnish schoolchildren.

Finns aren’t alone in wanting to wipe out or otherwise grapple with the many tributes to Lenin that dot the former Soviet bloc. Protesters in the former East German city of Schwerin have battled for more than two years against municipal authorities to remove one of the last Lenin statues standing in Germany: a 13-foot-tall memorial erected in 1985 in front of a Soviet-style apartment block. In Nowa Huta, a suburb of Krakow, Poland, once known as “the ideal socialist town,” locals at a 2014 art festival raised a fluorescent green Lenin poised in the act of urination—near where a Lenin statue was torn down in 1989. In Ukraine, about 100 Lenin monuments have been removed in the last couple of years, commencing with a Lenin statue in Kiev toppled during demonstrations that brought down President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Even a Lenin sculpture in a central Moscow courtyard was a recent victim of decapitation.

In the morning I boarded the Allegro high-speed train at Helsinki Central Station for the three-and-a-half-hour, 300-mile trip to St. Petersburg. As I settled into my seat in the first-class car, we sped past birch and pine forests and soon approached the Russian border. A female immigration official scrupulously leafed through my U.S. passport, asked the purpose of my visit (tourism, I replied), frowned, wordlessly stamped it and handed it back to me. Shortly afterward, we pulled into the Finlyandsky Vokzal—the Finland Station.

Lenin arrived here on the night of April 16, eight days after leaving Zurich. Hundreds of workers, soldiers and an honor guard of sailors were waiting. Lenin stepped out of the small, red brick depot and climbed onto the roof of an armored car. He promised to pull Russia out of the war and do away with private property. “The people need peace, the people need bread, the people need land. And [the Provisional Government] gives you war, hunger, no bread,” he declared. “We must fight for the social revolution...till the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!”

“Thus,” said Leon Trotsky, the Marxist theoretician and Lenin’s compatriot, “the February revolution, garrulous and flabby and still rather stupid, greeted the man who had arrived with a determination to set it straight both in thought and in will.” The Russian socialist Nikolai Valentinov, in his 1953 memoir,  Encounters With Lenin , recalls a fellow revolutionary who described Lenin as “that rare phenomenon—a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause, and possessed of equal faith in himself.”

I caught a tram outside the Finland Station, rebuilt as a concrete colossus in the 1960s, and followed Lenin’s route to his next stop in Petrograd: the Kshesinskaya Mansion, an Art Nouveau villa given by Czar Nicholas II to his ballet-star mistress and seized by Bolsheviks in March 1917. I’d arranged ahead of time for a private tour of the elegant block-long villa, a series of interconnected structures built of stone and brick and featuring decorative metalwork and colored tiles.

Lenin rode on top of an armored vehicle to the mansion and climbed the stairs to a balcony, where he addressed a cheering crowd. “The utter falsity of all the [Provisional Government’s] promises should be made clear.” The villa was declared a state museum by the Soviets during the 1950s, though it, too, has played down the revolutionary propaganda in the last 25 years. “Lenin was a great historical personality,” museum director Evgeny Artemov said as he led me into the office where Lenin worked daily until July 1917. “As for passing judgment, that’s up to our visitors.”

During the spring of 1917, Lenin and his wife resided with his elder sister, Anna, and brother-in-law, Mark Yelizarov, the director of a Petrograd marine insurance company, in an apartment building at Shirokaya Street 52, now Lenina Street. I entered the rundown lobby and climbed a stairwell that reeked of boiled cabbage to a carefully maintained five-room apartment crammed with Lenin memorabilia. Nelli Privalenko, the curator, led me into the salon where Lenin once plotted with Stalin and other revolutionaries. Privalenko pointed out Lenin’s samovar, a piano and a chess table with a secret compartment to hide materials from the police. That artifact spoke to events after the Provisional Government turned against the Bolsheviks in July 1917 and Lenin was on the run, moving among safe houses. “The secret police came here searching for him three times,” Privalenko said.

The Smolny Institute, a former school for aristocratic girls built in 1808, became the staging ground of the October Revolution. In October 1917 Trotsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, based here, mobilized Red Guards, rebellious troops and sailors and prepared them to seize power from the now deeply unpopular Provisional Government. On October 25, Lenin sneaked inside Smolny, and took charge of a coup d’état. “Lenin was coordinating the military attack, sending messages and telegrams from here,” said Olga Romanova, a guide at Smolny, which now houses both a museum and St. Petersburg administrative offices. She led me down a gloomy hallway to the conference room, a former dance hall where the Bolsheviks (“majority”) swept aside their socialist rivals and declared themselves in charge. “By 3 a.m. they heard that the Winter Palace had fallen, and that the government had been arrested.” Barely six months after his return to Russia, Lenin was the absolute ruler of his country.

The man who dreamed of creating an egalitarian society, in fact dealt ruthlessly with anyone who dared oppose him. In his “attitude to his fellow-men,” the Russian economist and one-time Marxist Pyotr Struve wrote in the 1930s, “Lenin breathed coldness, contempt and cruelty.” Crankshaw wrote in a 1954 essay that Lenin “wanted to save the people from the dreadful tyranny of the czars—but in his way and no other. His way held the seeds of another tyranny.”

Memorial, the prominent Russian human rights group, which has exposed abuses under Putin, continues to unearth damning evidence of crimes by Lenin that the Bolsheviks suppressed for decades. “If they had arrested Lenin at the Finland Station, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble,” historian Alexander Margolis said when I met him at the group’s cramped, book-lined offices. Communiqués uncovered by Russian historians support the idea that Lenin gave the direct order for the execution of the czar and his immediate family.

When the civil war began in 1918, Lenin called for what he termed “mass terror” to “crush” resistance, and tens of thousands of deserters, peasant rebels and ordinary criminals were executed over the next three years. Margolis says that the Soviet leadership white-washed Lenin’s murderous rampage to the end of its 74-year rule. “At Khrushchev’s Party Congress in 1956, the line was that under Lenin all was fine and Stalin was a pervert who spoiled it all for us,” he says. “But the scale of bloodshed, repression and violence was not any different.”

In spite of such revelations, many Russians today view Lenin nostalgically as the founder of a powerful empire, and his statue still rises over countless public squares and private courtyards. There are Lenin  prospekts , or boulevards, from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, and his embalmed corpse—Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1924 at age 53—still lies in its marble mausoleum beside the Kremlin. It’s one of the many ironies of his legacy that even as elite Russian troops guard his tomb, which hundreds of thousands of people visit annually, the government doesn’t quite know how to evaluate or even recognize what the man did.

In his 1971 appraisal of  To the Finland Station , Edmund Wilson acknowledged the horrors unleashed by the Bolshevik revolutionary—a darkness that has endured. “The remoteness of Russia from the West evidently made it even easier to imagine that the [aim of] the Russian Revolution was to get rid of an oppressive past,” he wrote. “We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia: censorship, secret police...and an all-powerful and brutal autocracy.”

As I had crossed Sweden and Finland, watching the frozen ground flash by hour after hour, and crossed into Russia, I envisioned Lenin, reading, dispatching messages to his comrades, looking out at the same vast skies and infinite horizon.

Whether he hurtled toward doom or triumph, he couldn’t know. In the last hours before I arrived at the Finland Station, the experience grew increasingly ominous: I was following, I realized, the trajectory of a figure for whom the lust for power and ruthless determination to raze the existing order overtook all else, devouring Lenin, and sealing Russia’s fate.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, set up his headquarters in the Smolny Institute. In this same building, just down the hall from Lenin’s old office, another politician with a ruthless style and a taste for authoritarianism was, from 1991 to 1996, paving his way to power: Deputy Mayor Vladimir Putin.

Now, on the eve of the centenary of the October Revolution that propelled Lenin to power, Putin is being called upon to pass definitive judgment on a figure that, in some ways, prefigured his own rise.

“Lenin was an idealist, but when he found himself in the real situation, he became a very evil and sinister person,” said Romanova, leading me into Lenin’s corner study, with views of the Neva River and mementos of the five months he lived and worked here, including his trademark worker’s cap. She had “heard nothing” from her superiors about how they should commemorate the event, and expects only silence. “It’s a very difficult subject for discussion,” she said. “Nobody but the Communists knows what to do. I have an impression that everybody is lost.”

Related Reads

Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is To Be Done?" and Other Writings

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (FSG Classics)

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Joshua Hammer | READ MORE

Joshua Hammer is a contributing writer to Smithsonian magazine and the author of several books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts and The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird .

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Roughly 10 years old.

Female rabbit.

Wobbles, forever the queen of HSoP ♥

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Hsop is dedicated to providing the animals in our facility with the highest level of care possible during their stay with us.  adhering to the five freedoms ensures we are giving the companion animals in our care everything they need to live a healthy and happy life.  staff monitors each pet at hsop individually to identify their specific mental and physical needs, so we can be sure to give them the most humane treatment during their temporary stay with us.  our shelter is committed to providing animals with:.

1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst

An adequate and healthful diet, with ready access to fresh drinking water.

2. Freedom from Discomfort

An appropriate living environment including a clean and comfortable resting area. 

3. Freedom from Pain, Injury, and Disease

Prevention or rapid diagnosis, and treatment for injury or illness. 

4. Freedom to Express Normal Behaviors

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5. Freedom from Fear and Distress

Conditions and treatment that avoid mental suffering and stress. 

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Here at HSoP we strive to ensure our animals receive the highest level of care possible. This includes physical, mental, and emotional stimulation while they stay with us. We do our best to make sure each animal in our facility receives all preventative and necessary medical attention, as well as enrichment in their kennels to keep them entertained. Did you know animals can go stir crazy when they are confined in a small space for periods of time with no distractions? This is a common issue for animal shelters nationwide, and we are determined to limit that likelihood as much as possible for the animals here at HSoP.

The staff here at HSoP are dedicated to making sure each animal has plenty of stimulation both physical and mental, to keep them from getting bored. Our wonderful volunteers help with this by taking the animals out of their kennels for some free time in a different area.

Thank you Nylabone for donating roughly 250 Chews!

Our dogs enjoy going to their outside kennels and side yard to play fetch, stretch their legs, and change their scenery! Our cats love to get out of their kennels and go into our adoption room so they can stretch their legs, chase some toys, and get some extra special cuddles!

We want our animals to have a great experience here while they wait for their new homes, so we are starting an Enrichment Program. This program will be dedicated to finding new and innovative ways to keep our furry friends busy and happy in their kennels!

To achieve this goal of ours, we need your help! We have created a Wishlist on our amazon of all the items we think could be of great use for this program. We hope you will take a moment to browse through our list and pick a few thin gs you would like to donate to our furry friends here at HSoP!

https://a.co/1SSv51R

Donations can be mailed to 2019 E. White Ave. Moscow, ID 83843

Thank you Starmark for donating 25 treat dispensing chew balls!

Thank you Petfinder Foundation for your grant of 15 Kong Toys to benefit our canine friends of HSoP. With this grant we are able to provide our dogs with both mental and physical stimulation. Keeping our animals happy and healthy during their stay with us is our number one priority. With donations and grants like this, we can continue to give our animals the highest quality of care possible. 

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Helen stuhr-rommereim, journey from st. petersburg to moscow, by alexander radishchev, translated by andrew kahn and irina reyfman, reviewed by helen stuhr-rommereim.

While Alexander Radishchev’s 1790 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is ostensibly traveler’s notes from the 450-or-so miles between the two resplendent centers of the late eighteenth-century Russian Empire, it is not a compilation of ethnographic observations. Instead, readers travel through a highly crafted reflection on the Enlightenment ideals of equality, justice, and progress. The most famous work by a career civil servant who also wrote poetry, nonfiction, and philosophy, the sui generis Journey collages together monologues from fellow travelers, found texts describing utopian social reform, and surreal dream visions to indict Russian society under the rule of Catherine the Great—especially for its reliance on the labor of enserfed peasants.

The brazen text earned its author a death sentence, later commuted to exile for life, though Radishchev may not have expected such a harsh response. Since taking the throne in 1762, Catherine had modeled herself as the ideal enlightened autocrat. The actual overthrow of the French monarchy cooled her progressive fervor, however, and Radishchev’s timing was unfortunate. His Journey was censored out of print for the duration of the nineteenth century, but after the Bolshevik revolution, its author was sanctified as Russia’s first anti-monarchist martyr.

Despite the book’s historical importance, it is virtually unknown outside of Russian studies. One reason is that it is notoriously difficult to read in Russian, written in sometimes intentionally archaic language with complex syntax and page-long sentences. The previous English translation, published in 1958, replicates all of this awkwardness and none of its style. In this new translation by Irina Reyfman and Andrew Kahn, Radishchev’s circuitous locutions are presented, for the first time, in idiosyncratic but eminently readable English. Recognizing the opacity of Radishchev’s prose as a purposeful stylistic choice, as Reyfman and Kahn do in their excellent introduction, not only makes the text newly accessible to a wide readership; it is also crucial to understanding its meaning.

Journey begins with a revelation: “I felt within myself strength enough to resist error; and—unspeakable joy!—I sensed that everyone has the ability to participate in doing good for his equal.” This is both a starting and ending point: the narrative that follows seeks to produce in its reader the same revelation, but it will take some work on the reader’s part. Throughout Journey, when physical beauty, social harmony, and material finery appear, they are almost always revealed as illusory. These trappings obscure the core equality of all people, and hence the moral blight of serfdom. Readers must come to feel this moral outrage viscerally within themselves—that every pleasure and privilege enjoyed by the noble class is, in essence, drinking “peasants’ tears”—rather than simply knowing it with their reason. Radishchev wants his reader to taste the salt.

The narrator’s journey takes place as much within his psyche as it does in physical space. In an early chapter, the narrator dreams he is a great ruler, surrounded by finery and fawning subjects. An old woman comes to see him; she is the “Straight Seer and Eye Doctor.” She cures his “cataracts” and transforms his perception. The King realizes he is covered in literal rot: “On my fingers I could see the remains of a human brain, my feet stood in mire. Those standing around me looked even more vile. Their entire innards looked black and consumed by the dull flame of insatiability.” Radishchev’s travelogue is meant to serve as a truth serum of the kind served up by the Straight Seer. Its readers will struggle to understand it, but that is precisely the point: thanks to the struggle, the truth will be felt, rather than mistaken for another illusory surface. Upon waking, the narrator has a message for the “rulers of the world”: “if in reading my dream you should smile sarcastically or furrow your brow, know this: the female wanderer I saw has flown away far from you and shuns your palace.” One begins to imagine the Empress’s enraged response.

Although formally unique, Journey belongs squarely to the history of European Enlightenment thought; Laurence Sterne is one influence, as are the philosophical writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The new translation will be an important addition to courses on Russian literature and history and the European Enlightenment. But Radishchev’s Journey is also worth reading for anyone seeking to square a belief in the goodness of humanity with the reality of structural injustice that is as much the basis of contemporary American society, as it was of Imperial Russian society in 1790. Reyfman and Kahn have preserved the strange, stilted style of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow while also capturing the searing moral outrage that motivated its writing. One gets the sense that, whether or not Radishchev knew that he would invoke his ruler’s wrath, he did not much care: what he wrote, he had to write.

Published on April 16, 2021

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Journey from st. petersburg to moscow.

Alexander Radishchev. Translated by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: November 2020

ISBN: 9780231185912

Format: Paperback

List Price: $19.95 £16.99

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Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur. Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is an outstanding monument of Enlightenment thought in Russia. Distinguished scholars Irina Reyfman and Andrew Kahn have skillfully translated Radishchev’s archaic, high style to heighten the emotional pathos and to contrast official rhetoric to the reality of human suffering. That this important work is again available in English is cause for celebration. Marcus C. Levitt, author of The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow offers a troubling account of Russian civilization at the end of the eighteenth century, a critique both deliberately archaic in its style and eminently resonant with the political and social anxieties of our contemporary moment. Reyfman and Kahn could not have found a better time to revive Radishchev’s classic in their remarkably lucid and readable translation. Luba Golburt, author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination

This is a much needed and long overdue new translation with a highly informative introduction and helpful annotations of Radishchev’s influential book, masterfully done by two premier specialists in eighteenth-century Russian literature. The translation preserves elements of Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style without sounding overly archaic, a notable achievement. Valeria Sobol, author of Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination

A valuable glimpse of Russia as seen in the years just before its 19th-century literary renaissance. Kirkus Reviews

[Radishchev] crafts a masterly fictional travelogue, combining philosophy, poetry, and the political ideals of the Enlightenment in an unequivocal condemnation of serfdom, censorship, and corruption . . . Various, engaging, and deeply affecting . . . Kahn and Reyfman’s attentive new translation is a boon for English-language readers. Publishers Weekly

Journey remains relevant by implicating the author, narrator and reader in its indictment . . . The insight to understand where our daily bread is truly coming from, the creativity to invent an idiom to express it, and the martyrdom of being broken by the state as a result – these are the lasting legacies of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey . Times Literary Supplement

[This book] will be an important addition to courses on Russian literature and history and the European Enlightenment. But Radishchev’s Journey is also worth reading for anyone seeking to square a belief in the goodness of humanity with the reality of structural injustice that is as much the basis of contemporary American society, as it was of Imperial Russian society in 1790. Reyfman and Kahn have preserved the strange, stilted style of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow while also capturing the searing moral outrage that motivated its writing. Harvard Review

A fascinating and entertaining read. Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

• Read a blog post by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman about Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Winner, 2021 Best Literary Translation into English, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

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A Timeline of Kate Middleton's Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

From her abdominal surgery in January to when she began preventative chemo, here's everything we know about the Princess of Wales's diagnosis and treatment.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Kensington Palace did not specify when Kate learned she had cancer, only saying she was. made aware of the diagnosis "once post-operative tests had been completed and results reviewed." Here, a full timeline of the Princess of Wales's cancer diagnosis and treatment:

January 16: Kate undergoes planned abdominal surgery.

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After thirteen days in the hospital, Kate was discharged . (Coincidentally, on the same day King Charles was discharged from the same hospital .)

"The Princess of Wales has returned home to Windsor to continue her recovery from surgery. She is making good progress," Kensington Palace said in a statement . "The Prince and Princess wish to say a huge thank you to the entire team at The London Clinic, especially the dedicated nursing staff, for the care they have provided. The Wales family continues to be grateful for the well wishes they have received from around the world."

She began recuperating at home at Adelaide Cottage in Windsor.

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Following her surgery, post-operative tests found cancer, and at some point in late February, Kate began "a course of preventative chemotherapy," according to a Palace spokesperson.

"The surgery was successful," Kate later shared in a video message . "However, tests after the operation found cancer had been present. My medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy and I am now in the early stages of that treatment. This of course came as a huge shock, and William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family."

March 22: Kensington Palace announces Kate has cancer, and releases personal message from the Princess.

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A senior royal aide also said "she will return to work when she has had the green light from doctors," but what that "green light" looks like is as yet unclear. The Palace has not provided any specific timeline for Kate's return to royal duties .

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After the park, it was back to the volunteer’s home for some relaxation. Sweet and affectionate Friday followed them all around the house, showing that when he was comfortable, he could be an excellent companion.

Tending a broken heart

Meanwhile, Arizona teacher Killeen Partridge was nursing a broken heart. She had just said goodbye to her beloved Shetland sheepdog, Gunner, after 16 years together.

“I've always had a dog with me to do all the adventures,” says Killeen.

Killeen knew she wanted another Sheltie-type dog but felt lost beyond that.  When was the right time to get a new pup? Should it be a puppy or an adult dog?  Luckily, fate nudged her in the right direction.

When she returned home from work on Good Friday, Killeen’s dad showed her a photo of an adoptable collie he’d found on Best Friends’ website. Looking into Friday’s deep eyes, Killeen had a feeling this dog could be “the one." She and her parents made the spontaneous decision to drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles to meet him.

A leap of faith

The family wanted to be first in line when the pet adoption center opened, so they hit the road at 2 a.m. The 8-hour car ride spanned 500 miles and was filled with anticipation. When they finally arrived, Best Friends staff welcomed them into a meeting room and went to get Friday.

“He comes right over to me. He just sits down, and he leans into me,” recalls Killeen. “I'm like, ‘Yep, that's what I was looking for.’” She knew they wouldn’t be leaving L.A. without him.

[ Life of adventure for a dog who couldn’t be left behind ]

Emma Pitt, the Best Friends lifesaving outcomes specialist who facilitated the adoption, says it was meant to be. “Beyond their compatible lifestyles and Killeen's experience with Shetland sheepdogs, her 8-hour drive exemplified a commitment to him that was very reassuring,” she says.

On the ride home, Friday (named after the day they found him) alternated between snoozing and gently resting his head in Killeen’s lap. He was headed to his new home in the Arizona mountains to begin his next chapter.

Happy Friday

Friday and Killeen spent those first weeks at home getting to know each other. As Friday settled in, his kind and affectionate personality shined even brighter. Killeen discovered he was also a cuddler, much to her delight. Friday fit right into Killeen’s lifestyle: relaxing at home after long days at work and going on camping trips most weekends. His home shares a fence line with a national forest, so many adventures await just beyond his own backyard. He’s a big fan of the forest (but not so much of the cattle who graze there).

Friday is the new darling of Killeen’s social media feed, where she documents their camping trips, training sessions, and more. Soon, the pair will be embarking on a road trip to Idaho and down the West Coast. Now that Friday has camping and hiking under his belt, Killeen plans to teach him how to ride a kayak next.

She’s also exploring the possibility of training Friday to become a therapy dog. His calming presence has been so beneficial for her own anxiety that maybe he could offer the same comfort to her students. Friday continues to fill and help heal her heart.

“I don't think of him as a replacement but as a dog who is the just right fit at just the right time and another member of my family,” says Killeen. “He’s just a gem.”

Let's make every shelter and every community no-kill by 2025

Our goal at Best Friends is to support all animal shelters in the U.S. in reaching no-kill by 2025 . No-kill means saving every dog and cat in a shelter who can be saved, accounting for community safety and good quality of life for pets. 

Shelter staff can’t do it alone. Saving animals in shelters is everyone’s responsibility, and it takes support and participation from the community. No-kill is possible when we work together thoughtfully, honestly, and collaboratively.

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You can help save homeless pets, you can help end the killing in shelters and save the lives of homeless pets when you foster, adopt, and advocate for the dogs and cats who need it most..

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To Peking: A Forgotten Journey from Moscow to Manchuria (Tauris Parke Paperbacks) Paperback – October 13, 2009

When in 1934 at the age of twenty-seven, Peter Fleming set out for the Far East, his ultimate goal was to return from China to India overland - a journey he later described in the classic News from Tartary . On his outward journey Fleming travelled through regions which remain some of the most remote and least-visited in Asia and which, soon after his journey, became closed entirely to westerners. From Moscow, through the Caucasus to the Caspian, on to Samarkand and Tashkent, skirting the edge of Outer Mongolia to Vladivostok and winding his way down to Peking, Fleming tells of people encountered, places explored and of ways of life that have since been lost through revolution, war and the passage of time. Along the way he kept a diary that he never intended to publish and that lay forgotten *In the box-room* of his mind for fifteen years. To Peking is an unassuming classic of travel literature. Subtle yet sparkling with intelligence and humour, simple yet beautifully told, it illuminates a world that travellers - armchair or otherwise - can only dream of today.

• Print length 200 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Tauris Parke Paperbacks
• Publication date October 13, 2009
• Dimensions 5.26 x 0.68 x 7.84 inches
• ISBN-10 1845119967
• ISBN-13 978-1845119966
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

*Peter Fleming’s To Peking tells the story of a long journey, with much that is relevant for us to-day, From the Caucasus to Shanghai, via Tashkent, Irkutz and Valdivostok, Fleming sharpens his keen eye and caustic wit on bewitching places and a medley of colourful characters he encounters along the way. Written with the immediacy of a diary, this is not a journey the reader will easily forget.* -- John Hare, author of Mysteries of the Gobi

Further Praise for Peter Fleming:

One's Company

“With an acid and scornful mind, a fresh and vivid style… One reads him for literary delight and for the pleasure of meeting an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind…. but he is also an observer of penetrating intellect.” -- Vita Sackville-West

“Original and impressive… As a journalist he is modernity itself; as a traveller he has about him an Elizabethan aroma, being both cruel and amused.” -- Harold Nicholson

“A classic traveller.” -- Compton Mackenzie, Daily Mail

News from Tartary

“… A simple blending of modesty and wit in disarming proportions… the result is something fresh and delightful in the literature of high Asia.” -- New York Times

“I read the book for the pleasure of Mr. Fleming’s company. Like thousands of other people I am charmed by high impudent street-urchin approach to danger and discomfort, to hunger and thirst.” -- David Garnett, New Statesman

“Its entertainment value is immense. It will arouse great fury and cause much pleasure.” -- Harold Nicholson

“It confirmed Fleming’s place in the front rank of travel writers… no modern work of travel has given me more pleasure… I have read it more times than I can remember.” -- Nigel Buxton

“Mr. Fleming will be remembered as a gifted writer with and easy pen given to satire… This kind of journey and this kind of book are at his fingertips.” -- V. S. Pritchard

“… One of the most impressive volumes that have come from Asia in many years… unadulterated reporting… brilliantly written and candidly truthful.” -- G. E. Sokolsky

Brazilian Adventure

*The best travel book I have read for a long time. It is crammed with sound observation, good writing, humour and a unique blend of disillusion, foolhardiness and high spirits.’ -- J.B. Priestley

*This account of the expedition has that essential double interest which is characteristic of all really great books of adventure. Mr Fleming has the most delightful sense of humour and he writes brilliantly.* -- David Garnett

*An extraordinarily good book.* -- Sunday Times

The Siege at Peking

“An exceptionally readable book.” -- Sunday Times

“…An astonishing tale… exciting, enthralling, at times humorous and always strictly accurate, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book.” -- Time and Tide

About the Author

Peter Fleming (1907-1971) was a journalist and writer and one of the last great adventurers of the 20th century. He began his career as a special correspondent for The Times and later wrote for The Spectator throughout. He served with the Grenadier Guards during World War II and from 1942 was in charge of military deception operations in Southeast Asia, for which he was awarded an OBE. He is author of several classic books, which include Brazilian Adventure , One's Company , News from Tartary and Bayonets to Lhasa . In his memory, The Royal Geographical Society established The Peter Fleming Award for projects that seek to advance geographical science.

Simon Winchester , OBE, New York Times best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman .

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tauris Parke Paperbacks (October 13, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1845119967
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1845119966
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.26 x 0.68 x 7.84 inches
• #1,119 in General China Travel Guides
• #1,490 in General India Travel Guides
• #2,360 in General Asia Travel Books

About the author

Peter fleming.

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Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. There has been progress over the last decades, but the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

Women and girls represent half of the world’s population and therefore also half of its potential. But gender inequality persists everywhere and stagnates social progress. On average, women in the labor market still earn 23 percent less than men globally and women spend about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men.

Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers. All these areas of inequality have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: there has been a surge in reports of sexual violence, women have taken on more care work due to school closures, and 70% of health and social workers globally are women.

At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.

Political leadership, investments and comprehensive policy reforms are needed to dismantle systemic barriers to achieving Goal 5 Gender equality is a cross-cutting objective and must be a key focus of national policies, budgets and institutions.

How much progress have we made?

International commitments to advance gender equality have brought about improvements in some areas: child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) have declined in recent years, and women’s representation in the political arena is higher than ever before. But the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality, and where all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled. In fact, that goal is probably even more distant than before, since women and girls are being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Are they any other gender-related challenges?

Yes. Worldwide, nearly half of married women lack decision-making power over their sexual and reproductive health and rights. 35 per cent of women between 15-49 years of age have experienced physical and/ or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.1 in 3 girls aged 15-19 have experienced some form of female genital mutilation/cutting in the 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, where the harmful practice is most common with a high risk of prolonged bleeding, infection (including HIV), childbirth complications, infertility and death.

This type of violence doesn’t just harm individual women and girls; it also undermines their overall quality of life and hinders their active involvement in society.

Why should gender equality matter to me?

Regardless of where you live in, gender equality is a fundamental human right. Advancing gender equality is critical to all areas of a healthy society, from reducing poverty to promoting the health, education, protection and the well-being of girls and boys.

What can we do?

If you are a girl, you can stay in school, help empower your female classmates to do the same and fight for your right to access sexual and reproductive health services. If you are a woman, you can address unconscious biases and implicit associations that form an unintended and often an invisible barrier to equal opportunity.

If you are a man or a boy, you can work alongside women and girls to achieve gender equality and embrace healthy, respectful relationships.

You can fund education campaigns to curb cultural practices like female genital mutilation and change harmful laws that limit the rights of women and girls and prevent them from achieving their full potential.

The Spotlight Initiative is an EU/UN partnership, and a global, multi-year initiative focused on eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls – the world’s largest targeted effort to end all forms of violence against women and girls.

Facts and figures

Goal 5 targets.

• With only seven years remaining, a mere 15.4 per cent of Goal 5 indicators with data are “on track”, 61.5 per cent are at a moderate distance and 23.1 per cent are far or very far off track from 2030 targets.
• In many areas, progress has been too slow. At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
• Political leadership, investments and comprehensive policy reforms are needed to dismantle systemic barriers to achieving Goal 5. Gender equality is a cross-cutting objective and must be a key focus of national policies, budgets and institutions.
• Around 2.4 billion women of working age are not afforded equal economic opportunity. Nearly 2.4 Billion Women Globally Don’t Have Same Economic Rights as Men  
• 178 countries maintain legal barriers that prevent women’s full economic participation. Nearly 2.4 Billion Women Globally Don’t Have Same Economic Rights as Men
• In 2019, one in five women, aged 20-24 years, were married before the age of 18. Girls | UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023

5.1 End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere

5.2 Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation

5.3 Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation

5.4 Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate

5.5 Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decisionmaking in political, economic and public life

5.6 Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences

5.A  Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws

5.B Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women

5.C Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels

He for She campaign

United Secretary-General Campaign UNiTE to End Violence Against Women

Every Woman Every Child Initiative

Spotlight Initiative

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

UN Population Fund: Gender equality

UN Population Fund: Female genital mutilation

UN Population Fund: Child marriage

UN Population Fund: Engaging men & boys

UN Population Fund: Gender-based violence

World Health Organization (WHO)

UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)

UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Gender Statistics

Fast Facts: Gender Equality

Infographic: Gender Equality

The Initiative is so named as it brings focused attention to this issue, moving it into the spotlight and placing it at the centre of efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

An initial investment in the order of EUR 500 million will be made, with the EU as the main contributor. Other donors and partners will be invited to join the Initiative to broaden its reach and scope. The modality for the delivery will be a UN multi- stakeholder trust fund, administered by the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office, with the support of core agencies UNDP, UNFPA and UN Women, and overseen by the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General.

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