Pskov - a travel essay

This article was written in 2015 and first published, in an abridged form as part of a longer article, by "East-West Review" in its Spring/Summer 2018 issue (Vol. 17, no. 1, ISSUE 47).

Pskov charmed me immediately. And with the passing of days, the charm only grew as we strolled along the riverside walks among the evening rollerbladers and picnicking families. By the mouth of the little Pskov River, where it empties into the Great River between two medieval towers, we sat on the terrace of a tavern. We drank beer - "903" - brewed at the microbrewery next door. From the opposite bank of the little river, above the round medieval towers with their conical wooden dunce-cap roofs, the Kremlin rises steeply. The setting sun coloured the white walls of the Trinity Cathedral that soar even higher still within the Kremlin.

The charm of the setting was not shattered by the sound of distant explosions. Nobody looked up from their beer and their conversation. They all know that this is a military town, home of the 76th Pskov Airborne Division. A loose flock of hooded crows flew overhead, a thousand black silhouettes against the pearly evening sky, southward over the Kremlin, over the golden cathedral domes.

"A murder of crows..." But Dmitri, who had joined us for a beer, didn't believe me that the correct collective noun in English for crows was a "murder". But perhaps it was the "murder" of crows, the association in the words, that prompted him to tell me the story of a double funeral.

Last year - in August 2014 - two men of the 76th Pskov Airborne Division were, Dmitri told us, buried in a local cemetery with full honours. When news of the funerals filtered out, journalists from Moscow and St Petersburg descended on Pskov to find out the details of these soldiers' deaths. Where had they died? How were they killed? Were the names of the dead the same as those reported in the Ukrainian press a few days earlier? There were many questions to answer. According to online reports, when the journalists reached the cemetery two men attacked their car. The car windows were damaged by corkscrews and the car's tyres were slashed. By the time they reached the point where the graves were said to be there had been no deaths, no funerals. There were no names on the tombstones. The same online source suggested in August 2014 that forty members of the 76th Pskov Airborne Division had already died in the Ukraine. Some say the number of dead was as high as eighty.

The official story goes that there are no Russian troops fighting in the Donbas, the Russian-speaking eastern part of the Ukraine, the part that is occupied by rebels against the government in Kiev. But Russia is a free country and if anybody, military or otherwise, wishes to spend their holidays in the Ukraine they are free to do so.

In August 2014, the website "kremlin.ru" published a Presidential Decree to the effect that

the 76th Guards Air Assault Chernigov Red Banner Division of Russian Airborne Troops have been awarded the Suvorov Award for successful fulfilment of combat assignments of the command and display of the personal staff of courage and heroism.

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Pskov has long been a military town, a border town on the western frontiers of Russia for much of its history. On Falcon Hill not far to the north of Pskov, within sight of the Lake Peipus, there is a 30-metre-high bronze monument to Alexander Nevsky. On the frozen ice of the lake to the north, on 5 April 1242, an army of Russian infantry led by Alexander defeated an army of heavily armoured German knights. The Russian victory on the ice was celebrated in Eisenstein's famous black-and-white film of 1938. That was a time when Germany was once again becoming an existential threat to Russia and the film has widely been interpreted as propaganda. But that does not detract from its power: the knights on their horses galloping across the frozen lake, the ranks of Russian infantry standing in disciplined ranks awaiting the charge, Alexander on the hill waiting, waiting, waiting until just the right moment to give the order to give battle...

Monument on Falcon Hill to Alexander Nevsky

The statue was meant to have been unveiled in April 1992, to mark the 750th anniversary of the battle. But the early 1990s, the years immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, were difficult times in Russia. A few became rich - very rich - on the spoils of the dying USSR. Many, many more became poor. It was, as John Vaillant writes in The Tiger, the time of the "most egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of the world." People in their twenties and early thirties today, who have no memory of living in the USSR, do have memories of being hungry as children then and memories of crime being commonplace - memories that colour today's attitudes to Vladimir Putin's reign.

Since 2000 Russia has had a time of falling crime, at least at the petty-crime level, and, until very recently, rising economic prosperity underpinned by high oil prices. Under Putin, the statue would have been completed on time. In the 1990s, though, it was over a year late. The colossal thirty-metre-high statue was unveiled on 24 June 1993. Fortunately, that coincided with another anniversary - the 1090th anniversary of the date when Pskov is first mentioned in a written source, in The Tale of Bygone Days also known as The Primary Chronicle.

Sometime in year 903 AD, Olga married Prince Igor Rurikovich who became the ruler of Kievan Rus. The story, with its fairy-tale, rags-to-riches elements that we encounter so often in Russian history, has it that Olga was the beautiful daughter of the ferryman at Pskov. Igor, out hunting on the banks of the Great River, wanted to cross over to the other side and summoned the ferry. When the boat came to fetch him, he discovered that it was operated by a beautiful young girl. So enchanted was the prince, that by the time the ferry reached the opposite bank of the river he had promised to marry her. Igor honoured his promise and, thus, the ferryman's daughter from Pskov became Princess Olga of Kiev.

But before long, Igor was killed. With their son, Svatoslav, the heir to the throne in Kiev, only three years old, Princess Olga became Regent. Still beautiful (and not incidentally the ruler of the richest polity among the East Slavs), Olga's hand was sought in marriage. Among those who wanted to bed her, was the ruler of the Drevlians who had not long before killed her husband, Igor. History does not record Olga's thoughts, only her actions.

She accepted the proposal of marriage and invited the leaders of the Drevlians to visit her. They came, were warmly received and invited to wash after their journey in the royal bathhouse. Princess Olga then had the bathhouse doors locked and burned them alive. Perhaps the Drevlians were preternaturally stupid, for shortly afterwards Olga invited a large group of them to join her at a feast commemorating her husband's death. They came. They got drunk. The Kievans slaughtered them in their thousands. As if that was not enough, when the Drevlians begged for mercy, Olga asked for three pigeons and three sparrows from each Drevlian household: 

Now Olga gave each soldier in her army a pigeon or a sparrow, and ordered them to attach by thread to each pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulfur bound with small pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the sparrows under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught on fire at once. The people fled from the city, and Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them. Thus she took the city and burned it, and captured the elders of the city. Some of the other captives she killed, while some she gave to others as slaves to her followers. The remnant she left to pay tribute.

Little more is heard of the hapless Drevlians. From that time onwards they were absorbed into Kievan Rus. Their capital, Iskorosten, is now Korosten - a obscure railway junction in the northern Ukraine close to the border with Belarus.

From ferryman's daughter, to Princess, to Regent and avenging widow... but Olga's greatest transformation still lay ahead. On a visit to Byzantium she became a Christian. Returning to her native, and still largely pagan, land she began to attempt to convert the country to her new religion. With her son, Svyatoslav, she failed. But in her grandson she found another convert. The grandson was Vladimir, he who in 988, in an iconic ceremony in the Dnieper River, "baptised Russia". For her role in this process, Olga became St Olga - with the honorific title of "Isapóstolos", "the equal of the apostles".

Olga is still very much remembered in Pskov. On the other side of the Great River from the Pskov Kremlin, across the busy Olginskaya Bridge, along the much quieter Olginskaya Embankment, past the Church of the Annunciation at the Ferry, is a modern chapel built in 2000 and dedicated to St Olga. It stands near the spot where she began her epic journey from ferryman's daughter to "Isapóstolos".

The site of the old ferry across the Great River

One of the glories of Pskov is its churches. Today there are about forty churches in the town. In the past there were many more. The exteriors of the churches here are universally plain but elegant. They are covered in a rough but fiercely bright white plaster. They have small windows and simple geometric patterns set into the plaster immediately beneath the onion domes. One of these churches sits tucked inside the south-western corner of the town walls in the shadow of the Pokrovskaya Bashnya, the largest tower (50 metres tall and 90 metres in diameter) in the walls. This is the Church of the Intercession of the Virgin in the Corner. It is built on the site where a local blacksmith is said to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary at a time when Pskov was undergoing one of the worst of the many sieges it has suffered in its long history.

The Church of the Intercession of the Virgin in the Corner

On 18 August 1581, towards the end of the Livonian War (1558-1583), a 31,000-strong (some say 50,000-strong) Polish-Lithuanian army under the command of King Stephen Bathóry appeared outside the walls of Pskov. Inside, the defenders were mostly civilians. Artillery bombardment, repeated attacks by the Polish soldiers and attempts to undermine the town walls were all in vain and, indeed, Polish losses were severe. As winter set in, Polish tactics moved to a passive siege, in an attempt to starve the defenders into surrender. But the winter was hard on the besieging force as well and mutiny was only just avoided.

Then, in the early weeks of 1582, while diplomatic efforts to end the war were going on elsewhere, the defenders hung the Icon of the Dormition of the Virgin on the walls of Pskov, in accordance with the instructions given in the blacksmith's vision. Within days, the Polish forces were gone. Another icon, the Icon of the Intercession, depicting the medieval walls of Pskov, commemorates the event. The Icon of the Dormition of the Virgin hangs today in Pechory Monastery, on the Estonian border, 30 kilometres west of Pskov. (I'll come back in a moment to the 20th century travels of the newer icon, the Icon of the Intercession, also known as the Icon of the Virgin Mary of Pskov.)

Pechory Monastery

Pskov ceased to be a Russian border fortress with the Russian conquest of the Baltic lands in the Great Northern War (1700-1723). Peter the Great, whose war it was, used Pskov as a base from which to launch his westward advance. Today, when you enter the Pskov Kremlin, you come into an area empty of buildings. Once this area was full of churches, each district of the town having a church within the Kremlin walls. Peter put an end to that, demolishing them all in the interests of his military ambitions. He also rebuilt the round towers in the walls of both the Kremlin and the town, removing the wooden dunce caps from them because they were fire hazards. Of course, they've been put back since. They are too picturesque to do otherwise.

The walls of Pskov rising above the Great River. The Pskov River flows into the Great River between the two towers on the left in the photo.

With the annexation of the Baltic lands at the end of the war, Pskov's importance as a military outpost diminished. Riga, Reval (now Tallinn) and above all the new town of St Petersburg replaced it as the trading gateways to the once-landlocked Russian interior. By the time Pushkin spent his years of internal exile at the family home at nearby Mikhailovskoe in the 1820s, Pskov's population had dwindled to a few thousand. Pskov's ancient independence as a free Russian republic (until it was annexed by Muscovy in 1510) and its associate membership of the Hanseatic League were by then no more than irrelevant historical memories.

The family house at Mikhailovskoe where Pushkin lived in internal exile

In March 1917, the train carrying Nicholas II, Tsar of the All the Russias, back from the World War I front to St Petersburg was stopped at Pskov station. Here the Tsar signed his abdication:

In the days of the great struggle against the foreign enemies, who for nearly three years have tried to enslave our fatherland, the Lord God has been pleased to send down on Russia a new heavy trial.

Internal popular disturbances threaten to have a disastrous effect on the future conduct of this persistent war.  The destiny of Russia, the honour of our heroic army, the welfare of the people and the whole future of our dear fatherland demand that the war should be brought to a victorious conclusion whatever the cost.

The cruel enemy is making his last efforts, and already the hour approaches when our glorious army together with our gallant allies will crush him.  In these decisive days in the life of Russia, We thought it Our duty of conscience to facilitate for Our people the closest union possible and a consolidation of all national forces for the speedy attainment of victory.

In agreement with the Imperial Duma We have thought it well to renounce the Throne of the Russian Empire and to lay down the supreme power.  As We do not wish to part from Our beloved son, We transmit the succession to Our brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and give Him Our blessing to mount the Throne of the Russian Empire.

We direct Our brother to conduct the affairs of state in full and inviolable union with the representatives of the people in the legislative bodies on those principles which will be established by them, and on which He will take an inviolable oath.

In the name of Our dearly beloved homeland, We call on Our faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfil their sacred duty to the fatherland, to obey the Tsar in the heavy moment of national trials, and to help Him, together with the representatives of the people, to guide the Russian Empire on the road to victory, welfare, and glory.

May the Lord God help Russia!

It was a chalice from which the brother did not wish to drink. Nicholas II was the last Tsar of Russia. Within nine months, Russia had undergone a second revolution - a coup d'état. Lenin and his Bolsheviks took charge. In yet another nine months, the Bolsheviks had hastily executed Tsar Nicholas and his family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg.

The statue of Lenin in the centre of Pskov

Forbidden by the Tsarist state to live in Moscow or St Petersburg, Lenin had once lived in Pskov - in the spring of 1900. Today the town's main square is named after Lenin and his statue still stands proudly in the middle of it. Yet not too far away, in the square outside Pskov's railway station where he abdicated, is a chapel to the memory of the last Tsar of Russia.

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In 1918 - after the two revolutions of 1917, with the country and its army in disarray, and for the first time since 1241 when the German Teutonic Knights had briefly taken the town before the Battle on the Ice - Pskov was occupied by foreign troops. When the German Imperial Army left, the town was occupied by Estonian forces for several months in 1919.  In 1920 Treaty of Tartu recognized Estonia as an independent nation and set its border. The new border, farther east than today's, was only a few kilometres away. Pskov became a Russian - now Soviet - frontier town once more.

Then, the town was attacked again and this proved to be the most destructive of all the foreign invasions of Pskov. Within two weeks of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Pskov fell to the invaders. Its medieval walls, which had been such an effective defence in centuries past, were irrelevant to 20th century warfare. For just over three years (9 July 1941 - 23 July 1944), Pskov was in German hands. It had been a city of some 60,000 people when the Germans took it. Many of those died during the period of occupation. None of the town's pre-war 10,000-strong Jewish population survived. When the Red Army retook the town in 1944, they found less than 150 people living among the ruins.

The Icon of the Intercession, commemorating an earlier - successful - defence of Pskov (1581-82), was looted in 1944 and taken by the retreating Germans to Germany. There it stayed for 55 years, hanging on the walls of a museum, until 2000. That year, when Vladimir Putin made his first visit to Germany as President of the Russian Federation (he had been there before as an employee of the KGB), the icon was returned to Russia. It now hangs again in the Trinity Cathedral in the Pskov Kremlin.

Perhaps the greatest treasure among Pskov's many churches is the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of our Saviour at the Mirozhsky Monastery on the banks of the Great River opposite the big tower - the Pokrovskaya Bashnaya - where the blacksmith had his vision. We are fortunate that it is still with us for in the latter stages of the Second World War an artillery shell fell on the church, penetrating the structure. But it was a dud and failed to explode. So, when the weather is not too damp or too cold or too hot, you can still see the 12th century frescoes within. 

The Mirozhsky Monastery

Few original frescoes of this Byzantine age survive in Russia. Most were lost long ago, during the time of the Mongols. But, though the Mongols never reached Pskov, there are only two surviving 12th century churches in Pskov - the one at the Mirozhsky Monastery and that at the Ivanovsky Monastery, opposite the two towers at the mouth of the Pskov River where we drank our "903" beer. Like most of the churches in Pskov, the Ivanovsky Monastery - in fact, a nunnery - ceased to function as a church during Communist times. It became in turn a garage, a store room and a museum. It suffered a disastrous fire in 1944 and most of its ancient frescoes were lost. The building was restored in the 1950s, but only returned to the Orthodox Church in 1991, after the fall of Soviet communism.

Despite being designated one of the towns in the Soviet Union for priority rebuilding after the devastations of the Second World War (including the rebuilding of its ecclesiastical buildings), Pskov struggled to recover. Much of the industry - perhaps 80% -  that did locate in Pskov after the war was related to the USSR's military-industrial complex. When the Cold War - and the Soviet Union - ended in 1991, Pskov received its portion from the "peace dividend": the closure of most of its factories. Today, many of these buildings still stand. Many are empty and in partial ruin. Others have been rehabilitated and turned into shopping malls and supermarkets.

Yet the military remains in Pskov and remains a welcome source of employment and income in one of Russia's most depopulating regions. (In the 2010 census, Russia was found to have 6,000 abandoned villages - "population points without population". 2,000 of those were in the Pskov Oblast. Another curious feature from that census: Russia has more married women than it has married men.) But being a military town sometimes still has a cost. As you travel south out of Pskov, on the road that leads to Vitebsk and Kiev, you pass the gates to the 76th Pskov Airborne Division's base. Outside the gates is a memorial, an open parachute landing on the ground.

The 76th airborne division memorial

At dawn on 24 February 2000, a detachment of 90 troops from the 76th Pskov Airborne Division found themselves in the hills of Chechnya, surrounded by dense fog and under attack by a much larger force of Chechen rebels and foreign jihadis fighting alongside them. The Russians suffered heavy casualties and then retreated to a hill top, known as Height 776. When the battle was over 84 men of the 76th Pskov Airborne Division were dead. Estimates of the attacking rebel force are in the order of 2000 men, more than 400 of whom are believed to have died. The last stand of the Pskov paratroopers, Battle of Height 776 as it has come to be known, has entered the mythology of the Airborne Division's heroics. A television series and films based on the Battle for Height 776 have been made, glorifying the events much as Hollywood once glorified General Custer's last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

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Trinity Cathedral inside the walls of the Pskov Kremlin

Another explosion. The crows fly overhead again, rising from behind the Trinity Cathedral and the Kremlin walls, flying north this time, north and out over the Great River. We order another round of beers. Only now do I make the connection and realize that the brand of our beer - "903" - refers to the date that Olga the ferryman's daughter became a princess, the date when Pskov emerged from pre-history. It is a warm summer evening and I marvel that there are so few people on the terrace, that there is, as far as I can see, only one other bar or café along the Golden Embankment. And that one was empty when we passed it.

"People in Pskov like to go to Tartu at the weekend. There is an Estonian consulate in Pskov and it is easy to get a Schengen visa. Tartu is a nice town, relaxed, good café culture, good shopping, not too expensive. It's not far from Pskov."

Perhaps one day the traffic will flow in the opposite direction. Perhaps, in a few years, the whole embankment along the Pskov River will be full of bars and cafés and restaurants with menus in languages other than Russian. Perhaps people in countries to the west, at candle-lit dinner parties, will say, "Pskov is a nice town, relaxed, good café culture and it is easy to get a Russian visa. I wish I'd had the time to see more of it." Perhaps. But for now I like it as it is.