Marching Through Red Square

Time to get back to some serious sightseeing! Today we took on Red Square. Red means beautiful in the old Russian language, and that it was! They close down Red Square in the mornings until 1pm and allow visitors into Lenin's Mausoleum. Then at 1pm they close the Tomb and open Red Square to pedestrians.

I spent the morning in the massive line waiting to see the notorious Lenin. I stood reading my novel, The Romanov Prophecy, in which the lead character, an attorney from Atlanta, was being chased around Red Square by the Russian Mafia -- I was riveted! While in line by the Kremlin wall I even got to see the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It always seems so foreign to see the goose-step.

Chad and I made friends with a crazy tour group who invited us to skip the line and head in with them. Lenin's red and black marble tomb was kept very dark and he looked so peaceful--such a contradiction to his life. The guards made everyone stay very quiet. It was surreal. We filed out along the Kremlin wall past the burial place of other communist leaders like Stalin and Brezhnev.

The most impressive place on Red Square, and maybe in all of Russia, is certainly St. Basil's Cathedral. The vivid colored domes scream Russia! The legend is that Ivan the Terrible had the two architects who created St. Basil's blinded so that they could never build anything as lovely again. The inside is like a maze with decorative alters in all directions. Since we were visiting on Sunday, we even got to see a small service in one of the alter rooms!

The last place we visited on Red Square was the GUM Department Store which ironically faces Lenin's Mausoleum. It is a beautiful modern domed mall with some interesting shops. Chad found a few shirts in a Scandinavian store and we took some photos of this grand bastion of capitalism on Red Square.

It was amazing to see Red Square still and restricted in the morning, and then bustling with tourists in the afternoon. I stood and pictured the countless times I'd seen the Soviet troops congregate here on the news. It's amazing to see such a change in our world!