RUSSIAN RIVERS : A Cruise Between St. Petersburg and Moscow, Along the Waterways of the Czars, Reveals Russia’s Hidden Heart

Peter the Great loved water. He learned to sail at the age of 12; he studied navigation and shipbuilding; he even worked in the shipyards of Amsterdam--after he had become czar. He also built the first Russian navy and commanded ships in successful sea battles against the Turks and Swedes. And in 1703, on the Neva River delta, he founded the great, lovely, canal-laced seaport of St. Petersburg, which became known as “the Venice of the North.”

St. Petersburg was a glorious city, a miracle of 18th-Century town planning. Built literally from the ground up--and the ground was a morass of marshland and islets--it grew into a complex of about 35,000 buildings, many of them designed by architects imported from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and Scotland. Peter stocked St. Petersburg with aristocratic families, distinguished merchants, artisans of every kind. Science, art and literature flourished. In 1712, he declared it capital of the Russian Empire.

Today, St. Petersburg--having been renamed Petrograd and then Leningrad in the meantime--has reclaimed its historic identity, and reminders of its former glory are everywhere. Golden domes and soaring spires are still reflected in its canals, and the vivid yellows, greens, reds and blues of its rococo and neoclassical palaces have a stage-set brilliance--especially when illuminated by the sharp-etched light of the setting sun. Catherine the Great’s famed Hermitage may be in trouble--plagued by vandalism, threatened by unstable riverbank soil and humidity--but its stunning Rembrandts, Picassos and Matisses and its gold-and-crystal chandeliers are still bathed in limpid, northern light bounced up through the windows off the Neva.

And on the quayside, in the city’s working port district, a brass band props up a notice reading, in English: “All the money you provide will be used to revive the great cultural heritage of our city.” They are playing “Tiger Rag.”

We’ve come to the port to board the M/V Sergei Kirov, a sleek, 1988-vintage German-built riverboat that is to take us, and about 250 other passengers, from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In a way, this is another legacy of Peter the Great and his love for water. Today, an intricate network of lakes, canals, rivers and reservoirs connects the two cities, passing through some of the most beautiful countryside in the Russian heartland, past remote islands and villages hard to visit any other way. Peter didn’t construct this network himself, but he inspired it and got it started.

In 1961, these waterways were opened to Russian tourism; in 1991, foreign visitors were invited to ply the route for the first time. It used to take the czars and their families 18 days to make the cruise. We took 11, including two nights each in St. Petersburg and Moscow, using the Kirov as our hotel.

And an international hotel it was: The boat’s captain and crew were Russian; the chefs were Swiss (serving food that was light, tasty and occasionally Russian); an English company booked the cruise, and the public relations was American--personified by a zippy, young, first-generation American-Russian cruise director from San Francisco.The accommodations were well-designed, comfortable double-berth cabins.

The night of our departure, the captain made a speech of welcome, and we drank toasts in reddish Russian champagne. Then off we went. Almost at once, the warehouses and factories of the port district gave way to an almost bucolic landscape of romantically dilapidated homes with vegetable gardens and little orchards alongside, interspersed with a surprising number of new dachas sprouting along the riverbanks. Then the silver birch and fir trees thickened, and we glided almost silently into the twilight.

During the night, the Neva bore us into Lake Ladoga, said to be the largest body of fresh water in Europe, about 136 miles long, 80 miles wide and as deep as 730 feet in some places. The navigation channel was slightly choppy in the brisk wind, and the vast moonlit expanse of water was a dramatic change from the confines of the Neva.

The next morning, we sailed out of the lake into the placid Svir River, its banks so densely wooded in places that we felt as if we were sailing through a primeval forest. The air was filled with the sweet scent of sawdust, and we passed small sawmills and great rafts of logs. Then came a long stretch of dachas crowding the river, their backs giving onto more dense woods. Here and there, a fisherman waited patiently at the water’s edge for a catch of pike, bream, perch or Baltic salmon. All the way to Moscow, we were to pass through landscapes like this one--riverfront communities with what looked like sheer wilderness behind them.

When we docked at the tiny village of Svirstroi, our captain went ashore to go mushrooming. We decided to explore on our own, penetrating the edge of the woods and walking over a carpet of green, gold and gray lichen. My wife picked a spectacular red-and-white spotted mushroom, and over garden fences, on our way back to the boat, we showed it proudly to villagers stacking birch logs for winter. Our mushroom was a source of much excited gesturing. One toothless babushka slapped her head and grabbed her throat when she saw it. It was apparently the most poisonous mushroom in all of Russia, and we carefully disposed of it.

That evening, we glided into Lake Onega and docked at Kizhi Island, now an open-air museum of ancient wooden farm and church architecture. The next morning, light seemed to dance through the air as the rising sun glanced off the silvery aspen wood scales covering the 22 onion domes clustered atop the island’s Preobrazhenskawa Church, or Church of the Transfiguration. Our guide to the island was a young woman named Luba, who lived on Kizhi. Showing us a 19th-Century farmhouse adorned with a fretwork fertility symbol, Luba recounted an old local custom: “If a girl wanted a husband, she would go naked into a young farmer’s field to wash face and body in dew. When she went again next day, generally boy would be there waiting.” She added dryly, “Later, with collective farms, it was not so simple.”

As the Kirov sailed that afternoon, the domes glowed pink, and a tintinnabulation of joyous bells rang out. A barge carrying massive logs followed us out of the lake into the Vitegra-Kovzha canal. The countryside now was rolling, hilly. At twilight, with the moon rising, we ascended from the Stygian depths of one lock till the tops of fir trees welcomed us. The gates opened, and we drifted on, our bows forging moonlit ripples on still, dark waters, the forest a constant brooding presence on either side.

The next day, we docked near the fortified monastery at Belozersk, on Beloe Ozero, or White Lake. This vast lakeside complex of towers, bastions, churches and a cathedral once protected local muzhiks or peasants from the Mongol hordes. Badly in need of restoration and bereft of its monks since the Revolution, it is now imbued with melancholy majesty.

Altogether more human was our stop the following day: We sailed down the Sheksna Canal, through the vast Rybinskoe Reservoir, past the river port of Rybinsk and down an arm of the fabled Volga River to the fortress-monastery of Yaroslavl, the oldest city on the river.

The monastery compound is now a public park, where the citizens of Yaroslavl, temporarily escaping their cramped living quarters, relax in a tree-shaded courtyard ablaze with flower beds. We inspected the doors of the monks’ cells, purposely made extremely narrow to discourage them from overeating, and marveled at the highly ornamented Church of the Epiphany, with its 17th-Century frescoes by local artists.

At Uglich, a sleepy, leafy Volga town dating from the 10th Century, we wandered among the Sunday shoppers. The food shop on the main street smelled of black bread and pickles. Customers carrying milk cans lined up for milk, smoked fish, sausage, buckwheat and Mars bars--a confection seemingly ubiquitous in Russia today; the cashiers added up purchases by abacus.

Uglich is a religious town. The church in the local kremlin , or fortress, is now a museum--but people still pray there before an icon of the Virgin Mary, whose veil is said to have floated down the Volga to the town.

Passing through a progression of locks below Dubna on the final leg of our journey, we entered the Moskva River and were soon moored in the Russian capital itself.

On the day we left Moscow--traveling by plane this time, not boat--another 250 passengers boarded the Sergei Kirov for a cruise in the other direction, downstream to St. Petersburg. I wished for a moment that I could join them, relishing once again that slow boat through the Russian heartland.

GUIDEBOOK

Slow Boat to Moscow

The Cruise: The M/V Sergei Kirov departs May 15 for its first trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow this year, returning from Moscow to St. Petersburg on May 25. The schedule continues regularly through September, with the year’s final cruise departing St. Petersburg for Moscow on Sept. 18. The basic cost in either direction, including round-trip air fare from London, all meals, on-board activities and onshore excursions, is $1,600 per person. (Beverages are extra.) Upgraded cabin supplements per person: Upper Deck, $330; Middle Deck, $225; Main Deck, $140. To book the cruise or for further information, contact Voyages Jules Verne, 21 Dorset Square, London NW1 6QG, England, telephone (44-71) 723-6556, fax, (44-71) 723-8629.