Gagarin Monument & Others
- August 11, 2000
- Rated 4 of 5 by
tretjak from Sundsvall, Medelpad, Sweden
Gagarin reaches first place in the monument league
The next day Henrik and I decided to visit the Gagarin monument at Ploshad Lenina. There is no question at all. This ca 70 m. high monument reaches first place in the monument league! Yuri is portrayed like a robot as he
stands on top of this gigantic shining cylinder made of metal. In the afternoon we checked out the parliament (the white house) which was known to the world during the military coup in 1993. The perpetrator of the coup
transformed it into a gigantic cheese with their tanks. Then we headed for the next Stalin scraper, this time the Hotel Ukraina. We used the elevator to get to the top 29th floor but unfortunately we could not manage to force
the doors to reach the balcony. The hotel staff probably would not have liked this plan!. Afterwards we headed home. To make the Metro trip a bit more fun, we stopped at each station and explored them carefully. I can hardly
describe how beautiful the stations are, many decorated with astonishingly beautiful Soviet propaganda paintings and sculptures. What did the Soviet citizen think when he walked past all that expensive and glorifying
pro-Soviet propaganda? Perhaps he thought that the happiness and wealth were actually here somewhere in the Soviet empire and the question was only: WHERE?
However, the new times with market economy has made the life conditions very hard especially for old age pensioners and the unemployed. They would probably gladly want the communistic system back. The dictatoric system had its advantages. Many of the people agree on this fact.
From journal Moscow - city of contrasts