Russian city

A big industrial and regional centre, Ivanovo is an integral part of the Golden Ring. It is linked by rail and road with Moscow, Yaroslavl, and Vladimir, and is easily accessible from any point on the Golden Ring.

Compared with the other towns we have visited, Ivanovo is young: in 1971, it celebrated its centenary. But the village of Ivanovo, which eventually grew up into a town, has been known for a long time. The first reference in writing goes back to 1561. By the mid-17th century this large trading and industrial village was already known abroad for its products. Linen from Ivanovo was eagerly bought by English agents. The local printed fabrics were very much in demand on the home market. Production began to develop at the end of the 18th century. Ivanovo calico is world famous to this day. In our own times large consignments of fabrics from the Ivanovo textile complexes are exported to many foreign countries.

Ivanovo is of considerable historical importance for its services to the Soviet Union: it was the town of the first Soviets. They came into being at the will of the Russian proletariat in Ivanovo-Voznesensk during the 1905 Revolution.

The Ivanovo textile workers had much experience of strikes as a weapon of struggle. As early as on 22 December 1897, 14000 Ivanovo-Voznesensk workers declared a strike. The reasons for the proletariat's action were the appalling working conditions, the low wages, the cruelty of the owners and, in particular, the reduced number of holidays. Among the strike leaders were members of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Union of Workers which maintained contact with the Moscow Union of Struggle for Liberation of the Working Class. Soon, the Union or Workers became the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). The workers were out on strike for three weeks. Army units were deployed against them. But, in spite of these repressive measures, the strikers won .certain concessions from the owners.

The 1905 strike (12 May to 23 July) was directed by the Bolshevik organization of the RSDLP headed by Mikhail Frunze, subsequently to be an outstanding government and political figure in the Soviet state and a major military leader in the Civil War. The strike began as an economic one, but soon became political. On 15 May, the workers created the Assembly of Plenipotentiaries--- virtually Russia's first town Soviet of Workers' Deputies. The Soviet functioned as an organ of revolutionary power: it independently authorized freedom of meetings, of speech, and of the press, established revolutionary order in the town and adopted measures to give assistance to strikers and their families. The tsarist authorities sent out troops against the strikers. On 3 June 1905, by the river Talka, people at a workers' meeting were shot down. The general strike lasted 72 days. Only starvation compelled the workers to accept partial concessions from the owners and to go back to work.

The revolutionary events of 1905 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk have been immortalized in a number of monuments and memorials. In Revolution Square, in the town centre where our tour begins, stands a monument To the Fighters for the Revolution--a bronze sculptured group on a granite pedestal: a worker is snatching a red flag--the symbol of struggle--from a comrade who has been hit by one of the executioners' bullets.

The greatest shrine of the Ivanovo townspeople is the memorial on the river Talka, where the idea of a Workers' Soviet was born and where the tsarist butchers shot down the striking proletarians of Ivanovo-Voznesensk at a meeting. The memory of the heroes of the revolutionary struggle is honoured in the town. There is a monument to Mikhail Frunze. Soviet sculptor Yury Neroda and architect Anatoly Rostkovsky have created a vivid image of this military leader who came from the people. One of the textile mills is called Krasnaya Talka. Working-class leaders, Olga Varentsova and Fyodor Afanasyev, are commemorated by monuments and by the names of Ivanovo factories.

Ivanovo, the capital of this textile world, is a rapidly developing town. The latest equipment has been installed at the blended yam and worsted complexes, at the Bolshaya Ivanovskaya Manufaktura Complex and at the Vosmoye Marta Textile Works. New factories and powerful industrial plants in Ivanovo are producing machines for textile mills and peat processing, also autocranes, boring lathes and testing instruments.

Ivanovo is a town of new building projects. Housing estates began to go up in the first years of Soviet power. The workers in pre-revolutionary Ivanovo-Voznesensk lived in slums and in the gloomy, sordid 'doss-houses', as they were called. In the 20s and 30s the leading Soviet architects carried out a number of building projects. In 1927 one of the founders of world constructivism, Victor Vesnin, built the State Bank in Ivanovo. Academician Ivan Fomin designed the beautiful Institute of Chemistry and Technology. In the 30s Alexander Vlasov--builder of such famous structures in Moscow as Krymsky Bridge, the Gorky Recreation Park, and the sports complex at Luzhniki--put up the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, an imposing building in the classical style.

Today's construction projects are impressive in their scope and size. New housing estates, palaces I of culture and sport, public libraries, and hospital complexes are opened every year in this organically developing contemporary town with its half a million inhabitants. Local tours will give you the chance to become more closely acquainted with the monuments to the history of the revolution and with the countless new building projects.

In spite of its industrial profile, Ivanovo is an artists' town. It is enough to think of the vivid, colourful products of the Ivanovo textile factories--the countless varieties of patterned cottons and colour combinations--to realize that dozens of inspired artists had a hand in their making. They are carrying on in the old traditions of folk decorative art. In the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Museum of Regional Studies you will see where the skill of the contemporary artists originated.

Examples of old printing blocks in the museum exhibition testify to the fine taste and truly folk character of the Ivanovo printed fabrics.

The whole of the Ivanovo Region is rich in art traditions. Take, for instance, Palekh, the 'village-academy' of folk art. It is the next stop on our journey.

There is a beautiful church in the centre of the big and handsome village of Palekh. The inscription on the outside of the west wall has preserved the builder's name: Master Yegor Dubov. The church was built in the austere ancient Russian style. In contrast with the whiteness of the exterior, the interior is strikingly colourful. The 17th-century Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is a branch of the Museum of Palekh Art. The upraised iconostas in the Russian Baroque style was executed by local craftsmen. The icons painted in Palekh were done in the tradition of Russian 15th-17th-century painting. In the iconostas of the south chapel the 16th-century carved Tsar Gates are of particular value: they came to the church from the ancient town of Uglich on the Volga.

In the pleasant two-storey Museum of Palekh Art the work of this famous village is fully represented in the form it adopted after the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Palekh miniatures arc a form of folk painting in tempera on lacquered papier-mache articles-- an art form which draws on its own traditions and has its own style, techniques and methods. Everything about it is out-of-the-ordinary: the special paints, the colours, the rhythms, the outlines, the use of gold, the sometimes fantastic forms of vegetation, architecture and ornamentation; the imagination and fantasy, the outstanding skill and, at the same time, the keen sense of reality and of the present.

With the development of capitalism in the 19th century, the once integral skill of the Palekh craftsmen broke up into a series of separate operations, and the artist became a sort of factory hand exploited by owners who earned millions from the toil of the icon-painters dependent on them.

The October Socialist Revolution opened the way to inspired creative work. The art of Soviet Palekh is inseparable from the Socialist Revolution. A great friend of the Palekh craftsmen was Soviet writer Maxim Gorky who saw their work as one of the little miracles being worked by the Revolution, evidence of awakening creative powers in the masses of the working people, one of the most significant leaps from the 'necessity' of forced labour to 'free creativeness'.

Palekh icon painting had one noteworthy feature: it preserved the lustre of ancient Russian art and its great schools of painting in Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Moscow. For this reason old Palekh was much valued by the archaeologist-experts and connoisseurs. The founders of contemporary Palekh art drew on this tradition that was deeply rooted in the art of the people; they gave it a new lease of life.

What has contemporary Palekh art inherited from ancient Russian painting? First, the material and the method; second, the system of decorative and graphic forms, such as 'hills', 'palaces', 'grasses' and the like; third, style--that is, certain techniques of drawing and painting, the use of gold paint, and original means of composition connected with a distinctive method of depicting space on a flat surface.

At the same time, this art has many new features, new elements and forms which, combining with the traditional elements, substantially change and modify them. In Soviet times, for instance, the Palekh artists have completely prevailed over the mediaeval ascetic manner of portraying man as a fleshless, refined creature with a dark face and no live physical colouring. The landscape has changed, as have the architecture and the ornamentation, to say nothing of the subjects and the ideological message of this art.

Palekh art is the people's art because it was created as the result of the amateur activity of simple peasant craftsmen; because it has always developed further the living elements of ancient Russian painting and folk crafts; because this art form is only possible in connection with the whole mass of the Russian people's skill--their songs, traditions, fairytales and folk epics; finally, because in an unusual form it reflects the social life and spiritual world of Soviet people today.

Ivan Golikov, the founder of Soviet Palekh art, was a man of outstanding natural talent. He was the first to apply egg yolk tempera to papier-mache, to paint stage scenery and execute paintings on a monumental scale.

Golikov imagined the revolution as a violent whirlwind. "I've painted many battles because I've taken part in fighting myself and, having seen cavalry clashes and engagements, cities on fire, looting, the horror of refugees, children and old people, I painted it all," explained Golikov. He often painted a battle with a city on fire in the background: the huge vortex of flames blazing and soaring against the black setting of the sky; leaping horsemen with slashing blades, rearing horses, often red or yellow in colour so that they are like the play of the untameable element of fire.

Apart from battles, Golikov also favoured highly expressive subjects such as hunts, strolls, troikas and folk dances.

Golikov's masterpieces can be seen in the display cases of the Museum of Palekh Art. Another memorial is the modest little timber house in which he lived and worked. Golikov's house vividly demonstrates that it is not special colours and brushes, but a special spirit inspired with imagination, that is the main source of imperishable art. Ivan Golikov was not alone. His example was an inspiration to other Palekh artists who had been icon-painters. An artel of ancient painting was formed in 1923. It included masters of the lacquered miniature, such as Alexander Kotukhin, Ivan Vakurov, Ivan Bakanov, Ivan Markichev, Ivan Zubkov, Alexei Vatagin, Aristarkh Dydykin, Nikolai Zinovyev and Dmitry Butorin. Together with Golikov, they are rightly considered the founders of contemporary Palekh art. Their work is the pride of the museum, and their names are on the marble memorial plaques to be seen on many of the modest houses in Palekh. It is fascinating to go for a walk round a village in which every house is a home of art.

We had good reason for calling Palekh a 'village-academy'. The rudiments of the craft have been, and are being, passed on to the young by the experienced masters. The art college is much loved and cared for by the people of Palekh, and it now has a new and beautifully equipped building. This is where the future artists are trained.

Over a hundred and fifty skilled artists work for the Palekh Art Production Studios, and many of them are members of the Artists' Union of the USSR. Palekh keeps its creative standards at a high level, and its lacquered miniatures are in demand all over the world.

Tourists in the ancient village are hospitably welcomed at a restaurant specially built to cope with the large numbers of visitors. Even there you can see Palekh interior decorations worthy of any museum.

Palekh is getting younger. The Master Plan for the development of the village envisages a new building for the Museum of Palekh Art, new studios for the miniaturists, a House of Culture, libraries and other facilities. The historic centre of Palekh with its characteristic atmosphere and landscape will become a protected zone.

Palekh is away from the railways. This famous village is linked with Moscow by bus service. Your route will take you through the fields and forests of the Russian Non-Black-Earth Zone, a poetic landscape that has given the world a charming art, a land undergoing rapid growth and development in every way.

Rostov Veliky

On the way to Moscow, not far from Rostov, a lain begins, undulating here and there, with woods and open fields. Climbing from hill to hill, the road takes us to the edge of the Lake Nero Depression and runs along its west shore for a few more kilometers. As we draw nearer to ancient Rostov, the gilded domes of the churches and the white fortress walls of the majestic Kremlin shine more and more vividly in the sun.

Russian master craftsmen put inexhaustible fantasy and skill into every one of the Rostov Kremlin buildings be it the mighty citadel walls with their eleven towers, the spacious limestone palaces or the church interiors with their fantastic wall frescoes. As soon as it was built in the 17th century, the Rostov Kremlin became one of the great sights of Russia. To this day it thrills us with its unique beauty, wealth of architectural forms and variety of the gilded domes.

In plan, the Rostov Kremlin is an irregular rectangle and covers an area of about two hectares. Unlike most Russian Kremlins and monasteries, it does not have a monumental cathedral to dominate the rest of the buildings The centerpiece of the ensemble is a spacious courtyard with buildings of about the same size, grouped along the walls. The town's main cathedral, the Cathedral of the Dormition, is outside the Kremlin walls. It is adjacent to the Kremlin, but still stands separately as part of a self-contained civic ensemble with the Shopping Centre (Tor-govyie Ryady), bell tower, and the Church of the Savior-on-the-Market Place (Spas-na-Torgu).

It is with the Cathedral of the Dormition that we begin our tour of Rostov. Massive and majestic, it was put up on the site of 12m-and 13th-century buildings during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. At this time Rostov played a significant part in the life of the Russian state. It was a major trading centre on the road from Moscow to the White Sea. AH the big expeditions of Russian pioneers leaving to tame the northern and eastern wilds passed through Rostov in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Cathedral of the Dormition has the five domes traditional in Ancient Russia. The interior walls are decorated with paintings. A shining example of the applied art of that time is to be seen on the west cathedral doors which arc-decorated with iron handles in the form of lion masks (12th century).

The Cathedral of the Dormition, as the tourist will notice when he enters the city from the direction of Moscow is not separate from the Kremlin visually, hut is closely connected with its walls and towers. Credit is due for this to the Metropolitan Ina Sysoyevich. He was responsible for the general design of the whole group and for helping to create and work out the style of a number of Kremlin buildings which have a deservedly prominent place among the architectural complexes of Ancient Russia.

The Kremlin walls and towers were built in 1670-5. The walls are relatively thin, the towers and gates are richly decorated, while the loopholes and battlements are ornamental rather than functional. The gate churches are directly incorporated into the composition of the walls: the Church of the Resurrection on the north wall, built it 1670, and the Church of St. John the Divine on the west wall, built in 16S3. Both churches stand over the Entrance Gates, and each is supported on two sides by graceful round towers.

The five-domed Church of the Resurrection stands over the Holy Gates, so called because the ceremonia processions of the Metropolitan to the Cathedral of the Dormition used to pass through them. The gates are richly) decorated. The church gallery and its walls are thickly covered with paintings of rare beauty, which were applied til fresco, that is, on the damp plaster, a technique demanding great skill, fine draughtsman ship and accurate choice of colors.

The Church of St. John the Divine is similar to the Church of the Resurrection, except that the interior space tends vertically upwards in a more pronounced manner. The church walls are painted with scenes from the life of St. John the Divine and St. Avraamy of Rostov, the legendary Christian missionary in Rostov.

The most important group of buildings is in the south-east part of the Kremlin and includes the civic building; which went up in 1672-80, and the true gem of the Kremlin complex, the Church of the Savior-in-the-Vestibule (Spas-na-Senyakh), 1675. The cube-shaped church with its modest architectural design has a single vault and is crowned with a small dome. The interior has no equivalent in Russian architecture. Half of the interior is taken up by a high raised soleya (elevated floor in front of the altar), decorated with a stone arcade resting on thick glided columns. The arcade of the soleya is joined by the arches to the stone iconostas. All the walls, the iconostas, and the arcade of the soleya are decorated with frescoes executed in the 17th century by Timofei Yarets, a native оf Rostov, Dmitry Stepanov from Vologda, and Ivan and Fyodor Karpov, natives of Yaroslavl.

Three hundred years have passed, and the Rostov frescoes have not lost their artistic merits. They are a delight to the eye thanks to the harmonious combination of soft turquoise and pale-blue shades with golden ochre, rose and white. The subjects are treated with freshness, originality, and with the tendency towards the secularization on ancient Russian painting, which was becoming more and more influenced by the everyday life, rituals and customs of the people. If one looks closely at the Rostov frescoes, it is not hard to detect behind the religious subjects the real life and, what is more, very profound real-life content. When creating their works, the artists of Ancient Russia were inspired by the images of the Russian people, their own contemporaries--tillers of the soil tradesmen, soldiers. The Rostov frescoes leave us in no doubt of this.

When viewing the Rostov Kremlin, it is possible, without descending to ground level, to walk round the wall; and not only visit all the churches, but to see all the other buildings as well--Chambers for Church Dignitaries the Prince's Chambers, the White Chamber, the Otdatochnaya Hall where people came to pay their respects, and the Metropolitan's House, all of which now accommodate a museum exhibition. The Rostov Museum is famous for its collection of enamels, ancient icons, copper eastings, coins, wooden sculptures and folk carvings. Even section in the museum can claim at least one masterpiece. The Rostov Museum is famous for its collection о enamels, ancient icons, copper easting, coins, wooden sculptures and folk carvings. Every section in the museum can claim at least one masterpiece. The production of enamels in Rostov has ancient and solid traditions Particularly valuable are the Rostov enamels of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century; they an exceptional for clarity of outline and rich variety of color. In our own times the traditions are being kept up by the magnificent enamellers at the Rostovskaya Finift Factory. The museum exhibition has on display examples of the 18th and 19th centuries and also the best work by contemporary enamellers. The Rostov craftsmen formerly made miniature enamelled icons, decorations for church books and for the robes of the higher clergy. Since the end of the 19th century the artists have concentrated more and more on orders of a secular nature Today's craftsmen in Rostov specialize in souvenirs, elegant women's ornaments, plaquettes with architectura views and miniature paintings with Russian songs and fairy-tales as their subject.

The museum exhibition vividly demonstrates that the Rostov enamellers knew the work of their Limoges and English counterparts. There are no direct borrowings, but studying the experience of the foreign craftsmen played a definite part in widening the technical resources of the Rostov artists.

To enumerate the exhibits in the Rostov museum, even if we confined ourselves to those of the very highest artistic quality, would be impossible in a brief article. We would nevertheless like to mention such masterpiece; as The Archangel Michael icon (14th-15th cc.), the carved limestone cross from the grave of the son of Stefan Borodaty, the prince's scribe (1458), and the wooden figure, St. George the Victorious (15th century), carved by the outstanding Russian architect, builder and sculptor Vasily Yer-molin.

Among the many buildings in the Kremlin, one that invariably attracts attention is the mighty four-tiered bell tower built in 1682-7. Even from a considerable distance it is possible to see in its spans the great bells on which the Rostov chimes are played.

Since ancient times the chiming of bells has accompanied the life of the people, calling them to battle sounding fire alarms, summoning congregations, or joyfully greeting heroes returning from the battlefield Novgorod the Great, Pskov, and Moscow were famed for their bells since olden times, but there was never anything anywhere to match the Rostov chimes.

There are thirteen bells in the bell tower of Rostov's Cathedral of the Dormition. The ringers stand so that the can see one another and keep in time. A joyful major chord is characteristic of the Rostov chimes which can be heard some twenty kilometers away.

It seems only right to begin the tour of Rostov with a visit to the museum and the Kremlin monuments. The town is a true preserve of 17th-century architecture. But this is only a part of what is to be seen there.

To the north-east of the Kremlin, near the ramparts, stands the small and beautiful one-domed Church of St Isidore the Blessed. It was built by Moscow master builder Andrei Maloi in 1566, and its shape is typical оf Moscow architecture at that time.

Also by Andrei Maloi is the great Cathedral of the Epiphany (1553) of the St. Avraamy Monastery on the east fringe of the town, one of the oldest surviving architectural monuments in Rostov.

The St. Jacob Monastery is situated on the west fringe of the town, on the shore of the lake within the stone wall and towers stands the Church of the Conception, built at the time of the Metropolitan lona Sysoyevich in

1686, and the Church of St. Demetrius an outstanding monument in tin. Russian neo-classical style. It was built in 1794-1801 by Dusking and Maroon, two serf architects win belonged to Count Sheremetev.

In the 18th and 19th century Rostov was a trading town know in Russia and abroad as a market-gardening centre. In the last quarter of the 19th century industry appeared in the form of a flax mill, a coffee and chicory works, and a molasses factory.

Nowadays, Rostov is seen primarily as a unique historical and architectural complex and a city-preserve. It is not being developed as an industrial centre, and no large-scale construction work is in progress. Each new building project in Rostov is carried out with a view to the location of the architectural monuments.

Rostov is a district centre of the Yaroslavl Region, and it proudly calls itself Rostov Veliky (the Great). The magnificent and lovingly preserved old buildings, the paintings and the famous Rostov chimes are the pride and glory of Russian art.

Suzdal