This is really a privileged glimpse inside the world of the Czars and the current rulers of Russia. The gold leafed room built in the fourteenth century is especially beautiful. It is really amazing how much skill there is in the world to produce such marvelous things. This was not only a wonderful place to entertain royal guests and visiting dignitaries to build political alliances, but also an opportunity to make an impressive display of wealth and power. During the soviet era, it was the Moscow power center of Stalin, and it would have been great to have been able to visit his rooms. The homes given to his political cronies and henchmen in the Kremlin were often tenuously occupied. You might be moved out at a moments notice, if you fell from power for example, or into disfavor from Stalin himself. It was a world where you were under constant scrutiny, and in a sense a captive, even amongst all the privilege and luxury. It is a common tool of political leaders.
It has been said during the time of the Tzars that the court consisted of approximately two thousand princes and princesses, while an hour away from Moscow, the peasants were eating tree bark to survive. It is very much the indifference to the hardships of the people that paved the way for revolution. It is also interesting to bring to mind that during much of the previous era, serfs, peasants who worked on the land, were owned by the landowner, and came with the land if it was a gift, or a purchase by a nobleman. The people were literally slaves.
It is a land of incredible wealth and hardship. One would think that generally one thinks of Russia during the winter, it always makes very striking photographs, and of course since the loosening of the party controls, there is abundant wealth in the country, (of course amongst the rich).
It is hard to envision that as the country entered the first world war, the troops seeing what was going on, and feeling perhaps empathy and frustration with the situation that was going on, finally revolted in 1917, refusing to continue to fight the Germans, and eventually giving their energy to fuel the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the Czar Nicholas the second. Himself, not entirely recognizing until it was too late that a new paradigm of rule was needed, he has been reported to being to fixed in his ways, indifferent to the people, and not a capable ruler. The next wave of rulers, beginning with Lenin, had a more pragmatic political approach, leading into the ruthless power, destruction and control of Stalin with the infamous purges of the nineteen thirties. The one thing that can be recognized as being part of Stalin's "genius", is that he perceived that there was a looming changed coming into the world. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century needed to be embraced by Russia, (not that they did not have trains, etc, of course), but that the world was changing rapidly, and he had a huge agriculturally based country, that needed to become technically powerful as they moved into the middle of the twentieth century. He developed huge projects, dams, power stations, factories, arms, weapons, munitions, all production generally, to have his country be readied in time for the conflicts he foresaw, and which culminated in the second world war,the height of America's influence in the world, the limits of the great British Empire of the nineteenth century, and at the end of the second world war in nineteen forty five, the beginning of the cold war which ended in the fall of the Berlin wall in nineteen eighty eight.
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