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The
Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War
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This
is a ticket to my very favourite museum in Moscow. As can be
seen on the relatively high price I payed - 40 roubles - I was
unsuccessful at convincing the ticket seller that I was a
Russian student. (This was actually the only time it happened.)
There are different ticket prices for adult Russians, adult
non-Russians, Russian students, non-Russian students, children,
and even more categories at some places, while war invalids,
Heroes of the Soviet Union, and some other people, get free
admission. Russian students often get very low priced tickets to
various museums, so if you've got your student
card, understand what the ticket seller says, and speak
Russian or are able to avoid speaking at all, you can see
wondrous things without paying much at all. |
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This museum is
located on
Поклонная
Гора, at the end of
Парк
победы ('Victory Park', 1984-ish
as it is ...). No pictures could ever make justice to the
grandiose glory of Парк
победы - it is a vast field of
concrete paths (great for roller skating) between elaborate
arrangements of flowers, bushes, trees and fountains, stretching up to
the museum building, which is built in a half circle around a
circular square, in the middle of which there is a monument,
stretching several hundreds of meters into the sky (or so it
seems, at least). Into its surface scenes from the Great Patriotic
War are worked. ... From afar it looks like a big stick with
wings.
On the right, a
Soviet medium sized tank is looking out over some artillery
pieces. |
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In the museum, there
are exhibitions of the war's history, a memorial hall, some
dioramas of dramatic scenes, and a large exhibition of artwork
inspired by the war (where I, having caught a heavy flu, had to
suppress violent fits of coughing up slime clots from my lungs,
as the dozens of old museum guard ladies lurking around were
staring at me suspiciously all the time, since I was the only
person at the exhibition). Last, but not least, there is
also an open air exposition of military equipment.
On the left, the legendary
Katyusha. |
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Here, you can see tanks, artillery pieces, planes and helicopters used in WWII - both Soviet and
German, as well as some Japanese pieces. There are bits of reconstructed entrenchments, too, but they look way too clean and
orderly to give any authentic feeling. Having translated parts of a
1930's Soviet textbook on anti-tank warfare for my Russian class
once, I could find particular pleasure in the display of
methods used to obstruct German tanks, such as parts
of rails welded together into crosses and laid out over roads.
A nice Soviet IS-3 heavy
tank on the right. Its successors were the only tanks in the
Egyptian army's service that were genuinely feared by Israeli
troops in the 1967 war. |
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I have a certain
strange love for tanks. Maybe it's because they are somehow
cute, like little bugs. Maybe because they are such bizarre
creations, and represent some of the general insanity of war.
Also, suffering from slight claustrophobia, I'm perversely fascinated by
all claustrophobic conditions - submarines, space ships, fighter
planes, tanks, you name it ...
A prominent place is, of
course, reserved for the T-34, the most widely used Soviet tank
during WWII. The board in front of it explains how all the great
andvantages of this tank made it the absolutely best tank that
participated in WWII.
Remarkably, there weren't any German Tiger tanks in the
exhibition ... |
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To visit the
museum, you should take the metro to
Багратионовская
station (on the
Филёвская
line - number four, light blue), and then either walk or take a
trolley bus in the direction of the stick with the wings, past
Gorbushka. The trolley bus option is recommended, since the
stick can seem to be much closer than it is in reality, and the
road is a bit strange sometimes. In 'my time', numbers 2 and 39
were the buses of choice; you should make
sure it says 'Парк
победы' on the sign in the
side window.
On the right, the
favourite object of all the Chinese tourists to pose in front of
when taking pictures of each other. It looks like it came
straight out of a Hayao Miyazaki comic.
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