[Looks like showbiz is flourishing everywhere there.]
June 29, 2006 Letter From Moscow
On Red Square, a Czarist Ritual Revived
By SOPHIA KISHOVSKY
Just before 2 p.m. on the last Saturday of each month from April to October, a dozen saber-bearing cavalry officers of the Kremlin Regiment, in tall hats and czarist military uniforms adorned with gold buttons, yellow tassels and epaulets, mount their horses and gallop through the Spassky Gates, past the impossibly colorful onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.
Their destination: the center of Red Square, near the podium where Communist Party bosses once stood and where thousands of tourists from around the world have gathered.
The Presidential Orchestra's marching band, dressed in white and playing grand imperial marches, and infantry officers with saber rifles follow close behind the mounted officers. Taking their positions in the middle of the square, they launch into half an hour's worth of elaborate formations, graceful pirouettes and breathtaking saber tosses.
The entire event reverberates with the kind of historical discordance that would cause Lenin to roll over in his lonely mausoleum, which also happens to be in the immediate vicinity, guarded by a single bored policeman.
The Kremlin commandant, Sergei Khlebnikov, and Grigori Antyufeyev, the chairman of Moscow's City Tourism Committee, introduced this recent recreation of a czarist cavalry and marching ceremony as Russia's answer to events like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London.
"The main goal of the event is directed at the further forming of a positive image of Moscow as an international tourist center and the development of international and domestic tourism in Russia," read a joint news release reflecting the very capitalist desire for tourist dollars, or euros, as the case may be, since the dollar continues to fall in Russia. ...
<http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/travel/29webletter.html>
Carl