ABSTRACT
The cupolas and turrets and crosses rose above the Volga in a celebration and explosion of faith and hope, making this city one of the most beautiful in all of Russia and one of the founts of the “Third Rome.” Then came communism in 1917 and Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Leaving Moscow for this journey up the Volga River, and then northward through the linked canals and great lakes of the heartland of Mother Russia, one sees nothing but poor wooden shacks. Some are nobly trimmed with charming wood carvings. Most seem gnarled and bent over, buried in mud and puddles and by a bureaucracy-imposed poverty so inexorable that Orthodoxy and communism only increased it. In Rostov: A remarkable, if harsh, Kremlin crumbles. Along the Volga itself: too many graceful onion domes and fortresses to count. And then in Goritsi: the astonishing monastery of St. Cyril, slowly being reclaimed from 70 years of communist destruction.
