It’s always interesting to read a travel piece about somewhere you visited. Just to compare notes. Today the Moscow Times obliged with a feature on Novgorod Veliky.

Staff writer Anna Malpas points out that it’s not to be confused with Nizhny Novgorod. Perhaps one should add, nor anywhere else. The other day this blog picked up a reader from Novgorod which Google imagines is in China.

Anyway, it’s clear Google Analytics has a bug and that both Anna and I visited the same place. She writes:

Despite its untouched appearance, the city is in fact a showpiece of Soviet-era restoration, since the centre was severely damaged by the Nazi forces that occupied it from 1941 to 1944.

The centre was also completely rebuilt by the Germans, but this time as POWs. Only now is it being acknowledged that Stalin drew on an immense pool of German skill as well as labour.

Novgorod is interesting because it doesn’t have one standout, prisoner-built palace, like Yekaterinburg City Hall, but avenues of German apartments and pleasant two-storey villas overlooking the river. It is unusual. Stalin wasn’t at all interested in urban planning. It was Stalin’s total neglect of infrastructure that necessitated the mass construction of those hideous panel-built apartments all over Eastern Europe under Kruschev.

Anna writes again:

The city has gained some coffee shops, such as Cafe Le Chocolat on the corner of Ulitsa Lyudogoshcha and Ulitsa Nekrasova, which is frequented by the city’s beautiful people at less-than-Moscow prices.

Well, I just happened to take a picture of that corner. The Cafe is POW built too. Like many nice buildings in Novgorod, little has been touched since WW2. The once-tiled roofs are usually patched with corrugated metal, which doesn’t always harmonise with the majesty of neo-classicism. But you can still tell an ‘elitny’ cafe by the drainpipe.

Notice that the check-out sticker is still on Le Chocolat Cafe’s new downpipe and compare it with that of the Korean cafe. Now you understand why a glass of wine in the Chocolat is 300 roubles, as opposed to 60 anywhere else in Novgorod. Note also that cleverly-designed Russian drainpipes empty wastewater directly into your trouser pocket.

Novgorod’s elitny Volna store is German built too. It’s so elitny that men even have cigarette cases instead of cardboard packs. (Double click for close-up.) The ugly Soviet block behind Volna is the University.

“German built’ is now becoming a buzzphrase amongst Russian real estate agents - particularly in places like Moscow, Novgorod and Kaliningrad. It adds value to property prices. (They are careful not to mention prisoners or slave labour.)

Actually, there is no logical reason why the standard of POW workmanship should be any higher than that of regular Russian labourers. Logically, dying men on a bowl of soup and 500 grammes of bread a day should never have been capable of building anything. Places like Moscow State University and Yekaterinburg City Hall were largely built by POWs from Stalingrad. Of the 90,000, already exhausted soldiers captured there, only 5,000 outlived the consequent construction labour and malnutrition. Such buildings are eloquent tombstones to the capacity of human survival.