For the next few weeks I am visiting Novgorod Veliky, which is why I’ve been off-blog lately. 

 

The Great Wall Of Novgorod. It appears to keep out capitalists.

An on-line guide I came across said of Novgorod, ‘allow about two hours’. But they lied.

Novgorod is a time warp wonderland. It’s a place where young workers still dream of making home in a pre-fab, Soviet style concret bunker. There’s still a whole lotta Lenin on plaques in plozhads. The patriot monument still receives floral tributes, the town centre is nicely furnished with Stalin Empire-Style buildings. And now in Autumn, Novgorod’s tree-lined ulitsas are as red and gold as any socialist banner.

If there was wi-fi - or even a half-decent Internet cafe, it would be perfect, but as it is I have to wait until Friday for a hard wired connection to my apartment so I can upload some happy snaps. In the meantime you’ll have to make do with this click-through link to local hero, Lenya Galikov.

Lenya has a little park to himself in downtown Novgorod and arguably a statue of more artistic merit than Lenin’s. The legend of the young pioneer is that, as a child soldier in WW2, he killed a Fascist General and destroyed a portfolio of important papers. I’m sure there’s more to the story than that but even Wikipedia is without so much as a stub on Lenya. A forthcoming challenge for your intrepid reporter.