Robert Smith

There’s a cannon in the Kremlin so big it’s never been fired in anger; no cannon ball has ever left its cavernous aperture. The Tsar Cannon keeps guard, uselessly, as waves of tourists stream past. Just down the path lies the Tsar Bell, the largest bell ever cast. But a huge, ten ton chunk broke off during the casting and its note has never sounded. They’re both massive and imposing, and designed only ever to be those.  The Kremlin is full of such stuff, spanning the mega, the mini, and all in between. Elsewhere there were swords, regalia, thrones, helmets, shields, and guns. All owned by Prince this and Tsar that. There was a throne for the twin Tsars, complete with a secret compartment from which their mother and regent could whisper to them. And then, as if it were totally normal, you stumble into a side room and come eye to eye with a fully stuffed horse. The best bit was the royal carriages. These ornate wooden traps, often entirely gilded, or painted a deep maroon, w...

We were desperate to get in. We’d been hanging around since 8am, queuing since 9, and couldn’t wait for the doors to open. We weren’t even the most keen. That honour went to the squat man in the orange coat who made a ludicrous cut across to the front of one queue as both were slowly walking up to the doors. In the event he saved a grand total of sixty seconds before we were all swallowed up in the vastness of the Hermitage.  This imposing turquoise, white, and gold palace, the scene of great drama in 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed it, and the repository of the second largest art collection in the world, is one of Russia’s most famous buildings. Like St Basils, or the Kremlin, the Winter Palace is synonymous with Russia itself.   But now questions of authenticity and tourism, after that meal at Duo, were nagging at me. Had we been seeing Russia inside the Hermitage?  Michelangelo's Crouching Boy My memories, both the particular and the gene...

‘We’d like to try some Russian food.’ ‘No, Russian food is bad – how about New Fusion?’ There was only one way to answer that. And anyway Vitaly clearly wouldn’t hear otherwise.  But we were in Russia to see Russia. Surely that meant doing Russian things, like tasting the borsch, stodgy stews, and endless herrings that passed for their national cuisine. Having no overwhelming desire to stuff ourselves with potatoes and small fish, though, we took Vitaly’s suggestion went to Duo, the New Fusion ‘gastrobar’, to book a table. Seven hours, and much canal-admiring and rain-dodging later, we were back. The burrata we ordered came out with a thick, salty puree of sundried tomatoes, and a dark green tapenade of mashed olives; we speared it on our forks and watched the cheese wobbling under the pastes; it disappeared in seconds. Veal cheeks followed, in a sticky, sweet gravy: slow-cooked, tender meat offset by sharp spinach and young peas. We finished with a chocolate ganache – t...