Zdravstvuyte and welcome to Russia! A few notes on the voyage: First, I must say what a very challenging adventure this was. Visiting in the dead of winter, I expected cold. I didn’t expect the brutal temperatures that we encountered: record-shattering, bone-slicing blasts straight from the arctic. In light of the frigid extremes, we are lucky to have any pictures at all. (I have even devoted a section of the video to wishing I were someplace warm!) I took a better camera in addition to my old point-and-shoot, but with a couple of brief exceptions was unable to use it - one of the problems being that it had too much frozen metal that my fingers would get stuck on. (Gloves were no match for the bitter air.) In addition, the sheer effort of putting on 15 pieces of clothing several times a day was exhausting, and trying to figure out what to take and how to take it on our many plane, train, and car trips made for a logistical nightmare. No matter the season, Russia will always be, to my mind, an eternal kingdom of ice.

But the reason we went in January was to get a tiny taste of what it was like to be there during the Second World War - without actually being shot at or starved to death. The suffering of the Soviet people during that time is simply unimaginable. 27 million people died in that country in the course of the war. As Stalin famously said, “Britain provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood”. There are not words adequate to express the loss, and regrettably the West no longer recognizes the decisive role played by Russia in ending WWII. Of every 10 German soldiers killed, 8 died in the USSR.

The video is travelogue for you, scrapbook for us. There are captions but we saw and did a LOT, and the idea is not so much to name every onion-domed church or every artist in the Hermitage, but to convey the feeling of being there. I try to do this in all my movies, but this one is slightly different in that it was primarily a war tour and so there are things that need to be explained in a historical context. This was a bit difficult, as I wanted to make a more-or-less linear narrative of a period in time, but the trip itself bounced around between battlefields and cemeteries and museums and monuments of different years. So the travel as shown has been simplified.

Another challenge was to impart the happiness and joy of discovery despite it being an exploration of some of the darkest years in human history. This was a pickle - show the good times without detracting from the larger tale. In this regard, cats were a help - as always.

Making these videos is like molding a sculpture. You don’t know exactly how it will turn out until you’re done, but it’s fun to see it come to life. Every second of every frame is molded - the light, the color, the panning, the length. It all makes up the story. And a huge part of that story is the music. Much effort is put into matching the pictures to the songs, down to the beat. (It is better to add extra photos than break up the song, in my opinion.) In the embedded videos - the shorter ones in the longer movie - if there is different music, it was there in real life.

There are bits that will be small but meaningful. The first song was inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and he is the prisoner at the end of that song. There is also a quick shot of Lenin with a girl looking at her cellphone instead. That alone could be the emblem of New Russia. After slogging through the Soviet years (“This country will never get ahead with that mummy lying in Red Square”), Russians have thrown off the yoke of communism but in the process have thrown much of the populace under the bus. There used to be cohesion - you were poor, but so was everyone else - and now there is sharp division, the haves and have-nots. The social safety net is gone and the hardship is undeniable.

Except in St. Petersburg. This city of palaces seems to exist not only in another country but possibly on another planet. Moscow is still heavily influenced by centuries of Mongol-Tatar-Tsarist absolute rule, and thus has an Asian soul. St. Petersburg, it seems to me, could serve as the capital of any northern European country - which is how it was designed by its founder, Peter the Great.

The video ends with a quote that is not Russian. I read it many years ago and it has always stayed with me. For some reason I felt compelled to use it in here so I looked it up, and turns out it is from an author who wrote a book called “Travels in Siberia”. That quote and this story were long ago destined to meet.

Now, let’s start traveling the Roads to Moscow.