Ninth of May (Victory Day) Photo

Alexander Belinky, the St. Petersburg Times staff photographer, gave me some of his best photos from over the years, which I will be putting up time to time on Eagle and the Bear. I’m leaving St. Petersburg in two weeks after a solid year here, and what better way to say goodbye to this city of light and darkness, neo-Classicism and “Sovok” (any form of the massive, quietly decaying body of detritus the Soviet Union left behind) than with photos like this one, taken on the elegant Palace Square during a Victory Day celebration in the early 1990’s. The regal, 18th-century General Headquarters building and the turquoise Winter Palace, where the Bolsheviks came to power by overthrowing the provisional government in October (November by the Western calendar) 1917, is obscured by a giant billboard of Marx, Engels and Lenin.