the eastern front

You might think it tricky to visit any museum about the Second World War and not leave feeling depressed, but the Museum of the Great Patriotic War is not simply an immersion in the horrors of the second world war. The way the loss of life is dealt with is quite beautiful (as Nish mentions below), and also the building itself is spectacular, even inspiring. The diorama displays are painted (with one or two exceptions) brilliantly and are almost worth the visit on their own – although you'd probably have to see them to quite believe that. I would.

As Nish also points out, this is also somewhere that plenty of people choose to have their wedding photos. This seems a peculiarly Russian thing – wedding parties climb into their white stretched Hummers and then drive to all the tourist spots around and have their photo taken at each. I saw the same in St. Petersburg, where some of the photos also included a baby black bear… I can't see this happening in Oxfordshire.

A number of the photo parties were grouped around the massive obelisk between the main museum's embracing wings. The obelisk really is very, very big indeed – 142m high, with each 10cm of representing one day of the war (the war on the eastern front being from 1941-1945). It's a modern, triangular Trajan's column, with its flanks covered in high relief scenes of battle, intermingled with comic-book block lettering listing Russian cities that suffered during the conflict. I think the effect is a bit spoiled by a bronze angel near the top that is so large and ponderous it looks ready to snap off and ruin the wedding parties at any moment. We're learning, though, that in Russia, big = beautiful, and this feels like just part of an odd kinship with the USA. Perhaps if Philip Pullman had set Lyra Belacqua's home in New York then its alternative reality would be Moscow.

However, for all its grandeur, artistic flair and surprising cultural comment, the museum did not fail in its primary purpose: something we won't now quickly forget is that the Soviet Union lost around 27 million of its citizens during the Second World War. This was around 15% of its population in 1940.