Driving Russia in Winter

The road looked perfectly flat until my car dropped sideways into the snow.

There was no dramatic crash. I had simply moved too far toward what I thought was the side of the road. Under all that white, the edge of the road and the ditch beside it looked almost identical.

Now one side of the car was buried.

I got the shovel out.

Eventually a road grader helped pull me free.

That happened during a 4,383 km drive through western Russia in February 2005. I spent 20 days on the road, much of it alone, with temperatures ranging from around −31°C to −6°C.

I had gone there primarily to see old Russian towns.

The winter became just as much a part of the journey.

I was living just across the border

At the time I was living in Finland.

I had received a scholarship to study Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Kankaanpää, part of Satakunta University of Applied Sciences. From there, Russia wasn't some distant idea on the other side of Europe. It was just across the border.

So I decided to drive there.

My route began in Kankaanpää and continued through Helsinki, Kotka and Vaalimaa before crossing toward Vyborg and Saint Petersburg.

The plan eventually developed into a huge loop: Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Suzdal, Vladimir, Pereslavl-Zalessky, Sergiyev Posad, Tver, Veliky Novgorod and dozens of villages and secondary roads between them.

I wanted the Golden Ring towns in particular.

But first I had to get through the border.

"Passport no good! Go away!"

The border gave me one of the strangest beginnings to any road trip.

A Russian immigration officer opened my passport and damaged part of the plastic covering the photograph page.

Then he handed it back.

Passport no good! Go away!

For a while it looked as if the journey might finish before it started.

I eventually managed to speak with a senior border officer. While looking through my passport, he noticed my Uzbekistan visa.

He told me he had been born in Samarkand.

Suddenly we were talking about Uzbekistan instead of my damaged passport. Where had I traveled? What had I seen?

The atmosphere changed completely.

I was allowed into Russia.

Saint Petersburg: back to art

One of my first major stops was Saint Petersburg.

Coming here while studying Fine Arts in Finland made the Hermitage an obvious stop.

One room contained Henri Matisse on a scale completely different from seeing reproductions in books. Dance filled a huge section of wall: red bodies, blue background, green ground, almost no detail.

I had crossed into Russia by car, but part of the reason I had the freedom to make this trip in the first place was that I was in Finland studying painting, sculpture, photography, philosophy and aesthetics.

So the museums were not separate from the road trip. They belonged to it.

The painting is Matisse's Dance, dated 1910 and held by the State Hermitage Museum, which records it as the companion to Music.

The churches offered another kind of visual education.

Their interiors could be completely covered in painted figures. Saints occupied the walls and vaults, Cyrillic lettering surrounded them, and gold halos stood against intense fields of blue.

In an Orthodox church, these images are not simply decoration added to an architectural interior. The painted and iconographic programme forms part of the religious space itself.

I kept stopping to look.

Driving east through the snow

From Saint Petersburg I continued east and then toward Moscow.

In summer, a secondary road gives you villages and countryside. In February it sometimes gave me almost nothing but white.

I preferred smaller roads whenever possible because I could see parts of the country that disappeared when driving only between major cities.

It also meant driving through places where the landscape seemed to have been erased.

Snow covered the fields. Snow covered the verge. Snow covered the smaller tracks.

Sometimes the only clear indication of where I was supposed to drive came from the compressed tyre marks ahead.

Inside the car, cold became part of the routine. I carried a shovel and other basic equipment because being stuck was no longer a theoretical possibility.

I used the shovel several times.

The white shoulder that wasn't a shoulder

The ditch was my mistake.

On an icy road, the car could slide easily. Worse, a smooth white area beside the compacted surface could look completely harmless.

That was how I ended up stuck.

The photograph is almost ridiculous now.

My little station wagon is leaning into the snow on one side of the road. A shovel is planted upright nearby. Beside it is an enormous Soviet-looking yellow grader on six large tyres.

That machine eventually helped me.

In rural Russia in February, asking somebody for assistance wasn't an abstract travel philosophy. At some point you were either moving or you weren't.

And I wasn't.

Tea and heat beside the road

Night changed the countryside completely.

One photograph I particularly like from the journey was taken at a small roadside bistro.

Two women stood behind the counter dressed in heavy dark coats and wool hats. Outside was snow and darkness. Behind them, the shop glowed under the Cyrillic sign БИСТРО — bistro.

On the counter stood a large metal samovar.

The samovar is basically a hot-water vessel built around Russia's long tea culture. The traditional versions heated water around a central fire tube; later ones became electric. Seeing one beside the road in the middle of winter made its purpose immediately obvious.

You didn't need a museum explanation.

Outside it was freezing. At the counter there was hot water and tea.

Moscow under snow

Moscow was a completely different scale again.

I photographed the Kremlin across the Moskva River with snow on both banks and broken pieces of ice floating on the water.

The walls cut a long red line across the white city.

I visited the Kremlin and Red Square as part of the same trip. Both have been on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 1990.

But Moscow wasn't the end point.

The places I most wanted to explore were farther east and northeast.

Into the Golden Ring

Suzdal became one of the bases for this part of the journey.

From there I drove through Vladimir, Kideksha and tiny settlements around the region, often taking deliberate secondary-road detours rather than moving directly between the famous monuments.

The architecture kept repeating itself in different forms.

White walls. Arches. Domes. Crosses above the snow.

Some churches had blue domes, others green or gold. Some stood in developed historical centres; others appeared beyond wooden houses and electricity poles in small settlements.

This was why driving worked so well for me here.

I could visit the major churches and monasteries and then continue through ordinary countryside without knowing exactly what the next village would contain.

Suzdal and nearby Vladimir hold a remarkable concentration of medieval white-stone monuments. UNESCO groups several of them, including the Suzdal Kremlin with its Cathedral of the Nativity and Vladimir's Assumption Cathedral, within the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal World Heritage property.

The religion was visible not only in individual monuments but in the silhouette of the towns.

Domes kept appearing above the snow.

People on the road

My Russian was basic, but I had learned enough to start conversations.

That helped.

One of my photographs shows me beside an older Russian man.

We are both dressed for the cold. I'm wearing a knitted hat. He has a huge black fur hat and a heavy coat with a thick wool collar. A cigarette hangs from his mouth.

The countryside behind us is completely white.

These encounters were one of the advantages of getting away from the main roads.

People noticed a foreign car. They wanted to know where I came from.

And because I could manage some Russian, the conversations could continue beyond hello.

Sergiyev Posad and back north

The route eventually brought me to Sergiyev Posad.

Its great monastery complex, the Trinity Sergius Lavra, forms one of the major centres of Russian Orthodox religious architecture. UNESCO describes the Lavra as an important spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church; its architectural ensemble is itself a World Heritage property.

From there I continued through Dmitrov, Klin and Tver.

Then north again.

Veliky Novgorod gave me another concentration of churches and medieval architecture before I returned toward Saint Petersburg and Vyborg. UNESCO's listed property there encompasses the historic monuments of Novgorod and its surroundings.

Finally I crossed back through Vaalimaa into Finland.

Twenty February days. 4,383 kilometres.

And my little station wagon made it back.

The photograph I keep coming back to isn't Moscow or the Hermitage.

It is the car sitting by itself on a narrow road with snow running all the way to the horizon — the one at the top of this page.

There is almost nothing else in the frame.

Just two tyre tracks continuing north.

For more winter driving at the other end of the thermometer, read how I spent 24 hours trapped in the no-man's-land of the Pamir Highway, or continue through my best travel experiences.