[size=18]J[/size]ust before 2 p.m. on the last Saturday of each month from April to October, a dozen saber-bearing cavalry officers of the Kremlin Regiment, in tall hats and czarist military uniforms adorned with gold buttons, yellow tassels and epaulets, mount their horses and gallop through the Spassky Gates, past the impossibly colorful onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.
Their destination: the center of Red Square, near the podium where Communist Party bosses once stood and where thousands of tourists from around the world have gathered.
The Presidential Orchestra's marching band, dressed in white and playing grand imperial marches, and infantry officers with saber rifles follow close behind the mounted officers. Taking their positions in the middle of the square, they launch into half an hour's worth of elaborate formations, graceful pirouettes and breathtaking saber tosses.
The entire event reverberates with the kind of historical discordance that would cause Lenin to roll over in his lonely mausoleum, which also happens to be in the immediate vicinity, guarded by a single bored policeman.
The Kremlin commandant, Sergei Khlebnikov, and Grigori Antyufeyev, the chairman of Moscow's City Tourism Committee, introduced this recent recreation of a czarist cavalry and marching ceremony as Russia's answer to events like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London.
"The main goal of the event is directed at the further forming of a positive image of Moscow as an international tourist center and the development of international and domestic tourism in Russia," read a joint news release reflecting the very capitalist desire for tourist dollars, or euros, as the case may be, since the dollar continues to fall in Russia.
Several foreign tourists who stumbled upon the Red Square ceremony, which began this spring, seemed duly impressed. "I think it is a memory of old time; it shows Russians still want to be a very strong country in the world," said Huang Shen, a 36-year-old sales manager from China who was making his first visit to Russia and is one of the throngs of Chinese tourists fanning out across Russia and the world.
"This was a surprise," said David Walsh, who visits Moscow periodically from Nottingham, England, to lecture on human resource management. "It's like the Trooping of Color."
His wife, Rosie, said she loved it and loved Moscow for the most part, but had hesitations about returning because, she said, her dark skin [ch8212] she is originally from Malaysia [ch8212] had generated some minor harassment from the Moscow police the day before.
Others noticed a certain blatant pandering to tourists. "It seemed predictable," said Jim Bruno, a custom T-shirt producer from Denver who had flown in earlier in the day and stumbled upon the ceremony. "You come to Red Square and you expect to see this. It was like a New Orleans jazz funeral. Like Disneyland."
Unlike so many things in Moscow, which was just ranked as the world's most expensive city and where a two-tier pricing system separates tourists from locals at many tourist sites, the ceremony is free.
A for-pay version of the ceremony, introduced last year, takes place at noon on other Saturdays of the month on Sobornaya Ploschad, or Cathedral Square, inside the Kremlin. It costs 960 rubles ($36, at 28 rubles to $1) for foreign guests, which includes visits to the Kremlin cathedrals. Russians pay 300 rubles ($11). It has been attended by such important guests as Prince Michael of Kent, who has become a patron of the arts and charities in Russia. With his striking resemblance to Czar Nicholas II, he turned many a tourist's head when he attended the ceremony last October. (The Cathedral Square ceremony was beautifully recreated in "The Barber of Siberia," the epic film about czarist Russia by the Oscar-winning director Nikita Mikhalkov.)
Until 1993, one of the main tasks of the ceremonial Kremlin Regiment, now officially known as the President's Regiment, was to guard Lenin's mausoleum, which throughout the Soviet era was surrounded by an endless line of officials, labor union delegations, Communist pilgrims, schoolchildren and curious tourists who came to pay their respects.
The eerie military precision of the changing of the guard at the mausoleum was one of the highlights of visits to Red Square.
No more. During the most recent cavalry ceremony, which took place last Saturday, a lone slouching policeman swung his keys idly as he waited for his shift to end. So far rumors that arise every couple of years that Lenin will be buried have not come to pass, but by all appearances he is being phased out as a major source of local pride.
Moscow, Red Square [ch8212] and post-Soviet Russia, in general [ch8212] are works in progress, with one past being replaced by another, and sometimes by a recreation of a past that may not even have existed. Red stars still top the Kremlin, but after the cavalry ceremony, the main entertainment on the square was a sound check for a concert by Roger Waters, who played Pink Floyd's greatest hits later that evening.
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