After taking in the Kremlin’s immense, impersonal government buildings, arriving at Assumption Cathedral, which is tucked deeper inside, is like falling back in time.  Its exterior is a battered, undressed stone that evokes a pre-Christian desert landscape.  And its interior — every square inch — is covered in jewel-hued frescoes that tell the story of the church.  These aren’t like the frescoes in Renaissance churches, that open windows into fictive space.  These are paintings stacked one upon the other, wrapping the walls and crawling up onto the ceiling vaults.  Populated with flattened figures in airless gold backgrounds, they’re like very sacred cartoons, rich with knowledge from another age.

The way the embellishment overwhelms the architecture made me think, as I had many, many times during my trip, that Russia not part of Europe but part of Asia.  In many ways the country reminds me of India.  It’s huge, deeply diverse in culture, and moving boldly into the new century while also remaining stubbornly the same.  In Moscow there’s a barely-concealed sense of chaos coursing below the streets that once senses could, at any moment, simply erupt.  This latent (and sometimes not) disorder seems like an essential part of the culture.

There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room.  The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point.  This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other.  On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky.

On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor.  To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next.  They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals.  There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present — every surface dissolves into ornament.  And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate.  (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.)  The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations.  It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight.  The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia.