KRONSHTADT
Being full up with impressions and the city's dust, you suddenly find yourself in the drowsy town-fortress on Kotlin Island, stretching along the sea façade of Saint Petersburg for almost 10 kilometres with the width of no more than three kilometres.
Kronshtadt is very near to St. Petersburg: being situated not more than 20 kilometres away from the city, it was planned as a complex of defensive buildings together with small forts which you can still see nowadays - either from the board of a promenade motor ship, or from the dam stretching from the northern part of the island up to Lakhta and meant to protect St. Petersburg against inundations (the dam, by the way, can be considered to be a separate museum of science-technical thought of the end of the second millennium).
Kronshtadt was a cradle of the Russian Navy, and at present the majority of people of the provincial town are seamen, shipbuilders, and fishermen. Some very vivid pages of the Russian navigation and shipbuilding history are connected with Kronshtadt. The first Russian steamship arrived from the capital to Kronshtadt; the world's first ice-breaker was constructed on this island. And today the traces of the outstanding technical achievements can be seen in the dilapidated town: the remains of the cast-iron pavement, or grouped into a black covey submarines at the training base. In the local hospital the first anaesthesia in Russia was applied; and it is the place where the phenomenon of ship-reflected radio-waves was discovered.
The fate of Kronshtadt bears a strong resemblance to that of the defended by it St. Petersburg: grandeur and architectural non-ordinariness, heyday and decay of the imperial ambitions. Being founded by Peter the Great in 1704, when the fort Kronshlot was laid which cut off for the potential enemy the main ship channel leading to the mouth of the Neva River where the new capital of the Empire was being built, the town immortalized its founder by a bronze monument in the town's park. The figures of Admiral Makharov and the submarine navy commander Alexander Marinesko were not slid round, either.
The best architects worked here; the wide streets and large squares led to the Naval Cathedral, the dome of which was seen from the coasts of the Gulf of Finland in fine weather.
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