russia: dubna

When we went to Chekhov, our very last stop in town was a small museum. In one corner of the museum was a computer with a list of random museums around the area. The sights listed were mostly estate museums, or house museums, or random things to see.

One of the sights listed was the second largest Lenin statue in the world, in a city called Dubna. We knew absolutely nothing about the city, we hadn't even heard of it, but when we found out about a statue of Lenin that was bigger than all the others we'd seen, we were in.

Dubna has about 70,000 residents, and is around 130 kilometers from Moscow. It's the northernmost city in Moscow oblast, and is easy to reach by public transport. The city is built at the confluence of a bunch of waterways. The Volga River divides the city in two, and the Dubna River is basically the border of the backside of the city. Another side of the city is bordered by the Moscow Canal.

The city was founded as a fort in 1132, which existed until 1216. Wikipedia goes on to mention a number of villages that were in the area, I'm not sure what these have to do with the history of Dubna. 

The city was actually the location of one of the first collective farms, after the Civil War was over. According to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's book 'The Gulag Archipelago,' Dubna was built by gulag prisoners. (Now that I've learned that I'm not so sure how I feel about the city.)

Dubna has the official designation of 'town of science' because it is home to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and a few other science related organizations.

As I said earlier, Dubna is an easy city to reach by public transport. Easy to get to, but not particularly quick to get to. 

Our train left Moscow at 0716, which is always tough on a Saturday morning; we arrived at 1003. There are two train stations in Dubna, we opted to get off at the first one the train goes through, as it is closest to the giant Lenin statue. This particular train station mentioned the science city designation right along with the name of the city.

We started walking toward the Lenin statue, my phone gave me a map that looked fairly straightforward. Right up until we got to a blocked off road. Uh oh. 

All of us knew immediately that if we weren't able to go this way, we probably wouldn't see Lenin, as going allllll the way around was going to be a very long walk. 

We looked to the side of the road closure, and noticed a very distinct path, so it seemed plenty of people had gone around the barriers by foot or on bikes. We decided to do the same.

Around the next corner we figured out why the road was closed. It goes through a tunnel under part of the damn that blocks up the Volga River. At least that's how I understood the location of the tunnel. 

This wouldn't normally be an issue, but one look at the ceiling of the tunnel told us it hadn't been kept up as well as it should have. Since the road is closed to vehicular traffic, that told us they didn't want the vibrations of cars traveling through the tunnel until it is fixed. While we walked through the tunnel several folks on bicycles passed us, so we didn't feel badly for going around the barrier.

Coming out the other side of the tunnel we kept following the road until we got to a stadium of sorts. I'd call it a water stadium. It was a seating area, along the water, so people can come watch boat races and the like. Pretty cool.

It took a bit longer, but we finally got to the Lenin statue. This one is the second largest in the world, after the statue near Volgograd. This statue is 25 meters tall, and sits on a 12 meter pedestal. Needless to say, we looked quite small in our team photo, and I had to set the camera a bit further back to make sure we got the whole thing in the photo. His pose wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

He stands on a small island between the two sides of the city. When he was built, there was another huge statue on another side of the waterway, this one of Stalin. 

We were disappointed to learn about the prior existence of the Stalin statue, (it would've been neat to see,) it had been taken down in the 60s, when Stalin wasn't very much in favour anymore, and there was an official period of de-Stalinization.

While we were looking at the man we heard a buzzing noise and realized another visitor had brought a drone. It was then that I decided I don't want a drone. While I can appreciate the photos they can take, I won't get those views myself, so I don't want to take those photos. And the noise is really annoying.

As Dubna sits on the water, there are quite a few little fingers of land sticking out, so there are quite a few small lighthouses. None of them were particularly unique, and none of them were big, but I always find them photogenic. I don't know how many of them are regularly used, if any. We walked to one of them, and saw others on the other sides of the water.

From there it was quite a long walk over the dam, to the center of one side of the city. Along the way we passed a couple science related monuments, one of which was dedicated to missiles, and a park that had a monument of a MiG-25 jet on one side.

Our next intended sight was the museum for missle history. Dubna is one of the places in the country where missile research is done, one of the displays was a map with other cities who also have missile research facilities. The museum was clearly not visited very often, as there wasn't even a ticket desk, though an employee chased us down to pay an entrance fee when we started to walk through the displays.

One of my favourite exhibits was a photo from when both the Lenin and Stalin statues still stood. I love old photos. There were also models of various missiles and the planes that carry them. 

A lot of scientific information that didn't mean much to me, as I'm definitely NOT inclined toward science.

We walked a ways to get to our next sight, a wooden church. It was surrounded by wooden walls, and there was another smaller, wooden church inside the walls, but it wasn't open. I liked the inside of the church, as the iconostasis up front was filled with colourful icons.

To get to our next sight, we took a taxi. I was keen to walk, but Claire and Angela were getting tired, and it would've been another long-ish walk. 

This sight belongs on the list of quirky monuments, it was a giant chair. Yup, a giant chair. I don't know how big it is, but it's big enough that you can't climb up to where you would normall sit. Very very big.

Near the giant chair was a monument that showed Dubna as being the center of Russian Europe. I'm not sure if this is true, but it was neat to see. Just down the street was another church, this one surrounded by a construction fence, as it was being renovated. The inside of the church wasn't very interesting, oh well.

At that point we were all ready to go back to Moscow, especially because we knew the train ride would be nearly three hours. We called a taxi, which took us to the other train station, from which we caught the next elektrichka back to Moscow.

I'm pretty sure we missed at least one museum in the city, so I wouldn't mind going back for another day trip.