Word: neva
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Next, the conspirators shot the starets a few times, and that slowed him down. He was still alive, but less chipper. Assassination as low comedy: now they doggedly carried Rasputin out to the frozen Neva and shoved him through a hole in the ice. He kept bobbing to the surface...
...money the Hermitage can scare up from this venture is sorely needed. Of all the world's great museums, it is in the worst physical shape. It is an enormous and, to the tourist, impossibly labyrinthine array of 1,050 rooms in six buildings along the bank of the Neva, the oldest of which, the Winter Palace, was finished in the 1750s. Though extremely art rich, the Hermitage is sustenance poor, from its crumbling basements to the cracking veneer on its intarsia doors. Its storage and conservation facilities are woefully inadequate: the walls weep with rising damp, and the lighting...
...bright sun of a northern winter can still turn the palaces and churches of Peter the Great's city into a feast of visual elegance. But beneath the sparkling exterior, the mood of the city's 5 million inhabitants is as frigid as the ice piled up in the Neva River. Slowly, less dramatically than during the 900-day siege by the German Wehrmacht in World War II, St. Petersburg is experiencing real hunger...
...Sobchak turns to the city's founder, Peter the Great, the Czar who set out to westernize the backward Russian Empire. "For 10 years Peter the Great tried to carry out reforms in Moscow, but nothing came of it," Sobchak says. "Then he moved to the banks of the Neva River, founded a capital here and achieved his reforms. And so now we have the chance to repeat Peter the Great's experiment...
Peter's efforts date back to 1703, when he began building his city from the miasmic swamps of the Neva River. He wanted to open "a window on Europe," a point of entry for the flow of Western ideas into his isolated empire. The reformist Czar hired Italian architects to design a modern European capital with intersecting avenues lined by stately homes and grand palaces...