We returned to Kiev via Poltava after the election and again stayed at the Palazzo Poltava. I had a first floor room with a balcony and a view.
It’s a short walk from the hotel to a park with a semi-circular colonnade at the entrance. On the way I passed this bronze lion with a shiny tail. Students rub it for luck before exams.
Then it was back to Kiev by train. Alongside platform 14 at Kiev is a railway museum. Every carriage tells a tale.
This carriage was built in 1910 in Hungary for Peter Stolypin, the 3rd Prime Minister of Russia, and Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire from 1906 to 1911. He used it to travel to Kiev in 1911 where he was assassinated at a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the Kiev Opera House in the presence of the Tsar and his two oldest daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana. Subsequently in the First World War the carriage belonged to General Aleksei Brusilov, famous for the 1916 Brusilov Offensive that broke through the Austro-Hungarian and German lines. Next it was used by the ministers of the Provisional Government and during the Civil War was used by Trotsky, Kalinin, Stalin and others. It would make a good film along the lines of The Yellow Rolls Royce, a film written by Terence Rattigan. It tells the stories of three owners of a 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II: an English aristocrat (Rex Harrison), an American gangster (George C Scott) and a rich American widow (Ingrid Bergman).
Another carriage was built in Leningrad in 1939 for state and party leaders. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, had his headquarters in it in the first weeks of World War II.
