Graveyard of the Fallen (plus a cat)

(This picture has nothing to do with the post, it's just here because I like it).

Having tried and failed to get into the Kremlin (owing to, we later discovered, a failure to find the entrance), we ended up going on a long and chilly wander down the Moskva River to Gorky Park, the largest and most famous of Moscow’s outdoor spaces. For once, we had a goal, which was the sculpture park outside the modern art museum, which now houses a bizarre ‘graveyard’ of all the Communist statues that Russia didn’t quite know what to do with after 1992. The seldom-visited park was covered in knee-deep snow and as we visited at twilight, the place had quite an eerie air, with dead Communist heroes (with the obligatory strong jaws and best-fist forward poses) peeking out from behind skinny little trees.

As you can see in the following picture, I managed to befriend one particular statue (no idea who this dude is – we think from his pensive pose that he might be a poet or a writer rather than a politician), and also a cat. Lord knows where this cat appeared from or why it was wondering round a sculpture park, but it was very sweet and quite happy to sit on my knee while we took the pictures. Don’t you think we make the perfect little Communist family?