Pole To Pole: Russian Steps

In Leningrad Palin meets up with a Vladimir Lenin impersonator, who gives him a tour of the city. He witnesses a Russian Orthodox baptism ceremony, and almost gets baptised himself. He visits the cemetery where the likes of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are buried, then has the honour of firing the noonday gun at the Peter and Paul Fortress. After buying some pears at a local market he experiences the difficulty of trying to buy a bottle of vodka in a super market which is “uncontaminated by food”—a reference to Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch. In Novgorod, he meets up with a director who casts him in a movie. Then he is invited to a dinner party, eating freshly caught crayfish and drinking twenty-three toasts, the tipple being homemade vodka. After participating in a ceremony on behalf of the sister city of Watford (portrayed as a dream) he visits the town of Chernobyl, Ukraine, scene of the 1986 nuclear disaster. From there it is on to Kiev and Odessa, where Palin receives a unique treatment where he is wrapped in malodorous, sulfurous, black mud. At the harbor in Odessa he descends the stairs made famous in the film The Battleship Potemkin, then boards a ferry and sails across the Black Sea. While on the ferry, Palin learns of the coup resulting in Mikhail Gorbachev's overthrow, which shortly leads to the collapse of the Soviet Union.