"Your Francis Gary Powers!"

Today we are in Yekaterinburg.  It is our favorite "big" city so far.  It is very pretty and there is a lot of interesting history here (two strikes against Novosibirsk).  We started out at the new Church of the Blood built on the site of the house (torn down on the orders of then Communist city leader Boris Yeltsin) where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were killed.  The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the whole family as martyrs for Orthodoxy after the fall of the Soviet Union and now there is a large new Church on the site.  It was interesting to see some of the icons they have made of the family and see some objects from the house that was torn down.

Our next stop was the the local military history museum at the officers' club.  Everyone who worked there had two questions: "Are you Americans?"  "Did you know we have your Francis Gary Power's things here?!"  For those in need of a brief history refresher, Francis Gary Powers was the pilot of the U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft that was shot down over the Soviet Union during the Eisenhower administration.  Darci Weaver can post the exact year :)  The plane crashed very near Yekaterinburg, and in the museum they have a few small pieces of the plane as well as a little exhibit about the incident.  

The very kind lady who showed us around was excited to tell us that she was at the May Day parade (the plane was shot down on May 1) when the explosion in the sky was clearly visible to everyone.  Of course, they didn't find out for a long time what had happened.  In fact, she said, what they probably saw was the first missile, which actually hit a Soviet fighter plane that couldn't get to a high enough altitude to intercept the U-2.  The second missile didn't actually hit the U-2 either, but exploded close enough to break the plane apart.  This was fortunate, since the ejector seat had been intentionally disabled as the pilots of the spy planes were not supposed to survive any accident over Soviet territory.  But because the plane broke apart, Powers was knocked free and parachuted to safety.  Just in case, he had some rubles, silk stockings, gold rings, and chocolate.  Khrushev later joked that perhaps Powers was planning to fly to Mars and seduce the women there.  According to our guide, the first people who encountered him were slightly inebriated because of the holiday and invited him for a drink.  They quickly figured out he was a foreigner, though, and called the authorities who, of course, were looking for him.  It was fun to meet someone who had witnessed an interesting event in history.