Gate Two of the Armoury Museum

MANILA, Philippines -- For hours, my plane cruised over the endless whiteout. Then ice powder swirled around me as we touched down. Frost glazed the runway, cottoned the trees and buried the streets in a fairytale landscape.

Bundled up like a cosmonaut in layers of fleece, I still shivered in the raw wind. It was crazy flying to Moscow in the dead of winter – the big chill famous for foiling Genghis Khan’s hordes and turning Napoleon Bonaparte’s army away.

My host, Eugene Kaspersky, Chairman and CEO of global security software firm Kaspersky Lab, didn’t look cold, however.

"Sorry. I ordered minus 30 degrees C for you. We only managed minus 15." He assured me my arrival was perfectly timed. “When people visit Russia, they look for snow.”

Snow obliterated much of the city, alright. Peeking out of my bedroom window at the Marriott Grand, I thought I’m better off burrowing under the comforters than slogging through the streets.

But I didn’t travel halfway around the globe to hibernate. So, I trudged out of the lobby, down into the countless mazes of the “perekhods” - subterranean tunnels lined with shops and housing metro stations.

The “perekhods” are Russia’s version of Manila’s underpass. They’re the only way to negotiate major pedestrian crossings in the city, if you don't want to end up as mincemeat aboveground.

Jostling through the crowds of commuters in parkas and furs, I was riveted by statues with over-polished dog’s noses and pistols. I gawked as Muscovites rubbed them vigorously for luck, the way we rubbed the feet of our icons in church.

On the bridge over the Moskva River, I stumbled across bunches of padlocks with names and hearts etched on them. Muscovites clip padlocks on the railings to ensure married bliss. Downtown, they even planted “padlock trees” made of iron, “Love Trees,” they called it, over Luzkhov Bridge.

In this city of 12 million, a couple marries every two and half minutes. When a woman weds, they say, “she goes behind the man,” literally, while a man “gets wifed”. But survival odds are high. One couple divorces every three minutes.

I walked 45 minutes from my hotel to the red-walled Kremlin –the place that personifies the Russia I sought - the glorious empire my father spoke of in my childhood.

This motherland of great writers - Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekov, was also the kingdom of melancholy for Ivan the Terrible, playground of Catherine the Great who counted 21 lovers while she defeated the Ottoman Empire and ushered the Golden Age, the doom of the Romanovs - Nicholas II and his family massacred with royal gems sewn in their clothes.

Of course, the one museum I’ve always yearned to see resides in the Kremlin: the Armoury.

Russia’s oldest museum hoards the treasures of 900 years - Tsarist artifacts, the richest archbishop vestments, coaches, armour and art, the Russian crown jewels plus the world’s biggest collection of infamous, rarely glimpsed Fabergé eggs.

Inside, I gazed at Ivan the Terrible’s sable-lined Monomakh skullcap-crown, perfect for keeping royal pates warm in half a millennium of Russian winters. This crown also formed part of Moscow’s legend as the Third Rome of the People, after Rome of the Emperors and Rome of the Popes.

Ivan’s 16th century "carved bone armchair” assembled with plates of ivory and walrus tusks stood out beside the Persian gold and turquoise thrones of his successor, Boris Godunov and Tsar Michael, the first Romanov, as well as the most valuable Diamond Throne of his son, Tsar Alexis, studded with 3,000 gems.

Most intriguing was the twin thrones of Alexis’ sons - two Romanovs crowned simultaneously:  15-year-old Ivan V and his 10-year old half-brother, the future Peter the Great. A small, curtained, prompter’s window cut behind Peter’s throne allowed his Aunt Sophia to listen in as the boy talked to the nobles and whisper instructions to him.

I lingered before Catherine the Great's wedding dress with its 18-inch waist pinched over a wide hoop skirt. The Prussian-born Empress was 16 when she wed her second cousin, Peter III, the weak, alcoholic grandson of Peter the Great. Their unhappy union was arranged to strengthen Prusso-Russian relations.

Peter III became Tsar during the Seven Years War against Prussia. He ruled for just six months, his pro-Prussian stance prompting a coup d’ etat which forced him to abdicate. Catherine’s lover, Count Grigory Orlov, assassinated him after.

Catherine usurped the throne and placed the Great Imperial Crown on her head in the cathedral close by.

To this day, her mitre-shaped diadem remains an Armoury star attraction. Set with 5,000 diamonds in laurel wreath and oak branch pattern, it was trimmed with pearls and topped with the second largest ruby on earth.

Alongside, lay her Sceptre studded with the 189-carat Orlov diamond, the size of half a hen’s egg. The stone was once the eye of a Hindu deity in an Indian temple before a French deserter stole it and sold it to Count Orlov, who gave it to Catherine.

The count fathered two of the Empress’ children but she traded him for a younger prince when he went abroad on a failed mission. Orlov’s diamond gift didn’t rekindle her passion though she gave him a marble palace in St. Petersburg for his pains.

The best, I saved for last - the Faberge Imperial Eggs which two generations of Tsars gave as gifts to their wives.

Master goldsmith Peter Carl Faberge crafted the jeweled eggs hiding miniature "surprises”. He made 50 for Alexander III and Nicholas II. The Armoury has 10, the largest collection in the world.

The first was Alexander the Peacemaker’s 20th wedding anniversary gift to his Empress Maria. Seeking to divert his wife’s mind from assassins and uprisings, he remembered how she loved her aunt’s ivory Easter Egg with a surprise ring inside it

A few years back, a terrorist bomber killed his father, Alexander II the Liberator. Both his son and grandson, the future last Tsar, saw him bleed to death. Next, the brother of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who led Russia into Communism, tried to kill Alexander III but failed.

So, the Tsar commissioned a golden Hen Egg which opens to a golden yolk hiding a golden hen containing a ruby pendant suspended from a tiny diamond replica of the Imperial Crown.

Empress Maria was so delighted, Tsar Alexander appointed Fabergé as the Imperial Crown’s goldsmith and commissioned more eggs, among them the bloodstone Memory of Azov with a miniature gold replica of the cruiser in which their son, Nicholas II, sailed to the Far East.

“Bloody Nicholas” started his reign with the Khodynka Tragedy, a stampede which killed 1,500. Then on Bloody Sunday, Imperial guards gunned down thousands of unarmed demonstrators marching peacefully to petition the Tsar.

Under Nicholas II, Russia’s entire fleet was annihilated. The country suffered defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. When he approved Russia’s entry in World War I, 3.3 million Russians perished.

But throughout his 22 years in power, Nicholas gifted his wife, Empress Alexandra, with Faberge Eggs.

The Bouquet of Lilies, an egg-shaped onyx clock crowned with lilies held a ruby and diamond pendant inside. The Clover Leaf hid a clover with twenty three diamonds and four mini- portraits of their daughters- Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. The Steel Military also contains a miniature painting framed with diamonds.

The Moscow Kremlin Egg was a replica of the Assumption Cathedral where Nicolas and all the Tsars of Russia were crowned, with removable dome, tiny enameled icons and High Altar.

The Alexander Palace Egg features five miniature watercolor portraits of their children, including the hemophiliac Alexis, and a replica of the family's favorite residence inside it. The Standart Yacht cradles a gold replica of the largest yacht in the world where the royal family vacationed when World War I started.

In the last year of his life, Nicholas commissioned the Romanov Tercentenary Egg embellished with mini-portraits of the eighteen Romanov Tsars who ruled Russia for 300 years, a dynasty which ended with him.

However, my favourite is the onyx and quartz Trans-Siberian Railway Egg whose velvet–lined interior nestled a miniature gold locomotive. Complete with a diamond headlight, ruby taillights and five coaches labeled “mail”, “ladies only”, “smoking”, “non-smoking” and “chapel”, the train runs on tiny gold tracks when wound with a golden key.

Nicholas personally opened the 9,259 kilometer railway linking Moscow with Vladivostok. I rode the Trans-Siberian train myself in another winter, so the miniature brought back fond memories. Yet the Trans-Siberian doomed the Romanovs, in a strange twist of Fate.

After Nicholas abdicated, the Communists imprisoned the family in the Urals. But when anti-communist forces closed in to protect the Trans Siberian Railway, a vital logistics link, their captors mistakenly thought they came to rescue the Romanovs.

The Bolsheviks told the family they’ll be moved and made them wait in the basement. Then a firing squad marched in and the order for their execution was read out to them.

Nicholas died instantly in a hail of bullets. The Empress and her daughters didn’t even have time to cross themselves. But their daughters have sewn three pounds of diamonds each in their clothing, acting as a shield. The guards had to shoot them in the head and stab them with bayonets.

The Romanovs weren’t given Christian burial until 1998, afterwhich the Russian Orthodox Church canonized them as “passion bearers” for the Christ-like way they faced their death.

(TO BE CONTINUED)