All that was missing was actor Alec Guinness’ voice. Otherwise, I felt like I’d stepped into master director David Lean’s movie Doctor Zhivago, one with no voice-over except my own that kept complaining about the cold.

To say the landscape was frigid or the weather freezing as we drove from St. Petersburg to Kronshtadt one December during the Yeltsin era would fail to convey the enshrouding Russian winter blanketing a topography blasted by ice and snow. The trees looked ready to snap into ice shards.