Larry and I went to the Peter Paul Fortress, a former military bastion just over the Neva river from the Hermitage. Like every multi-part attraction we visited here, it wasn’t possible to buy one ticket for everything. You pay to get in, and then each little area has its own ticket booth with someone in it selling a small ticket for their attraction. “That’s socialism for you,” Larry commented, “full employment through inefficiency.”
In any case, aside from the very sobering prison, with its lists of the famous and not so famous political prisoners, we had to see the torture museum, with its careful catalog of the ingenious ways people have tortured each other through the centuries. I was surprised to see that the guillotine was in use in France until 1977.
Larry felt it was significantly better than its counterpart in Siena, which we also visited. A few images from the museum follow, but you may want to stop here. They’re not for the faint of heart. Each image has a helpful little blurb like this one, in Russian and in English: