Zakharova told how she worked as a guide in the 90s

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, told how she worked as a guide for Chinese tourists in the 90s.

“The years of the 1990s were financially difficult for all of us,” the diplomat said, talking to architecture students from Donbass.

Zakharova said that she “studied, then came to work at the Foreign Ministry” and she still “needed to earn extra money” in order to be able to “eat, drink and still get to work.”

“Those were the times, all people worked part-time,” she said.

According to Zakharova, using her knowledge of Chinese, she led groups of Chinese tourists around Moscow on weekends.

The representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry said that it is difficult to surprise Chinese tourists in such a way that “their creation is turned upside down, so that they freeze.”

At the same time, all people coming from China were very impressed by the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

“They all “broke” on the XXC,” Zakharova said – when they were told that “this temple was built with people’s money, which was collected for several decades, which was not enough,” how hard it was to build the largest Orthodox church, and then “in one the day… was blown up.”

The Chinese, as Zakharova said, “the matrix began to float” – they did not believe her words so much that they had to repeat the story.

They asked a lot of questions about why it was necessary to blow up the XXC.

“And here I have a culmination: and then there was a pool … Also the largest,” the diplomat recalls his conversations with tourists.

The Chinese were no less impressed by the fact that the pool worked in the open air all year round.

And the fact that the Russians later closed this pool and restored the temple, and it was precisely in the 90s, when there was no money in Russia.

Zakharova supplemented her story with the fact that the green columns from the original XXC were installed in the foyer of the high-rise building of Moscow State University on Sparrow Hills. Moscow State University rector Viktor Sadovnichy told her that he was afraid that Patriarch Alexy II would demand the return of these columns to the temple. But that did not happen.