In 1963, when the James Bond spy thriller, From Russia With Love, came out just a year after the Cuban missile crisis, which pushed us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, if anyone had predicted that one day I'd be taking a boat to Moscow, I'd have said they were crazy.

And if I'd been told that I'd find centuries-old, stunningly beautiful Russian Orthodox cathedrals within the Kremlin, which we've been led to believe was home only to the Soviet government and the KGB, I'd have thought they were hallucinating.

Yet there we were in late July standing in the great, red-brick-walled Kremlin (originally constructed of wood in the 12th century), thanks to a 10-day riverboat cruise sponsored by the Albuquerque International Association with its Russian director, Marina Oborotova. We toured the grounds before entering the Assumption Cathedral, where all of the Russian czars and emperors had been crowned.

We flew to St. Petersburg and were immediately transferred to our ship, the M/S Maxim Litvinov, docked on the Neva River. Founded by Peter the Great in 1707, this elegant city with its river and canals, sometimes called "the Venice of the north," is nearly 100 years younger than Santa Fe and almost the opposite: with its waterways versus our desert, its baroque stone architecture verus our adobe and only 60 sunny days per year.

The highlight of our St. Petersburg visit was the State Hermitage Museum, the former winter palace of the czars. However, we had time to see only a small portion of the vast art collections displayed in the extraordinarily lavish rooms in which they lived and entertained. Then there were the summer palaces: Catherine the Great's in the village of Pushkin, 15 miles south of St. Petersburg and Peter the Great's, known as Peterhof, 18 miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland. In Pushkin, we toured Catherine's glittering blue, white and gold palace while at Peterhof, we bypassed the palace, in favor of the dazzling gardens and fountains inspired by those of Versailles just outside of Paris.

Finally, we had to leave this fairy tale city. So, along with 200-some other American, British, German and Chinese fellow travelers on our boat, we headed for other intriguing destinations along the rivers and lakes.

My favorite was tiny Kizhi Island. Described as an open-air Museum of Architecture, it's comprised of a unique array of ancient wooden structures gathered from around the country then set amid wild flowers and grasses, fields of rye and flax all connected by foot paths. Walking beneath a brilliant blue sky, we were enchanted by this idyllic island and touched by the tales of the families who had lived and worked in the rugged two- and three-story homes with their livestock on the ground floor through the long, harsh winters.

And contemplating the Church of Transfiguration with its 22 onion-top domes, constructed in 1714 of aspen shingles without any nails, we were reminded of Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel with its mysterious wooden spiral staircase also created without nails.

As we continued our cruise, we enjoyed many options besides observing the great expanses of forests dotted with little clearings for farms, dachas or country homes, monasteries and occasional sawmills loading logs onto barges or leaning on the ship railings.

James Bond, with all of his beautiful women and death-defying missions, never had it so good as we did: basking in our all-too-brief love affair with a new-old Russia, which is transforming itself into a democracy and a mighty economic power.

"There is no truth where there is no love," Alexander Pushkin wrote.

RUSSIAN RESOURCES

Orthodox Cruise Company of Rostov-on-Don, with offices also in Moscow and a number of small cruise ships like the Litvinov, offers many cruises between May and September within Russia and also from Kiev to Istanbul. For more information, visit www.cruise.ru.

Russian Art, 2002 film by Alexander Sokurov. Visit the State Hermitage Museum vicariously as invisible guest are led by a whimsical diplomat-guide through the galleries and grounds, zigzagging between contemporary scenes and full-dress historical characters. and events.