St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  St Petersburg was an antidote to Moscow – the ‘true Russian,’ observed Casanova, was ‘a stranger to St Petersburg’.4 A Frenchman in the early nineteenth century considered that it was ‘not the city of Russians’, but a ‘city of foreign artists paid by Russia’.5 That impression of the capital was offered again by an American visiting in the communist era. Playwright Lillian Hellman came to Leningrad and was delighted by the imagination that had placed ‘pale, delicate southern-yellow buildings’ in a ‘cheerless, damp northern climate’. It was clear to her that the city was built by ‘people who had no connection with Moscow or Kiev.’6 Yet so much of the glory of Russia has been created in Peter’s city – its literature, its music, its dance – and even, between the 1820s and 1918, its political vision. For three centuries there has been a struggle between life and death, and the miserable weather has always played its part.

  Looking at a map of the Neva delta, there seems something pharyngeal. The estuary is an open maw exposed to cold winds. Vulnerable inhabitants – like siege victims – are hostage to the weather. Dostoevsky shivered and suffered ‘a terrible night, a November night, damp, foggy, rainy, snowy, fraught with agues, catarrhs, colds, quinsies, fevers of every possible species and variety, in short . . . a St Petersburg November’.7 He wrote of a terrain so wet that gravediggers could not bury a dry body.8 And yet, when you step off the train from hard, driven, dressy Moscow, although a bitter sleet may cut you to the quick, there’s a palpable warmth. You move through a more relaxed, studenty kind of atmosphere. Big-city busy people still barge and scowl – they’ve had to fight their corner – but there is a relative ease that is elusive in chic and edgy Moscow.

  A Rastrelli-like sequence of downpipes deals with the weather.

  St Petersburg was an unwanted upstart. Moscow became a brash usurper. In Petersburg restaurants today, people appear to relax informally. In Moscow, I round the corner of a restaurant and walk straight into the combat-kitted unit of a small private army. Like mercenaries in some banana republic, operatives lounge against jeeps and bulletproofed, dark-windowed limos, while others patrol, cradling weapons of size and power. I’m happy not to have a reservation, in case a rival clan comes to call. The establishment is a curious choice for someone who needs protection. But the outing must be about ostentation if the boss, flanked by Armani-suited associates and cleavaged women, chooses to occupy a window seat. The top dog nibbles voraciously, as if he hasn’t quite recovered from impecunious provincial origins. His plateau of fruits de mer includes species that – at a glance – I believe I have never seen. I want to linger and investigate but, as a minder two metres tall approaches me, I decide to hasten off in the direction of the Kremlin. The enormous department store, Gum – lit up like Harrods – screams out at Lenin’s mausoleum on the far side of Red Square. The recently revamped St Basil’s Cathedral looks so brand-new that it would outshine any over-radiant Las Vegas imitation. ‘What did we want?’ mused a construction worker who was interviewed here in Red Square in 1991. ‘Gentle socialism, humane socialism . . . What did we get?. . . bloodthirsty capitalism. Shooting. Showdowns.’9 Twenty-five years on, I know that St Petersburg has at least settled somewhat, after the violence of the Nineties, into a new attempt to find, if not a ‘humane socialism’, then at least a smoother, more palatable kind of life – as far as that is possible in the kleptocracy of Putin’s Russia. The president is known to be richer than Abramovich. It’s Kremlin Inc., with oligarchs for boyars. Putin, the Leningrad kid, is heir to Menshikov rather than Peter the Great. Yet, just as Peter did, Putin needs the West – it’s where his pals stash their cash.10

  St Petersburg is not a flawless museum where every Rastrelli flourish and Rossi sweep is perfect. Ten to fifteen historical buildings – from among the 15,000 pre-1914 edifices in this Unesco World Heritage site – are lost to developers or disintegration each year. As with Venice, dilapidation is woven into every fibre of the city’s being. Its life has been short and damaged. Like a starlet – the casualty of ambition, fame and infamy – the city enters rehab and emerges with a new lease of life time and time again. Elizabeth’s shimmering palaces, Paul’s harlequin fortress, schooners swept by flood waters against the sides of baroque churches, Gogol’s double-dealing Nevsky Prospekt and the cabbage patch in St Isaac’s Square: all become different kinds of absurdity in the bright business noon of the modern city. Understandably, St Petersburg authorities want to make of their metropolis more than the magnificent utterances of its past. City planners insist that people must want to live in St Petersburg. It must compete with other modern centres. Hence initiatives such as the Lakhta Centre and the Zenit Arena, which will feature in the 2018 World Cup. Typically, its construction workers are living in appalling conditions and some are owed back-pay.11

  Land versus sea – the Western Rapid Diameter bridge system and the core of the Lakhta Gazprom Tower under construction beyond.

  Petersburg brags and boasts to tourists. But, seen from a certain angle, Falconet’s Bronze Horseman appears puny. Custine dismissed his compatriot’s statue; it was ‘excessively praised because it happens to be in Russia’.12 The Horseman has nothing of the power of, say, Andrea del Verrocchio’s equestrian Colleoni Monument, which dominates Venice’s Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo. Youthful, spirited, but dwarfed by the immensity of Senate Square and the expanse of the Neva, Falconet’s Peter seems hardly up to the job. If he dismounted, he’d stagger off – like a drunkard trying to walk the straight line, his dubious legacy 300 years of murderous desire.

  Modern St Petersburg struggles to thrive, determined – after all the mismanagement – to find viable solutions to possibly insoluble problems, such as geological risk. Most of the centre is rated as high, which is why they built the metro low. The lowest station is Admiralskaya, at nearly ninety metres. The metro system works very well. Trains are frequent and the distances covered at high speeds are considerable. The stations don’t have the imperial swagger of their Moscow counterparts, but they are impressive and very clean. The problem is that the stops are sparsely located and the city’s trolley-bus network and its privately run, rattling and bouncing marsbrutki minibuses are consequently overloaded. Another problem with the metro is that escalator rides take between two minutes fifteen seconds and two minutes fifty seconds. A worker going to the office every day – with two descents and two ascents – clocks up nearly an hour a week on escalators, without counting pleasure trips. Some commuters sit on the moving steps, while the daring run, and most stand – often reading. St Petersburgers are still voracious readers. The older generation remembers the time of treasuring words; mimeographed samizdat copies of forbidden works were as prized as an extra ration or a weapon that could change the world.13

  Areas of the city are strangled by the ugliness of a cheapskate or ageing infrastructure. On Vasilevsky Island or on the Vyborg Side, huge, temporary, cladded tubes run above ground to deliver heat. On the outskirts, cat’s cradles of overhead electricity lines blight the sky. Vast tracts of potholed terrain flag incomplete or abandoned building projects. Unprofitable scrubland stands bleakly between brash shopping centres. The new perimeter of the city is under siege by a commercial ring of Auchan, H&M, Castorama, Decathlon, Ikea – the list is growing. The only sparkling dose of Anymall, Planet Earth plumped in the centre of the city is Galeria, which was opened in 2010 on Livorsky Prospekt near the Moskovsky railway station. But, as Western-style or Western-owned enterprise installs itself, the city’s sense of difference and identity is eroded. Yet St Petersburg has always been disturbed by novelties imported from beyond Russia’s borders, promising something tantalising, something out of reach. With average salaries in 2016 running at between 40,000 and 50,000 roubles a month – around £650 – it is difficult to see how ordinary people easily afford the scarves and woolly hats for sale in middle-range shops like Zara, let alone have enough for a down-payment on one of the modestly sized new apartments discreetly advertised in the metro.

  Inhabitants
under twenty-five don’t have a memory of the really hard times. The gulag is a distant epoch. This shows in their tendency to smile and in their capacity to enjoy life. Students dress casually. They kiss, hold hands, expect to be met by friendly staff in coffee bars and wonder – as students do in Europe – what kind of prospects are open to them, post-degree. Resisting the brash intrusion of anonymous globalisation, there are pockets of great charm where intimate cafés resemble some of the cosier haunts found in Europe or America. The architectural eclecticism of the late nineteenth century – as it is brought back from years of neglect – echoes certain gracious parts of venerable American cities. Rubinsteyna Street, with its cafés and restaurants, glows, as do streets in Chicago or New York built during the same period. Rubinsteyna even has an American-style open parking lot. The elegantly restored Maly Konyushennaya is reminiscent of smart streets found in northern European cities. At the Mariinsky and the Philharmonic, tickets remain inexpensive and the public passion for the performing arts runs high. Yet lurking behind the impressive façades remain dark entranceways, drab staircases and creaky lifts. Soviet-era bureaucracy is lodged stubbornly in the psyche – form-filling, stamping, registering – and often occludes even a simple commercial transaction.14 Will the Nevsky Prospekt ever reassert itself against the most fashionable thoroughfares of the West – this time round, with good Russian products for sale – or will it stay fractured and rough? Darker than any doorway is the regime that stops Russia from realising its vast potential. The kleptocrats – Menshikov redivivus – pocketing the riches. Any decent mir would know what to do with Gazprom profits.

  The present past: Petersburg in 2017.

  I am watching the waters of the choppy Neva splash against the shore not far from where Peter’s log cabin stands, not far from where the Aurora is moored, and I’m thinking about murderous desire – desire for a frontier fort, an imperial capital, revolutionary success, communism, gangsterism, capitalism, the non-capital that remains a cultural capital – the desire for the splendour worthy of a capital, the desire for freedom, openness and life. It is 100 years since that blank, fired from the Aurora, triggered a nightmare vision of a good dream. Seventy-five years since genocidal Stalin stood against holocaustic Hitler. Twenty-five since Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union. Oligarchs echo Romanovs. Revolution was a good idea that went horribly wrong. Look back behind the chaos and slaughter, and see Alexander Herzen gazing on the shores of utopia.

  An image I first saw painted on a wall in Vilnius has gone viral: the new American president and the familiar, old, ongoing president of the Russian Federation are kissing. Dangerously erotic – power. If one thinks of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and all the deception that entailed, it’s true that strange bedfellows have played their part in Russian strategy. Who – one asks – is playing who? How will it pan out, when the misspelt impetuous tweet meets the calculated smirk of the KGB? The weight of Russia’s past – a terrible howl of mistreatment and misfortune – presses heavily on human rights and happiness. Does the future promise to prove Chaadaev’s celebrated statement that Russia exists simply to alert the world that its way of doing things should be avoided, whatever the cost? In the film Russian Ark the visitor asks, ‘What system is there now?’ The reply comes back, ‘I don’t know.’

  I cross a long bridge over the Neva. Night falls. Between the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Anichkov Palace an operatic moon – the kind that so often gloats low in the Petersburg sky – is suddenly eclipsed by a gusting cloud. The city is, in many of its guises, incredible: the Summer Garden in autumn, winter buildings laced with snow, the islands in late spring. There are unexpected architectural details, fanciful effects in no-nonsense spaces. The lighting of palaces and public buildings enchants the darkness. The city surprises. You can walk along the Moika in the early hours and catch sight, through an unexpectedly lit window, of a corner of Matisse’s Dance, one of the simplest, most powerful and most positive paintings ever made. Above all – in hope for the future – there is potential in the number of gracious buildings waiting to be restored. The city has a capacity to astound. For the moment, looking back through its changing faces, I feel it as a mirage, a magnificent Atlantis, an impossible metropolis risen from the mists, which the mud and the mire keep trying to reclaim.

  Peter wanted a window onto Europe. He aspired to Western style – he was left with Russia. Now the riches of that country are all tied up in offshore accounts, and 143 million citizens have been buried in the enterprise.

  ‘We’ll build a city here, a port’ – Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As usual, my greatest debt is to Katiu, whose loving contribution has been of an incredible calibre. Marjotte, my daughter, has been most sensitive – her enthusiasm and intelligence are treasures.

  I should like to thank my previous agent, John Saddler, for his help on St Petersburg in its earliest stages; also George Lucas at InkWell in New York for a similar contribution. Great thanks are due to my agent, Julian Alexander, for judiciously placing the book with Hutchinson, whose staff I thank heartily for their tremendously warm response to the project. Particularly I would like to mention the avid, supremely sensitive and truly collaborative editor Sarah Rigby. I should also like to thank the eagle-eyed Mandy Greenfield, who copy-edited and made some astute suggestions; Melissa Four, who produced a dazzling jacket; Lindsay Nash for her elegant book design; and Najma Finlay for her energetic publicity push.

  Many influences stand behind this work. A significant debt is owed to the late Marshall Berman, whose All That’s Solid Melts Into Air provides moving and provocative insights on the subject of the city and modernism. But there are so many people – the scholarship on Petersburg that has been achieved in recent years has been voluminous and penetrating, augmenting a rich record provided by the multitude of wonderful ‘eyes on the ground’. The scholars who have excoriated often obscure aspects of the city’s past are too numerous to mention but they are to be found in the bibliography.

  I would like to thank Karen Hewitt and the Oxford Russia Fund, the wonderful staff of that superlative library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the very helpful staff of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, as well as the staff of museums, palaces and theatres in St Petersburg, Moscow, both Novgorods, and other Russian cities, including Perm, where the children at the lycée gave me a tour of what was once Sergei Diaghilev’s natal house and is now their school. Also, a big thank you to the very giving Russians I have met both in their country and abroad, among them dancers at what was then the Kirov, academics from all over Russia, as well as Nadia Boudris and her family, Olga Kolatina, Lyudmila Kadzhaya, Marina Koreneva and Anatoli Fetisov. Thanks also to Vladimir Malakoff, Virginie Aubry at the Cinémathèque de la Danse in Paris for obtaining rare footage of Pavlova, Ulanova and Nureyev, and to Laurence and Chadi Chabert for their help and thoughtfulness and for the magical Bret. Also, much gratitude to a whole host of understanding friends, to the very supportive Amélie Louveau, and to my patient, kind and ever lovely mama, Claire.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

  Pages

  x–xi Impressionistic panorama of St Petersburg. (SOTK 2011/Alamy)

  26 River Neva, early 1700s. Cartographer unknown. (Public domain/ Jonathan Miles)

  26 Undeveloped Neva Delta. Cartographer unknown. (Public domain/ Jonathan Miles)

  34 The Admiralty. From Alexei Rostovtsev, ‘Panorama of St Petersburg’, 1717. (Public domain)

  36 Valentin Serov, Peter the Great, 1907. (Sputnik/Alamy Stock Photo)

  36 Wedding of the Royal Dwarf. (Granger Historical Picture Archive/ Alamy)

  45 Le Blond’s plan for St Petersburg, early 1700s. (Leemage/UIG via Getty Images)

  47 Centre of early St Petersburg (detail). Johann Baptist Homann, ‘St Petersburg Master Plan’, c. 1718-20. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

  54 Peterhof. (Jonathan Miles)

  63 The Twe
lve Colleges. Yekim Terentiyevich Vnukov, 1753. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/TopFoto)

  73 The Kunstkammer. (Jonathan Miles)

  78 Pontoon Bridge. Mikhail Makhaev, ‘Views of St Petersburg’, 1753. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/TopFoto)

  91 Masquerade. J. C. Trömer, ‘Des Deutsch François Shriften’, c. 1736. (Public domain)

  96 Eropkin’s three diverging thoroughfares (detail). Cartographer unknown, ‘City Map of St Petersburg’, 1817. (Public domain)

  105 Façade at Tsarskoe Selo. (Jonathan Miles)

  115 The ‘living organ’. From John Augustus Atkinson and James Walker, A Picturesque Representation of the Manners, Customs and Amusements of The Russians in One Hundred Coloured Plates, Vol. 1, 1803. (Public domain)

  123 View down the Nevsky. Mikhail Makhaev, ‘Views of St Petersburg’, 1753. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/TopFoto)

  128 Ice hills and a summer fair. Friedrich Johann Bertuch, Bertuch’s Bilderbuch fur Kinder, c. 1807. (Florilegius/SSPL/Getty Images)

  145 Transporting the ‘thunder rock’. From Marinos Charbourès (Marin Carburi), Monument élevé à la gloire de Pierre-le-Grand, 1777. (Public domain)

  146 The Bronze Horseman. (Jonathan Miles)

  148 The Academy of Arts. (Jonathan Miles)

  150 The Cameron Gallery. (Jonathan Miles)

  169 Ivan Letunov, Banya, 1825. (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/ Bridgeman Images)

  176 Vladimir Borovikovsky, Catherine II Promenading in the Park at Tsarskoe Selo with the Obelisk to Count Rumyantsev’s Victories 1794. (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images)

  181 Carl Shulz, View of Gatchina Palace, mid-nineteenth century. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)