In the cold winter months, the tunnels let people move through the city without battling the elements. The underground walkways have bakeries, fur stores, hair salons blasting techno music. You can buy a wedding dress or take English lessons while crossing Nevsky Prospect. Sometimes people refer to this as an underground city.
Many extend off of exits for the St. Petersburg metro, which is an upgrade that reveals what the others have been striving for. Like the station that reduced me to tears in Tashkent, the stops are all relics of an earlier era filled with details that feel like antiques. The escalators with giant teeth, the brass lamps on the railings, the ’60s clocks that hang from the ceiling—they all feel like collectors’ items. But no one seems to pay much attention to the marble hallways making me misty-eyed. The strangest part of being a tourist is how normal everyone around you seems to find the things that stop you midcommute and overwhelm you with awe.
“Don’t cry,” I whisper to myself. “They’ll know you’re a tourist.”
One peculiarity of the St. Petersburg metro is that a lot of the platforms have doors that only open when the trains’ do, which means that you wait in relative blindness. You can’t lean over the edge and crane your neck to see if a train’s coming around a bend in the track. You can’t see the track at all, because your view is blocked by solid walls and metal doors. There’s a Soviet vibe to the whole thing: you feel powerless standing in front of imposing doors that open and close at an unseen overlord’s command, and you realize, of course, that you never have any control over the whimsy of a metropolitan transit authority. It’s like riding an elevator without buttons.
I pace the platform. Finally, I hear a train arrive, and the doors open, and I take the metro to the first of many museums.
To Americans, Carlo Rossi is the name of a wine you can buy by the jug.
To Petersburgians, it’s the name of one of the Italian architects responsible for the city’s resplendent buildings.
Each building in downtown St. Petersburg feels like a unique work of art. The avenues are lined with miles of incredible architecture, stunning churches, homes, structures brightly painted and enlivened with lavish façades. Spires of gold and green copper poke out over the skyline.
Petersburgian buildings also feature a unique architectural support I can only describe as “hunky naked men holding up buildings.” In the place where traditional neoclassical buildings would have columns, the façades of St. Petersburg’s finest instead have statues of Adonis-like figures, with long, flowing hair, and extremely chiseled abs, who are posed to look like they’re bearing the weight of the building. It’s . . . original.
To walk down the street in St. Petersburg is to consistently gasp at architecture. Even the Burger King is in an elegant yellow building with a row of sculpted flowers planted below its eaves.
St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great, who had the temerity to both build the Russian Empire a new capital from scratch and, one assumes, figure the Russian Orthodox Church would eventually get around to canonizing him.
Peter the Great is best remembered for modernizing the empire over which he presided. Depending on who you ask, he either brought contemporary European ideas to his subjects, or he dragged them out of their old ways kicking and screaming.
Before gaining full control of the throne in 1696, Peter developed a fascination with Europe, a place seen as very different and separate from Russia. Ideas from the nascent Enlightenment had spread through Western Europe, which was connected by a unifying Catholic religion. Russia, as an Eastern Orthodox empire, missed out on this shift in philosophy. At the end of the seventeenth century, Russia was seen by its European neighbors as a backward, old-fashioned country still stuck in the Dark Ages. While Europe was pumping out symphonies and the Mona Lisa, Russia was giving the world more wooden paintings of Jesus with weirdly proportioned limbs, along with monk chantings. It was still wildly enamored with the feudal system. It did not see much value in idle pastimes like science, technology, and education. Also, Russian men wore really long, unflattering beards.
Peter was determined to change all this. Early in his reign, legend has it, he traveled to Holland in disguise and took an undercover apprenticeship in a shipyard. He returned to Russia and declared that Russians would shave their beards and become more like their European neighbors.
To kick off this campaign, Peter needed a new European-style capital. He’d recently relieved the Swedes of a swampy parcel of land near the banks of the Neva River, and this, he decided, would be his new metropolis. Since no one was particularly lining up to work construction in a bog that spent most of its year in winter, Peter conscripted tens of thousands of serfs, many of whom died while building his gleaming new seat of government.
The finished product thus has the unifying architectural themes associated with Haussmann’s Paris. There are wide boulevards with elegant buildings that seem to stretch along the entire block. There are triumphant arches and exquisite churches and towering monuments just because.
There are also a lot of museums.
I start off at the Hermitage, the vast art collection displayed in the former Winter Palace. There’s a throne hall with red velvet walls, a gold-plated room filled with jewels, and the tsar’s two-story library made of carved wood. There are fourteen da Vincis. There’s an audioguide with a distinctly Russian sensibility. “Raphael lived the life span of a true genius,” the narrator declares gravely. “He died on his thirty-seventh birthday.”
I stroll along the canals that connect the city. The brightly colored buildings stand out against the gray sky and murky water. It’s cold, but not as bad as I was expecting.
The Yusupov Palace is described, in all the guidebooks, as the place where Rasputin was assassinated. To attract visitors, the museum that now operates and manages the eighteenth-century mansion, which makes the couple that tried to recreate Versailles look restrained, plays up this connection. There’s a tour of the basement that details the particulars of the grisly execution, which took numerous tries to get right, though the tour is unfortunately not offered on the day I visit.
At first, I am disappointed. Rasputin is one of maybe three Russian historical figures most Americans can name. The reasons for this are unclear and possibly heavily influenced, at least for the generation born after the 1980s, by the Disney movie Anastasia.
But his outsized reputation is at odds with his modest historical impact, which falls somewhere along the spectrum between slight and negligible. He’s known for having the ear of the final tsarina, a skill for manipulation that often gives him a reputation for something like evil incarnate, and, as a teenager who’s been bored in a history class can tell you, a giant penis.
In reality, Rasputin was more like a shady religious leader with a penchant for mysticism and a talent for making the best friends and the worst enemies. He won the Romanov family’s trust by seeming to heal Alexei, the tsar’s youngest child, only son, and heir to the throne. He also, some argue, assured the downfall of the Romanov family simply by being so divisive and disliked. In 1916, he was lured to the Yusupov Palace by a group of noblemen, and over the course of a dinner, he was poisoned, poisoned again, shot, left for dead, discovered to still be alive, shot again, and finally dumped in a nearby river.
I have arrived at the Yusupov Palace shortly before closing, and whatever pains the institution as a whole may have taken to draw visitors to the palace, this philosophy has not extended to the staff, who follow me, hover, remind me that the museum is closing soon, and turn off the lights in each room once I leave. The Rasputin story, I realize, is not half as interesting as the mansions Russian nobility built for themselves. The Yusupov Palace, for example, belonged to your average, run-of-the-mill Russian princelings, and includes a gold-leaf theater and a gold-leaf Turkish bath.
In the Turkish bath, I strike up a conversation with two French girls who are also being rushed through the Yusupov Palace by docents eager to go home. We speed through a su
mptuous mahogany library, and I learn that one of the two is studying here; the other is visiting.
The girls are friendly, and we bond in the way that foreigners even from different countries can, because they’re instantly in the same boat. We laugh over the impossibility of the Russian language and the women shooing us out of the palace.
In the Turkish bath, I overheard the girls discussing finding a sauna to go to next, and I sense that I might be invited. We’re hitting it off; they’re probably picking up on my unlike most Americans, I’ve gotten comfortable with public nudity vibe.
We find ourselves back outside on the dark cobblestone streets. The reflection of the palace lights floats on the surface of the dark canal below us.
“So pretty,” one of the girls says, and we admire the row of illuminated buildings across the water.
This is just like Camilla, I remind myself, only this time I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t let fear of rejection thwart a budding friendship; I won’t keep passing their building while I work up the courage to ask them to lunch.
“Which way are you going?” one asks, gesturing up the road. “We will maybe find a sauna, or . . .”
“North!” I exclaim, loudly, immediately, and untruthfully. North leads directly into the canal, and, more problematically, away from where they’re pointing.
There’s still time to correct myself or ask if I can join them at the sauna, but instead I find myself saying goodbye and heading toward a bridge that will take me north, so that I can at least make good on my word.
Stupid, stupid! I admonish myself as I walk away.
I shiver on the sidewalk, imagining the sisterhood that could have been. I picture us sitting in the sauna, laughing, joking, improbably sipping champagne. Meeting up for reunions thirty years later, and somehow we haven’t aged a day.
But instead I’m back on the subway platform with nothing to do but stare at the metal doors until they open.
That night, I make pizza with Natalia and her daughter. Her daughter seems sweet but shy. I ask her about school and how she likes St. Petersburg. (She grew up with her grandparents and only moved here a few months ago; she misses her friends but likes that she can walk to her new school.) I wonder what it would be like to grow up with parents who Couchsurf, with strangers periodically arriving at your home in the middle of the night.
I decide that a good Couchsurfer would try to share her culture with Natalia’s daughter. I start by describing New York.
“It’s really big,” I tell her. “And there are many tall buildings.” I’m off to a terrible start.
“One thing I noticed about America,” Natalia chimes in helpfully, “is that, in some places, maybe Wyoming, you have a house, and then no other houses around it for one hundred kilometers.”
I nod, and Natalia sees that I’m missing something. “In other countries, China and Russia for example, yes, we have villages in the countryside, but it’s a small community, and then no one around for one hundred kilometers. And in that small community, all the houses are close together, like in a city.”
This strikes me as a very good point, and very illustrative of American culture. I try to explain to Natalia’s daughter how most Americans would rather build big houses in the suburbs than buy an apartment in the city, and how we all have cars, but it suddenly strikes me as strange how we almost seek out privacy that borders on isolation, and that maybe that’s why I’m so bad at Couchsurfing.
“Also,” Natalia explains to her daughter, “the big difference between the Russian countryside and the American countryside is that in America, there isn’t trash everywhere.”
I take a bullet train to Moscow four days before the end of my trip. I’m speeding both to another city and away from the knowledge that I’ll soon have to return to China. There, I’ll have to make another decision: After my next stretch of work, do I return to New York, my curiosity somewhat satiated, or keep traveling through this part of the world?
Much as I’ll be glad to be back with friends in familiar places, I don’t quite feel ready to leave the former Soviet Union.
My trip started out at the edges of the Russian Empire and inched closer to its center. Each capital I visited, no matter how glorious, was still in some ways looking to Moscow. No matter that Moscow was now a different country or that now there were resentments about Moscow’s imperial rule, people still gestured around at their trendy cafes and proudly declared it to be like Moscow or pointed to a beloved building and sighed, “Yes, but in Moscow . . .” You could hate the people it had sent you, but you couldn’t hate Moscow; it charmed people from afar, seduced them up close. The way New York City swallows even the most worldly, jaded European tourists and spits them out as children, starstruck by billboards and babbling about buildings, Moscow mesmerized the masses. In some countries, it feels like the young and ambitious are still looking to Moscow, because if you want to make it big, that’s where you go.
Any great city seems to embody the dreams of its countrymen. St. Petersburg may be Russia’s most beautiful city, but Moscow is more glamorous.
Also colder.
Here the buildings soar into the sky in wedding-cake tiers for whom we also have Stalin to thank. After the war, Stalin commissioned the seven iconic skyscrapers, known in English as the Seven Sisters, that still captivate visitors today. They’re massive, truly gargantuan Gothic towers topped with spires and finally a five-pointed star. Unlike most skyscrapers I know, their bases are wide and support secondary smaller towers on each side. The aesthetic was applied to Soviet-financed buildings all over the world, and I recognize it from a structure across from my office in Shanghai: the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building.
Looking out at the elegant and foreboding church-like spires from the steps of the train station in Moscow, I have the same sensation as when I arrived in St. Petersburg.
I’m in Moscow.
Also it’s freezing.
I’m Couchsurfing again. This time, I’m staying with a young couple: Anna and Kolya. They host so many Couchsurfers that they’ve set up a Google calendar to track requests, and their profile is filled with glowing reviews.
Anna gives me precise, step-by-step directions to her apartment. “Walk out of exit number three and turn right.” While I’m doing that, an older man in a dapper winter hat wordlessly picks up my suitcase and carries it up the stairs. For all the glory of the Soviet Metros—and Moscow’s by the way puts all others to shame—they rarely have escalators leading up to the street.
Outside, the man asks where I’m headed, and when he hears my accent he switches to English.
“I STUDY ENGLISH IN UNIVERSITY,” he explains, speaking in the vocal equivalent of all caps. I smile. It’s a universal impulse, I suppose, to speak loudly and overenunciate through a language barrier.
He insists on carrying my suitcase to Anna’s apartment. “EXCUSE ME, CAN I ASK YOU, WHY YOU ARE ONE PERSON TRAVEL AND CARRY SUCH HEAVY BAGGAGE?”
“I NEED MANY CLOTHES,” I explain, and we both laugh. I stare enviously at his thick leather gloves. It’s so cold here that I feel like stepping into a walk-in freezer would warm me up.
Anna’s apartment is on the sixth floor, and miraculously, she has an elevator. It’s tiny and one of the old-fashioned caged cars where you pull the door closed and watch yourself ascend.
As soon as Anna opens the door, I can tell something is not quite right. She has two fresh scars on her face. Her kitchen window is open, and one of the gas burners on her stove is turned up all the way. I offer her the bottle of wine I’ve brought to say thank you.
“I’ve already had one”—she shrugs—“but let’s drink this, too.”
In an earlier message, she’d told me that her husband would be away while I visited, but I now notice that she wears no ring. She begins telling me stories about an older pilot, whose relevance I can’t understand until she finally tells me, “We are together, in a way.” She pulls up photos. He’s divorced and in his sixties. His ex-wife and
teenage daughter know about Anna and aren’t happy. “I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of Anton and Vadik and Elena.
She shows me pictures of a recent vacation she took with the pilot to Rhode Island. “We saw all of the lighthouses!” she exclaims.
I try to take this all in. She sounds happy with the pilot. Though she doesn’t mention her husband, I assume they’re in the process of separating. This, too, is a familiar pain. But so many of Anna’s stories take a dark turn. “I fell down, but I don’t remember” is a common refrain. While we’re halfway through splitting a bottle of wine, she starts rolling a joint. “If I get arrested, I just need to pay someone not to go to jail.” She shrugs.
Anna hates Russia. She hates the government, the corruption, the mentality the post-Soviet system has forced upon the people who’ve endured it. She tells me about her semi-estranged brother, who lives in the U.S. “When the Soviet Union collapsed, my mom got us all visas,” she explains. “Because, you know, we are Jewish.”
“Why didn’t you go?” I ask.
She shrugs. “My life is here. Why would I go?”
By this point, I’m drunk, too, and I want to say something, make a suggestion, but I have no right. Like with Dima and his sinus infection. Besides, what do I say? Would someone look at my life and say, I’m worried, too?
The next morning, it’s snowing. It’s the first snow I’ve seen all year, and I’m giddy. Anna rolls her eyes. “So now, there will be snow until May.”
Anna sees what I’m trying to wear and insists on bundling me up in a scarf and fur hat. I’m glad she does: as soon as I step outside, my eyes tear up from the cold.
The snow makes Red Square look like it’s been sprinkled with powdered sugar: the iconic Kremlin clock towers, the gumdrop onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the spired redbrick State Historical Museum. I feel like I’ve walked into a postcard.
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