Sunday, April 21, 2002

For Pete's sake


For Pete's sake

St Petersburg was supposed to be the greatest city in the world. So why did Peter the Great build it in a remote swamp on the edge of Finland?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 21 April 2002

It is the work of a madman," says Timofei, flinging a wild arm at his city. We're standing in the gloom and the cold beside Russia's most famous statue. My shoes are wet. And here is the culprit: Peter the Great, he of the intercontinental vision, astride a colossal horse, rearing and ready to charge.
Timofei, my guide, just can't help spewing out emotional jokes and erudite references. And pointing darkly at the statue, he now assures me that nobody of taste likes this 18th-century premonition of Stalin. "Your two front hooves," he mutters, "have leaped far off into the darkness..."

He is quoting some poet, as usual. I can't match that, though I do recall Catherine's favourite philosopher, Denis Diderot, calling this "a city of quite a new kind, a great and amazing city". Yes. Peter's city was to be the greatest city in the world. It was to be a city of the future, modern, commercial, multicultural, free from the past, free from darkness – perhaps even free from Russia. Mud would be turned to marble, huts to palaces, beards to brains. And how has it turned out?

For some reason, this strikes Timofei as a hilarious question. Just 10 minutes ago he was skidding me through the Palace Square, all overspread with ugly black tarmac as if for a film shoot; a rerun, say, of the Bolsheviks' assault on the Winter Palace. And then there was the palace itself: enclosing its Karelian-birch furniture, its walls of crimson damask, its colonnades, its onyx columns and agate inlays and rosewood window shutters.

"But can you imagine how it is, living with that in the centre of your city?" Timofei keeps asking, in incredulity. "Requiring your subjection, for ever and ever?" Unshaven, scarf-wrapped and sniffing, he looks more eccentric by the minute. Into the 20th century – he now exclaims – that fabled building remained home to an absolute monarch! A Caesar, a Sun King, claiming divine right to rule Russia!
So catastrophe was imminent. Even I can see that, without Timofei labouring the point. In 1918, with cigarette butts and dirty mattresses now littering its Winter Palace, this city rudely ceased to be capital of Russia. Within two years, its population had plummeted by two thirds. In the 1930s a quarter of its surviving population was purged. And within a decade of that, amid mass starvation, the entire city – now known as Leningrad – would stand on the brink of physical annihilation.

"Maybe, things ... have got a little better since then?" I murmur. Just an hour ago, after all, I was sitting in the restored Astoria Hotel, drinking tea and listening to a piano tinkle. Nicholas I's statue still prances outside the hotel, and Europe's rich seems able once again, in St Petersburg, to enjoy the exclusive opulence of liveried servants, a ballroom and a winter garden.

But Timofei does not want to hear this. He wants to talk about the fact that it's been sleeting and snowing ever since I arrived, and that Nevsky Prospekt and Decembrists' Square are full of darkly clad people shuffling through inches of mud and slush. And it's all Peter's fault. Why in God's name couldn't he have foreseen this in 1703, when he built his city on the edge of nowhere, in a swampy fetid corner of Finland, on Russia's remotest edge? Beneath these palaces and pavements, St Petersburg is half-sea, half-marsh. "Sprung out of the mire of dark and wood," marvelled Pushkin. Right now, with dripping icicles threatening me from every overhang, I admit it seems a wet place for a city.

Or perhaps it was just a joke. Peter's kind of joke: to watch gentlemen in brocaded coats, from the court and the diplomatic corps, forced to leave Moscow and set up home in a watery wilderness. Wasn't it hilarious? Timofei looks almost ready to cry as he recalls Peter's cruelties. This was the Tsar who purposely invited more guests to his dinner parties than could find seats. The result was "such scuffling and fighting for chairs that nothing more scandalous can be seen in any country". When the dust had settled, carpenters and shipwrights were in the best seats next to the Tsar, while "senators, ministers, generals, priests, sailors, buffoons of all kinds, sit pell-mell without distinction".

Might St Petersburg have been conceived as one of these jokes? A ghastly experiment in human souls? Timofei just won't stop. He is now almost on a gallop, gesturing at palaces, gabbling out reasons for hating the greatest tsar. Forty thousand labourers per year were to be sent here from the provinces to build, build, build! Tens of thousands died! "And this heretic," he pants, "is the founder of our modern state!"

From the start, then, it was clear that only evil could ever befall this newfangled city on the Gulf of Finland, with its Germanic-sounding name, disastrously founded on blasphemy and impiety. So said old men then, in (illegal) long beards, and so says Timofei now. But while Timofei is pointing out storm-stained, mustard-coloured palaces, with heavy doors, begrimed interiors and colossal renovation costs, my mind is floating back to Pushkin, and thinking of old St Petersburg, with its soft northern light and its bridges and spires, its noblemen on horseback, its sail ships filling the Neva skyline, its phosphorescent summer nights, its women in silk stockings and beauty spots, its gilded carriages and sledges, its whirling couples behind windows, its galloping troikas, its duels at daybreak. I demand a brief pause in the tour.

Since Pushkin's day, I now declare, central St Petersburg – as a monument in stone and stucco – has hardly changed. "It has! It is 200 years worse!" retorts Timofei at once, implacable, leaning by the embankment of the Moika Canal. The white ice on the canal is littered with vodka bottles. On muddy verges, a whole winter's worth of dog excrement is surfacing with the thaw. On street level I see grimy cars, grimy buildings, grimy windows; up above, tangled cables for trams and trolley buses criss-cross the sky. Where is the answer? Was this city really condemned to misery from the day it was built?

Timofei is keen for me to understand that it was. And under black skies, we now hurry on foot to the place where it all began 299 years ago: the St Peter and Paul fortress on its own island in the Neva. Crossing a footbridge over the ice, we enter a cathedral full of marble slabs.

"Meet the family," Timofei is saying. He means it. Because here they are, the Romanov Tsars, all under one roof, in the candlelight. To describe this lot as dysfunctional would do them no justice at all. Peter killed his son, Catherine her husband, and Alexander I his father. Which prompts me to wonder aloud if St Petersburgers are now glad to have their last tsar back here, rescued from his Communist hell in 1998. But Timofei, unblinking, is staring at these plain slabs of marble. "St Petersburgers are these people," he says. When I remind him that Nicholas II died 80 years ago, he dismisses this. "No, no, it has never stopped for us. We are citizens of St Petersburg."

This is an unusual situation. My guide seems to be on the point of losing his mind, as a result of his work. I escort him outside. Is he OK? Does he need to rest? "No, no," he says, standing in puddles, wiping his nose. "But let's get out of here." We hurry over bridges through slush-splattered traffic, in search of something less depressing. And half an hour later we are on the snowy parade ground of the Field of Mars, surrounded by bile-coloured barracks and palaces. Packs of children are warming themselves beside an eternal flame. But here it was, 200 years ago, that Catherine's son Paul tried to regulate Russian chaos by introducing Prussian-style square-bashing. "It was just like Peter shaving off holy Russian beards," scoffs Timofei.

Somehow we are being drawn inexorably to another St Petersburg: the cold city of the 19th-century autocracy, of Nicholas I, the immobile, neoclassical, haughty Nicholas; the city of yellow stucco and white columns, where even the office workers wore uniform, the nightmare city of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, where one button undone could mean degrading to the ranks, a flogging, or exile to Siberia.

Depression begins to weigh me down. But on the subject of alienation and disaffection, Timofei seems to cheer up. A while later, he is leading me to Sennaya Ploshchad, the old hay market, the setting for Crime and Punishment. He starts reminding me of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov stumbling about this square, a place of "revolting misery" and "insufferable stenches" and "drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day". And before I know it, he's on to Gogol, with his "soulless heap of houses tumbled one upon the other, roaring streets, seething mercantilism, that ugly pile of fashions, parades, clerks, wild northern nights, specious glitter and base colourlessness". And it's true: things are just as cheerlessly static here as in any other part of St Petersburg. The square looks like an 1880s slum. Shifty men in bad suits and caps are standing about amid piles of slush and excrement, while women walk defensively arm in arm. For a moment, dare I say it, Timofei almost looks at home.
In the heat of his optimism, in fact, he even suggests taking a bus out of town – which is all very well for the first 20 miles, enclosed behind steamed-up windows, until the unmistakable shadow of another baroque palace falls upon our bus. This is Tsarskoye Selo: good for me, bad for Timofei. As we step into the snow, the façade of the Catherine Palace seems to go on for ever, shining now gold, now blue, windows rising upon windows, statues upon statues, columns upon columns, in a relentless receding line. "You see," says Timofei, "after Peter's death, the city began to acquire this fake, southern, Italian magnificence."

It was the Empress Elizabeth who first asked Bartolomeo Rastrelli to amend Peter's palaces; Catherine the Great then made further improvements to impress foreigners. "Well I'm a foreigner and I am impressed," I say, hoping to boost my guide's morale. And I mean it. Stepping inside, we find Rastrelli's monumental ballroom, crawling from ceiling to floor with gold leaf, on the mirror frames, the cornices, the candelabra, the lintels. We stroll through rooms that go on for ever, like years. One room is cool and classical, the next a baroque inferno. Each is themed and fabulous, with chinoiserie, cherubs, garlands, silken wallpaper, onyx vases, agate wall panels, Ottoman divans, patterned parquet flooring, monumental tiled stoves, ceramic columns, lapis lazuli tabletops, giant picture portraits.
"Upstarts!" Timofei keeps bursting out in my ear. "Parvenus! Trying to out-Europe Europe!" I have just been imagining immense retinues of courtiers with diamond buckles and buttons and epaulets. Now I see my guide's pale face. Perhaps a little fresh air for him? And in blinding snow, we step out into the garden, with its lawns, gravel walks, woods and follies. Troops of huddled tourists shuffle about under snow-laden trees. Then, down the road, beyond frozen ponds and rickety bridges, we spy the unkempt and peeling columns of the Alexander Palace.

Timofei looks reluctant to enter another palace. But once inside, we notice that it has been decorated on a rather modest scale. It is almost human. Suddenly, we are faced with chintzy English wallpaper, electric light switches, telephones, toys, chests of drawers, snaps of the children in cheap frames crowding the mantelpiece; personal remnants of the last tsar and his family.

"The creeping embourgoisement of the later tsars" is how my snooty guidebook describes these scenes. But the photos are painful. There is the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, uptight, with a pulled-in waist and puffed out shoulders; there is Nicholas beside his identically bearded cousin, the future King George V of Great Britain. And, suddenly, we are in the age of a 20th-century royal family. Nicholas, slight and neat, sitting in a group shot with his handsome wife and the children. Maria, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and little Prince Alexei: all at ease, all shimmering in their privileged innocence; all facing imminent death.

I hear a gutter gurgling. In this dingy room, the long windowpanes seem to be walls of sleet. But Timofei is wrapping and unwrapping his scarf, in an uncharacteristic silence, out-stared by the royal ghosts. It's that family again. And like them, it seems, Peter's great hope for Russia – his great city of the future – has already been dead and gone, for many, many years.


The Facts


Getting there
Only British Airways (0845 77 333 77; www.ba.com) and Aeroflot (020-7355 2233; www.aeroflot.co.uk) fly direct from the UK (London) to St Petersburg. Return flights cost £315 with BA and £210 with Aeroflot.

Jeremy Atiyah stayed at the five-star Astoria Hotel, which can booked through The Leading Hotels of the World UK (00800 2888 8882; www.lhw.com). Doubles cost from £258 per night.

He also spent several nights staying in "home-stay" accommodation, booked through The Russia Experience (020-8566 8846; www.trans-siberian.co.ukwww.trans-siberian.co.uk), an excellent option for first-time visitors to Russia. Prices vary according to location, starting from around £170 per person, based on two sharing, for a minimum three-night stay, including transfers and half-board accommodation.

Interchange (020-8681 3612; email: interchange@interchange.uk.com), a specialist Russia operator, can put together packages. A three-night break costs £344 per person, based on two sharing, including return direct flights, transfers and b&b in a hotel.


Further information
All visitors to Russia require a visa. If booking a package through an operator leave visa formalities to them, otherwise contact the Russian Consulate, 5 Kensington Palace Gdns, London W8 4QX (020-7229 8027).

No comments:

Post a Comment