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St. Petersburg the Great1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
After only a few days in St. Petersburg, my wife and I are drinking Russia’s “little water” with alacrity, contending with a Cyrillic script that is unfamiliar (though “vodka” is an easy word to master) and an altogether mesmerizing place in which situations can be as puzzling as the streets are exhilarating and beautiful. What unspoken law is it that reduces some dictators to kitsch figures but not others? Here, this means Lenin, though not Stalin or Peter the Great. St. Petersburg, the czar’s grandiose urban fantasy, is said to rest on the bones of the hundreds of thousands of serfs who died building it. The city is a kind of folly, its founding dictator more heinous than Lenin ever was – Peter didn’t even pretend to care about the masses – and yet Peter is neither blamed nor ridiculed. Instead, the czar is called Great. St. Petersburg, the new capital that he envisioned in 1703 rising from the marshes at the edge of the Gulf of Finland, is alternately compelling and distressing – raw yet refined, brimming with high culture but also brutish. Peter’s wish had been to create a Russian Versailles or a Venice – only greater. He was making the statement that Russia had arrived and was every bit as magnificent as Europe was. With the city’s revival under Vladimir Putin, who was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1952, Peter’s message is being communicated a second time. New shops and malls are flourishing along the avenues and canals wrested from the mud, and perestroika’s oligarchs are refurbishing the palatial homes, such as those built along the original Millionaire’s Row running behind the Hermitage. Monster homes are a 300-year-old Russian habit, ostentation having been fundamental then – and now. The Nevsky Prospekt, the broad street that Peter intended to be the city’s theatrical main artery, used to be desolate but for a few Ladas and grim shops in Soviet years but is now furious with traffic and sidewalks filled to bursting. |
