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St. Petersburg the Great1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
During White Nights – the few weeks every summer when the sun finally sets at three and then rises again before six – St. Petersburg celebrates with a splendid arts festival. The city waters become a jubilant maritime madhouse as Russians take to the canals in their own boats or on barge tours and then congregate on the Neva. After midnight, as the city empties of those who are able to sleep in the bright light, a trawl of the city’s bars begins that becomes, for many, a journey of evermore spectacular debauchery. A local friend I’d made guided us toward the Konyushennaya Ploshchad, formerly home of the imperial stables, and past the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, where Czar Alexander II was killed in March 1881. “Another assassination spot,” I said, walking by. “We’re a bloody people,” my friend muttered. “Get used to it.” We turned at the bridge over the Moika – busy, even during the week, with Russian bridegrooms carrying their betrotheds over its triple span for good luck – and then passed the Souvenirs Market, where the wooden matryoshka dolls that were the Soviet Union’s only trinket now come in a variety of models, featuring everyone from Mats Sundin and a diminishing sequence of Toronto Maple Leafs to Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Brezhnev (though not Putin). In daytime, the square is a tranquil place, but that night a Hummer was shining its headlights on the hips of two passing women as its passengers hooted and a pickup truck with a bevy of teenage girls in the back drove out of the derelict courtyard they were entering. Several bars were housed in the street-facing wall of the centuries-old quadrangle, including one called Achtung Baby. The grungy, hopping nightclub consisted of two enormous arched rooms of crumbling brick and, in the second room, young Russians cavorted on tables as others staggered across the rudimentary dance floor beneath the black and white Marx Brothers movie being projected on the wall. At the far end of the inner courtyard, another bar had been set up in the outdoors with sand, deck chairs and a volleyball net. It was called the Dunes – popular (this week, anyway) with hundreds. Hours later, our night ended near the Gostiny Dvor – a newly restored mall at the junction of Dumskaya Ulitsa and the Nevsky Prospekt – at Fidel, a pocket-size bar in the last of a series of one-room vaults that might once have been storehouses, now with a different club in each. Inside, three teenagers were asleep on a legless couch while another was reading, and others danced in front of a full wall-size portrait of Fidel Castro mounted behind neon black light and a curtain of hanging beads. Now it was the Cubans’ turn to be kitsch. In St. Petersburg, the noteworthy is either tawdry or a few steps underground or magnificent and palatial beyond imagining. It is as if Peter’s lofty dream and the lowly serfdom that made it possible persist in the soul of the city because neither ever existed without the other. Even at the Grand Hotel Europe – luxurious during the fin de siècle, turned into an orphanage under the Soviets and now restored by the Orient-Express group – the city’s painful, contrary history is not far from the surface. Nazi Germany’s siege of Leningrad lasted from 1941 to 1944 and is to St. Petersburg what the explosion is to Halifax – its abiding memory, its defining moment. As we checked in at the hotel, the young employee who showed me its splendid rooms started to weep as she spoke of those three dreadful winters of bombardment, death and penury that the city had survived. She was too young by 40 years to have survived the siege personally, but her father was born during its 900 days and her grandmother, only recently deceased, had told her the stories. (A great part of the city has, in fact, been rebuilt since the Russians burned the original panelling and furniture – anything combustible – to stay alive.) |
