‘Hidden spaces’ of St Petersburg, 1990s.
By August 2002, the city was largely under scaffolding. The spire of Trezzini’s cathedral in the Peter and Paul Fortress and St Isaac’s were shrouded. Palace Square was being resurfaced. Nearly 2,500 ’monuments of history and culture’, 300 ‘monumental sculptures’ and 600 ‘decorative sculptures’ were in need of repair.15 The Palace at Strelna, which had been an orphanage in the 1920S and was later occupied by the Nazis, was turned into the sumptuous National Congress Palace by Vladimir Putin. The president has always shown generosity towards improving the look and increasing the status of the city where he grew up in a kommunalka, not far from the KGB’s ‘Big House’ on Liteiny Prospekt. Money from the federal budget was allocated to St Petersburg during the tenure of Putin’s protégé, Mayor Valentina Matvienko, who energetically presided over a number of high-profile projects between 2003 and 2011.16
Peter and Paul Fortress before and after restoration for 2003.
For the tercentennial celebrations, St Petersburg’s bus station was overhauled. Streets were paved. The potholed old Nevsky was smoothed over, and life in the city – so hard throughout the 1990s – was gentrified. Big events were planned: promenade concerts in the Summer Garden, a laser show on the Neva, where coloured fountains played and jets of water sprayed. There was a regatta, an ice-cream festival. Flames blazed again from the Rostral Columns. There was a Peter the Great exhibition at the Hermitage, the reopening of the Mikhailovsky Palace after extensive restoration, and the inauguration – by President Putin and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder – of the Amber Room at Tsarskoe Selo, after twenty-four years of restoration. There was a $1,500-a-ticket ball. Top Russian bands played the rock festival ‘Open the Window’. A performance of Donizetti’s little-known opera, Peter the Great, was given. There was the White Nights Swing Jazz Festival and the 6th International Early Music Festival. James Levine visited with the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, and a gala concert from the Mariinsky was broadcast worldwide by the BBC.17
The dynamic workaholic Valery Gergiev, who has been at the helm of the Mariinsky since 1996, transformed the institution into a powerhouse of creativity. It employs about 1,000 people – 180 in the orchestra, 200 dancers, 80 singers, 300 techies, along with administrators and doctors. Giving up to 100 performances at the Mariinsky each year, Gergiev frequently comes off the podium, bundles into a car to Pulkovo Airport and jets off to conduct in Europe. Among his many directorial tasks are the gala dinners held after performances. It is hard to step from the realm of Glinka or Tchaikovsky and plunge into the world of millionaire diners who may just become valuable sponsors, yet for Gergiev today it is part of the process of turning the Mariinsky into a world-famous brand that people are willing to buy into. Like the Hermitage, the name alone sells, as visitors come as much for what the institution represents in the cultural top-sights league-table as for the artistic treasures it offers.18
Indeed, the anniversary celebration was seen as an opportunity to sell the city. Residents who had been looking west found a renewed pride in Russian brands. Peter the Great was put to work promoting products and services. The Petrovsky Bank on the Nevsky displayed a bust of the great Westerniser over its entrance. Peter I cigarettes claimed to contain a superior type of tobacco sold at the tsar’s court. Petrovskoe Beer with its Bronze Horseman logo and Peter the Great Vodka – brewed and distilled in the city – appealed to resident and tourist alike. But the celebrations were not, of course, entirely without pain or difficulty. Survival websites were set up to suggest ways for residents to cope with the influx of tourists: how to escape the deafening spiel from the bullhorns hawking canal cruises or hydrofoils to Peterhof; how to negotiate the clusters of frilly-bonneted maidens and giant Peter the Great photo-ops.19 Above and beyond all those nuisances was the familiar shadow of corruption, casting its sombre and familiar light. Funds had gone missing. There were suspicious misallocations of huge sums.20
Yet the city learned the lesson of 2003 and continued to present attractions that would add to the already-rich array of sights and keep the tourists coming. A large but dubious item, another fragment of St Petersburg flotsam, was added to the historical curiosities that fill the city. At the Museum of Erotica in Furshtatskaya Street a thirty-centimetre-long preserved penis, which reputedly once belonged to the orgiastic Grygory Rasputin, went on display in 2004 – its authenticity understandably questioned. Resembling one of the eerie pickled oddities on show in the Kunstkammer, the object has been identified variously as a sea cucumber or the penis of one of the larger quadrupeds. The item was purchased by Igor Knyazkin, the director of the museum, for $8,000 from a French antiquarian who had obtained it from a Californian who, in turn, had acquired it from Rasputin’s daughter, who had wrested it from a circle of Russian émigrés in Paris, who treasured it as a holy relic.
Banned by the Soviet regime in 1964 as a member of The Beatles, Paul McCartney played to 60,000 fans in St Petersburg forty years later, in June 2004. Although it was his first concert in the city, it was McCartney’s 3,000th concert, in a career spanning more than half a century, and tickets changed hands for up to $500.21 The stage was set up facing the Alexander Column, with its back to the Moika, and McCartney sang to generations for whom his early songs had been like a ‘road of life’ to the West. The Rolling Stones played in July 2007. On the set list was ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, which includes references to the regime change of 1917 that occurred in the Winter Palace only a few metres from their stage.
The previous winter, another temporary tourist attraction had appeared in Palace Square. The company Ice Studio made a glacial replica of Empress Anna’s Ice Palace. Such attractions were useful to an industrial city that had lost much of its manufacturing base. Inhabitants were increasingly white-collar, working hard in private marketing firms, import—export or public relations. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the civil service had grown to positively tsarist proportions. Housing was increasingly expensive, and although the rise in owner-occupiers impacted positively on the environment, many people commuted to work as apartment prices in the centre – where 40 per cent of the population worked – were particularly high. Yet behind the new prosperity, there was still old St Petersburg, dilapidated and wild. Police blackmailed drivers with faked felonies, in order to make a bit on the side. At length the city responded with a hotline for the denunciation of corruption, bribery and scams. Prostitutes, many of them working to feed their drug habits, were rounded up by a local police official, driven to the outskirts of the city and made to ‘lick his car clean’. Little was done about the patently racial attacks on African students studying in the city – five were shot or stabbed between 2000 and 2006. Freedom of speech was under attack, as democracy was edged out by the Putin machine. One of his first acts as president was to silence independent television. In April 2015, a building on Shavushkina Street in north-west Petersburg was pinpointed as the HQ of Russia’s Internet trolls, who spend their days slipping praise for Putin and defamation of Western democracy across Internet forums and social networks. While the strengthening state successfully restrained the gang culture of a decade earlier, its own officials engaged in protection and extortion.22
In 2007, a survey conducted in three cities – including St Petersburg – returned the staggering statistic that 71 per cent of people thought Stalin had been a positive influence, and even more believed that Felix Dzerzhinsky had preserved order.23 It offered a carte blanche to the leadership. Putin’s KGB training had taught him that what was not controlled remained a threat. Action against Chechnya and Georgia, as well as the annexation of Crimea – as shown on Russian television – did much to push the idea of a renewed, restrengthened Russia. Many citizens were persuaded that the president was the best man to defend them. He was a judo black belt, caught big fish, hunted big game and sent his soldiers to quash any challenge to the Russian nation. Wars reported through state-controlled media – li
ve broadcasts had been banned – were as useful as chemically enhanced sportsmen or enormous propaganda budgets, in proclaiming Russian prowess. Putin, aching from the humiliation of Russia by the West in the 1990s, wanted his country to be great again, but somewhere along the line he marginalised the quest for national greatness in his drive to amass personal wealth. It was Catherine the Great all over again. Troublesome journalists were silenced. Alexander Litvinenko accused the reincarnated KGB – the FSB – of planting the murderous ‘Chechen’ bombs that ripped through Moscow apartment blocks, thereby justifying a war against the alleged perpetrators. Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who tackled organised crime, also accused Putin of involvement in the 2006 murder of the human-rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who opposed the president’s policy in the Second Chechen War. By 2010 Robert Gates, the US Secretary of Defence, suggested that the idea of democracy in Russia had all but vanished. And hours before he was shot in February 2015, only a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, Boris Nemtsov – who had been an idealistic and honest member of Yeltsin’s government and was intensely optimistic about the changes in Russia – sadly declared that Russia was becoming a fascist state.24
Post 2010, the St Petersburg city authorities listed 660,000 people as still inhabiting the remaining 105,000 kommunalki in the city, although many of these were temporary or even illegal migrants.25 The financial crisis of 2008 had led to a renewed government subsidy on basic foods, and the old and poor were stranded with the perennial peasant diet of grains and pulses, while the rich seemed even better off. Some were very much better off. Krestovsky Island became fashionable. Housing developments sprang up in the neighbourhood near the Tauride Palace. Property developers – with a little help from the authorities – would evict people from desirable buildings that were conveniently declared uninhabitable, in order to create luxury apartments. Prices were commensurate with those in other major cities in Europe and America. However, some controversial developments were blocked by local resistance. Gazprom planned to build a 400-metre-high tower in Okhta, on the land where the Swedish fort at Nyenskans had stood. Apart from being an archaeological site, its proximity to the Smolny Monastery and the Smolny Institute on the other side of the Neva was considered an intrusion on the historical city. Local pressure, stimulated by the St Petersburg intelligentsia, managed to sway Dmitri Medvedev – president during Putin’s tactical interregnum – to urge Gazprom to move their projected tower to the less historical Lakhta,26 and become the silver-needle centrepiece of a steel-and-glass development on the waterfront: St Petersburg meets Singapore.
Video watchdogs guard new money in St Petersburg 2016
Passing the Lakhta site, driving along the A181, you soon join the 142-kilometre St Petersburg Ring Road, which connects Kronstadt with the shore. It runs along the flood barriers begun in the late 1970s, interrupted by the political turmoil of the 1990S and finally completed under Putin’s initiative between 2005 and 2011. Kronstadt, suffering from its demise as a naval base, became a St Petersburg suburb that was accessible by bus. The barrier should protect the city from the flooding which has threatened its survival since the year it was founded. That is, if leaders across the world agree to cut back on fossil fuels. But gas and oil are Russia’s biggest exports. In 2009, as six million Russians became poverty-stricken, the country became the world’s biggest oil producer. And Putin – like a tsar – became enormously wealthy.27
Kronstadt’s empty canals and warehouses.
Another exciting project was the redevelopment of Peter the Great’s old maritime timber yard on New Holland Island. The powerhouse director of the Mariinsky, Valery Gergiev, had plans for a huge glass-cube opera house to be suspended over the island. The design, submitted by Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss, was vetoed by city planner Oleg Kharchenko, who had no enthusiasm for ‘formless glass structures’ – a sentiment backed by the Kremlin. The concept of a floating glass cube harked back to one of the city’s most exciting, yet unrealised architectural dreams – Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. The decision was thus unhistorical, and was damaging to the city’s capacity to attract tourists. The plan was replaced by a more conservative scheme by the British architect Norman Foster, which in turn, foundered when the consortium behind it encountered financial difficulties. The oligarch and Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich, stepped in with a welcome 400-million-euro donation. The resulting complex, phase one of which was finished in 2016, includes studios, bookshops, galleries and a park, but lacks that magnificence of vision associated with the daring architectural tradition of St Petersburg.28
At the nearby Mariinsky, Gergiev made do with a new concert hall of modest size and a new auditorium. The concert hall is well disposed and the acoustics warm, but the Mariinsky II is neither architecturally nor acoustically innovative. As for Mariinsky performances, some are brilliant, while others appear to be a victim of the St Petersburg time-warp. A recent performance of Swan Lake was somewhat soulless – although the corps de ballet, as befits St Petersburg tradition, was adept. The production dated from 1950, but apart from strangely outsized swans gliding across the backdrop – swans which also made a guest appearance in the 2017 production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko — the effect was contemporary. This is not the case with all the older Mariinsky productions. A Nozze di Figaro dating from 1998 – lumpen, leaden, lacking wit and brio – should have been mothballed long ago.
Today, the Mariinsky seems obliged to present certain ballets and operas again and again, in an obvious pitch to tourist audiences. Elsewhere in the city, the theatre offers a gamut of entertainment. In late 2016, these ranged from the French farce Boeing-Boeing to a powerful and brilliant adaptation of Yuri Grossman’s novel Life and Fate at the Maly Drama Theatre. As for the city itself, St Petersburg has always provided a magnificent set for its own drama. Whether it is a break-dancer who bursts into a metro carriage and begins to gyrate as the train starts to move, a ghostly street artist promenading the nighttime Nevsky or the architecture renovated for the tercentennial celebrations, St Petersburg remains truly theatrical. Sometimes the architecture is difficult to appreciate through the spiders’ webs of overhead trolley-bus lines, but the buildings are a grand testimony to a huge, if short, past. Standing by the Blagoveshchensky Bridge on Vassilevsky Island, the statue of Trezzini looks proudly out on all the might and the mess – on what has become of the city that Peter the Great engaged him to build.
17
MIRAGE
2017
This book began with a walk down the Nevsky Prospekt in the strange twilight of the post-communist decade. The going was – for St Petersburg – about to get rougher. In one way or another, for one section of the community or another, it has always been tough. Peasant, tsar, intellectual, bourgeois, comrade, the quiet person going about his or her business – they’ve all struggled for a vision of the city and a decent life.
On 31 October 2015, a terrorist bomb downed a Russian passenger jet killing 224 people en route from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh to Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport. Seventeen months later, on 3 April 2017, a terrorist bomb killed and injured travellers on the Petersburg metro. Both tragedies hurt the city and shocked the world.
Peter’s dream capital was majestic but crumbling, even as it was built. Workmen spent their summers restoring what winter destroyed.1 The city that was an eruption of otherness became a nightmare of endurance. The sum of all the misery sustained in its 300-year history weighs heavily in the balance against its myriad joys and triumphs. Yet, through the drama of St Petersburg, a mighty territory became a mighty nation. The city’s vitality proceeded from its rootlessness. Like New York, St Petersburg was a construct of strangers who brought with them a mix of traditions and capacities that created a new and particular cultural identity. Certainly more like New York than Brasilia – another selfconsciously constructed capital built in the middle of nowhere, which nobody wanted to inhabit – St Petersburg forged, in record time,
the complex character of one of the most artistically rich and politically volatile cities in the world. But how can any city thrive in a country that is corrupt from the top down?
St Petersburg: a fort, a port and a centre of enlightenment learning.
St Petersburg has spawned monsters and monstrous ideas. The city seemed bizarre and ‘different’ enough to prompt Mary Shelley to begin the story of Frankenstein in this northern capital. Captain Walton’s voyage to Arkhangelsk and beyond to discover ‘a thousand celestial observations’ in ‘unexplored regions’ begins in St Petersburg. During Walton’s expedition, he encounters Frankenstein tracking his hideous monster.2 St Petersburg’s promise is mysterious, unsafe. Dostoevsky described it as ‘the most fantastic city with the most fantastic history of all cities on this planet’.3
St. Petersburg Page 46
