“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright -
And this was odd because it was
The middle of the night.”
(Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass)
This quotation came to mind as soon as we had booked the holiday in Russia - five nights in St Petersburg and two in Moscow. St Petersburg in June experiences the ‘White Nights’, when the city’s northerly location means that the hours of darkness are extremely short. It was disconcerting to wander back to our hotel at almost midnight under cloudless blue skies and unbroken sunshine.
Night-time sunshine was not the only odd aspect of the trip. In many ways, my pre-conceptions of the two cities derived from received perceptions of two major figures from Russian history. It is well known that Peter the Great was the essential inspiration for the creation of St Petersburg as a ‘window on the West’, a new city in European style reflecting Peter’s travels through western Europe as a young man. (Ironically, and in typical Russian fashion, the oldest surviving Russian city is Novgorod, whose name in Russian means ‘new town’.)
In contrast, I thought beforehand that the ancient and present Russian capital, Moscow, might still fall under some of the shadow of Communism - all that old footage of May Day military rallies at the Kremlin - and specifically Stalinism. Stalin, with his purges, paranoia and insistence on ‘socialist realism’ in the arts, did not seem to have been other than a negative, destructive force. Visiting the two cities did not destroy all my ideas and assumptions, but it did challenge them.
It would not be wise to make the facile mistake of trying to guess what an individual dead for over 200 years would make of modern St Petersburg. Peter was a man of his time and to treat him otherwise is to make him “a fish out of water”, as Ranjitsinghi wrote in another context. It is, in my view, quite legitimate to think about how impressive the new city of St Petersburg might have looked two centuries or more ago.
The horse drawn carriages carrying the aristocracy of the 18th century would probably have enjoyed the wide boulevards, so evocative of Paris. No doubt the painted facades in blue, green, yellow, pink and myriad other colours were even more beautiful when they had been in place for mere decades.
This is not to imply that the city is unattractive now - far from it. In some ways, in this “age of miracles and wonders”, it is surprising that St Petersburg has changed as little as it has, especially given its turbulent central role in Russian history over the past 100 years or so. The view along the Neva, for example, remains a largely unbroken and lovely vista. A visit to the Literary Café on Nevsky Prospekt, where Dostoevsky and many other writers once dined and where a string quartet will entertain you, offers a whiff of Imperial Viennese elegance. But back streets show telltale signs of decay, neglect and tiredness.
St Petersburg has embraced the West - to some extent, and not always for the better. At our nearest Metro station, there were wide screen advertisements, but no posters by the escalators. The Metro itself offers a curious mixture of design features and flaws. Many stations are designed with a little upward incline as trains pull into them, in order to decrease the pressure needed on the brakes. On the other hand, when your train stops at the next station and the doors open, there is often no sign confirming the name of the station; so you have to get out and hope that you have counted correctly!
The Hotel Moscow - the name is another perverse touch - included its own mini-market, beauty parlour, sauna, post office and casino amongst other things. While this was undoubtedly very convenient, I did wonder whether it was a legacy of the old Soviet suspicion of tourists and a wish to control them by making it easy for them to stay in one place and not ‘stray’. There was also the surreal touch of eating breakfast in a St Petersburg hotel to the live piano accompaniment of Midnight in Moscow and The Last Waltz. An English language newspaper, the St Petersburg Times, ran an article while we were there, calling for more Western investors to help set up mid-range hotels, which might be more suitable for modern tourists than the old, huge, relatively de luxe hotels.
Such mid-range hotels would probably not feature the blini bar we visited at the Hotel Moscow, where you can eat blini (pancakes) with various fillings. There is even a blini special, with choices of menu featuring blini as starter, main course and dessert. Anyone who recalls the episode from The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin where Perrin orders ravioli, ravioli and ravioli at an Italian restaurant will get the general idea.
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| Blini |
The satellite TV in our hotel room carried BBC World broadcasts, including a special report on homelessness in St Petersburg. We recognised with some surprise that the report on Volodya (a contraction of Vladimir), who sells a Russian equivalent of The Big Issue, had been made directly outside our hotel. It was more disconcerting still to meet Volodya himself outside the hotel the next day. The world is a smaller place than ever. The local English language newspapers reported on the Bulger case and also on how one British school had imported teachers from Russia to solve its recruitment problems.
Maybe one should not exaggerate the extent of change in St Petersburg. The Hermitage is undoubtedly beautiful, although we glimpsed no more than a fraction of its content. We also spent a pleasant afternoon in and around the Alexander Nevsky monastery, and the cemetery which contains the gravesof many great composers including Borodin, Mussourgsky and Tchaikovsky. The Peter and Paul fortress now houses the remains of the last of the Romanovs; and you can buy Nicholas II commemorative mugs there, too. Thus does the whirligig of time bring in his revenges.
Overall, though, the city seems shrouded in a sense of melancholy. Its time has gone and may never come again - for all the jet skis on the Neva, the basketball competitions and rock concerts outside the Hermitage and the Pizza Huts and McDonalds along Nevsky Prospekt. I am not sure how much the city’s inhabitants actually want Westernisation - its benefits or problems. From a selfish, tourist viewpoint, it would also be sad if others could not do in future as we did, and eat blinis in a café across the river from St Isaac’s Cathedral for £1.50 per head!
One myth is due a decent burial: St Petersburg is not, never will be and probably never was “the Venice of the North”. Aspects of the city reminded us more of Paris (the boulevards and street artists), Vienna (architecture and cafes), Prague (bridges) and Amsterdam (canals). It does share a certain surreal quality with Venice, but not for the same reasons.
A 5½ hour journey on what may be the world’s slowest ‘express’ train, in the company of some excitable middle-aged Italians, took us to Moscow and the Hotel Ukraine. This monstrous creation boasts 28 floors - though no 13th - and over 1500 rooms. The tour brochure labelled its exterior as ‘Stalinist wedding cake’, but the architect had probably seen too many old RKO serials e.g. Flash Gordon or King of the Rocket Men. The inside was much more elegant in look and style, but there was still plenty to interest and intrigue. There were a number of seemingly redundant lifts at various points. One or two floors included the old Soviet ‘design feature’ of a middle-aged lady at a desk, presumably waiting for secret agents to sidle up to her with key code phrases such as “The bathroom illuminations have been destroyed”. In contrast to Midnight in Moscow on piano in the hotel in St Petersburg, taped Western music played while we sampled the array of breakfast options including sausages, rissoles with suspicious fillings and bread pudding.
A brief digression on food: Russia will not offer a great culinary experience for the discerning. But we did enjoy the solyanka (meat soup), pelmeni (a cousin of ravioli), sturgeon and other fish and the aforementioned blini. Vegetarians will not go hungry, either, even if Russian salads do tend to contain substantial meat or fish elements. We ate in Lebanese, American rodeo theme and pizza restaurants, amongst other places.
With less time in Moscow than St Petersburg, we focused mainly on the inevitable: Red Square, the Kremlin and the Metro. Red Square is neither red nor square - the original Russian name was not ‘red’, but ‘beautiful’ (I think!) The weather was so hot and sunny, and the hustle and bustle of tourists and locals so overwhelming, that any sense of lingering menace from Cold War days was simply non-existent. We did not get to see Mr Lenin, as it is forbidden to take cameras or bags into the tomb - but there is nowhere available to store these items. I should also mention that Mr Lenin is closed to visitors on Fridays. Even a dead icon of world revolution needs a day off, it seems.
The Kremlin we found most impressive, and good value at 1000 roubles - equivalent to £30 for two adults, which included an additional fee for permission to take photographs. There was virtually no queue for the Armoury, with its displays of Faberge eggs and many other attractions, when we arrived, although we did see many tourist groups entering as we left. (It was certainly better value than the overpriced Tower of London, where hapless visitors are carried on a conveyor belt past a giant screen showing a video of the Coronation, and then past the Crown Jewels - a sort of Generation Game in reverse, without cuddly toys.)
We could easily have spent more time in the Kremlin’s array of cathedrals and its beautiful gardens. The Russians are proud of possessing ‘the world’s biggest bell’, although it does have a large piece broken off it - maybe by the world’s largest mice? A large cannon from Revolutionary times faces the current State Council building, perhaps symbolically...Talking of symbolism, on one side of Red Square there is GUM, the famous shopping centre. Lenin might turn in his tomb (but not on Fridays) to see it now. GUM’s grey exterior belies a beautiful interior, whose style reminded me of St Petersburg or even Milan. Most of the shops appeared to be designer clothes stores or shoe shops.
The Metro induced mixed feelings. I had expected to be appalled by the opulence which had been described to me in its decorations. It was built by prisoners in the 1930s as a piece of political nose thumbing at the West by Stalin. Considering the shortages, the climate of fear and the millions of Russian lives lost or ruined at the time, the time and money spent on marble decorations for an underground seems obscene in many ways, and yet...
When I saw the bronze figures at Ploschchad Revolutsi, or the Socialist art in Kievskaya, Belorusskaya and Mayakovskaya, it was impossible to condemn it completely. Let us hope that the horrors of world war, experienced by Russia more than most countries, never come again. But, if they do, the citizens of a besieged city might, just might, find some small comfort in the images of unity, determination and compassion. In modern Moscow, they are a welcome flash of colour.
Time defeated our efforts to explore Moscow more thoroughly. We did finally locate the old Lubyanka - once headquarters of the KGB - in a square of depressingly similar grey buildings, having waved at the shop staff dressed up as M and Ms who were cavorting in the heat on the other side of the square. At least they lent it some cheer.
Russia is probably too vast a country to generalise about, but Lewis Carroll’s characters might very well have been quite at home in St Petersburg and Moscow - two odd and surprising cities.
First published in VISA issue 44 (winter 2001)
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