St Petersburg has the same disorienting impact as visiting Venice for the first time – “Christ, how did they make all this and even more important, why here of all places?”. Uninhabitable bogs and marshes obviously inspire humans to excel themselves. Try as I did, I couldn’t truly grasp the colossal scale of the endeavour until we had tramped down miles of imperious boulevards or spent time on boats tunnelling through quays, city streets and the massive archaic port.
It has a mesmeric affect on the locals too – the traffic consists of patched up wrecks of cars streaming across the Neva with a sullen indifference to other drivers let alone pedestrians. There may be smouldering billions of untapped oil and gas largesse elsewhere in Russia, but here the only manifestation is the very occasional “Proles Royce” (Stretched limo) or glass darkened Range Rover.
My wife was here to interview Mikhail Piotrovsky, the head of the Hermitage and one of the two most powerful men in the city (the other is Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky) while the female Governor is merely Putin’s marionette. This gave us behind the scenes access to some grand functions in the Hermitage itself, which after hours takes on the feel of its origins – the most fuck off urban palace ever built. Such are the precious hoards of objects – and art – that the only way uber-precious things can be assured of security is for the head curators to place little initialled wax seals on their cases every night.
Fortunately the artistic elite of the city are not robotic supporters of Putin, the local lad made bad. Like in any autocratic regime, the best advice is to keep your head down and under no circumstances attract police attention, as it will inevitably lead to shakedowns involving bribes or worse. As a wise art dealer friend who spends a lot of time here said: “If you see a body with a pool of blood on the footpath, you step around it and just keep walking – and don’t look back”.
This is also not a place to come for eating or shopping. The streets are dirty and the window displays indifferent. There appeared to be no manufactured luxury goods worth looking at and even the caviar is not to be trusted on the black market. A number of impressive wine importers have sprung up but why pay three to four times world prices for bottles that may have just been left out in the snow for a day or two?
But you can put all of that behind you and instead just wallow in the artistic booty. For a start, there are at least a dozen museums and palaces worth visiting. Just strolling down the boulevards we came across a beautifully proportioned classical mansion only to discover that it was merely one of two extremities of a huge colonnaded palace which must have had a length of 500 feet.
But the prime purpose of visit has to be the Hermitage. Imagine the Met, Prado and the Vatican Museums all commingled into one and you approach the splendours on display at the Hermitage. My epiphany moment was wandering through high ceiling connected drawing rooms to see dozens of Van Goghs, Matisses and Picassos I never knew existed.
But stretch beyond the obvious and you can find some delightful relics from the Imperial Age, when eager foreigners heaped gifts of all sorts on the Tsars. The most compelling museum, easily visible on the other side of the Neva from the Hermitage, is the Kunstkammer, St Petersburg’s very first museum. The core of the collection is an anatomists nightmare – preserved human freaks that caught Peter the Great’s eye on a tour of Holland, including a hermaphrodite, Siamese twins and a two headed sheep. Peter the Great also generously donated the skeleton and heart of “Bourgeois”, his giant personal servant. This is a cabinet of curiosities run riot.
To see the real gem of the collection, the Gottorf Globe, a discreet “sweetener” has to be made. This was worth the entire journey – the world’s first planetarium which was made in Germany in the Seventeenth Century and turned by water power. Twelve feet in diameter, it has the known world on the outside while inside there is space for several people to sit and look at wonderful maps of the Constellations. The Nazis seized it during the Siege of Leningrad but it was recovered after the war.
We also travelled out to the nearest grand palace, the Peterhof, which lives up to its billing as the Russian Versailles. Apart from the obvious attractions of the gilded ballrooms grottoes, I managed to stumble over a visiting delegation from Pakistan, led by a diplomat I had previously met in Islamabad in the late Eighties. One of the delegation was a brusque Pathan leader who pointed got his arm out of the way when my wife attempted to shake his hand.
Our St Petersburg guide didn’t actually turn up until the day we were leaving but it really isn’t necessary to rely on anything but a first rate guide book. Predictably she took us to the birthplace of the city, the Peter and Paul Cathedral opposite the Hermitage. The glorious golden spire on this Baroque masterpiece is still the highest landmark in the city, but sadly it will soon be overtaken several times over by a monstrous tower to be constructed by the Putin-controlled energy giant Gazprom. The other aspect that I found extremely depressing was how highly educated and intelligent the young people selling remnants of the Soviet empire to passing tourists.
The last Tsar and his murdered family have been reburied at the cathedral in the past few years, which gives it a palpable sense of immediacy – after all, there are still a number of people around who in their extreme youth, would have known them. But my favourite discovery was outside the cathedral near the fortress walls. There, marooned by a workman’s ditch and looking abandoned, is a perfectly preserved Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost in its own large glass case. I was prepared to read on the plinth about another case of the ruling family exploiting the masses with their passion for luxury. But no, this was the last remaining Rolls of a dozen imported into the Soviet Union by Lenin as he wished the Commissars to have the best available transport. I wonder how long it will survive abandoned and forgotten before disappearing into some nameless Oligarchs private collection.
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