ST. PETERSBURG - Peter the Great built St. Petersburg to prove that a Russian city could be as beautiful and highbrow as any Western European capital. The result is something that must have looked particularly bizarre to 18th-century Europe: a pretty Italian town on steroids. The city still has its charms, as a TBT writer discovered on a recent trip during the White Nights.
Day 1
The trip begins with a visit to the SS Peter and Paul Cathedral, where the Romanovs are buried. The cathedral stands at the center of the Peter and Paul Fortress, a large construction that once housed such prisoners as Dostoevsky, Trotsky and Peter the Great's wayward son, Alexei. Compared to other Czarist splendor and churches in the city, the cathedral is just a lot of gilt in bad taste, intriguing for the fact that it is so unimpressive. The graves are no more than a collection of large marble blocks, a chilling reminder that in death we are all equal. The fortress itself looks like any banal third world construction. Sunbathers, looking out onto the Neva River, line its borders.
Day 2
The marshrutka, or mini-bus, to Tsarskoe Selo, is crowded with old women, forcing a young soldier to stand, with his back bent as his hat keeps hitting the bus roof. A woman offers to hold his hat in her lap and he smiles and thanks her. Eventually he gets a seat to himself, where he takes off his jacket and loosens his green tie. It's in the lower thirties Celsius today.
Catherine the Great built quite a few kitschy buildings in her time on the grounds of her palace at Tsarskoe Selo, some of it still in good shape, some of it not. There are the remnants of what was once recognizable as a life-size replica of a Chinese theater. The place is more democratic than aristocratic now. At a pond some meters away, a group of teenagers strip down to their briefs and go for a dip to escape the Homeric heat.
At Metro, a remarkably clean, well-lit student bar, I meet a group of 18- and 19-year-old kids. "Is everyone in America stupid like they say in the press?" There are stupid people everywhere, including Russia, aren't there? "True. We get all this propaganda that we don't know what to believe…Do Americans hate Russians?" It has nothing to do with you're people. We just don't like your government. "Why?" Well, Putin is undermining fledgling democracies all over your border, destroying the free press and raping the Chechens. (Pause.) "Well, what about Iraq?" Iraq is pretty bad. (Longer pause.) "Actually we don't like our government either. At least I don't."
Day 3
An enormous crowd mobs Leonardo's "Benois Madonna" (1478) and "Madonna Litta" (1490), two small striking canvases that enjoy pride of place on the second floor of the large Hermitage. Tour guides shout at everybody not to use flash photography, which everybody ignores. Did somebody mention Dan Brown?
While walking in Park Pobedy at 11:30 p.m., which is still daylight hours during the White Nights, I get stopped by two policemen. From different places in my wallet and bicycle bag I pull out the business card from my hostel, my passport, and the white registration document I was handed when I first crossed the border. One of the policeman, a short man with particularly thick eyebrows, folds the registration document in half and carefully places it, along with the business card, in the passport. He hands it back to me and wishes me a good night.
Day 4
I forego the advertised tour and decide to take a walk, on my own, around the area where Dostoevsky lived in the 1860s and where he set "Crime and Punishment." There's the place where Raskolnikov supposedly lived 's the line between reality and fiction is terribly blurred 's but none of the tenants allow me past the security-locked iron gates. Haymarket, which in the novel is filled with demonic drunks, thieves and prostitutes, underwent a huge facelift a few years ago in preparation for the city's 300th anniversary. It's a loud place, but relatively tame, without much Dostoevskyan menace left. There's a baby with a bad rash across its face in a stroller. An old woman takes out a dumpling from the soup she keeps in a thermos to feed a street cat with a bad eye infection.
The Lonely Planet mentions Chocolate Museum, a kitschy store where you can buy a bust of Lenin made out of white chocolate for 3,000 rubles (88 euros). The shop employs black doormen dressed in eighteenth century finery, which the book calls "a typically Russian idea of humor that will misfire with most Westerners." The book does not mention that the doormen 's here's one fingering a wad of 50-ruble notes 's make a pretty good living having their pictures taken with tourists. Sometimes racism can be profitable.
A small military shop tucked in a cove on the far end of Nevsky Prospekt is a child's dream. The proprietor is honest to a fault. "I got these medals from a man who said they were authentic. But if they were I wouldn't be selling them for six dollars, but hundreds." I tell him about my run-in with the police the night before. "Of course, they stopped you. You have black hair and a beard and your clothes aren't very nice. You look like you're from the Northern Caucasus." (A few other Russians I mention the incident to in the following days corroborate his claims. That said, everybody seems to get stopped by cops at some point in Russia.) I buy a light green soldier shirt that's just a half-inch too big for me along the shoulders and about an inch too big at the sleeves.
A group of teenagers drinking beer at Park Pobedy invites me over to join them. They find out I'm a foreigner. "We're skinheads. Hitler good." Really? "No, just kidding."
Day 5
A search to find the oak tree Peter the Great planted on Kamenny Island 300 years ago proves fruitless. "They took it down a few years ago," a local says. "They're planting a new one."
Day 6
A Russian man wakes me up at 6:30 a.m. to complain that someone has taken the sheets off his bed in the hostel. He lives in the city, works nights here, and stays in the hostel because it's cheap. "Who did this?" I don't know. "It was the black man who was staying here I think." He's not black, I say. He's dark-skinned. He's from Belgium. And, without missing a beat, the Belgian walks in. "Did you steal my sheets?" The Belgian, slightly drunk, doesn't realize this may be a good time to apologize.
I meet a group of German expatriates, including a social worker who lives in Moscow. "I love my job. I work with old Russian woman who lived through World War II. They're in their nineties. They're really nice to me, even though, you know, the Germans did bad things here. And I work with HIV positive children. They're very sweet." We spend that night, the shortest night of the year, walking the streets of St. Petersburg. A teenager runs his hand over the eternal flame in Mars Field, which memorializes the victims of the 1917 Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. We sit on the banks of the Nevsky River and admire the well-lit Peter and Paul Cathedral from afar.
Day 7
Returning to the hostel at 7 a.m., I see the drunk Belgian asleep on the stairs outside, clutching his two duffel bags tight to his body. No one inside can give me a straight answer of what happened to him the night before. When I get to my room, I find someone has taken the sheets off my bed too. I go to the reception and complain.
