In Europe (24 page)

And so I while away my days here, chez Oblomov. At night the temperature drops to around twelve below zero, during the day the sun shines. From my room I have a view of the stone cannons adorning the front of an old munitions plant, and of a brightly lit branch office of the former KGB. The Neva is a wide, white expanse of ice. The sky is a brilliant blue. Children are playing on the canals.

Everyone else is talking about what a rotten winter it has been. In August the city was still lively and bright, then the rouble turned into Monopoly money, after that the weather turned cold, companies went bankrupt, building projects came to a halt, and the birds haven't even started singing yet.

Candles and incense smoulder in the smudgy black vaults of the church nearby. It is full of people, young and old, wrapped up snugly in shawls. A little market has sprung up close to the tiled stove. At least a dozen women have set up a trade in vodka, leeks and assorted obscurities.

In one of the naves, a priest begins chanting. Leaning against a wall are four coffin lids, and now I see the four corpses as well: two emaciated old people and two somewhat younger souls, a man with a pointed face and a skinny woman with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. The women around the stove genuflect from behind their wares. And the winter holds on, it will never end, even though everyone is long exhausted.

My growing attachment to this city and the indolent life at the hotel, I reflect, may have something to do with a deep and fundamental sense of recognition. The last time I was here was about six years ago, and little has changed in the city since. The revolution of Sony, IBM and Head & Shoulders that has been sweeping the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and East Germans along with it since 1989 seems to have got stranded here amid the drab houses and brownish snow. Moscow is where all the money is made on the black market. In St Petersburg the trams are the same weathered wrecks they were then, the potholes in the streets are as deep as ever, the rubbish lies around for a long, long time, and every couple of hundred metres along the street you see someone tinkering with his car. The city is still torn down the middle each evening when the bridges over the Neva are pulled up for a few hours, providing the perfect adulterer's excuse: ‘Sorry, I had to wait for the bridge.’

What
has
disappeared in the last six years is the established order. The
St Petersburg Times
of 16 March, 1999 reports a bank robbery by the pensioner Dmitri Setrakov: during the rouble crisis of August 1998 he lost his entire life savings of $20,000; no one helped him; his last resort was a TOZ-106 hunting rifle. Another article: in the city of Prokopyevsk, three patients in an intensive care ward are in additional mortal danger because
the hospital cannot pay its electricity bill. A whole government apparatus has gone bust here. If my hotel pays any taxes at all, it is to the boss of the shabby guards at the door, a mafia chieftain who runs a little country of his own. Someone recounts the story of the local entrepreneur Sergei M. Like everyone, Sergei pays for protection, for a ‘roof’ as they say here. One day an angry customer came into Sergei's place of business, accompanied by an armed gangster, to demand his money back. Sergei was given permission to call his ‘roof’. Within a few minutes his protector was there in the office, fully armed. The two gangsters talked calmly for a few minutes; it soon turned out that Sergei's roof belonged to a network of patronage within the St Petersburg mafia that ranked higher than the customer's. The case was closed: Sergei was not bothered again.

And so it goes everywhere in this stateless state, even unto the old Singer factory that now houses Dom Knigi, the biggest bookshop in St Petersburg. At Dom Knigi, every department – fiction, non-fiction, children's literature – is watched over by a heavily armed commando, the guardian angel sent by yet another private state. A simple shopping trip in this city leads you from one sovereignty to the next.

The old section of St Petersburg is essentially a frozen metropolis from 1917, with the same doors and decorated house fronts, the same street lamps and the same graceful bridges. The only difference with 1917 is that all of this is eighty years older now and a great deal more ramshackle, for there has never been money for maintenance or restoration. But on the other hand, where else does one find a city where money was no object for two whole centuries, a city that was moulded by the best European architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then more or less forgotten?

The communist leaders who came later focused all their razing and renewal on Moscow. They did not like Leningrad, and that was the salvation of the beautiful banks of the Neva, the lovely, low ochre-yellow buildings and Nevsky Prospect, which today looks much as it did in Gogol's day, except that little is left of the ‘carnivalesque atmosphere’, the ‘cheerful carriages’ and the ‘spotlessly clean sidewalks’.

The history of St Petersburg reflects the relationship between Russia and Europe. And, by association, it also reflects the gulf between the
Russian state and the Russian people, which grew wider and went on growing until it finally became unbridgeable.

St Petersburg itself, like Vienna, like Berlin, reflects the dream of an old dynasty, with all the accompanying peculiarities. But St Petersburg has much more going for it. The city, after all, was designed and built as a grand attempt to force a change in the course and the thinking of a semi-medieval nation. That ambition, that evangelical message, can be seen on the streets and buildings everywhere, even today. The physical forms have something overly deliberate about them, like a caricature of nineteenth-century Europe. The palaces here are more exuberant than anywhere else, the boulevards wider than any I have seen, the opulence is that of the parvenu. Here reigns, as the Marquis de Custine once wrote, a typical ‘façade culture’, one ‘without roots in history or in the Russian soil, an apparent order, like a veil thrown over the Asiatic barbarism’.

St Petersburg symbolises the continuing identity crisis of this huge empire to Europe's east: who are we really, where do we want to belong? ‘Of course we're Europeans,’ say the two schoolgirls I speak to briefly on Nevsky Prospect. But at the same time they talk excitedly about their upcoming holiday ‘to Europe’, as though that were some far-off and exotic world.

A friend of a friend grants me a taste of the atmosphere of the palace that once belonged to Felix Yusupov, the nobleman who later murdered the seer Grigori Rasputin. I am even allowed a peek at the room and the untidy garden where it all happened. Yusopov, an Oxford graduate, was ‘merely’ married to the czar's niece, yet the palace has the size and the allure of the residences of a Western European potentate. Aristocrats like Yusopov did absolutely nothing at all, but until 1914 were the reigning European champions at the noble art of wasting money. The notes I make during the visit are punctuated solely with exclamation marks. The Turkish bath! The Jugendstil dining room! The prince did not have much time to enjoy it, however: in 1917 he fled head over heels to Paris, where he died at a ripe old age in the 1960s. I take a peek at his private theatre: a complete miniature Bolshoi, a chocolate box lined with red velvet, with every last accoutrement, exclusively for the prince and his guests.

Like his cousin Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II felt a strong bond with his English kin. The czar was married to Queen Victoria's granddaughter,
spoke English like a Cambridge don, cultivated public-school manners and was known as ‘the most civil man in Europe’. At the same time, he aspired to the status of a true Russian czar, the absolute ruler over a vast, semi-Asiatic empire.

And just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Nicholas preferred living in a past of his own making. He intended his dynasty to remain a beacon in the uncertain days of modernisation and democratisation. Many of the glorious façades of St Petersburg's eighteenth-century palaces were replaced, with the czar's approval, with new ones in a hotchpotch of neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque or ‘pre-modern Gothic’ styles. In that way, too, the city resembled Berlin; the nouveau riche left their mark on both cities with identical conviction.

The reign of Nicholas II began under a bad sign. A few days after his coronation, during the traditional distribution of cake and beverages, he watched as 1,400 people were trampled to death in the crowd. In 1881 – Nicholas was thirteen at the time – his relatively liberal grandfather Alexander II was murdered in his carriage by ‘nihilistic’ revolutionaries. That was the first, and perhaps the seminal, turning point in modern Russian history. After that, moderate reformers could accomplish almost nothing. The second was the popular rebellion of 1905. The third and pivotal change was the Bolshevik coup of 1917.

Ten years after the death of Alexander II, the country was racked by unparalleled famine. The czarist regime could not do a thing. Countless well-to-do volunteers went to the countryside to help the suffering farmers, and for many of them the contrast between the grinding poverty of the farmers and the regime's shortsighted arrogance came as a shock. In 1894, Alexander III, a reactionary mogul, died unexpectedly of a kidney ailment. His son Nicholas had to assume power whether he liked it or not.

Kaiser Wilhelm, despite his conservatism, was thoroughly interested in all forms of modern technology, but Nicholas was obsessed with seventeenth-century fantasies. The role he wished to play fitted neither his age nor his person. He yearned for absolute power over an empire, but at the same time lacked the vision and skills needed for such a position. To make matters worse he did not even realise that he lacked those talents, or that Russia was actually in need of very different qualities
indeed. His greatest achievement came in 1913: the pompous celebration of 300 years of the Romanov dynasty. It was one, great nostalgic cry for a non-existent past.

During those same years, Russian literacy rose from twenty per cent in 1897 to forty per cent in 1914. Between 1860 and 1914, the number of university students grew from 5,000 to nearly 70,000, and the number of Russian newspapers from 13 to more than 850. Even the Russian
miri
, the village communes of peasant farmers, were opening up to the real world. But Nicholas had no eye for any of that.

On Sunday, 9 January, 1905, his soldiers opened fire on a praying, kneeling crowd in St Petersburg. About 200 people were killed, hundreds more were wounded. The myth of ‘Papa Czar’ was shattered and the Russian people were furious, riots and disturbances broke out everywhere. Some 3,000 rural estates were looted. From the famous steps at the quayside in Odessa, soldiers fired on a crowd that was demonstrating in support of mutineers on the battleship
Potemkin
. More than 2,000 people were killed: shot, trampled or drowned. In late 1905, a revolt in Moscow was crushed at the last moment.

A czarist countermovement arose: anti-liberal, anti-socialist, and above all anti-Semitic. Some 700 pogroms took place across Russia in the fall of 1905. In Odessa 800 Jews were murdered, more than 100,000 lost their homes. And rightly so, according to the czar. ‘Nine out of every ten of the troublemakers were Jews,’ he wrote contentedly to his mother on 27 October, 1905. To him, the pogroms were a clear demonstration of what an enraged crowd of loyal subjects could do: ‘They encircle the houses where the revolutionaries have sought refuge, set them on fire and kill everyone who tries to escape.’

In 1905, the Russian Army was called in to crush a total of 720 major and minor revolts. An estimated 15,000 ‘politicals’ were executed, 45,000 sent into exile or to prison. Tens of thousands of farmers were flogged, hundreds of thousands of huts were put to the torch.

A Russian friend of mine knew a very old woman who spent time in prison in those days. Her family sent her books, wrapped in white bread. ‘The guards brought them to her, watched as she unpacked the books – she pounced on them right away – and were all too happy to receive the bread in return.’

In due course the czar announced a few reforms, but retracted them just as quickly. A new sense of uncertainty took hold of the moneyed classes. For the first time, the bourgeoisie had witnessed the destructive rage of millions of poverty-stricken Russians. And, after the violent repression of the revolts, the bitterness only increased. More than ever the farmers became aware of their own utter powerlessness and poverty, the strikes in the cities grew in frequency and intensity, the intellectuals began taking part as well, and a growing number of key administrators became disgusted with the rigid czarist court.

Around the courtyards of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the citadel built by Peter the Great in 1703, one can still visit the dungeons in which revolutionaries were held in those days. A survey of those imprisoned here reads like a roll of honour: there were Decabrists, nihilists, populists, Marxists, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and, later, more Menshevik prisoners of the Bolsheviks, along with priests and royalists. By 1917 the average Bolshevik activist had spent four years in prison, an active Menshevik five. The rest of Europe had long embraced the liberal motto of ‘that which is not forbidden is allowed’, but in Russia it was just the opposite: ‘all that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.’

For many years, the final souvenir of that famous April night in 1917 stood before the Lenin Musuem: the antique armoured car in which Lenin was driven from Finland Station to Kshesinskaya Palace. Today both museum and armoured car have disappeared. In their stead, pride of place has now been given to the old equestrian statue of Czar Alexander III, an implacable bronze giant on a horse with legs like pillars, a caricature of the ponderous rigour of the czarist autocracy. The statue was so preposterous that the Bolsheviks only bothered to have it removed in the 1930s. The saying had it that the sculptor, Pavel Trubetskov, was not at all interested in politics, but had merely wished to portray ‘one animal atop another’. The citizens of Petrograd laughed about that.

St Petersburg was obviously not the ideal capital for the last of the Romanovs. Their hearts lay further to the east and south; Moscow was the city of the Russian past, of devout farmers who bowed to church and czar. The ministries and palaces of St Petersburg were reminiscent of
Paris or Rome, the city itself had European leanings, and no Orthodox Church could compete with that.