Sixty Degrees North (20 page)

A little later, sitting in a café downstairs with my breakfast, I watched them go by, hunched and huddled against the rain. I had no umbrella myself and no particular desire to get wet, and so I waited, sipping my coffee, then washing it down with apple cake. From the rooftops outside, enormous metal drainpipes were slung like elephants' trunks, water gushing onto the pavement below. In the street, trams and trolleybuses rattled past on their wires and rails. Cars fizzed over the wet tarmac. Everything on Nevsky Prospekt was moving.

This street is the most famous thoroughfare in the country. It was also one of the city's first, begun in 1712. It runs more or less west to east, beginning at the Admiralty building on the banks of the Neva and running three miles towards Uprising Square. Some of Petersburg's most distinctive buildings lie along this street: the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, with its sweeping arc of Corinthian columns; the sprawling arcade of Gostiny Dvor; the Stroganov Palace, built in 1753. Here, as elsewhere in the city, an extraordinary array of colours can be found, some earthy, some rich, some garish. The stone buildings are painted lime sorbet green, pastel blue, sweet salmon pink, the yellow of fallen birch leaves. There are colours here that I have seen nowhere else before or since.

Over the past two decades, the commercial accoutrements of every other large street in northern Europe have arrived on Nevsky Prospekt and made it home. Designer shops, identikit cafés, sushi bars and expensive restaurants all jostle for attention. Window displays compete to draw customers in from outside. It is hard to imagine now, amid all this human noise and commotion, that for a long time the city's rulers struggled to wrestle this place from the wilderness
out of which it had grown. Right through to the mid-eighteenth century, deer and wild boar were hunted around Nevsky Prospekt (then known as the Great Perspective Road) and the last reported wolf attack on a person was as late as 1819.

When the rain subsided later that morning, I set off to wander the city's streets. And for days on end I did the same thing: breakfasted and then walked, usually without route or destination in mind. When it was damp I went inside, to museums or galleries, or I travelled the metro from station to station. I took a boat trip though the canals to see things from another angle, and several times I stood inside churches and cathedrals – places of incense and gold and genuflection – where bowls brimmed with donated coins, and where, on one occasion, the glorious sound of a choir hung above the congregation's bowed heads like the proof of a better world to come.

On a day when the drizzle would not lift, I wandered until evening through the Hermitage Museum, overwhelmed by the rooms themselves as much as by the artworks they contained. The high ceilings were adorned with frescoes, gilded cornicing and enormous chandeliers of crystal and gold. There were walls of deep forest green and crimson, pillars of marble and of malachite, shining parquet floors. It seemed almost obscene, this concentration of wealth and splendour. There was something surreal about it all, something too perfect and controlled to be true. I felt awed and uneasy as I passed, room by room, through the Winter Palace. Such beauty, such luxury, such order. This city is truly the opposite of the swamp on which it stands. Which of course was Peter's intention all along.

On other days, without a watch or a phone with which to tell the time, I walked for hours, until my legs and back were sore, enjoying the absence of a schedule. I stopped to eat when I was hungry, or to rest my feet in a café, and
sometimes I learned the hour by checking my receipt. But mostly I didn't even look. Joseph Brodsky wrote of St Petersburg that, ‘There is something in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly flowing, departing water that instils in one's soles an almost sensual desire for walking.' I felt that desire and I kept going, returning to my little room only when it was dark. And as I lay down and tried to sleep at night, the city went on living and breathing, shouting itself hoarse outside my window.

As the days passed, I began to find new routes through the city. Ducking off the main streets, through gates and under archways, I found myself in what felt like other worlds – spaces quite apart from the commotion outside. Many of the residential buildings here were created with courtyards in the centre, where stables and servants' quarters would once have been. Some of these spaces are small and claustrophobic, others are light and open. Virtually all are accessible from both sides, offering an endlessly diverse means of crossing from street to street. On stepping in to these courtyards, the sound of traffic is immediately softened, and sometimes, when one yard leads through narrow passageways into second and third yards, something close to silence can be found.

At first I explored cautiously, like a trespasser. But as the days passed I found myself seeking out these places. This was a secret world, to which visitors were not invited. Here, cats padded through the shadows, and old men stood chatting with their neighbours. Sometimes there would be columns of ivy covering the walls, or a solitary tree reaching up towards a square of grey sky. Here and there were cafés and guest houses, sometimes shops and small businesses. In one cramped yard I found an umbrella-repair workshop housed in a ground-floor flat, with a tiny window for customers to knock. Once these areas would have been rundown and dirty, and a few still are. They were the secret, squalid heart
of the city. But today the seclusion and quiet they offer is, to many, as attractive as the coloured facades behind which they hide.

From high above, on the colonnade of St Isaac's Cathedral, you can see the true extent of these courtyards. They stretch across the city like a vast labyrinth of calm, secreted among the buildings. A huge swathe of St Petersburg is concealed like this, off the streets and off the map.

Above ground, there are the courtyards; below, the tunnels and stations of the metro. Down there, in rattling carriages, I saw lovers kissing, old women laughing, and young boys in military uniform, accompanied by their mothers. The stations, built deep beneath the surface, were called ‘people's palaces' in Soviet times, and their opulence is striking. Intricate designs, mosaics, statues: they ape and mirror the grandeur above ground. Exploring these hidden places, I began to see the city expanding and revealing itself, like a set of Russian dolls, one within the other.

So much of this place has been hidden. Though it was conceived as a perfect city, it seems today like a kind of Oz, where curtain covers curtain and mask hides mask. This St Petersburg once was Leningrad, once was Petrograd, once more was Petersburg. But that most recent name change was not so much a return or unveiling as the latest in a long series of cover-ups.

Over the centuries, it is not just the city that has changed its name, but streets and squares and buildings and bridges. Time and again they have been retitled and reinvented. Petersburg has been viewed by the country's leaders as an unfixed thing, a place that can be shaped and altered to the needs of the day. The most aggressive of these leaders, of course, were the Soviets, who tried to alter not just names but history too. They tore down churches or put them to new use. With sledgehammer irony, St Isaac's Cathedral was converted into a museum of atheism, while the Old
Believers Church of St Nicholas was turned into a museum of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Inside, paintings and photographs of frozen landscapes now adorn the walls and ceiling. Religious icons have been replaced by dioramas and the clergy swapped for stuffed penguins and polar bears.

The communists built statues, then took them down again. They created monuments to selective memory, and to the terrible absence of doubt. And yet today, Stalin, who did so much to mould the history of this place, has in turn been hidden. The many tributes to him that once stood around the city now are gone. His face, so perfectly familiar, is now hard to find. Yet he is still there, walking the streets unseen. Concealed beneath shirts, on the chests of many older men, are tattoos of that face, tattoos which once would have demonstrated loyalty or perhaps offered protection against the firing squad, and which now exist only in mirrors and in the eyes of wives and loved ones.

Within the people of this city are millions of lifetimes of memories, and within those memories are the secrets that might once have led to exile or death, and which now are kept only out of habit. Those secrets are the dreams and nightmares of the city, what it was, what it is now and what it might have been. Millions of Petersburgs, of Leningrads, of Petrograds: fragments of the place, each no greater or lesser than the other. And beneath it all is the swampy ground and the broad, brown river.

In the city centre, looking out over the Neva, is a statue that is more than a statue. Unveiled in 1782 and dedicated from Catherine the Great to Peter the Great, the figure known as the Bronze Horseman has come to symbolise the city itself, the fate of one entangled forever with the fate of the other. As grand and imposing as one would expect from a monument such as this, the statue shows Peter atop a rearing
steed, towering over all onlookers. He wears a toga and a laurel wreath, and beneath the hooves of his horse is a snake, symbolising evil and the nation's enemies. Designed by the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet, the statue took sixteen years to complete, and the single piece of rippled granite it stands upon, weighing more than 1,500 tonnes, was dragged much of the way here by thousands of soldiers, a few agonising metres a day.

The story of the cursed city, and the natural and human disasters that have repeatedly threatened to make that curse come true, have echoed through Petersburg's three centuries. And for much of that time, this figure has been part of that story. Most famously, in one of Russia's best-known poems, Alexander Pushkin cemented the connection between statue and city, and cemented too the ambiguous place that both Peter and Petersburg have occupied in the national imagination. ‘The Bronze Horseman' was written in 1833 and is largely set in the great flood that took place nine years earlier. It opens with a standard, mythologised account of the city's beginnings, admiring how this ‘lovely wonder of the North' rose ‘From darkest woods and swampy earth'. The poem then turns to the eve of the flood itself, when the river ‘stormed and seethed' and, ‘like a savage beast, leapt at / The city'. Here we meet the central character, a poor clerk named Yevgeny, who seeks out his fiancée's house only to find it destroyed by the rising water. The girl and her family have disappeared. Distraught, he wanders the city for months, never again returning home. In part two, set a year or more after the flood, we find Yevgeny stood before Peter's statue, with ‘a tightness in his chest' and a ‘boiling in his blood'. Enraged, he shouts at the tsar and then runs away in terror, while behind him, ‘One arm flung out on high, full speed, / Comes the Bronze Horseman in his flight'. Yevgeny is pursued through the night by the living statue.

This is a poem riddled with tensions, ironies and contradictions. On the one hand it glorifies Peter and his creation, while on the other it paints him as a tyrant, trampling the ordinary man. Yevgeny, we are told, is the ‘hero' of the story, but Yevgeny is mad, pathetic and, by the end of the poem, lies dead. Is the real hero not Peter, the great emperor, who made this city and saved the nation with his strength and guile?

For his contemporaries, Pushkin's choice of setting would have made these tensions clearer still, since this square was the location of the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825 (the year in which the poem's dramatic conclusion is also set). On that occasion, three thousand soldiers and officers assembled in an effort to stop Nicholas I from taking the throne after the death of his brother Tsar Alexander. These rebels sought a more liberal, freer Russia, with improved conditions for their ordinary countrymen. It was a cause with which the poet sympathised, and his closest friends were among the insurgents. Pushkin himself would have been there, as he later told the tsar, had he not already been in exile at the time. But the coup was a disaster. More than a thousand of those who gathered in the square were shot by troops loyal to Nicholas. Of those who survived, many were sent to Siberia, and five of the ringleaders were hanged. Political repression in the country worsened under the new tsar as a direct result, and Yevgeny's shout of anger in ‘The Bronze Horseman' echoed, if not directly paralleled, the Decembrists' own ultimately futile protest. And so statue and city were entwined, and in literature as in life Petersburg took on a dual character: both Paradise and Hell, both doomed and fated for glory. This duality, as Pushkin and others recognised, came straight from the character of its founder. They were the embodiment of Peter's own contradictions: hero and villain, wise ruler and merciless despot.

Peter the Great was a giant of a man, literally and metaphorically. At over six foot seven, with legendary strength
and stamina, he was physically imposing. He was intelligent and brave – fearless, even – and he laid the foundations not just for this city but for the modern Russian state. Through his wisdom, skill and acuity, Russia was turned from a backward country into a significant and influential European empire. But Peter was also a profoundly strange person, cruel and sadistic. He took pleasure in tormenting prisoners – among them his own son Aleksey, whom he personally tortured for the young man's alleged patricidal intentions. The tsar was highly skilled in many trades, including carpentry and shipbuilding, but his hobbies also included dentistry, and Peter would regularly remove teeth from courtiers for his own amusement, then store these tiny trophies for posterity. He was cultured, and a bringer of Enlightenment values – he built the world's first public museum and founded the Academy of Sciences, as well as Russia's first library and school for non-nobles – but he was also an old-fashioned autocrat, utterly convinced of his own infallibility.