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  ST. PETERSBURG

  Art, Desire, and Murder on the Banks of the Neva

  JONATHAN MILES

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  for Katiu

  CONTENTS

  1 Twilight on the Nevsky – 1993

  PART I EMPERORS 1698–1825

  2 Havoc in London

  3 Dangerous Acceleration

  4 Oblivion and Rebirth

  5 Dancing, Love-Making, Drink

  6 The City Transformed

  7 Madness, Murder and Insurrection

  PART II SUBJECTS 1825–1917

  8 A New Kind of Cold

  9 Discontent

  10 Dancing on the Edge

  11 Dazzle and Despair

  PART III COMRADES & CITIZENS 1917–2017

  12 Red Petrograd

  13 A City Diminished

  14 Darkest and Finest Hour

  15 Murmurs from the Underground

  16 Broken Window onto the West

  17 Mirage – 2017

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations Insert

  Index

  ST. PETERSBURG

  Stories circulate about about a man born in St Petersburg, who grew up in Petrograd, who grew old in Leningrad and was asked where he’d like to die.

  He replied, ‘St Petersburg.’

  1

  TWILIGHT ON THE NEVSKY

  1993

  In October 1917, a blank fired from the battleship Aurora signalled the start of the Russian Revolution. Three-quarters of a century have passed and, once again, there is chaos and change. It is an eerie 3 a.m. on a summer’s morning in 1993. I am standing on a balcony overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, the once-great avenue of the once-great city of St Petersburg. There is something surreal about the perpetual twilight of these so-called ‘White Nights’. The French novelist Alexandre Dumas, visiting the capital at the height of its glory, suggested that, at such a moment, the silence makes you wonder if you ‘hear the angels sing or God speak’.1 For me, there are no angels, and the silence is disturbed by the rattle of antique traffic. When Dumas wrote, the splendid metropolis was a powerful magnet for the greatest European architects, writers and thinkers. In the early 1990S, having flourished for much of its 300-year history, St Petersburg is visibly crumbling. The street below me is potholed, the façades on the far side of the Prospekt are cracked, their stucco flaked and their windows mired. There is no money or any adequate agency to protect and care for a city created as a spectacular setting for its own great drama. After three riveting acts – 1703–1825, 1825–1917 and 1917–1991 – I wonder if this is the final curtain.

  I look down on a scatter of thugs as they swiftly close in on a well-dressed man and beat him up. People on the street shuffle by. Somewhere a shot rings out. Another. It strikes me as odd that a city whose past has been dominated by the struggle between the revolutionary intellectual and repressive authority should now resemble a lawless frontier town – but maybe it always has. The deft hoods leave their victim in a heap. Nobody seems to care. As the man tries to stagger up, I can’t help thinking that violence is endemic to the city. It was conceived in violence as the capital of a new Russia – an attempt to yank the country from its isolated past by a megalomaniac Europhile. Peter the Great set his will not only against nature, but also against the practices of a vast country stretching from the borders of Poland and Germany across almost 13,000 kilometres of northern Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Although it was sited on Russia’s western edge, Peter’s ‘window onto Europe’ has been slammed shut again and again, the city abandoned to tyranny and coercion, the spirit of the population perpetually torn between extravagant hope and hopeless deprivation. Even in the first years of the twentieth century – when the city centre was bright with bourgeois opulence – the five-kilometre stretch of the Nevsky Prospekt, from the magnificent government buildings at the historical heart of the capital to the muddy slums on its outskirts, dramatised the persistent gulf between dazzling wealth and dire poverty and between the new and old Russia. St Petersburg is both confrontational and contradictory.

  Compare the swift creation of its magnificent physical structure – an architectural and engineering achievement unparalleled in modern times – with the sloth of a paralysing bureaucracy that stifled the lives, but not the souls, of its inhabitants. The city is schizophrenic: pushed and pulled by dramatic changes of identity and name. It has been expeditionary, imperial, enlightened, repressive, dissolute, revolutionary, communist and chaotic. It has been called St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and, once again, St Petersburg. On this visit, I can see that whatever joy the inhabitants feel in shaking off the yoke of seventy-five years of communist rule is negated by the material difficulties of a society unprepared for radical change. That is typical St Petersburg time-warp – politically, everything happens too quickly or too slowly and the population is left stranded. The frustrations that compromise innovation, and the recurring and unresolved tensions, make the story of Petersburg as maddening as it is exciting.

  As the sun rises on another difficult day I go down onto the Nevsky Prospekt, on which so much of St Petersburg’s history has occurred. The Nevsky is the central nervous system of the city. There has been no greater display of its modernity. By 1830, it had become the most important avenue, the longest, widest and best-lit thoroughfare. In its heyday the Nevsky was a polyglot consumer showcase. Sadly, as I walk down the Nevsky in the dying years of the revolutionary twentieth century, I see broken cars and abandoned trucks shrouded by muck left from the late-spring thaw. And yet strange new illuminations glint through the stagnation of this brown-wrapped world: an aluminium hamburger stand, with its acid lights, breaks the neoclassical decorum of Arts Square. The logos of Lancôme, L’Oréal and Baskin-Robbins shine through the gloomy dawn, hinting at the shape of things to come. Although ten years on there will be a surge of confidence in the rouble, in 1993 these Western consumer outposts only tease the population with dreams. The Philips shop trades solely in dollars, and a middle-range hi-fi costs what an average citizen earns in many months. A supermarket on the Nevsky Prospekt fronted with garish neon, and filled inside with rows of glaring white freezers, has only apples for sale. The queue and the empty shelf are the two givens of any shopping trip – just as they were under communism. It is tragic to see how one of the world’s great social thoroughfares is so broken. But this new dawn is only a moment in the story of the swift rise, difficult life, rapid decay and agonised rebirth of the glorious city of St Petersburg. The vandalised phone kiosk that I pass is a witness to what must be the defining notion of this city: absurdity. When you can find a booth that is not battered into oblivion, you discover that the public telephone takes a fifteen-kopek piece. But fifteen-kopek pieces are scarce and can only be obtained from cunning racketeers for fifty times their face value.2 The closer you get to what passes for normal in St Petersburg, the more irrational the place becomes. The writer Nikolai Gogol knew this. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich contended with it. There was folly in the choice of the site. There was madness in the excesses and fetishes of its early rulers. And yet, if you look at a plan of St Petersburg, there is logic. There is order. There is intention.

  In 1839, the Marquis de Custine observed that St Petersburg was undoubtedly one of the wonders of the world, and yet, it was a folly without measure – a Greek city improvised for Tartars like some theatre set, a site where hordes of peasants camped in shacks ‘around a pile of ancient temples’.3 This juxtaposition of order and chaos was a source of great tension in the nineteenth century and a major theme in the literature of that period. St Petersburg writers created the figure of
the ‘little man’ adrift, struggling against the injustices of officialdom. In the shadowy, post-communist city, it is once again the ordinary, honest citizen who is suffering. On my previous trip – just after the break-up of the Soviet Union – I happened upon impromptu markets where desperate people tried to sell one shoe, one boot, a lock without a key, a key without a lock. When I talked to dancers from the Mariinsky Theatre, they attributed a decline in the standard of their performances to worthless wages and malnutrition. The market was de-regulated at the beginning of 1992 and prices doubled, then trebled. For vast sectors of the population with no access to hard currency, the situation became extreme. The problem of under-developed modernisation, which had assailed the population for 300 years, was still – in a newly reincarnated St Petersburg – claiming innumerable victims.

  Continuing down the Nevsky Prospekt, I step into the underpass by Gostiny Dvor metro station. Some buskers are punching out ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. Only years before, such freedom was forbidden. But accompanying such vital performances are wildly misguided visions of life in the glittering, gilded West; St Petersburg is – and always has been – a city in which dreams are big, and information and truth are in short supply. I spoke to a friend who, as a child, had been sent with her school choir to sing in Kiev soon after the Chernobyl disaster. When they returned to what was then Leningrad, the children were told simply to throw away their shoes. Restriction of information – the chilling scale of official secrecy – runs through the history of the city and has given rise to a rich and dynamic underground culture.

  I walk into the heart of historical Petersburg on the banks of the Neva, where I am struck by the majesty of the Admiralty and the Headquarters of the General Staff – buildings which remind me that Peter the Great’s original intention was to build a fort to protect a port. But the siting of a naval and trading base on the banks of a river that freezes up for eight months every year was absurd or, perhaps, desperate. Craving access to the Baltic trade route, Peter situated his new capital on Russia’s vulnerable north-western frontier. The risk was at once made obvious by the Great Northern War against Sweden, which disturbed the first years of the city’s construction.

  As I stand before the magnificent parabola of official buildings that embraces Palace Square, I am reminded of what the French writer André Gide said when he visited in 1936: ‘In Leningrad it is St Petersburg that I admire.’4 I glance across at the turquoise, gilt and white façade of the Winter Palace, where the 1917 Revolution began – a historical ‘moment’ emasculated by the ease with which the revolutionaries entered the building. The only shooting in Palace Square, observed the poet Joseph Brodsky, was done by Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in his celebration of the Revolution: October5

  Between 1711 and 1917 the Winter Palace, in one or other of its incarnations, has been the residence of so many larger-than-life personalities – epic figures who played their extravagant part in the folly and bravura of St Petersburg: the impulsive and despotic founder, Peter the Great; the indolent and sadistic Anna I; the hedonistic Elizabeth I; the culturally and sexually voracious Catherine the Great; mad Paul I; repressive Nicholas I. Add to these rulers the subversive writers Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky; the flamboyant showman Sergei Diaghilev; the disturbed dancer Vaslav Nijinsky; the priest-turned-celebrity-protester Father Gapon; the pilgrim-turned-debauched-con-man Rasputin; the uncompromising revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Add to those the many writers, artists and musicians whose innovative and often-preposterous creations have captured the spirit of an improbable capital in which a resilient and resistant population has battled every kind of adversity. Beyond this incredible cast of extraordinary characters stands the grandest and most interesting of them all: the awe-inspiring, dysfunctional city itself, risen from the mists and – at this point in 1993 – in danger of sinking into the mire.

  PART I

  EMPERORS

  1698–1825

  2

  HAVOC IN LONDON

  1698

  Wearing simple clothing, he left his diplomatic ‘Great Embassy’ when it reached the Rhine, boarded a small boat and sailed towards Zaandam on the Ij. At the beginning of a grand adventure that would change his nation’s destiny, he was nearing that Dutch port on a Sunday in mid-August 1698, when he suddenly yelled across the water at a man spending quiet hours with his eel traps. Disturbed by such sudden, wild clamouring, Gerrit Kist glanced up from his catch, astonished to see his old master – tsar of that distant and exotic country, Russia – dressed in working man’s clothes and sailing a humble skiff. Kist had worked as a blacksmith for Tsar Peter in Moscow and was, at once, sworn to secrecy: the tsar was travelling to Zaandam disguised as a simple artisan to learn the Dutch manner of shipbuilding from the keel up.1

  Motivated by his urge to understand how things worked, the two-metre-tall twenty-six-year-old tsar shunned pomp and ceremony. His Great Embassy, headed by his unquenchable drinking buddy François Lefort, acted as a decoy. As the Russians crossed Europe, Lefort drew the diplomatic heat, leaving Peter free to satisfy his curiosity. But for all his precaution, the tsar’s purpose and reputation preceded him. In England, the Bishop of Salisbury spoke of ‘a mighty Northern Emperor’ who, ‘to raise his Nation, and enlarge his Empire . . . comes to learn the best methods of doing it’.2 And there were other, less flattering impressions coming out of Moscow. The tsar, it seemed, forced nobles to skid, bare-arsed, on the ice. He enjoyed seeing his favourites shoot at one another. He was delighted by the sight of houses burning and by fireworks and other explosions. During Svyatki – or Yuletide – Peter forced ‘the fattest Lords’ to sledge over cracks in the ice where many tumbled into the freezing water and drowned.3 Prince Kuratkin, later the Russian Ambassador to Holland, recalled how Peter and his friends stuck a candle in Prince Volkonsky’s anus and chanted prayers over him. They ‘tarred and pitched people and made them stand on their heads’. On one occasion they ‘used a bellows to pump air into Ivan Akakievich’s colon’, horseplay which resulted in the man’s immediate death. Such scenes – worthy of Brueghel or Bosch suggest a world of carnivalesque irreverence, a world turned upside down. Maslenitsa, the Butter Week revelry preceding Lent, was a time when people abandoned themselves to the devil, in a gluttonous obliteration of winter.4 It was a festival celebrated with a merciless thirst and by roughhousing, sanctioned by the fact that no Russian ruler had ever gained a new perspective on things by visiting a Western land. To Europe, at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, such romps seemed like pagan antics from a land that time forgot. For Russia, Tsar Peter’s behaviour carried a sting in its tale. His tomfoolery was not merely carnival freedom, but an assertion that the tsar could do absolutely as he pleased because he was an autocrat.

  In 1671, Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei, married a nineteen-year-old black-eyed beauty called Natalya Naryshkin, ward of his friend and adviser Artamon Matveyev.5 The match ignited a feud between two clans vying for control of Russia: the Milo-slavskys, who were the family of Alexei’s deceased wife, and the Naryshkins, the family of his young bride. Natalya brought a breath of fresh, gently Westernising air to the court and, in May 1672, produced a robust male heir who was christened Peter Alexeivich Romanov.

  As a young boy, Peter enjoyed toy soldiers and guns. His staff of dwarfs were both servants and playmates. Strong, capable and inquisitive, Peter was adored by his loving parents until – in early 1676 – the healthy and happy Tsar Alexei caught a chill while blessing the waters of the Moscow River. A month later he was dead, and Peter became subject to a new tsar, his fifteen-year-old half-brother, Fyodor III – a Miloslavsky. When Fyodor III died in 1682 without a male heir, protocol dictated that his sixteen-year-old brother, Ivan, should rule. But Ivan was lame, almost blind and battling a severe speech impediment.6 By contrast, his strapping ten-year-old half-brother, Peter, seemed a popular and prudent choice. Many of Moscow’s senators or privy counsellors – the boyars – wanted the strong young Naryshkin to
rule under the regent, Natalya. Thus Peter was declared tsar. But the Miloslavskys protested: Ivan was older, Ivan was next in line. The Naryshkins and the Miloslavskys embarked on a savage power struggle, which became entangled with the discontent of the streltsy.

  Moscow’s all-purpose emergency guard was an underused, overpaid grab-bag of 22,000 gaudily uniformed men who were also traders pampered by the state. They were rich and idle, but their very name, streltsy – ‘musketeers’ – hinted at their trigger-happy tendency. When the rank and file of one of their regiment accused their colonel of corruption, the allegation proved infectious. The inexperienced and ill-advised Natalya unwisely yielded to their demands, thereby giving them a taste of power. The Miloslavskys were swift to exploit this and persuaded the streltsy that the Naryshkins had murdered Ivan, in an attempt to secure the throne for Peter. As bloodthirsty streltsy surged into the Kremlin, Artamon Matveyev persuaded Natalya to appear before them with both Ivan and Peter. Prince Michael Dolgoruky, son of the streltsy commander, rashly chose that precarious moment to reassert military discipline, and the streltsy pressed up the stairs to where he stood, seized him and flung him down onto the pikes and halberds of their comrades below. Skewered, Dolgoruky’s body was then butchered and the streltsy went for Matveyev. They prised the old man from Natalya’s arms and – in front of her wide-eyed ten-year-old son, Peter – flung him onto the blades below. It was at this moment that Sophia, the dynamic older sister of Fyodor and Ivan, intervened. Peter and Ivan would rule jointly and Sophia would become regent.7 Her seven-year tenure as the first woman to control Russia had begun.