#9
Financial Times (UK)
November 3, 2001
BOOKS: Civilisation and its discontents: John Lloyd on
how Russia's window on the west, a 'hero city' in war, survives in peacetime
By JOHN LLOYD
In St Petersburg two years ago to research a profile on Vladimir Putin, Idiscovered a kind of litany among his former colleagues and acquaintances. Whether they liked him or not (and given that he was about to become president, they tended to like him), they all said that his birth, upbringing and working life in "Piter" was a sign of his civilisation. Even Boris Putsintsev, the veteran human rights campaigner who hates the KGB in which Putin served, said: "he's the first leader of Russia since the tsars who's a Piter man. Maybe that will mean he's better than the rest."
The resilience of the belief in its civilising influence held by the citizens of St Petersburg or, as many Russians still prefer to call it, Leningrad, has been hard bought. It has perhaps seen less wretchedness than a few capital cities - Kiev and Berlin come to mind in 20th- century Europe - but it is in the premier league for suffering. And none, in its history, has been so grandiose, so extreme. Even now, as its decay is punctuated by fitful efforts at revival, St Petersburg attracts the kind of devotion to its past and its greatness which Venice does - without, however, the latter's power to raise money for its preservation.
It must also lead in any competition for "re-branding" a nation. Peter I (the Great) wanted it to be Russia's window to the west's culture, technology and wealth. He saw it as a civilising force for his rude land, a process he was wont to speed up by commanding that his courtiers trim their bushy beards back to European moustache length. He sited it on the Baltic to command the northern trade routes to Europe, and to be at the head of the Neva, through which river trade could reach all the way down to the Mediterranean. Once the Swedes were pushed out of territory they had dominated for centuries, Peter was free to build.
And built the city was, heedless of the deaths of thousands of the serfs who laboured there; of the floods which periodically turned the city into a lake; of the murderous cold in winter and the murderous mosquitoes in the summer. Authoritarian will, the principle which has driven Russia through the centuries of its existence, commanded it, and kept serfs and nobles alike tied to the city until it established itself over Moscow as the imperial seat.
As the emperor built, so did the courtiers. The Russian aristocracy was among the richest and the most exploitative in the world: a point W. Bruce Lincoln makes many times. The vast serf estates of the great lords pumped money into Petersburg, and summoned to it a legion of Italian architects and artists: Giacomo Quarenghi, Antonio Rinaldi, Carlo Rossi and the most extravagant of all, Bartolomeo Rastrelli. They designed and built palaces and public buildings which remain, after revolution and war, a stunning assemblage of arrogance and love of conspicuous display. Peter's successors, particularly Catherine, were aided by the Roman and Greek themes carved, painted and displayed all about them to regard themselves as earthly gods. Catherine also decreed into existence a monumental statue of Peter - the great Bronze Horseman which rears up towards the Neva. The work of the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, its plinth of granite weighing 3m pounds was dragged and floated to Petersburg; atop was placed the immortal Peter on his steed, a rigid right arm commanding Russia ever forwards.
Petersburg in the 19th century reached its apogee, and glimpsed its fate. The empire had summoned armies of clerks, traders, serfs, students - Dostoyevsky's people - who lived as they could in hideous conditions, often in shacks and tenements hugger-mugger with the grand palaces of the nobility they served. By the end of the century, however, the workers appeared on the city's outskirts, to man the burgeoning ring of engineering and textile and chemical plants. The wealth they created brought new gilt to the palaces on the Neva, but it gave the revolutionaries, who had become more daring and desperate as the century progressed, a reliable army and, in Marxism, a theory of proletarian revolution and progress.
The revolution, at least, came farcically rather than dramatically, as a war-hating military simply deserted the rulers and officers who had abused them. They turned to, or at least did not oppose, the Bolsheviks whose abuse of the people they commanded rose to levels never before attained.
Petersburg, the capital, was abandoned. Lenin hated its luxury: the western-inspired Bolsheviks nevertheless wanted to govern from the Euro-Asiatic centre of Russia, not from its north-western tip. But the city, compensated by being given the name of the Bolshevik god, remained a symbol.
During the second world war, death on the Neva was not a house-to-house, street-by-street inferno as in Stalingrad to the south. The Germans, though they occupied the outlying villages and palaces, never got into the city. A thin supply route across Lake Lagoda remained open. But for many, especially in the first half of the 900 days Leningrad was besieged, death came by slow starvation and disease. The city's intelligentsia included Anna Akhmatova, among the greatest poets of the century, and Dmitri Shostakovich, among its greatest musicians. They were drawn, in spite of their understanding that two monstrous dictatorships were grappling above their heads, into the city's defence. Leningrad survived, to become a "hero city". It was rebuilt - patched, one should say, and the patches show up in its post-Soviet poverty.
Lincoln's book catches the immense pathos of the place now, and gives a real and moving sense of how it earned it. His interests were - he died as he finished this city biography - in Russia's artistic life, and he is fine on the architecture and art, music and literature to which the place gave birth. He is less good on the economic and industrial life, and skimpy on the politics, including the post-Soviet politics, which are barely mentioned. He prefers the poets: he ends by quoting Joseph Brodsky, not the least of the city's literary talents, to the effect that "in this city, the individual is always going to reach beyond". The Bronze Horseman's outstretched arm commands no less - but the will has to be recovered. The best hope for the new century is that it is found, indeed, in the individual: and that the terrible power of the autocrat, Petersburg's real foundation, will cease to be its principle.
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