St. Petersburg

Being asked three times for your passport on a train to Russia is not a good feeling.  The severe passport patrol was a stark change from the easy-going Fins.  As the train rattled past dilapidated rail buildings and graffitied walls our former hosts left the train and a new bunch of bureaucrats in Soviet green uniforms boarded. They sized us up:  an American and a Mexican traveling together from Finland.

Her badge was unreadable to my eyes.  Name badges had changed from a Western alphabet to Cyrillic.  I had no idea if I was being scrutinized by a junior border guard or an army commandant.  She questioned our destination, our names, our countries.   One glance, two glances, three glances at my passport until finally, she walked away with it.  Two guards conferred over my documents.  My stomach began to roil.

It took months to gain the visas to allow us to enter Russia. We had to send our passports along with declarations of our entire life’s history to the Russian embassy months before.  If our paperwork wasn’t properly filed, we’d be kaput.  I imagined them dropping us off at the Finnish border to wait in vain for a train.  The purpose for our long planned voyage made moot with a single “nyet.”

She came back with my passport and smiled.  “Pajelsta.”

That’s Russia.  A stern face, wishing for better days, turns bright and welcoming after much confusing bureaucracy and a momentary scare.

___

I didn’t know what to expect from St. Petersburg.  

I knew it was old.  I knew the city had suffered terribly during World War II.  I knew it was supposed to be beautiful. 

This was not my first impression.  

Dina, our Russian guide with the soft lilting voice, summed it up for me on our first tour of the city, a stroll down Nevsky Prospect.

“Here’s the literary cafe where notable writers of the 18th and 19th century came to work and discuss ideas. Dostoyevsky was arrested there and then sent to Siberia. It is still very good.  A nice place to eat.” 

That rang true:  a rich cultural history subverted by brutal government repression and capricious strong-arm tactics, now struggling for its once resonant and proud voice. 

St. Petersburg was an incredibly beautiful city.  In another ten or fifteen years, after the influx of new wealth from capitalists and oligarchs have remade the splendor of their 18th and 19th century buildings, turning them into rental lofts for the new middle class,  it will be again.  At the moment, it’s in a ’tweener stage.  The bones of are there underneath several layers of grit, 90 years of neglect, and some bad Soviet renovation. 

If HGTV created a reality show set in the city (Russian Revolution: Million Dollar Rehab St. Petersburg-style!), in a short year it would be a phoenix risen from the ashes, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. 

Under the grit is some of the most ornate baroque, neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings in the world.  You understand very quickly how rich the rich were before Lenin started trading treasures for tractors.   The last Tzar’s trusted advisor, Count Ussopov, didn’t have just one palace in the city.  He had four.  That’s not including his country palaces.   The Tzar had a couple homes in town too, even though one of his homes was the Winter Palace, a gigantic baroque riverfront property that now houses the Hermitage Museum.  

Building after building, many now converted to hotels and museums, are vestiges of the long-running noble class.  Most all other monarchies were stripped of their power and riches at least 100 years before World War I gave a motley crew of intellectuals and a hungry peasant army a chance to upend a nearly feudal system. 

Just to give you an idea of how Russian nobles could afford their palaces, serfs were required to work (as essentially slaves up until 1861) for the noble class five days a week.  The other two days, they could work to feed their families, at least that’s the official story. 

In Russia, the guides are full of concrete numbers (dates, distance, population, how many paintings, stones, and bricks) but short on “truth.”  That’s not because they aren’t smart or learned, but because they don’t believe their history.   They are fully aware that there is always four versions of every moment in history:  what really happened, the local, anecdotal version of what happened, what they are officially told happened and how their enemies perceive what happened.  None of these versions match.

Their faith is clearly in not in the past or the present government but in their churches.  We stopped at the Kazan Cathedral on the way down Nevsky.  Though it was mid-day, the cathedral was full of women lighting candles and kissing the glass of one icon or another.  

“How important is the church in Russia today,” we asked.

Dina explained, “Most people believe that life is not in your hands.  I try not to think this but I do 80 percent of the time.  It’s God will, what happens,” she said as she put on her kerchief to enter the church.

As for the future of St. Petersburg, she offers this explanation. 

In 1904, the 16th century miraculous icon of the Madonna of Kazan was stolen from the Kazan church in St. Petersburg.  People believed that its theft foretold of hard times to come.  It hasn’t been returned but they pray that they have suffered enough for the loss.  

But, of course, that’s in God’s hands. 

 

Church of the Spilled Blood