Every Sunday at noon in St Petersburg they let off the field gun. It’s the depths of February and, preceded by a little Tchaikovsky, the shot rings out across the snow and ice of the frozen River Neva with a huge bang, a haze of brown cordite hanging still in the frozen air. The Neva looks about a mile wide and has little troops of walkers trekking across it, with kids on sleds. Shimmering like a mirage in the distance, a thin pastel and gold strip between white sky and white snow, is the Winter Palace. It’s the most sublime moment, and most sublime vista, I’ve ever seen.
They brought me over here because I know about Las Vegas. Vegas is almost 100 years old, St Petersburg is 300. Both are phantasmagoric. We are a small TV crew: our director – an ex-war correspondent, supremely amicable and bear-like – and his Estonian crew – the ice men and maiden, who we hope are warming to us. We stand there in the ice and snow listening to the bang and look at each other and go ‘fuckin’ ’ell’.
May 1703, and Peter the Great wields his
axe – ‘We will build a town here’ – building his own log cabin in three
days, on swamp land. He ordered thousands more, workers digging with their
bare hands. A city built on bones, completed in 50 years to the Tsar’s own
vision; this city was his plaything. With Enlightenment plundered from
Amsterdam, Venice, London, Paris. Dragooning imported architects, sculptors,
painters, performers, professors – the lot – to build Europe, here. Peter
married a buxom, Lithuanian peasant girl in secret, but dragged Russia
kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century. There would always be two
sides to this place, but he would pull out those beards with his own hands.
A clean start to the city. His directness of approach was as refreshing as
the chill air. You need a government building – first work out which
government. It has twelve departments, so there will be twelve departments
strung out in a line with a 400-metre corridor running along the back. Then
we’ll dress it in European style, with stucco and stone. Now 300 years or so
on, we echo down that empty corridor, the longest corridor in Western
Europe. Outside, the snow; inside, the motley janitor and his pals, hanging
around in the puddles, or sitting in beat-up Moscovich cars smelling of
diesel and, now, cordite, stamping their feet. Nobody much around, it’s like
a ghost town.
That’s the backbone of all phantasmagorias, a healthy dose of common sense, but it’s not what you are here for: it’s the glitz.
They want me to talk about it, bounce up and down in front of the camera. Why me? Because I love Las Vegas and I did a vodka commercial. The perfect combination. From 30 above to 30 below, and it’s all the same. That’s me: take me to these Byzantia, where the rafters ring with the screams of despots throwing their toys out of the pram, ‘Bring all the goods to me! All of it, I will choose.’ We need a chamber orchestra? Just train a thousand serfs to play just one note and play it at the right time.
No wonder the city caused almost psychotic
breakdown in the writers who tried to come to terms with this instant
infusion of luxury, this seventeenth-century Las Vegas. Gogol, Dostoevsky,
they suffered on the potentiality of its streets, grappled and tormented by
the glories of the Nevsky Prospekt, a four-kilometre-long boulevard of
delirium showing off all you couldn’t or shouldn’t have. Gogol, driven mad,
eventually burned his own books and systematically starved himself to death.
The Sheremetiev Palace. The prince was told where to build it and what it
should look like. It was built of timber and made presentable with stone and
stucco. A string of rooms to the front for sipping tea like the English,
reciting French poetry, singing Italian operetta; a string of rooms at the
back for visceral, orgiastic drunkenness, for living with pigs, for farting
and grunting and doing all things truly Russian. Underneath, the loins of
the building, a city of servant fires, heating, cooking, distilling, just
waiting for a lick of flame to send the whole thing sky high, which it did.
Then do it all again.
Build palaces like cakes; big, big cakes. In Vegas architects have Dryvit, an ‘external installation and finish system’ that can ‘replicate all styles of all periods at all scales’. Francesco Rastrelli, an eighteenth century architect to all intents and purposes serving a life sentence in St Petersburg, had stucco. Stucco like you’ve never seen it before, oozing ‘laconic architectural forms in festive colourfulness’. At 16 he was dragged to Russia by his father, to the midst of Peter the Great’s vast construction site. He was building there himself by the age of 20, and stayed 50 years. But fortune and favour turn; oblivion and poverty struck as the court turned its head. ‘An architect is valued here only when he is needed’ was his bitter refrain before an anonymous demise. That was Catherine the Great for you. Cruelty and splendour. Catherine ruled by favour, and those who favoured her most, especially in the bedroom, did best. Catherine had great boudoir interest in the arts, philosophy and politics, and, finding a book on Roman baths that pleased her – traditional Russian bathing was as elemental as thrashing around in the forest – summoned its Scottish author, one Charles Cameron. He brought more severe lines in architecture and more panting from the Tsarina: ‘I confess that I myself will not tire during nine weeks of watching this’ (the completion of her rooms at the palace of Tsarskoe Selo). She finally squealed: ‘My Anglomania predominates over my Plutomania’, but, of course, all this in French. Cameron would also end his days in St Petersburg but in slightly better circumstances, with a Russian name.
The Hermitage, Catherine’s clocks. They don’t tell the time, they decorate the day. They are elaborate distractions, mechanical golden peacocks periodically spreading their wings in a room themed as a Moorish palace. No clocks, just eternity. You can feel the boredom. Oh, what she would have done with slot machines.
Marxists creeping up the back steps of the Winter Palace. The storming of which was more of a sneaking, only to be embellished by Eisenstein for the show reels. In reality, it was all done in the shadows, just as it would be for the next 70 years, when they banned Christmas trees and lights. During that time, the Winter Palace would, in turn, become a symbol of the despotic tsars, the Revolution, Bolshevism, the Great Patriotic War, and currently – with The Hermitage Inc. – a symbol of the glorious global art market with a branch in Las Vegas.
In the Hermitage on Mondays, hundreds of artists set up their easels to make their own copies. Copies and more copies, copies begetting copies. That patriotic nude hanging in your groovy, soviet-period hangover hotel-lobby gift shop you are rather taken with, is that a copy?
Vodka at 20p a shot. Hookers line the hotel bar like they’re in a Max Beckmann painting. That’s Beckmann, not Bette Davis. The bar is on the third floor, with the pool tables. The crew are forever finding ladies popping their heads out of the lavatories and fire escapes along their corridor saying ‘Vood you like sex?’ Prostitution is legal here, so it adds to the show; all ages, all types, anything you like as long as it’s not black in the new Russia. Putin’s Russia. He’s even got his hands on a Summer Palace for himself.
The next day we are filming on the steps of the Karzan Cathedral on Nevsky. It’s a straight rip-off of St Peter’s in Rome, with Bernini’s colonnades scaled down and the nave flipped 90 degrees. A student project, designed by a serf to include replica bronze doors from the Baptistery in Florence for good measure. Shove it all together: enjoy it, this rude, rude architecture.
Two old soldiers in big caps are in charge of that gun; putting on the music, counting down to pull the ripcord, always with a second gun on stand-by, just so Petersburgers will never forget. Never forget starving to death for 890 days while Hitler saw the Winter Palace as the home of all Bolshevism. Never forget having to eat shoe leather and lick the back off wallpaper. They give us the shell casing so we won’t forget it either. It’s our souvenir of St Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, and the film we made there. We put it down next to the TV, with a little bunch of electric tulips sprouting out of it.
So is Las Vegas the new St Petersburg, or St Petersburg the new Las Vegas? Peter the Great took an axe to the swamp; Bugsy took a piss in the desert. Remember, St Petersburg lay frozen in everything but meaning for 50 years, only to be opened up now to mass tourism with the end of the Cold War, and Vegas was where they were busy testing those nuclear bombs.
Today, St Petersburg has become the ground for conventional architectural controversy. Should it be maintained as a tourist jewel like Venice? Or are pesky radical (and American) architects going to mosey in and rev it up again. For the present competition for the Mariinsky theatre, Eric Owen Moss proposes a glass box, or ‘garbage sack’. These are his words, not mine, those of an architectural world lost in its own radical pretension. Personally, I would recommend aspic for some considerable time, just to let everybody see St Petersburg as it is. Architecture is about tourism these days, and glass boxes have limited appeal.
The Treasures of St Petersburg & The Hermitage was made for Channel 5 television by First Freedom Productions Ltd and aired on 10 June 2003.
Paul Davies is a writer and senior lecturer on the Architecture of Entertainment at South Bank University and the Architectural Association, London