Some places are pleasurable on the first encounter. Venice has most people hooked as they approach it over the lagoon. Everyone’s charmed by Paris, bowled over by Tokyo, intrigued by Havana. This appeals to a romantic streak in us that says profound experiences hit us like thunderbolts. But I think there’s a complementary phenomenon, where a place that can seem inscrutable or standoffish at first turns into a lifelong love. My experience of St Petersburg is a case in point.
I was 14 the first time I went. It was actually Leningrad then. This was 1983 and my impressions of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union were lamentably superficial: the food was bad, the butter was unsalted and there was no fresh milk. I wouldn’t say the experience of visiting the country was wasted on me, exactly, but it was rather like the first taste of an unfamiliar food or reading a book that I wasn’t ready for.
My second visit came seven years later when I was hired to do research for a guidebook to the Soviet Union. Brezhnevite stagnation had been replaced by a giddy sense of change. Soviet power was unravelling before my eyes.
I recall a sense of gloom about the city. The majestic palaces on the Neva seemed badly in need of repair. The food in the hotels seemed barely to have improved since my last visit. But there was something in the air that I found exhilarating: the briny smell of canals, the thick, perfumed smoke of cardboard-tipped Soviet cigarettes, diesel fumes, sunshine on old stone, garlic sausage.
I was struck most of all by conversations I had with ordinary Russians who seemed relieved to be able to set aside finally all that Cold War baggage. I remember great generosity and kindness: the old test pilot who bought me drinks and complained that Coca-Cola tasted of shampoo, a travel agent who helped me book my flight home and then burst into tears because she had never been able to leave Russia herself and umpteen taxi drivers who wanted to have frank conversations about the shortcomings of their government, which seemed so intoxicating in the light of their recent past.
Looking back, it seems obvious that the country was going through a collective crisis, letting go of all sorts of false certainties about communism and unsure what was coming next. Responding to vulnerability like this is a profound test of character and I’m not sure that the West’s reaction was particularly creditable.
American businessmen were swaggering around the five-star hotels lamenting the hopelessness of Russian workers at one moment and making plans to buy up the country’s factories the next. This was the moment when newspapers and magazines seemed fascinated with the incursion of Western consumerism into Russia – the first McDonald’s, the first Vogue magazine, the first Pizza Hut – as though it was really something that this nation that had defeated the Wehrmacht and put a man in space had now mastered the intricacies of pepperoni topping.
Last summer I visited St Petersburg again and I kicked myself for not returning sooner. The canals, the colourful Baroque palaces, the gilded spires of the Admiralty flashing in the watery light: it all looks better after the economic boom of the last eight years. The end of communism has brought, among other things, more responsive service, better restaurants and shopping. And, of course, in the Hermitage, you have one of the world’s great art museums.
These are all good reasons to visit. But I think what will draw you back to the city is something else. St Petersburg tells in miniature the story of Russia over the last 300 years and that story is simply extraordinary. This country seems fated to live through the sharpest extremes of human experience: a feudal system that lasted until 1861, reactionary rulers, revolution, the most crushing forms of totalitarianism, famine, purges, the most terrible fighting of WWII, decades of political repression, then another revolution and, in the last few years, probably the biggest explosion of private wealth in any country in history.
If you are willing to let it, St Petersburg connects you to this great story. It makes you wonder at the capacities of the human soul for selflessness, greatness, cruelty and self-deception. It is like reading a great book: a disquieting book, that shows you every side of human nature and seems to ask, in the end, who you are.
Marcel Theroux’s latest novel Far North (£12.99, Faber and Faber) is out now.
British Airways flies to St. Petersburg from London Heathrow. Book a flight on ba.com now.
