What was left of the day in St Petersburg passed in a bleary, sleep-deprived haze: the bus to the Admiralty, the walk down Nevsky prospect, the Hermitage, the crowds of sailors in their dinner-plate caps and the women in their old-fashioned day frocks. We tottered past them, swaying slightly in a dream. Past the zig-zag sweaters and the cardi combos, the furbelows and the bulky leather jackets, the leather flat-caps, the laces with little fur tippets and the seventies patch-pocket, belted safari jackets, all striding around unabashed.
Four years previously I had stood in Red Square on an early March evening and looked on, goggle-eyed, as the rush hour began. Huge crowds washed across the great open spaces of Moscow. Tidal waves of people scurried home. I could see why Russian thinkers had been obsessed by ‘the masses’. If the masses had only kept to the back streets, or discreetly sluiced across bridges like London’s Waterloo, perhaps the intelligentsia of Russia would never have considered harnessing their power at all.
This soup of humanity absorbed five Englishmen easily enough.
After months of visiting Scandinavian cities which promised the imminence of utter global uniformity, we had finally set down in Oz: part Emerald City and part stronghold of the Wicked Witch of the West. The cracked pavements, the rubbish, the collapsed transport system and the beggars reminded us of home, but the mix of palatial extravagance and market-trader glamour was, at last, somewhere excellently different.
But the magnificent architecture of the Italians and French, who had flocked to the city to make their fortunes and left the fancy-cake palaces, the colonnades and the monuments, blurred into an impression of pale pink and apricot under fuzzy skies. We had arrived and just wanted to sleep. The only solution was to trudge on. We were stalled by the utter impossibility of seeing everything in three days. So we resolved to see nothing.
There is too much history in the short history of St Petersburg. It is a city that has been ruled for 200 years by megalomaniac hobbyists with bottomless purses. Catherine the Great was the Elton John of her day. She shopped for her country. She collected buildings like other people collect Beanie Bears. ‘The more you build the more you want to build,’ she is reported to have said. ‘It’s a sickness somewhat akin to being addicted to alcohol. Or perhaps it’s just a habit.’
She might have said just one of my habits’. She collected everything else as well: pictures, statues, ghastly bright green marble urns and soldiers. She actually collected collections as a way of speeding the process up. And so did subsequent tsars and empresses, obliged to increase the cornucopia of imported important objects with more important objects of their own. Along came the Bolsheviks. They stole a few collections, to keep up, and added works of art from their conquests in Eastern Europe, plus a completely new set of must-sees, like ‘The Communication Workers Palace of Culture’.
Swaying in the middle of all this, suffering from sea-lag, cultural nausea swept over me. Could I skip the Marble Palace? What would people say if I had to admit I had passed by the Blok Museum, never got to the Gramophone Museum, missed out on the Engineer’s Castle? Sod it, I would have to come back and look at it properly some other time.
We did the only safe thing to do in this metropolis of unbridled acquisition. We went shopping.
In Gostiniy dvor, an apartment store that dates from the eighteenth century, we watched New Russians kit themselves out with black leather trench coats while their admiring girlfriends, in shiny plastic boots and lacy stockings, looked on. Each floor was an extended passageway that wound along different levels and past uncoordinated staircases, like Gamages, or those dead department stores in London suburbs where yellow cellophane in the windows indicates nobody ever changes the window displays.
Gostiniy dvor was lined with independently run stalls, selling furs or lighting fittings or sports goods. One natty place sold second-hand machine-guns, another, miniature lead models of the Beatles.
Bob was bent on looting Russia. ‘It’s too late,’ I told him, ‘all the Soviet militaria crap has already gone to the Portobello Road. They actually make Lenin buttons in the factories now, simply to sell to the tourists. And don’t get a gun, please, Bob.’ But Bob was already gazing longingly at the interlocking Brezhnev dolls and fingering the pilots’ uniforms at the street tourist markets.
We arranged with Vladimir to take a ride into the southern suburbs to a flea market and, early the next morning, wandered in a dusty cinder field, down the carefully demarcated paths between the car-boot rubbish laid out in the dirt. Massive pylons crossed a washed-out landscape of broken factories and vast housing boxes. Lines of shabbily dressed people shuffled up a littered bank, past the remains of fences and abandoned buildings into the market, looking for what? Half the stalls, manned, like car boot sales all over the world, by unshaven men in broken glasses wearing three layers of coats and peculiar hats, sold rubbish, while the other half sold utter rubbish. There was the last drawer in the flat, emptied out and laid on a blanket, in the hope that someone needed half a broken pair of spectacles, a cracked watch without a strap or a single shoe. (The single one of a pair seemed to be a recurring marketing opportunity.)
Perhaps all these punters who stared at the goods so intently were, indeed, looking for the other stirrup or the missing bit of their handle. Several stalls offered electrical parts: transistors, knobs and wiring, clearly from the same radio, snipped and cleaned and laid out side by side on a square of dirty cloth. Could the component parts of a broken radio possibly have more value than the whole? There was no hope of riffling through a cardboard box of junk in search of some lost treasure. The box itself would have been a prime exhibit; the staples removed, straightened out and sold separately.
The place was insanely crowded. It was more crowded than the Winter Palace that we visited in the afternoon. The passers-by looked at the single copies of faded magazines with missing backs, or the decapitated and limbless plastic dolls, more fervently than the spectators in the museum looked at the priceless ormolu-encrusted commodes. But they didn’t want the old radio valves or the glassless motorcycle goggles. Who possibly could? This was a market of despair, a market of hopeless inertia.
If there was Soviet memorabilia, it was broken, feeble stuff. Sometimes the face of Lenin or Stalin stared out from the heap, but with a chipped cheek or a smashed nose. Baines bought a hideous china owl clock. But the indefatigable Bob had to admit defeat.
‘You see,’ Vladimir told me, ‘candidly, there are some things that we all believe were better under the old Soviet system and some things that have got worse. Hospitals, education and the public services are all much worse.’
‘And better?’
‘Personal freedom. People can make their own way. There is no sense of fear. And it is possible to travel.’
‘To leave Russia.’
‘Yes.’
Baines’s friend who worked in the Hermitage had put us in touch with Catherine, so, at the ‘stage door’ of the Hermitage, we waited at the bottom of a set of steps, in a vestibule panelled in oak, while curators and scholars scurried past clutching briefcases to their chests.
Catherine, our free guide, took us on a brief tour of a collection that it has been estimated would take seven years to look at in any detail. She had originally come to Russia to work as a nanny in the Embassy. One day she was told that the personnel department thought she was a spy. The rumour became so insistent that she felt obliged to confront a senior official. He smiled at her. ‘Yes, Catherine, we know all about you.’
She was shocked. ‘What on earth makes you think I’m a spy?’
‘You learned Russian.’
‘Yes, I learned it for my job.’
‘Yes, but you learned it remarkably quickly, didn’t you?’ And he smiled knowingly again.
She tried to assure him that it was eagerness, not indoctrination, but never felt they were convinced.
‘They were very charming,’ she said, ‘but I felt I was being watched all the time.’ Since the other side was also convinced she was a spy, she ended up with far more status than she might otherwise have deserved: a double non-agent nanny.
Linguistically equipped, she had looked for another job and that’s how she came to be appointed to the museum, helping to organize the exhibitions in Somerset House, which, in a series of cramped rooms in London, attempt to give some of the flavour of the Winter Palace.
‘You were at the opening of it, weren’t you,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘We saw your name and wondered if you were some secret expert on Russian art.’
‘No, no. It’s just the charity circuit. One of Somerset House’s benefactors also helped out with the Hackney Empire.’ We felt conspiratorial, solving our little mystery, far from home.
Her next assignment was to ship artistic coals to Newcastle. Some English art was going home: Wright of Derby, Joshua Reynolds and other painters admired by the Enlightenment Russians. But the five rooms in Somerset House could never really capture the spirit of the magpie hoard on the banks of the Neva. It was the overwhelming volume of posh junk that impressed. We stumbled along behind Catherine as she strode across the acres of parquet, stopping to talk about the pieces, about the tsars, about the painters, and leading us on and upwards past thousands of paintings, clocks, urns, commodes and jewels to the upper floors, where six rooms unfold into the stark simplicity of the Matisses and Vlamincks and Van Dongens, all collected on the eve of Revolution by wealthy Russian businessmen.
Like the Gaugins in the Pushkin Museum, they were shocking. The Matisses were so fresh and alive, so new, that they seemed to say, ‘Look, here is a clean, clear, bright future for the twentieth century.’ They opened shutters into light after the heavy brocades and gold-encrusted fustiness of the ‘treasures’ we had walked past. Free of the pomp and servile craftsmanship that had created the rest of the expensive brocante, they seemed democratic and universal and leap-frogged the entire revolution, denting the accepted chronology of the last hundred years. How could they have come from the same world as Lenin?
Vladimir had arranged for us to meet up with his friend Mischa, appropriately, given Bob’s bear collection, a dealer in militaria. They were waiting on the embankment. Mischa was in his fifties, thin and long-haired. He spoke in a soft, distracted way, taught classical guitar and lived in the ‘Golden Quarter’.
A stone staircase took us up to his tenement, past heavy, leather-covered doors and crumbling grey plasterwork. An enormous stove by the entrance fed cumbersome radiators on each floor.
Mischa was restoring his flat. ‘It is very difficult, very difficult, the pieces must be found with great care. I go looking for the right wood for a frame or floorboard or a fireplace.’ A distracted Dostoyevsky intellectual, he was dressed in a panama hat, corduroy trousers, grey suede lattice shoes, a stripy banker’s shirt and a cravat, like a member of the Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah band, but he seemed very burdened.
‘Many of these apartments are owned now by New Russians and they just want everything new, with mirrors and black leather walls.’ He shook his head as he unlocked the door. His apartment had high ceilings and the wallpaper was stripped in most places. A fridge had been propped up against one wall on an improvised pallet. The floor was made of rough boards and some parts of the wall had been cleared of old plaster and the interleaved lengths of ancient wattle showed through. Wiring hung out of the cracked gaps. Every surface was piled with boxes. There were tottering heaps of trunks and neatly arranged piles of navy clothing. Mischa began casually opening boxes of insignia, cap ribbons and gun sights and passing them to Bob.
This was the second flat he had renovated. Here was a familiar London figure: the speculative gentrifier. ‘Originally all the Russian people were given houses according to their status and then with Perestroika they were allowed to buy and sell them, but this area is very popular with foreigners and when I am done then maybe I will sell the house and move on to somewhere else.’
Bob emerged from the room next door wearing a submarine officer’s reefer jacket and a woolly hat.
‘This is real leather,’ said Mischa. ‘An ordinary sailor would have one of these. You see, plastic’
He presented a glossy catalogue which sold nothing but Russian army surplus. It was printed in America and was backed by a website. I was taken with the battleship binoculars, mounted on stands and the size of small artillery pieces. Never used, they could be supplied in their original boxes for £3,000 each. ‘Now you can own a piece of Russian military precision engineering that you will treasure for ever.’
Mischa told us he could get anything in the catalogue at a very reasonable price. In fact, he was a middle man for the American producers. He showed me a beautifully made set of heavy Perspex parallel rulers and a slide rule, both presented in lacquered boxes and rather lovely. But I sensed that we were scavengers at the tail end of a bargain hunt. Other looters had been here before us and the real kitsch had already been hoovered up and transported away.
Bob, undeterred, had everything in the flat opened up and laid before him. His negotiations were to last two days and he eventually returned to the boat with his hat and his coat, a high-altitude oxygen helmet and a rolled-up painting of a parrot, chopped from its stretchers.
‘You know what,’ he told me later in London. ‘I sent the picture of the parrot to be reframed and they told me that it had been painted quite recently.’ He was more puzzled than angry. Even Bob recognized that it wasn’t a very good nineteenth-century painting. ‘So why bother forging it?’ he asked, bewildered.