When the reform-minded new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Russia’s historic Window on the West in May 1985, his initial itinerary followed that of any Soviet ruler on an official visit. The new general secretary toured factories, met with faculty at the Polytechnical Institute, and attended a Party meeting at Smolny, the revolutionary headquarters turned city hall. Then Gorbachev did something no Soviet leader had ever done: he went to Nevsky Prospect and plunged into the crowds, mixing and chatting with ordinary Leningraders.
Gorbachev, at just fifty-four the youngest member of the Politburo, had been elevated to power in the hope that a youthful reformer could reinvigorate the Soviet system after decades of stagnation and a string of geriatric general secretaries. Now he was in Leningrad to solidify popular support in preparation for unveiling his signature reforms: perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Having traveled many times to the West as a rising Soviet official, Gorbachev, like previous Westernizers, cast himself as the Great Curator and hoped to import certain features he had observed abroad—private enterprise, a free press, elections—while still maintaining ultimate control. It was the mission for which the Western-looking city on the Neva stood. As Gorbachev later recalled, “The people of Leningrad . . . listened closely to my explanations, asked questions, gave advice and encouragement. When someone yelled ‘Keep it up!’ this was indeed heartening.”
The people of Leningrad, true to form, were soon pressing even the reformist leader toward further democratization. On March 16, 1987, a rumor spread through the city’s preservation-obsessed populace that the Angleterre Hotel, a massive nineteenth-century edifice that stood on the square facing St. Isaac’s Cathedral, was about to be razed. In a panic, preservationists massed in front of the hotel while their leader, Alexei Kovalev, went to the relevant city administration building, conveniently located on the same square, to complain. Inside, a high-ranking bureaucrat told him no demolition was planned and exhorted him to “stop misinforming people and spreading panic.” A half-hour later, a blast echoed through the square and the hotel imploded.
For seventy years the people of the city had been subjected to the bald-faced lies of the apparatchiks who ruled them, but this time something had changed. Rather than disperse, crestfallen, toward the nearest metro station, the crowd stood its ground, staying to protest in front of the dusty remains of the hotel. The following day hundreds massed and transformed the fence around the demolition site into an informal “information point” for dissidents to post their formerly underground criticisms of the Soviet system in broad daylight. The protest, which came to be known as the Battle of the Angleterre, continued on the square for three days. The information point endured for two and a half months before city authorities shut it down.
The following spring, Leningraders went even further, claiming a section of the Mikhailov Garden, the former home of the grand duke that had become a public park with the revolution, as a free-speech zone. In a public version of Peter’s “assemblies” and Catherine’s salons, on Saturday afternoons ordinary citizens could make five-minute speeches on any topic. The activists called their creation “Hyde Park,” named for the London greenspace with its famous “Speakers’ Corner.” When the authorities cracked down on the venue, organizers decamped for an even more public space: Nevsky Prospect. Setting up in front of a former cathedral that had been transformed by the Communists into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, “Hyde Park” now claimed the most visible location in the city. The street that had long offered Russians all the bounty of the West—save its political freedoms—finally seemed to be fulfilling its destiny.
Free speech soon blossomed into free assembly. That summer Leningrad witnessed the first large-scale grassroots political protest in the history of the Soviet Union. On the day the Supreme Court of the USSR posthumously overturned the guilty verdicts in the treason cases that had launched Stalin’s 1930s Great Purge out of Leningrad, locals held a memorial gathering to honor the memory of victims of state repression.
Leningrad was rapidly reopening economically and culturally as well, even as reform lagged in the backwaters of the vast Soviet empire. Rediscovering its long-dormant tradition of being Russia’s commerical gateway to the world, with perestroika permitting joint ventures with foreign companies, the city again welcomed international businessmen. Foreign languages could again be heard on Leningrad’s streets beyond the herds of tourists who were carefully corralled around the city on government-controlled trips. The city’s television station, Channel 5, embraced glasnost to pioneer the nation’s freest news program, broadcasting muckraking reporting never seen in the city under either the tsars or the commissars. Culturally, Leningrad not only opened up to the world but rediscovered its own long-suppressed avant-garde heritage. Alongside Catherine the Great’s imported Western masterpieces at the Hermitage, works by Russian Constructivist artists and architects were again put on display. And Leningrad émigré writers, like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, were finally published in their hometown.
With Gorbachev’s reforms, for the first time, Leningraders were permitted to choose their leaders through free and fair elections with universal suffrage. In 1989, they sent Leningrad State University law professor Anatoly Sobchak to Moscow as their elected representative. Famous as the host of the Channel 5 talk show, Law and Economic Life, Sobchak had campaigned tirelessly with his trademark bullhorn outside a metro station not far from the university. Through his connections with Channel 5’s management, he convinced the station to host the USSR’s first televised political debate. In 1990, Leningraders elected Sobchak to their local council, the Leningrad Soviet, where he became chairman, effectively mayor of the city.
One of the new council’s first moves was to allow Leningraders to vote on what their city should be called. A lively debate ensued. Exiled dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had bravely written about his experiences in Stalin’s labor camps, suggested the city be renamed “Svyato-Petrograd”—acknowledging the city’s roots while substituting Russian for the original Dutch. But Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion never made it onto the ballot. “Leningrad” and “St. Petersburg” were the only choices. In June 1991 voters chose to adopt the original name Peter the Great had given the city. The name-change debate—with its binary choice of a name from 1924 or one from 1703—captured the city’s predicament. Rather than conceive of a new role for itself, it simply chose between different types of nostalgia—one for tsarist opulence, the other for Soviet superpowerdom—both of which had stifled the city. In the same vein, while the vote was taking place, the Angleterre Hotel was being rebuilt on-site in a nostalgic style chosen to mimic the building that had been destroyed just four years earlier.
Two months after the referendum, on August 19, conservative Party officials launched a coup against Gorbachev and his fellow reformers. The general secretary was placed under house arrest and arrest warrants were issued for reformist officials, including Sobchak. The St. Petersburg mayor, who was in Moscow, escaped to the airport ten minutes before agents arrived to arrest him. Safely back in St. Petersburg, Sobchak rallied its citizens against the coup, taking full advantage of the historic resonances of his revolutionary hometown. Crowds massed in front of Sobchak’s office on the square where both Russia’s first liberal insurrection, the Decembrist revolt, and its most recent, the Battle of the Angleterre, had been launched. As barricades rose amid the constructivist buildings near the Kirov Works (the renamed Putilov Works), Sobchak protested with the plant workers who had officially condemned the putsch in the tradition of their forbears who had led the 1905 Revolution.
That night, Sobchak used his connections at Channel 5 to speak out against the coup on national television. It was the first televised statement of open opposition; until that point, Soviet television had been largely controlled by the coup leaders in Moscow. A loop of the ballet Swan Lake ran ceaselessly on all channels, interrupted at regular intervals by an announcement of the “state of emergency”—a chilling crystallization of Russia’s strange mix of more-Western-than-the-West culture and pre–Magna Carta politics.
The next day, a massive rally was held in front of the Winter Palace. So many Petersburgers turned out—estimates range up to three hundred thousand—that the square, built by the tsars for massive, intimidating military parades, couldn’t hold them all. Copies of the nascent glasnost-protected newspapers were defiantly distributed gratis to the crowd with white spaces brazenly showing where the coup’s censors had removed content. While the foreign media focused its attention on demonstrations in Moscow where Boris Yeltsin, the first-ever elected president of the Russian Republic, the largest of the USSR’s constituent republics, famously stared down the army from atop a tank, the St. Petersburg rally was twice its size—all the more impressive considering that the long-demoted second city was now just half the size of Moscow. But even as massive protests rocked the country’s two historic capitals, most of Russia was quiescent. With the exception of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yeltsin’s hometown of Sverdlovsk, there was no unrest at all. Though the putsch fizzled out when the army units in Moscow defected to Yeltsin’s side, the disparate reactions to the state of emergency underscored the enduring differences between urban and rural Russia in general and St. Petersburg and the rest of the nation specifically.
Gorbachev survived the coup and nominally returned to power. But the image of a heroic barrel-chested Yeltsin atop a tank contrasting with a dazed and disheveled Gorbachev returning from his nightmarish summer vacation discredited the Soviet premier’s rule. Governed by a leader whose power had been exposed as illusory, the USSR unraveled in the months after the failed coup. The various republics declared independence, and the largest piece of the shattered empire, stretching from St. Petersburg in the west to Siberia in the east, became an independent Russia under Boris Yeltsin.
As Yeltsin struggled with the massive task of moving a vast nation dotted with collective farms and unproductive state-owned factories toward a market economy, Mayor Sobchak rushed ahead with his vision for St. Petersburg. He called his city “the only Russian door to Europe” and dreamed of a St. Petersburg restored to its prerevolutionary role as Russia’s banking and financial hub. Sobchak hoped to turn St. Petersburg into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of the type he had seen on a trip to Deng Xiaoping’s China in his days as a professor—a city with special business regulations to woo foreign investment. The appeal of the SEZ concept for Sobchak was obvious: his West-facing city could finally be decoupled from Russia’s backward hinterlands.
Under Sobchak’s leadership, the city privatized its local businesses much faster than the rest of Russia. His old university partnered with the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, to open a school of management, and Duke University opened an executive training program for businessmen in the city. Foreign companies soon opened up St. Petersburg offices, including Coca-Cola, Gillette, and Otis Elevator.
As Sobchak focused his efforts locally, a group of St. Petersburg economists and Western experts centered around Anatoly Chubais, who had begun pushing market-based reforms publicly once the space for debate had been opened by the Battle of the Angleterre, embraced a more extreme strand of the Petersburg legacy. The group believed that Russia’s most modern city could, through the sheer force of its brilliant imported ideas, wrench all of Russia into the future. Chubais and his crew sold Yeltsin on a strategy for reform known as “shock therapy.” Rather than a Chinese-style transition to a market economy, slowly weaning unproductive industries off of state subsidies and only then freeing up prices for basic commodities, the St. Petersburg economists endorsed immediate removal of price controls. Unleashing the forces of supply and demand, they theorized, would immediately remedy the chronic shortages and epic queues that plagued the late-Soviet economy. When they succeeded in applying their shock therapy to the Russian economy, the prices of long-subsidized food staples tripled literally overnight. But since the still-collectivized farms had no incentive to produce more even as the price of their products rose, Russia’s people were left to buy the same amount of goods at higher prices. Shock therapy, as the bitter joke of the era went, was all shock and no therapy.
The largest privatization scheme in the history of the world went similarly awry. Per Chubais’s plan, the major industries of the old Soviet Union were converted into private companies, and every Russian was given a share worth twenty dollars of the erstwhile state-owned companies. But with prices for staples spiking and ordinary Russians desperate for cash, those with secret fortunes amassed during late Communist times, by definition organized crime associates if not outright gangsters, immediately bought up all the shares. Having seized control of the nation’s companies, these new politically connected oligarchs surveyed the broken economic landscape and decided, rather than build up their companies, they would go for the quick buck through asset stripping. Everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor in factories all over Russia was sold, and then, to protect the proceeds of the sales from rampant ruble inflation, profits were converted into hard currency and moved to banks in the West.
American economist Joseph Stiglitz, who had just finished serving as chief economist of the World Bank, quipped of the Russian reforms, “Privatization [alone] is no great achievement—it can occur whenever one wants—if only by giving away [public] property to one’s friends.” The St. Petersburg economists soon came to be compared with another group of vanguardist revolutionaries so taken with the beauty of their imported theories that they were blinded to the damage they wreaked on the ground. They became known as “market Bolsheviks.”
The St. Petersburg economists’ national plans were disastrous for their hometown. Mayor Sobchak’s vision for his city as a business hub foundered as foreign companies realized that doing business in the new Russia would not be like doing business in the West. In Europe, a company could base its operations in a financial center like Frankfurt and station a skeleton staff in Berlin and Brussels to keep an eye on government policies and the regulatory environment. But in Russia, a clique of politically connected Muscovites would control the entire economy. Without access to political power in Moscow, a foreign company didn’t stand a chance of success. Soon many corporations that had initially sited their Russian headquarters in St. Petersburg decamped for Moscow. Among them was the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, whose office had been a fixture on Nevsky Prospect before the revolution and had initially been eager to return. Even Danish shipping giant Maersk forsook Peter the Great’s city of boats for Russia’s landlocked capital.
Soon St. Petersburg’s economy—and even its population—was in free fall. Indeed all of Russia, save for a few posh neighborhoods in Moscow where the asset-strippers lived, was collapsing. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of Russians living on four dollars a day or less went from two million to sixty million. The crime rate spiked. Russia became the only industrialized country in history to see its life expectancy go into steady decline, from 68.5 in 1991 to 64.5 in 1994. Overall, in the 1990s, economic inequality doubled while Russia’s economy shrank by nearly half. Russians began to quip that everything Marx had said about communism had been wrong—but everything he’d said about capitalism was right.
St. Petersburg became a living symbol of capitalism gone awry. Unregulated gambling parlors sprouted up all over town with flashing neon “zhakpot” signs. Side streets, unlit by neon, became muggers’ alleys. Organized crime hits plagued the city’s top hotels. But since gangsters, rumored to be in league with the city’s reconstituted KGB, were their only customers—virtually anyone who had money in the city was, at least to some degree, mixed up with the mob—the hotels simply asked that weapons be checked at the door, like coats. With the economy’s productive capacities lower even than during the late-Soviet stagnation and the social safety net in tatters, patients were asked to bring their own syringe to the doctor. On the streets, elderly women, their pensions wiped out by runaway inflation, their husbands wiped out by vodka, hawked their last meager worldly possessions. Shock therapy had turned the whole city into a giant, tawdry flea-market-cum-casino.
But the “market Bolsheviks” would not be discouraged. When American adviser Jeffrey Sachs, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard economics professor, was asked by the Financial Times in 1992 about the economic catastrophe that was unfolding on his watch, he dismissed complaints as “yak, yak, yak.” It was only the financial crisis of 1998, which completely decimated the value of the ruble and emptied St. Petersburg store shelves for a full two weeks, that finally ended the Russian experiment with shock therapy’s “free market.”
Russians came to associate the poverty, crime, and chaos of the Yeltsin years with democracy. Many yearned for a strong leader to reimpose order. That leader would be Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, who would renationalize the commanding heights of the economy and centralize power through an authoritarian system that came to be known as Kremlin, Inc. In the guise of a modern, Westernized nation brimming with profitable multinationals, Putin’s Russia would be an autocracy reborn.
Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952, the grandson of one of Stalin’s cooks. As a teenager, spellbound by Soviet spy movies, Putin went to his local KGB office to sign up. Told that the organization didn’t take volunteers—if it wanted him, it would find him—Putin set his sights on Leningrad State University’s law school, a well-known KGB feeder. There, he studied under a charismatic young professor named Anatoly Sobchak.
Just as the young Putin had hoped, when he graduated in 1975, the KGB came calling. The newly minted spy was initially stationed in his hometown. While Putin’s precise Leningrad assignment has never been conclusively confirmed, he most certainly served as one of the many anonymous henchmen who kept Russia’s historic window to the West firmly shut in the pre-Gorbachev era, either monitoring foreigners, domestic dissidents, or both. An excellent student of German, Putin was sent to Dresden in 1985 to work in the KGB branch office across the street from the local headquarters of the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous secret police. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and crowds ransacked the Dresden Stasi building, the young Putin dutifully burned documents across the street. When protestors turned on the KGB office, the compact, steely-eyed Putin pulled a gun on them. The crowd backed down.
With the collapse of Russia’s East Bloc empire, Putin returned to Leningrad and remained on the KGB payroll even as he landed an administrative job at his alma mater, Leningrad State University. There, he reconnected with his old teacher, Anatoly Sobchak, possibly on a KGB assignment to keep an eye on the reform-minded professor. Sobchak hired Putin as an aide when he became the head of the Leningrad City Council. When the August 1991 coup came, even though the KGB chairman was a leading conspirator, Putin tacked to the prevailing wind, casting his lot with the resistence. Putin caught Sobchak’s escape plane to St. Petersburg and helped organize the massive anticoup rally in front of the Winter Palace.
Putin served Sobchak as deputy mayor until 1996 when, plagued by charges of corruption and impotent to halt post-Soviet St. Petersburg’s descent into crime and poverty, Sobchak was denied a second term by the voters. (By Sobchak’s own admission, he gave formerly state-owned apartments to banker and journalist friends; when Sobchak came under investigation by federal prosecutors for corruption, Putin helped ferry him out of the country to France.) Through connections in Moscow, the out-of-work Putin landed a position as a minor functionary in the Kremlin, where he impressed Boris Yeltsin with his loyalty. Putin became head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, in 1998 and prime minister in 1999. That New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin went on national television with a surprise announcement: he was resigning his office several months early and turning over his powers to Putin. The new president’s first major act in office was to grant Yeltsin and his family immunity from prosecution. (The Yeltsins were suspected of taking bribes from a Swiss company that won construction contracts to renovate the Kremlin.)
Putin’s main vehicle for recentralizing economic power in the Kremlin was Russia’s largest company, the quasi-governmental natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Fossil fuels had always been the secret strength of the Soviet economy. The country’s natural gas reserves were so vast that Soviet apartment buildings had no gas gauges, their units had no thermostats, and their radiators had just two settings: on and off. Indeed, it was a drop in global energy prices in the 1980s that, in part, brought on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When the St. Petersburg economists and their Western advisers were breaking up the old Soviet economy in the 1990s, they made an exception for natural gas. While other industries were spliced into rival companies, they left untouched the old Soviet Ministry of Gas that in 1989 had simply converted itself into a private corporation, with the government as the largest single shareholder.
Under Putin, the government asserted increasing control over the company—and the company, in turn, asserted increasing control over the country. In 2001, government representatives became a majority on the company’s corporate board; in 2005, the government used cash to raise its stake in the company above 50 percent. As demand for energy rose in the new century with the stunning growth in China and India, cash poured into the coffers of Kremlin, Inc. By 2011 Gazprom was the fifteenth largest company in the world, bigger than American corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs. As energy prices spiked, Gazprom grew richer, Russia grew powerful, and Putin and his allies grew unassailable.
The key was that under Putin, Gazprom ceased to be just a gas company. Instead, it was transformed into a vast conglomerate that served as the government’s vehicle for asserting control over Russia’s remaining independent media. In 2001, oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, imprisoned on tax evasion charges, sold his media empire to Gazprom for a lowball price in exchange for his release. The sale included NTV, Russia’s leading independent television station, and Itogi, a newsmagazine that had been published in conjunction with the American publication Newsweek. Ultimately, all three Russian television networks came under Kremlin control. With television defanged, newspaper censorship could be less strict; the marginalized St. Petersburg and Moscow intelligentsia, though at times openly critical of Putin’s regime, was seen as powerless to threaten it. As a Kremlin official put it, “The president has a very clear idea: let them print whatever they want, nobody reads it.”
Having established a pliant mass media, after his 2004 election victory Putin executed his most audacious power grab: seizing the authority to choose regional governors from Russian voters. Henceforth, governors, as well as the mayors of St. Petersburg and Moscow, who have governor status by virtue of their cities’ size, would be appointed by the president. Putin, the former aide to the democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg, had taken away the power of his hometown residents to choose their own leaders.
In what would turn out to be St. Petersburg’s final mayoral election, in 2003 voters had elected Communist-youth-movement-leader-turned-Putin-protégé Valentina Matviyenko. The state-controlled television news stations had heavily favored Matviyenko, who appeared side by side with Putin on billboards around the city. Suspecting Putin had things rigged, few Petersburgers even bothered to vote. Turnout was just 29 percent. Matviyenko’s closest rival, Anna Markova, could only mock the absurdity of the “free and fair” election: in the highlight of the campaign, she posed with a horse on Nevsky Prospect with a sign reading, “Would you vote for a horse if the president asked you to?”
When Putin proposed doing away with gubernatorial elections altogether in 2004, not a single governor spoke out against the proposal. Instead, a pair of American correspondents reported, the governors issued “statements so fawning that even a tsarist courtier might have blushed.” Many were surely cowed by fears of a politically motivated federal investigation like those that plagued some of their less-loyal colleagues. But Putin’s closest allies were true authoritarians—none more so than St. Petersburg mayor Matviyenko. On the day Putin announced his proposal, Matvi-yenko appeared with him on state television to endorse it. A few weeks later, Matviyenko baldly told the now-docile, reconstituted Gazprom-owned magazine, Itogi, “The Russian mentality needs a baron, a tsar, a president . . . in one word, a boss.”
In Putin’s Russia, St. Petersburg would no longer be a symbol of cosmopolitan modernity but a symbol of repression, the cradle of Putin’s KGB–alumni association regime. And critics of the regime began to see the mobbed-up, corrupt, dangerous St. Petersburg of the 1990s as a kind of embryonic version of Putin’s Russia—not Mayor Sobchak’s city gone awry but his underling Putin’s city operating according to plan. A joke began spreading around Russia that attested to the new reality: A phone rings in Moscow. The man picks up to hear, “I’m calling from St. Petersburg.” He responds, “Don’t begin by threatening me!”
With Matviyenko ensconced in the mayor’s office, never to have to face the voters again, she and her patron in the Kremlin were free to advance their vision of St. Petersburg as a Potemkin village. While major planned infrastructure improvements like a high-speed rail connection to Moscow and a beltway around the city were downsized, delayed, and plagued by pilfered funds, Putin shined up central St. Petersburg. Putin envisioned his rehabilitated hometown as a window through which Westerners could gaze at Russia, be reassured by how European it looked, and return home confident that the great empire to the east has finally become a “normal” European country. St. Petersburg was to be a cynical stage set of a Westernized Russia that Putin had no intention of fostering beyond the city’s boundaries.
Like a true Potemkin village, the authorities cleaned up the front façades of the city’s historic imperial center while allowing the backs of the buildings to rot, a shambles of peeling paint, broken windows, and cracking stucco. The Kunstkamera’s rear wall, safely hidden from its riverfront viewers, is sloppily painted two noticeably different tones of flaking blue paint. Inside, the stodgy museum exhibits are like a time warp to the American Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. An institution that once offered a vision of the future that the West couldn’t match is now a tunnel burrowing into the past. The historical marker plaque on the building identifies the institution only as “Russia’s first science museum,” not the world’s first. Having turned inward from Peter the Great’s broad-minded era, at the Kunstkamera, one of the city’s greatest triumphs is not even a distant memory; its global significance has been completely forgotten.
A few blocks from the Kunstkamera, the university that Peter the Great built—Putin’s alma mater—is similarly a scandal. The meticulously restored third-of-a-mile-long eighteenth-century façade is just that: a façade. Those who enter the university’s interior courtyard find a central quadrangle where virtually every structure is in some state of dilapidation. Poorly funded and subject to censorship in Putin’s Russia, the university is no longer considered a place to make a career. Professors follow their students to the greener pastures on the Kremlin, Inc., payroll.
To lure tourist dollars without the destabilizing influence of a large foreign community, the authorities have made obtaining a visa to enter Russia a long, arduous, and expensive process while exempting short-term Petersburg-only cruise-ship tourists from the red tape. In summer, hundreds of thousands of Westerners pour in on luxury liners, generally seeing nothing of Russia beyond the shined-up façades fronting the Neva and the suburban imperial palaces. Finding, often to their surprise, that St. Petersburg doesn’t look Russian—so European; so civilized!—tourists stock up on postcards of the Muscovite-style Cathedral of Our Savior on Spilt Blood, lest confused relatives back home think their aunt went to Amsterdam or Venice.
This is the face of Russia that Putin is eager to show foreign dignitaries as well. In suburban Strelna, Putin had the vast baroque Constantine Palace, begun under Peter the Great but trashed by the Nazis and left unrestored by the Soviets, returned to its former glory to host diplomatic conferences. It is a luxurious little world of Versailles-worthy topiary gardens, Dutch-style billiard rooms bedecked with blue and white porcelain tiles, and statues of Peter the Great, all safely quarantined away from the real Russia. Along the seaside, Putin had luxurious retro-style “cottages” built for the foreign heads of state who visited for the 2006 meeting of the G8, an organization of the world’s largest economies plus Russia, its leading nuclear-armed petrostate.
Putin is always eager to keep up a cynical façade of Westernness in his policies as well. “Russia is a diverse country,” Putin publicly pontificated, “but we are part of Western European culture. No matter where our people live, in the Far East or in the South, we are Europeans.” Even his most brazen power grabs were always cloaked in the trappings of Western-style legitimacy. By controlling the media through state-controlled companies rather than a state propaganda ministry, Putin ensured that the arrangement, on the surface, looked similar to General Electric’s ownership of NBC in the United States. And controlling the media in turn made more overtly totalitarian methods unnecessary. In today’s Russia, only the largest protests must be banned outright or violently broken up. Smaller ones can just be purposefully misreported. When green-clad environmental activists protested a vote on a bill in the St. Petersburg city council to open one thousand city parks, gardens, and green spaces to real estate development, they were shown on the nightly news—but identified as supporters of the bill rather than opponents.
But even in St. Petersburg, Putin is not alone in his authoritarian sympathies. The humiliations of the loss of superpower status has pushed many Petersburgers into a defensive crouch against the outside world. A city that once yearned for progress now searches for scapegoats. In St. Petersburg a proud devotion to European high culture that outstrips any actual European city now coexists with the routine voicing of illiberal attitudes that would be considered backward in Europe’s capitals. St. Petersburg is a city where an otherwise liberal academic, so enamored of European high culture that she attended Richard Wagner’s complete four-opera Ring Cycle at the Mariinsky Theater night after night while seven-months pregnant, rails against Western feminism and openly yearns for the reconquest of the Russian empire. The careful political correctness of genteel European society does not exist in St. Petersburg where racial slurs, particularly against Asian migrant workers, are used in polite company.
The sense of masquerade so salient in the eighteenth century with its printed soirée manuals is still palpable in the city today. At a rooftop summertime barbeque, mediocre imported wine rather than excellent local beer is served because, as one guest puts it, “St. Petersburg is always trying to be European.” But a few glasses later, a distinctly un-European conversation breaks out filled with homophobic vitriol justified by Russia’s religious conservatism and apologetics for post-Soviet corruption. One young lawyer, a graduate of Putin’s local alma mater, whose firm, as he puts it, “represents the monopolies,” defends his clients as the only firms capable of getting the job done—a rather circular argument in an economy without open competition. The attorney praises Putin for cleaning up downtown, but for the city’s founder, he has less fulsome praise: “Peter the Great is a very controversial figure in Russian history.”
As the crowning glory of Putin’s shiny new Petrolgrad, a giant symbol of the petroleum-based power of the Petersburger in the Kremlin was proposed: a Gazprom office tower that would be, at over 1,300 feet, Europe’s tallest skyscraper. Sited just across the river from a Rastrelli-designed Russian baroque cathedral, the tower would dwarf the historic city. Though Gazprom had obtained a special exemption from the historic neighborhood’s height limit, the UN cultural agency, UNESCO, threatened to remove St. Petersburg from its list of World Heritage sites if the tower were built. To preservationists locally and at UNESCO, the unity of the city’s church spire–dominated skyline would be destroyed by inserting the tallest building in Europe along the Neva.
The design for the Gazprom tower was chosen in 2006 through an international competition marred by controversy. International starchitects Sir Norman Foster and Rafael Viñoly, who had been enlisted as judges, resigned from the committee in protest. While neither architect explained his reasons publicly, speculation was rampant that they quit over preservation concerns as well as pressure from Mayor Matviyenko to pick her favorite design, that of London-based architecture firm, RMJM. Competitors complained as well. Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, which submitted a design to the competition, put out a statement saying that the process “seemed to confirm the clichés about Russia, which we are reluctant to believe.”
Amid the controversy, RMJM’s proposal for a translucent, twisting, tapering design that echoed the blue gas flame of the Gazprom corporate logo was chosen. Philip Nikandrov, a native St. Petersburg architect who had launched his career in Dubai, became the firm’s point man in the city. He served as the public face of the protower forces from his office in the Singer Building on Nevsky Prospect—a building that itself had been initially proposed to tower over the street at sixteen stories, only to be cut down to six by decree of the tsar.
From the start, the project had powerful backers in Putin, Matviyenko, and Dmitri Medvedev, the chairman of Gazprom’s board of directors who, in 2008, became Putin’s handpicked successor as Russian president. (Putin would reclaim the presidency in 2012, demoting Medvedev to prime minister.) But the people of St. Petersburg, from the architectural elite down to workaday residents, were hostile to the tower. The skyscraper debate was an issue where dissent could not be covered up by the authorities. How could a Petersburger not have an opinion on whether the tallest tower in Europe should be built over their city? En masse, residents returned to the defensive preservationist stance they had held to in the Soviet period, with popular opposition to the tower spearheaded by Living City, an activist group made up of architects and historians as well as ordinary citizens. Members of the city’s architects’ union were almost universally opposed to the project, which they felt violated the architectural traditions of the old capital—its sense of proportion, balance, and horizontality. There was even talk of expelling Nikandrov from the union, but with the unsavory historical resonance—in Stalin’s time, being expelled from your professional organization was typically a prelude to being arrested and executed—the group decided simply to issue a formal statement of opposition.
Critics of the skyscraper found themselves up against an almost tsar-like arrogance. When several leading St. Petersburg cultural figures secured a meeting with Gazprom executives to air their objections, the company’s St. Petersburg chief assumed from their impertinence that they must be missing something. Public opinion was irrelevant, the executive explained, because, as he put it simply, “We are Gazprom.”
And yet for all its arrogance, the new regime was keen to keep up appearances of democratic legitimacy. Even if the outcomes were fixed, a show of proper procedure was made. Public hearings were duly held on the Gazprom tower albeit with riot police present to intimidate opponents. But the hearings themselves were a kind of kabuki theater. In 2008, antitower activists surreptitiously attended and filmed a casting call for actors hired to support the project at public meetings. And a scrappy local English-language newspaper reported that after the hearing, protower actors had lined up around the corner to collect their pay, reportedly four hundred rubles (seventeen US dollars). As with Catherine the Great’s assemblies, the Western-style ritual was performed but drained of its meaning in a masquerade of political equality and democratic openness.
Architect Nikandrov himself was unfazed by the allegation that project supporters were paid actors. Even if the protower members of the audience were paid, he explained, this would still be in keeping with the letter of the law. “Even if it was done, it wouldn’t be a breach [of the law] because [in] a public hearing, anybody can come. An artist [or actor] can come. There are no limitations, [to] an open public hearing, anybody can come.” In Putin’s Petersburg, as everyone understands, democracy is just a show. So why should it matter if some of the actors are paid and others are volunteers?
As usual, it was left to Matviyenko to play the open authoritarian. After visiting Dubai to sign up Arabtec, the contractor that built the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, for the Gazprom job, she gushed, “Of course, it’s summer there year round. Of course, they have a cheap workforce there, and there is the sheik, who signs off on a project one day and the next day building begins. We don’t have that here yet. Nevertheless, it should give us pause for thought. We should carefully study this know-how and use all the positive elements in our work.”
With near-unanimous public opposition to a project backed by a mayor who would never have to run for reelection and the man who put her in office, the public fight over the tower became a proxy war over the city and nation’s turn toward authoritarianism under Putin. Being a proxy war, the stakes were much higher than just whether the tower would be built. If the project went through, opposition figures in St. Petersburg felt, activism on all fronts in the city would collapse as Petersburgers would be forced to conclude that they had been demoted from the citizens of the early post-Soviet period to mere petitioners again, as they had been in tsarist and Communist times.
In the winter of 2010, something surprising happened: Mayor Matviyenko announced that the tower project would be moved to the outskirts of the city where it wouldn’t mar views of the historic center. Many observers believed that the relocation plan was just a face-saving measure, that the tower would never be built at all. Regardless, it was a stunning victory for the tower’s opponents.
The people of St. Petersburg had proven that they could, together, still veto their unaccountable leaders’ vision for their city—but they still felt impotent to propose what their city should become. The leading opposition group in the tower fight may have been called Living City, but it had no vision for the future of St. Petersburg. It just wanted to protect the existing city from those who would destroy it. (The activists’ critique without a constructive project would be echoed in the rallying cry of the 2012 protests: “Russia Without Putin.”) The leaders who were proposing the tallest tower in Europe had little vision either. The tower wasn’t the symbol of a dynamic global hub or even of a St. Petersburg that again aspired to become one. It wasn’t the pinnacle of a vast program of urban development, a worthy heir to Peter the Great’s ambitions. It was a one-off vanity project—a monument to the petrochemical wealth that bubbles up from Russian soil and the Petersburg clique in the Kremlin that shrewdly seized it. Ultimately, the Gazprom tower was just a twenty-first-century Ice Palace, a monument to what leaders can buy, not what they can build.
For all its failure to live up to its potential today, St. Petersburg proves that Peter the Great was right about something: geography matters. In the post-Soviet era, being a short drive from the European Union border has again made St. Petersburg Russia’s Window on the West, even if its rulers would prefer otherwise. While the new Russia retains the Soviet-era internal passport system that tracks its people despite the freedom of movement ostensibly guaranteed by its constitution, the end of the Cold War led Western Europe to loosen its restrictions on Russian visitors. To reap the benefits of Russia’s new petroleum wealth, Finland provides its neighbors to the east with tourist visas almost on demand. Today, even workaday Petersburgers have all been to Europe, if only to Finland for a day trip to the mall.
But even a shopping trip to Finland, makes an impression. When you get pulled over for speeding in Scandinavia, Russians notice, the cops don’t demand a bribe. In scrupulously honest Finland, the former prime minister was arrested for drunk driving, while in Russia, the concept of a leader bound by law seems hopelessly utopian. Just 120 miles from the European Union border, St. Petersburg is where the status quo in today’s Russia gets questioned. While the rest of the country generally accepts the way things are done in Russia, Petersburgers ask why.
The specter haunting Russia today is that St. Petersburg gives up—that the city stops trying to influence the larger nation and retreats into its cocoon. It is a lovely cocoon, nicer than it has been in a century. The Petersburgers who run Russia make sure the façades of the Winter Palace get a new coat of paint every summer and the parks get freshly planted flowers. Nevsky Prospect today is once again a thoroughfare where the most luxurious goods in the world are available for purchase by wealthy locals—the pride of a city that is, as it was in the nineteenth century, open to foreign products, if not foreign ideas. In the 24/7 sunlight of the summer months, fashionable young Russians riding the fossil fuels gravy train—Gazprom employees and the lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, public relations managers, and bankers who serve them—line the cafes enjoying international delights, sushi and mojitos being the trendiest of late, after a night at the theater. Institutions catering to tourists, including the Hermitage museum and the Mariinsky Theater, have all been shined up to a polish not seen since tsarist times. The city built out of an inferiority complex is now firmly a world capital of high culture, and it revels in its ability to look down on upstart Eastern metropolises as Western Europeans once looked down on it. Of his time in Dubai, architect Philip Nikandrov sneered, “It’s a depressing place, if you’re a civilized person.”
But not everyone is drawn in by the bread and circus of Petrolgrad. While some young Petersburgers drink cosmopolitans in Nevsky Prospect cafes, others walk the streets in English-language T-shirts bearing tongue-in-cheek slogans like “Politicians Never Lie” and “Follow Your Leader.” Again, just as they did during the reigns of the most reactionary tsars and commissars, St. Petersburg’s artists create a realm of freedom in an unfree city, blurring the lines between art and politics. When Putin and Medvedev welcomed dignitaries to the International Economic Forum at the height of the White Nights in 2010, the radical art collective Voina (Russian for “war”), which is run from shifting undisclosed locations, mounted a protest of sorts. During St. Petersburg summers, tourists gather after midnight to watch the drawbridges on the Neva rise to accommodate barge and ship traffic. In a perfectly timed assault on the bridge in front of St. Petersburg’s “Big House,” the KGB-turned-FSB headquarters, artists scrambled out to paint a giant phallus, which duly rose in salute to the office where Vladimir Putin and his cronies got their start. Rising up along the Neva, it conjured the Gazprom tower, mocked the Napoleon complexes of the pint-sized Putin and Medvedev, and underscored that the petty authoritarians who so often run this city were, yet again, unworthy of its sophisticated, worldly populace. Whether that populace can seize the reins and build the future is unclear. But one thing is certain: despite the miserable slog of Russian history, as long as there is St. Petersburg—a city where even at midnight, a glimmer of sunlight still peeks out over the horizon—there is hope.