In Europe

the indolent life at the hotel, I reflect, may have something to do with a deep and fundamental sense of recognition. The last time I was here was about six years ago, and little has changed in the city since. The revolution of Sony, IBM and Head & Shoulders that has been sweeping the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and East Germans along with it since 1989 seems to have got stranded here amid the drab houses and brownish snow. Moscow is where all the money is made on the black market. In St Petersburg the trams are the same weathered wrecks they were then, the potholes in the streets are as deep as ever, the rubbish lies around for a long, long time, and every couple of hundred metres along the street you see someone tinkering with his car. The city is still torn down the middle each evening when the bridges over the Neva are pulled up for a few hours, providing the perfect adulterer's excuse: ‘Sorry, I had to wait for the bridge.’
    What
has
disappeared in the last six years is the established order. The
St Petersburg Times
of 16 March, 1999 reports a bank robbery by the pensioner Dmitri Setrakov: during the rouble crisis of August 1998 he lost his entire life savings of $20,000; no one helped him; his last resort was a TOZ-106 hunting rifle. Another article: in the city of Prokopyevsk, three patients in an intensive care ward are in additional mortal danger becausethe hospital cannot pay its electricity bill. A whole government apparatus has gone bust here. If my hotel pays any taxes at all, it is to the boss of the shabby guards at the door, a mafia chieftain who runs a little country of his own. Someone recounts the story of the local entrepreneur Sergei M. Like everyone, Sergei pays for protection, for a ‘roof’ as they say here. One day an angry customer came into Sergei's place of business, accompanied by an armed gangster, to demand his money back. Sergei was given permission to call his ‘roof’. Within a few minutes his protector was there in the office, fully armed. The two gangsters talked calmly for a few minutes; it soon turned out that Sergei's roof belonged to a network of patronage within the St Petersburg mafia that ranked higher than the customer's. The case was closed: Sergei was not bothered again.
    And so it goes everywhere in this stateless state, even unto the old Singer factory that now houses Dom Knigi, the biggest bookshop in St Petersburg. At Dom Knigi, every department – fiction, non-fiction, children's literature – is watched over by a heavily armed commando, the guardian angel sent by yet another private state. A simple shopping trip in this city leads you from one sovereignty to the next.
    The old section of St Petersburg is essentially a frozen metropolis from 1917, with the same doors and decorated house fronts, the same street lamps and the same graceful bridges. The only difference with 1917 is that all of this is eighty years older now and a great deal more ramshackle, for there has never been money for maintenance or restoration. But on the other hand, where else does one find a city where money was no object for two whole centuries, a city that was moulded by the best European architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then more or less forgotten?
    The communist leaders who came later focused all their razing and renewal on Moscow. They did not like Leningrad, and that was the salvation of the beautiful banks of the Neva, the lovely, low ochre-yellow buildings and Nevsky Prospect, which today looks much as it did in Gogol's day, except that little is left of the ‘carnivalesque atmosphere’, the ‘cheerful carriages’ and the ‘spotlessly clean sidewalks’.
    The history of St Petersburg reflects the relationship between Russia and Europe. And, by association, it also reflects the gulf between theRussian state and the Russian people, which grew wider and went on growing until it finally became unbridgeable.
    St Petersburg itself, like Vienna, like Berlin, reflects the dream of an old dynasty, with all the accompanying peculiarities. But St Petersburg has much more going for it. The city, after all, was designed and built as a grand attempt to force a change in the course and the thinking of a semi-medieval nation. That ambition, that evangelical message, can be seen on the streets and buildings everywhere, even today. The physical forms have something overly deliberate about them, like a caricature of nineteenth-century Europe. The palaces here are