In Europe

more exuberant than anywhere else, the boulevards wider than any I have seen, the opulence is that of the parvenu. Here reigns, as the Marquis de Custine once wrote, a typical ‘façade culture’, one ‘without roots in history or in the Russian soil, an apparent order, like a veil thrown over the Asiatic barbarism’.
    St Petersburg symbolises the continuing identity crisis of this huge empire to Europe's east: who are we really, where do we want to belong? ‘Of course we're Europeans,’ say the two schoolgirls I speak to briefly on Nevsky Prospect. But at the same time they talk excitedly about their upcoming holiday ‘to Europe’, as though that were some far-off and exotic world.
    A friend of a friend grants me a taste of the atmosphere of the palace that once belonged to Felix Yusupov, the nobleman who later murdered the seer Grigori Rasputin. I am even allowed a peek at the room and the untidy garden where it all happened. Yusopov, an Oxford graduate, was ‘merely’ married to the czar's niece, yet the palace has the size and the allure of the residences of a Western European potentate. Aristocrats like Yusopov did absolutely nothing at all, but until 1914 were the reigning European champions at the noble art of wasting money. The notes I make during the visit are punctuated solely with exclamation marks. The Turkish bath! The Jugendstil dining room! The prince did not have much time to enjoy it, however: in 1917 he fled head over heels to Paris, where he died at a ripe old age in the 1960s. I take a peek at his private theatre: a complete miniature Bolshoi, a chocolate box lined with red velvet, with every last accoutrement, exclusively for the prince and his guests.
    Like his cousin Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II felt a strong bond with his English kin. The czar was married to Queen Victoria's granddaughter,spoke English like a Cambridge don, cultivated public-school manners and was known as ‘the most civil man in Europe’. At the same time, he aspired to the status of a true Russian czar, the absolute ruler over a vast, semi-Asiatic empire.
    And just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Nicholas preferred living in a past of his own making. He intended his dynasty to remain a beacon in the uncertain days of modernisation and democratisation. Many of the glorious façades of St Petersburg's eighteenth-century palaces were replaced, with the czar's approval, with new ones in a hotchpotch of neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque or ‘pre-modern Gothic’ styles. In that way, too, the city resembled Berlin; the nouveau riche left their mark on both cities with identical conviction.
    The reign of Nicholas II began under a bad sign. A few days after his coronation, during the traditional distribution of cake and beverages, he watched as 1,400 people were trampled to death in the crowd. In 1881 – Nicholas was thirteen at the time – his relatively liberal grandfather Alexander II was murdered in his carriage by ‘nihilistic’ revolutionaries. That was the first, and perhaps the seminal, turning point in modern Russian history. After that, moderate reformers could accomplish almost nothing. The second was the popular rebellion of 1905. The third and pivotal change was the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
    Ten years after the death of Alexander II, the country was racked by unparalleled famine. The czarist regime could not do a thing. Countless well-to-do volunteers went to the countryside to help the suffering farmers, and for many of them the contrast between the grinding poverty of the farmers and the regime's shortsighted arrogance came as a shock. In 1894, Alexander III, a reactionary mogul, died unexpectedly of a kidney ailment. His son Nicholas had to assume power whether he liked it or not.
    Kaiser Wilhelm, despite his conservatism, was thoroughly interested in all forms of modern technology, but Nicholas was obsessed with seventeenth-century fantasies. The role he wished to play fitted neither his age nor his person. He yearned for absolute power over an empire, but at the same time lacked the vision and skills needed for such a position. To make matters worse he did not even realise that he lacked those talents, or that Russia was actually in need of very different qualitiesindeed. His greatest achievement came in 1913: the pompous celebration of 300 years of the Romanov dynasty. It was one, great nostalgic cry for a non-existent past.
    During those same years, Russian literacy rose from twenty per cent in 1897 to forty per