Travel: Magnificence and decay in Peter's royal city

A faded bouquet of white chrysanthemums lies under the flying hooves of the Bronze Horseman: a statue of Peter the Great on his stallion, its hind legs rooted in Russian granite, its raised hooves lashing the European air. After three revolutions, after the 900 starving days of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and now, after the collapse of the Bolshevik revolution which began here, Falconet's statue of Tsar Peter is still one of the places where the young people of St Petersburg leave flowers after a wedding.

Almost 300 years after his death, Peter has seen off his great rival: the city is no longer Leningrad, it is St Petersburg again. The locomotive that brought Lenin, disguised as a fireman, back to the city in 1917 to launch the October Revolution, still stands inside the Finland Station and the statue of Lenin still stands in the square. But no one would dream of giving him flowers.

London and Paris grew street by street over centuries. St Petersburg was decreed by the titanic will and vision of one man, and it remains trapped in the contradictions of Peter the Great's character and the ambiguity of his aims.

He built his city on mudbanks peopled only by Finnish fishermen, at the westernmost corner of his vast domains, because he wanted to open up Russia to the technology and the Enlightenment of the West.

At the same time, he built it to be the cap-stone of a system of ruthless autocracy. The city's history is the working-out of that contradiction.

Today, the first contrast is between magnificence and decay. The palaces loom out of the haze, over the ubiquitous water, in a wash of pastel colours: turquoise and ochre, mustard and plum. But behind the opulence of the baroque facades there are shabby courtyards and overcrowded tenements - and poverty, both genteel and not genteel at all.

As dusk falls, the streets are full of citizens walking their dogs. And if many of the dogs are as big as Baskerville hounds, that is because these streets are no longer as safe as they were under two autocracies.

Nevsky Prospect is one of the great streets of Europe, but its eastern end, by the Alexander Nevsky monastery where men's voices could be heard singing the Orthodox funeral rite, is seediness itself.

Grubby windows in peeling buildings proclaim a pharmacy, a dairy or a gastronom (grocery). But these state enterprises seem half-empty and half-hearted in contrast to the enthusiasm of the people selling vodka, bootlaces, newspapers or matryoshka dolls from improvised kiosks.

As you pass the Moscow Station, where Anna Karenina threw herself under the train, the drabness recedes. Nevsky Prospect's shops may still be ill-stocked, except for the few that can deal in dollars, but the pavements are crowded and the House of Books - the offices of the Singer sewing-machine company before the Revolution - is crammed with buyers.

You pass the great library; the Kazan cathedral, where the emperor and General Kutuzov attended the Te Deum of thanksgiving after General Mud and General Snow had routed Napoleon and made Russia a Great Power; and the princely palaces along the canals, the Fontanka, the Griboyedova and the Moika. It was at No 12 Moika that Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, was taken to die after being shot in a duel. As you near the river Moika, there are still blue signs warning you to keep to the south-eastern side of the street - it was safer from German shells during the siege.

Nevsky Prospect's western end culminates in the most perfect of St Petersburg's great buildings, the Admiralty. It rises over the trees to its weather-vane, the golden ship at the tip of its needle spire.

'In the darkness of the green,' wrote the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a gulag in 1938, 'a frigate or acropolis / Shines from afar, / The brother to the water and sky.'

'It teaches,' Mandelstam went on, 'that beauty is not the fancy of a demigod / But the simple carpenter's predatory eye.'

In St Petersburg you cannot get away from the tension between the demigod and the craftsman, between autocracy, massively stupid and ruthlessly cruel, and the intelligentsia - also, as it turned out, just as capable of stupidity and cruelty.

You can even argue that the European intelligentsia originated in St Petersburg. When government allowed as little intellectual freedom as it did under the tsars, those who wanted to write or to think or to change Russia had no choice but to band together as conspirators. In any case, this city is the magnificent mausoleum of both autocracy and intelligentsia.

The monuments of autocracy are more visible. If you go to the Strelka, the narrow spit of land at the tip of Vasilevsky island, with your back to what was once the world's most elegant stock exchange, they are all around you.

If you look to the north, the spire of the church where all the Romanovs are buried - from Peter to the Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, who died last year in Miami - rises over the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Across the water is the Trubetskoy Bastion, where Peter was present when his own son, who rebelled against him, was tortured to death. And there on the wall, in 1825, the five ringleaders of the Decembrists - idealistic aristocratic mutineers - were publicly hanged. The nooses slipped and the men fell from the gallows. One of them, Muravyov-Apostol, broke both his legs. 'Poor Russia,' he said, 'she cannot even hang decently.' They took him back and hanged him again.

Twenty-four years later, a young former army engineer was marched out of the gates of the same fortress and put through a mock execution by firing squad. His crime: belonging to a group that had discussed political reform. His name: Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Look the other way, across the river Neva, and you will see the crowning achievement of autocracy: the gleaming white-and- green facade of the Winter Palace, now the home of the incomparable treasures of the Hermitage museum - Rembrandt and Titian, Poussin and Claude, and an unforgettable madonna by Leonardo. Even more extraordinary is the best collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists outside Paris - Cezanne, Degas, Monet - and unforgettable landscapes by Derain, a roomful of Matisse, another of Picasso.

The whole city is a museum of the architecture of the Russian baroque, a theatrical style made possible by the sheer wealth of the patrons, and brought to the highest pitch of elegance and grandeur by architects both Russian and imported.

But perhaps the finest of its achievements are the great suburban palaces: Peterhof, also known as Petrodvorets; Pushkin, which was Tsarskoye Selo, with its facade of gold, white and turquoise, built for Catherine the Great

to entertain her 14 official and numerous unofficial lovers; and Pavlovsk, built in the purest Palladian style for her son Paul by the brilliant Scottish architect, Charles Cameron.

The achievements of the St Petersburg intelligentsia are less tangible, but scarcely less glittering. In the 18th century, St Petersburg was like the Hollywood of the Thirties, a magnet for foreign talent. By the 19th century, it was producing talents of its own that stood comparison with those in any other society: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Gogol and Chekhov, their lives overlapping in the same city; Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, all composing for the same orchestras and audiences.

By the beginning of this century the city was exporting ideas, fashions and talents where once it had been a cultural importer.

In 1912 the Ballets Russes - from St Petersburg, of course - burst upon Paris and then London like a liberation. In the dancing of Nijinsky and Tsishinskaya, and in Diaghilev's choreography from the Mariynsky Theatre in St Petersburg, there was sensual abandon and sexual vigour. In the designs of Bakst there was barbaric colour and energy, and in Stravinsky's music there was the marriage of folk tunes and avant-garde sophistication, all coming from St Petersburg.

There was a cafe fashionable among the intelligentsia in those days - rather an expensive-looking cafe, to judge from its exterior - that is being restored, in spite of its name: the Stray Dog. Someone remembers walking in there one day, in about 1915, and seeing five great poets - Blok, Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak - all drinking their coffee and taking no notice of one another. It is hard to think of such a galaxy of poetic talent being found anywhere else at any one time.

Diaghilev's Mariynsky Theatre is still there; it is now called the Kirov, after the Leningrad party boss whose murder in 1934 set off the Terror.

It is still well nigh impossible to get tickets, for the ballet is superb, and there is also life and vigour in St Petersburg's film-making, rock music and jazz.

I was lucky enough to be taken to a premiere at the House of Film. We were served an excellent dinner, with caviare, by waiters in dinner jackets, while an amateur pianist played 'Honky-tonk Train Blues' more than creditably, with his friends leaning over his shoulders to request the next number. There is music everywhere in the city, from the brass band of buskers which greets you and sends you off from the airport, to the stars of the ballet and the Conservatoire.

The Stray Dog is being restored, but the great question is whether the city will ever again witness that magical outpouring of poetry, that explosion of artistic and intellectual energy that both heralded the October Revolution and was destroyed by it.

Every day, long queues form outside the Hermitage. But there was not a soul but ourselves when we visited the Museum of the History of St Petersburg, in a handsome palace downriver near the naval dockyard.

It is a museum dedicated to the history of the city since the cruiser Aurora, still moored alongside the quay nearby, fired a signal for the Red Guards from the factories in the southern suburbs to close in, almost without a shot, on the Provisional Government, whose ministers were watching nervously from the great windows of the Winter Palace.

The museum has a marvellous collection of revolutionary posters and mementoes. But it also tells the story of the city's own calvary during the siege of 1941-44, when first the heating went, then the lights, and finally the water, and people survived only by melting snow. All supplies came in trucks over the ice of the frozen Lake Ladoga, and priority was given to ammunition. It is said that 641,000 people died of hunger. Certainly some of the inhabitants were driven to cannibalism.

We tiptoed around the museum, almost whispering, because we realised that the elderly ladies knitting and reading magazines in the corners of the empty rooms must have experienced the siege as children.

They must have been much the same age as Tatyana Savicheva, whose diary is preserved in a glass case. It records deaths in the childish scrawl of frozen fingers: first Granny, then Uncle Alyosha, then Mummy. It ends: 'Everyone's dead, only Tanya's left.'

But unlike the ladies in the museum, Tanya did not survive. Perhaps her body was dragged across the ice like the child's body in a photograph in the exhibition, wrapped in a shroud, on a toboggan just like the ones the noisy children were playing with in the snow outside.

Few other cities are as beautiful, whether in the snow or in the White Nights of the northern summer; and absolutely no other city burns with the same emotional intensity as St Petersburg under its shabby-elegant exterior.

Here, as nowhere else, you can finally understand the splendours and the misery, the courage and the cruelty that are the European inheritance.

Getting there: Travelling to St Petersburg is no problem. British Airways runs direct flights on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, and Aeroflot on Saturdays. About a dozen other European airlines fly there, too: for example, Finnair, through Helsinki. Take the bus from the airport; it is far, far cheaper than risking taxi drivers who demand dollars.

Package holidays: My arrangements were made by Regent Holidays (0272 211711), the efficient and enthusiastic Bristol travel agency which specialises in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It can arrange an Intourist guide, or attach you to a guided group. You ought to book a couple of months in advance, though: it still takes a long time to get a Russian visa.

Accommodation: The two big Soviet-style hotels are the St Petersburg, opposite the cruiser Aurora and close to the Finland Station, and the Moskva, opposite the Nevsky monastery at the 'wrong' end of Nevsky Prospect. Two new hotels - the Pulkovskaya and the Pribaltiskaya - have been built on the Gulf of Finland, at the opposite end of Vasilevsky island from the city centre. Convenient for the palaces of Lomonosov (Oranienbaum), Petrodvorets (Peterhof), Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) and Pavlovsk, they come into their own during the 'white nights' of summer.

Money: It is safest to eat in the hotels, where the food is reliable and cheap (a glass of vodka, some caviare, a steak and a half-bottle of Armenian, Georgian or even French wine for less than dollars 20). But the rouble's collapse is not all good news: taxi drivers and the new Russian entrepreneurs want dollars for everything; they have not heard of marks, francs or pounds. The official beriozka shops are full of tempting items (furs, glass, china, enamel, caviare) at untempting prices; for example, several hundred dollars for a beautiful but modern manufactured porcelain cup (you can buy 18th-century Worcester for less).

Safety: Russia is going through tough times, and Russians are having to scuffle to survive. There is a fair amount of crime in St Petersburg, and some of it is violent. If you are sensible, you have little to fear. The vast majority of people in St Petersburg are resourceful, friendly and charming.

Reading: I found two books especially helpful. One, St Petersburg, in the Insight Guides series, contains excellent essays by well-known Russian writers including Yevgeny Yevtushenko (originally a Ukrainian, to be pedantic) and the Academician, Dmitry Likhachev, and an account by the late Lidiya Ginsburg of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

The other book is St Petersburg: a Traveller's Companion, published by Constable and well edited by Laurence Kelly. This is a selection of texts describing specific buildings, such as the Hermitage or the Peter and Paul Fortress by writers such as Tolstoy, Pushkin, Herzen and Gogol, and by Western travellers, from Casanova to John Reed.

Together, these books give the visitor a haunting sense of the history of the place.

(Photographsomitted)