Chapter 23: A week in Saint Petersburg

The tipping point came at The Hermitage. 

I wrote in my last post about how I’d gone to greater effort to be able to visit Russia than anywhere else, and that I’d been underwhelmed by what I found in Moscow. I finished that post with a ‘maybe’: maybe Saint Petersburg would be better. By Friday – my fifth day in Saint Petersburg, my eleventh in Russia - I’d given up on that idea. The problem wasn’t Moscow. The problem was Russia. 

There’s a perceived pressure when travelling, and especially when one is foolish enough to start writing a travelogue, for everything to be wonderful, to be having adventures and accumulating stories, to dial all your senses up to eleven until you’re overwhelmed, and happily overwhelmed at that. And it doubles when you’re going somewhere with a little bit of mystery and otherness to it, like Russia. I’m not suggesting for a moment that anybody reading this has created that sort of pressure, by the way, but a lifetime of travel shows, ads, Facebook posts and Instagram photos have.

Sometimes the reality, especially when you’ve been travelling for four months, is rather different. Sometimes the reality is having your third serious cold in ten weeks. With shitty weather. With a hundred minor difficulties that are each perfectly manageable and no big deal on their own, but that are each part of a greater whole that is just too much bloody effort, and sometimes you can’t be bothered and you wish you’d just stayed home. That was the point I had reached at The Hermitage. I jumped on Facebook and made my confession: I wasn’t enjoying myself. It might have been the smartest thing I did in Russia, because I unburdened myself of that perceived pressure. 

I genuinely felt at the time that I’d given Saint Petersburg a fair chance. I’d ended up with an extra day here, thanks to the ghost bus incident in Poland, which had in turn forced me to shave a Schengen visa day back from Tallinn, my next destination inside the zone. So six days became seven, but when I got sick in Moscow seven days once again became six. I’d use the extra time to bum around the hostel on my first day, stay warm, try to recover and maybe even get some writing done. 

The hostel and I got off to an awkward start, and our relationship never really recovered. Upon checking in I was confronted with a full, A4 page ‘guest contract’ to sign. This being Russia, it was in Russian, and the hostel staff member couldn’t understand – or hide his impatience for – my insistence on being told, line by line, what I was signing. We were there a while, but eventually I signed, having known all along that I had no choice unless I wanted to spend the night wandering the streets of Saint Petersburg, insulin bag in hand, dying of man flu. But hey, signing documents without reading them has never gone badly for anybody in Russia, ever, right? 

Then we had another stand-off over the wifi: the hostel’s internet is set up so you have to log-in via Facebook, with who knew what data falling into the clutches of who knew what Russian company. I kept objecting until they gave me access to the staff log-in to shut me up. Even then, the network was so slow as to be effectively unusable, especially because my paranoia meant that I wouldn’t touch an internet connection the entire time I was in Russia unless I could get it to accept my VPN. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have bothered worrying. If we’ve learned anything from the rolling Trump farce, it’s that if Russians really wanted any of my data they can get it easily enough. 

I finally roused myself to go exploring on day two. I’d read something about there being a museum in the Smolny Institute, the building that had been the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet during the 1917 revolution, so I headed in that direction. Saint Petersburg is a big, sprawling city, and I’d already walked a couple of kilometres by the time I got there, only to be stopped by a guard (or maybe a police officer. There’s so many different uniforms in this country it’s impossible to tell). I’d just seen other people walk in, but when I approached the guard blocked the gate. ‘Nyet’, he said.

Hmm. ‘Is this the museum?, I asked, with little optimism that he would understand me.

‘Nyet’.

I looked back down at Google Maps on my phone. It clearly stated there was a museum here. I simplified my question down to a single word. ‘Museum’? I pointed at the door. 

‘Nyet’. This time I got a shake of the head as well.

I eventually unravelled the explanation: there is a museum there, but it’s still an official building of some kind. A black Mercedes had in fact roared up as I was there, depositing a posse of VIP sorts who certainly didn’t wait for the guard to say ‘da’ before marching inside. Museum visits are strictly by appointment-only: I wasn’t getting into the Smolny Institute.

I hadn’t realised, either, that Smolny was relatively remote from the other interesting parts of Saint Petersburg, so I kept walking – heading for Finland Station - when I probably should have hopped a train into the city centre. I wonder, if I’d done that, whether I might have come to appreciate Saint Petersburg a little earlier. Instead I walked for about 45 minutes, in drizzling rain, through a streetscape of office blocks and light industry: not quite the triumphant first walk through town I was after. And Finland Station was a disappointment too. It’s where Lenin arrived late to the revolution in 1917, and promptly gave a speech that upset many a 20th century apple cart. I’m not sure what I expected to find there, but the spot was marked only with a Lenin statue, and I’d seen quite enough of those over the past few weeks already. Dispirited with my first day out and about in Saint Petersburg, then, I gave up and returned to the hostel for a few hours of wifi dropouts and being glared at by the guy who was working when I arrived.

Two days in, and Saint Petersburg was so far no better than Moscow. But I had a pair of aces up my sleeve on day three: the Museum of Russian Political History and the Museum of Russian Political Police. If a museum about political police, in what’s still effectively a police state, couldn’t lift me out of my malaise then nothing could. But, of course, none of the signs were in English, and even if I’d been able to read them the displays appeared to be no more than photos of old Soviet secret police chiefs, along with the odd document they’d signed ordering the arrest or execution of someone or other. I fiddled on my phone for 15 minutes, waiting just long enough to make a respectful departure, and went on my way. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on the Museum of Russian Political History, but as yet I’d had nothing but sickness and strike-outs since arriving in Saint Petersburg. 

I had plenty of time, so I walked the couple of kilometres between the museums. It was a good decision, because for the first time I caught some hint of the Saint Petersburg I’d read such good things about. The route took me past The Hermitage and across the River Neva to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where I thought for a delightful moment that I’d snuck in without paying before I found out the grounds are free, while all the buildings cost extra. You could walk along the walls for 300 rubles (about $7), and I was amazed to see people actually paying it: they were getting the exact same view of Saint Petersburg as I’d gotten walking along the front of the fortress, but with an extra height of five metres. A tourist and her money are soon parted, I guess.

Whilst at the Fortress I came across a statue of an inverse Donald Trump: a tiny head and enormous hands, but every bit as creepy:

The museum, thankfully, didn’t disappoint, at least not overall. It certainly has its weaknesses as a museum – Russia’s political history is so complex and so fascinating that they really need a building several times bigger than what they have to adequately cover it, but the location was presumably chosen because Lenin based himself there for a period during 2017. It’s odd: I felt Lenin’s presence (in a ‘close to history’ sense, nothing mystical) more in the room where he had an office than when I’d stood and looked at his body the previous week.

I half-expected to find a complete whitewash of history as I moved through the museum, but it’s more of an incomplete whitewash. The displays flit from year to year, from 1905 to 1917 to 1920 to 1936 to 1941: it’s not that they prefer not to mention the Great Purge, for instance, but they simply don’t have the space to linger: one must be getting onto Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, before lurching forward another 20 years to get to Sakharov. 

Putin, conveniently enough, appears only at the very end of the route. We get some mentions of corruption-busting politicians and journalists who were assassinated during the Yeltsin era, but the journey ends on December 31, 1999, with a recording of Putin’s address to the nation upon becoming President. There’s no room left to explore the mysterious deaths of Alexander Litvinenko or Anna Politkovskaya, or to note the invasions of Georgia or Ukraine. Unfortunate, isn’t it?

I’d half-decided to use the next day to go out to one of the big palace complexes on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg – the Peterhof, perhaps, or the Catherine Palace – but my inability to choose which one hints at my ambivalence. To be honest, despite a somewhat better day I was still struggling for motivation to leave the hostel (except to search for usable wifi). I ended up leaving it too late to get out to either and instead visited the Battleship Aurora, whose crew famously fired the first shots of the November 1917 revolution:

It clearly didn’t make much of an impression. When I started planning out and drafting this piece I had to use the placeholder text ‘What did I do on Thursday?’, until I went through photos, because I honestly couldn’t remember. I never did get the hang of Thursdays.

I’d left The Hermitage to Friday, when I could take advantage of the later opening hours. Things started out well enough: I bought an online ticket to avoid an hour long wait, and a kindly staff member showed me the right entrance (the gallery stretches out across several buildings). Things went downhill, though, when I got in. The info desk at this entrance didn’t have an English map, only Russian ones, and I’d gotten disoriented on the way in. I asked the woman there to show me, on the Russian map, where we were so I could navigate to another entrance and look for an English one there. ‘No English’, she replied.

That could mean two things – either she was repeating that she had no English maps, or saying she didn’t speak English. Probably both, in fact. But never mind, all I wanted her to do was point to where we were, so I gestured around the room and then pointed at the map, hoping she’d get the gist of the question. ‘No English’, she repeated, and turned her back. And no amount of saying ‘excuse me’ could get her to turn around again: I’d been dismissed. I don’t think I’m one of those ugly tourists who expects everybody to speak English or to go out of their way for me, but this woman worked in visitor services in Saint Petersburg’s biggest tourist attraction. To simply turn her back on me, to ignore my attempts to communicate, was too much. 

This woman was in a small minority of unnecessarily rude people in Russia. Indeed, several times strangers who spoke English jumped in when I was struggling in a restaurant or shop, offering to serve as a translator. Rudeness wasn’t the issue, and Russia’s reputation for it is as undeserved as it is in France.

No. I was just sick and tired of everything being just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. Tired of not being able to communicate. Tired of getting lost. Tired of having to scout out food options. Tired of pushing through illness, and bad weather, and general indifference in pursuit of the time of my life. Tired, just for a moment, of travelling. Tired of not being home. It’s not entirely a coincidence that it was Russia – a place I’d invested a lot of time and effort in getting to, and certainly not the easiest of countries to visit – but it could have been somewhere else too. And so I declared that I was hating my time there, and I was, but I’d misdiagnosed the issue. But conceding defeat – giving up on liking Russia – was an unwitting stroke of genius. Pressure lifted, indifferent about what I did with my remaining time, I even managed to somehow enjoy myself.

The Hermitage collection is mostly made up of the landscapes and fat babies genres, like the Louvre, but I enjoyed wandering around once I’d vented my frustrations a little. There’s a couple of Leonardo da Vinci paintings that had a similar scene to the one at the Mona Lisa, on a smaller scale. And there’s an enormous hall with both walls covered with hundreds of portraits of Russian military officers, some of whom caused me to laugh out loud in a most disrespectful fashion:

The Hermitage is centred around the Winter Palace, which was the city residence of the Tsars. Many of the state rooms have been kept as they were pre-revolution, like the throne room:

Once the seat of imperial power, it’s now a museum exhibit. Hopefully a similar fate eventually befalls our own throne (or Britain’s, rather). 

Having seen the Hermitage I discarded any remaining notion of going to the Peterhof or Catherine Palace, as I figured they would be much the same thing. I’m probably the only tourist ever to visit Saint Petersburg and go to neither, but that’s okay.

I had to find an Internet café to watch the Swans game, and along the way caught a fleeting glimpse – too fleeting for a photo, alas – of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a periscope on the roof and stickers of The Beatles, wearing Sgt Pepper costumes, on the side. It was a rare Russian moment of utter delight, and because this was Russia, where no such delight could be left to fester, it was followed just two minutes later by seeing an overly aggressive bouncer capsicum spraying two young men. There wasn’t much I could do, but I gave them my water bottle to rinse out their eyes and kept going. The man sitting next to me at the Internet café, an Arsenal fan, was watching them play at Homebush stadium, a five minute walk away from where the Swans were playing GWS. The world really is much smaller than it looks.

After the game I wandered about with no particular place to be and finally – almost, but not quite too late – found the Saint Petersburg I’d been looking for. I started following a canal into an old industrial area, and found a newly opened park – with beanbags and clean, free public toilets no less – built into the middle of a former shipbuilding dock. I fell asleep in a bean bag for a while, woke up with low blood sugar and rushed off to buy something to eat, unwittingly leaving my camera behind. But when I dashed back ten minutes later, one of the group who had swooped on my beanbag escorted me to the office where they’d handed it in as lost property. “Not all Russians are unkind”, he told me. I know, mate. I know.

I kept roaming along the canals and eventually tracked one back towards the Neva, where I arrived in good time to catch the sunset hitting the river and the Hermitage:

And Russia and I were finally able to part on good terms.