St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past available in Hardcover, eBook
- ISBN-10:
- 0300169183
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300169188
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2014
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0300169183
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300169188
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2014
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
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Overview
Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities—a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past.
In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300169188 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2014 |
| Pages: | 488 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d) |
About the Author
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of many books about Russian literature and culture. She lives in Oxford and St. Petersburg.
Read an Excerpt
ST PETERSBURG
SHADOWS OF THE PAST
By Catriona Kelly
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Catriona KellyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-16918-8
CHAPTER 1
Moscow Station and Palace Bridge
The cosy jangle of the crawling tram, Its apple smell of the holiday's first vodka ... (Nonna Slepakova)
In terms of metaphor, Petersburg is a ship-haunted city. The municipal crest, introduced in 1730 and used again from 1991, is decorated with sea and river anchors. A miniature ship – marine life seen through the other end of the telescope – tops the Admiralty building, and anchors decorate its entrances. The building inhabited by many Leningrad writers in the 1920s was known as 'the crazy ship'.
By legend, a salvo from another famous nautical symbol, the cruiser Aurora, began the Revolution. The ship became a museum in 1948. Lovingly preserved (indeed, according to a widespread rumour, completely rebuilt to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Revolution), the Aurora formed part of a major monumental complex on Petrograd Side, moored alongside the cabin built by Peter the Great, founder of the first Russian fleet. The Aurora was only one of the hero ships preserved at different points down the embankments. On Vasilievsky Island stood the icebreaker Krasin, dispatched to the rescue of Umberto Nobile's expedition to the Arctic, and returned on 5 October 1928 to a city-wide celebration.
Majestic and ominous, the sea dominated literary representations of the city. For Alexander Blok, the forlorn, drunken sailor on the docks stood for human tragedy in the broadest sense. Mandelstam's apocalyptic postrevolutionary poems about listing, doomed 'Petropolis' identified sea location and watery catastrophe. The air of the Baltic blew through Joseph Brodsky's poems, and the sea figured regularly in the poet's drawings as well. In 1981, the cultural historian Yuri Lotman, a native of the city, saw the association more concretely: 'Petersburg met me with squally winds, the smell of the sea and the thaw. I even had the feeling that Nevsky Prospekt was rocking like a deck. [...] As I went down Nevsky at night, I had a poetic moment or two, sensing the city like a vast boat.'
The insistent recrudescence of the maritime in metaphors was partly a displacement. In Petrine days entire sections of the centre were given over to rigging and bales of tow, but in the twentieth century the sea made a muted impact on Petersburg's historic centre – bursts of brackish air and the odd perpetually indignant seagull aside. In the Soviet period, private seafaring craft were as far beyond the reach of Soviet citizens as personal planes. Leningrad was not even visited by long-distance ocean-going ferries. There were no hovercrafts from Tallinn or ro-ros from Helsinki. Sea links with the outer world took the form of luxury cruises, with the huge white ships acting as temporary hotels for Western tourists come to sight-see (and in the case of Finns, drink the town dry). Occasionally they would take some privileged Soviet traveller in the other direction – to Denmark, Germany, and, until the end of the 1970s, England.
There was also a considerable distance between the heart of the city and its marine extremities. Sometimes a cruise liner might be moored in the centre, looking as though someone had dropped it, but the main passenger port was the 'Sea Station' out on the western end of Vasilievsky Island, a vast concrete stack topped with a notional mast, completed in 1982. Before reaching the station, the hopeful traveller had been exposed to mile upon mile of crumbling concrete docks, as the ship slowly made its way up the 'sea canal' from the coast.
The indignity of this approach – as a local historian I know put it in 1990, 'From the sea, Leningrad is an appalling city' – was a recognised embarrassment for the city's administration. In the late Soviet period, the construction of a 'marine facade' became one of the preoccupations of city planners. The tower blocks created on reclaimed land at the western end of Vasilievsky Island in order to effect this frontage became one of the most prestigious housing zones in the city. But by the early twenty-first century, they too were regarded as graceless, and plans for a new 'marine facade' on reclaimed land in front of the 1970s one were set in train. Constructed as a joint state-private finance initiative, the complex was – according to the company building it – 'an impressive European facade for the Northern capital on its seaward side, with high-rise business centres, shopping malls, leisure facilities, parks, new housing.' It would 'present a modern and convenient marine gateway for guests arriving in St Petersburg', as well as much-needed office space within easy reach of the historic centre.
This ambitious scheme was intended to transform the functionally landlubber existence of the Neva's major city. In the early Soviet period, the banks of the river were still used for freighting, but embankment-building in the post-war years turned the shores of Vyborg Side and Okhta, and the Neva banks south of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, into ordinary urban thoroughfares.
Throughout the Soviet period, sailing had been the preserve of professional mariners – the sailors based out at Kronstadt, the sea cadets in the Makarov College, and the merchant seamen manning the Soviet Union's largest cargo port. Sailors were a specific sub-cultural group, given their relative freedom to travel. In the late Soviet period, merchant seamen were among the key suppliers of the city's lively black market. Naval officers and ratings inspired much more affection than ordinary army officers and 'Navy Day' was a genuine local holiday, with its brass bands, dress uniforms, and sometimes naval visitors from afar. There was also a 'mariner literature', such as Nikolai Rubtsov's poem 'On the Ocean', which recalled the spattered appearance and cod stink of a sea-going trawler, with its tireless procession of seabirds behind:
And the waves bulged crimson
like muscles,
foam-flecked,
drunken,
on the ocean's nervy chest,
and the seals dived into the waves.
For most locals on ordinary days, though, Leningrad's relationship with the sea recalled Edinburgh rather than Venice or Stockholm. Leningrad was a major training centre for marine architects, and thousands of people were employed in ship-building and marine ballistics. But as activities of strategic significance, these lay below the surface: an open secret, but still a secret. The city's naval base was at Kronstadt, accessible only by special permit. The freight docks lay on remote Kanonersky Island, beyond the end of the city's most proletarian waterway, the Obvodnyi Canal. Only in the summer did the city's connections with the sea revive, with improvised kebab bars down at the docks, and the Neva embankments at the western end of Vasilievsky Island thronged by nautical traffic waiting for the opening of the city's drawbridges.
On summer nights down by the embankments, the lit ships preparing for the off gave a sense of freedom unusual in a country with closed borders. (Along the Estonian coast, villagers who had once worked as fishermen were allowed to keep their boats only if they had these sawn in half; the remnants were used to ornament people's gardens.) But Leningrad's status as harbour was not celebrated in Soviet mythology. It was Moscow, the capital, which had to have primacy here, its landlocked position dissolved in the title 'Port of Five Seas'.
Once 'Leningrad' became 'Petersburg', its relationship with the sea remained ambiguous. With the Baltic Fleet run down, Kronstadt became functionally a normal city suburb, accessible by bus over the flood dam, though still with a military air to its spruce, cobbled streets. However, the 300th anniversary of the foundation of the Russian navy was commemorated by a spate of new monuments. The city filled up with tall ships, suddenly resembling once more the magnet for 'all flags' planned by Peter I in Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman. But the flotilla soon dispersed.
Petersburg continued to be one of the Russian Federation's leading cargo ports, with a turnover exceeding that of every other city bar Novorossiisk. Yet this did not put it even in the top fifty internationally (indeed, world leaders such as Shanghai and Singapore handled more cargo than all the ports in the Russian Federation put together); rather, the figure was comparable with the slimmed-down Port of London. At the same time, Petersburg's role as a centre for the marine defence industry survived, at least outwardly. In the new world, factories openly advertised themselves as 'Submarine Factory' (on the Neva, beyond Admiralty Wharves), or 'Underwater Ballistics Concern' (on Bol'shoi Sampsonievsky).
Privatisation, while creating problems for the city's professional sailors, did not lead to a surge in boat-purchasing. Sea travel largely remained the preserve of professional sailors and the prosperous – the very rich moored their yachts in Monaco, not on Krestovsky Island. To visit the sea, most locals were likely to take a train out to the Gulf of Finland (the local 'riviera', with its resorts of Zelenogorsk, Sestroretsk, Repino, and Komarovo), rather than head to the city shores.
The sea was thus not so much an essential component of city life as a reminder, at times an awkward reminder, of the potential for elemental nightmares. In 2004, drunks lifted a commemorative anchor on Vasilievsky Island off its pedestal in order to use the marble base as a table, as though such lesemajeste could reduce the ocean itself to size. In Il'ya Averbakh's film Monologue (1972), the teenage heroine's attractive but heartless seducer was a keen amateur sailor, with sexual transgression and wandering the deep at will symbolically associated. The marine haunted the imagination of the city's artists, but in its physical actuality St Petersburg was a river city of a quintessentially Russian kind. The double identity of St Petersburg as marine yet non-marine was poetically captured by Alexander Sokurov's film Father and Son (2003), set in a city which, like St Petersburg, was bounded by the grey ocean – but in fact mostly filmed in Lisbon.
The city and sea remained uncomfortable neighbours. Before work started on the protective dam alongside Kronstadt (begun in 1979), major floods were a constant threat. As building slowly advanced (it was interrupted in 1990 for more than a decade, and continued into the 2010s), the possible ecological damage (stagnation, rise in pollution and in topsoil salinity levels) made the thinking public anxious. Artists took refuge in an imaginative retreat to the period of great deluges (as in Andrei Chezhin's 2003 series, The Neva [Baptismal] Font, which showed the city's landmarks surrounded by churning floods). Hemmed in by increasingly fetid water, the actual St Petersburg – despite the promise of the new 'Marine Facade' – seemed cut off from the ocean to a greater extent than at any time in its history.
Airborne and Overland
By the late twentieth century, the vast majority of international travellers, and many from within the country, were arriving by air rather than water. Passenger traffic had begun in the 1930s at the airfield to the south of the city later known as Shosseinaya. But flights were few in number, and travellers were mainly those on official business – what Soviet usage referred to as the 'commanded'. A second airfield, Smol'noe (later known as Rzhevka), was opened in 1941, in order to service warplanes (the airfield to the south had been swallowed by the front line). After the war, Smol'noe continued in use, servicing short-range flights in small aircraft. However, it was Shosseinaya airfield that was developed for large-scale traffic. Reopened in 1948, it acquired its first arrival hall (a building of modest size in the conservative neo-classical style contemporary Western architects would have used for a bank) in 1951.
In the late 1950s, the place was still a modest operation, with fewer than 100 flights a day (at the same period, New York-La Guardia was handling over 1000). From the early 1960s, the number of flights started increasing rapidly. By the late 1960s, this was the second busiest airport in the Soviet Union, serving 1.2 million passengers in 1967.
Reconstructed by the leading Leningrad architect Aleksandr Zhuk, it reopened in 1973 as 'Pulkovo'; the design, awarded a State Prize in 1974, attracted a great deal of flattering press coverage. It was later to be on most lists of the leading modern buildings in the city. If the first hall at Pulkovo had resembled a Soviet station (for example, that at Vyborg), the new one looked like an enormous liner with five central funnels (once again, marine metaphors surfaced as the importance of the sea receded). Inside, however, functionalism dominated – by the late twentieth century, rather dilapidated functionalism.
From the late 1980s – as international travel suddenly became possible for Russians – the focus in reporting switched from the airport's splendours to its deficiencies. Among the 'all too earthly concerns' of the aviation authorities, as one journalist put it, was the absence of a city terminus, not to speak of hotels for transit passengers.
The terminal for foreign traffic, the original Shosseinaya arrivals hall, was particularly cramped. Those meeting and seeing off passengers milled aimlessly in an ill-defined arena, with just one cafe squeezed into a side aisle. In early January 2003, with outside temperatures down to minus 30, it was so cold in the area where passengers were herded to wait for passport control that you had to unpeel the skin of your hand from the surface of a fake marble pillar after using this as a prop for signing off the arrival paperwork. Large-scale reconstruction had to wait till a new pavilion, in the steel and glass style of neoglobalism, was built for the 2003 Jubilee. Even this was hardly adequate to numbers when not being used just by VIPs, particularly as almost all the flights – presumably, for the convenience of customs and passport control staff – arrived and departed in the late afternoon.
All the same, air travel remained a prestige form of long-distance travel into the twenty-first century. In the Soviet period, this was also the only kind of domestic transport for which one could buy a return ticket. Any other type of travel often required the passenger either to trust fate, or to badger friends or connections at the far end to obtain the return before the outward journey was booked. Since the main direction of traffic was into Leningrad (as with Moscow), voyaging on spec meant being stranded at the provincial end of the trip, where tickets would be harder to get than reservations in one of London or New York's most fashionable restaurants.
At the other end of the scale from planes lay long-distance buses. In the 1960s, these seemed (at least to provincial travellers) quite luxurious: 'brand new Ikarus vehicles, pretty chic for the times,' remembered a Russian living in Estonia. With the same Ikarus in service for decades, the main virtue came to be cheapness. Concessions to comfort were almost non-existent. At best, there might be a 'relaxer seat' on long-distance routes – though this would not necessarily work – and curtains that, in summer, flapped in the hot, dusty air from the windows. Tickets were till receipts faintly printed out on fibrous, buff-coloured paper. Relegated to a site on Obvodnyi Canal, and built in late-Soviet style économique, the Leningrad bus station was the most shame-faced of major entry points.
The bus station was reconstructed for the Jubilee of 2003, and ticketing systems modernised. Bus travellers could now, if they liked, travel considerably more comfortably than in the past, but in that case, tickets cost much the same as by rail. However, bargain-basement bus travel still existed, as was clear from the vehicles lined up outside the Moscow Station in the late evening. Destinations – Elista, the capital of the Kalmyk Republic, Vladikavkaz – made clear that a sizable cohort of passengers were the so-called gastarbaitery. Buses to Berlin, Dusseldorf, Helsinki or Paris offered Petersburgers on tight budgets an economical route to the West. Those who could not afford even the bus fare were likely to hitch lifts – though a small sum often needed to be paid for these too.
But for travellers living above the breadline, as well as for many people who had been 'commanded' (that is, were arriving on official business), the train was the most likely mode of transport. It offered a permissively wide tariff for all from VIPs (who, in the Soviet years, might contact the authorities to have a couple of extra carriages added to the country's number one train, the 'Red Arrow')44 down to those packing the shelf-bunks of the 'general carriages' or occupying an ordinary seat. A sense of occasion was conferred by the playing of Reinhold Gliere's 1949 anthem, 'Hymn to a Great City', over the tannoy as the passengers of the premier trains descended to the platforms and made their way to the covered entrance. But whatever their status, rail gave its users access to the heart of the city.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ST PETERSBURG by Catriona Kelly. Copyright © 2014 Catriona Kelly. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations.................... ix
Preface and Acknowledgements.................... xiii
Introduction: City Panorama.................... 1
1 Moscow Station and Palace Bridge.................... 23
2 Making a Home on the Neva.................... 63
3 'The Hermitage and My Own Front Door': City Spaces.................... 93
4 Initiation into the Working Class.................... 129
5 Eliseev and Aprashka.................... 170
6 Theatre Street.................... 209
7 From Nord to Saigon.................... 251
8 The Twenty-Seventh Kilometre.................... 279
9 The Last Journey.................... 312
10 Afterword.................... 332
Abbreviations and Conventions.................... 338
Notes.................... 341
Glossary and List of Major Place Names.................... 428
Sources and their Uses.................... 431
Select Bibliography.................... 435
Index.................... 453