21 Slices of St. Petersburg Life

What is there left to write about St. Petersburg? It would seem that everything has been written 150 million times over the last 300 years. It was St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and again St. Petersburg; the city’s name is as changeable as its unpredictable weather. 

And yet it is always “Piter.”

Our city was founded by a reformist Russian tsar amidst Finnish swamps, to be filled with strange Italian, French and German architecture that imitates pagan Greek shrines. It was populated forcibly by citizens who never wanted to live in the swamp that became our window on Europe — Russia’s unwitting cultural capital. 

Scholars who study Russian culture insist that St. Petersburg is male, while Moscow, with its feminine noun ending, is female. Thus, Moscow gives birth and Petersburg creates. This may explain the city’s artificial beginnings, its unnatural political turnovers and the greenish tint of its residents’ skin.

Yet this city is proud and full of itself.

But it has reason to be. It is the only place that beats Venice in the sheer number of canals and bridges; it is northernmost of continental Europe’s large cities; it tricked its residents into living here at this most uncomfortable latitude, where even wolves refused to live because of the constant threat of flooding. But there is no city in the world that is more beautiful, with streets that are straighter and a sky that is grayer. It is a beautiful and noble shade of gray, backgrounded by  subtle hints of sunshine. It is hectic and it is legendary.

But St. Petersburg is really just a metaphor for a city. The city itself is a fake.

Do you know how Rubens’ students used to harass the famous Flemish artist in his old age? They would paint coins on the floor and then make a game of watching the old master thievishly look around and bend down to pick up the coins.

St. Petersburg is like those coins. It is a phony, artificial city, not really equipped to be lived in. But its mythological beauty and charm are undeniable, and millions come here every year to try to take one of those elusive coins home with them.

There are a few characteristics that define or symbolize Piter and you can try to find them, enjoy them, mix them up and then forget them immediately—because Petersburg is so utopian that any impressions of it will disappear, if not today, then in a week. 

Nonetheless, we offer these 21 signs of life in St. Petersburg, an offbeat consideration of some of the facets of the odd jewel that is our home, our Northern Capital, our Piter.

• Dualist

Petersburg is greedy. To live in the Northern Capital is expensive and unpleasant. The decorative facades and embankments of downtown are seen by all. But few visitors happen upon the outlying bedroom communities filled with windy vacant lots, where enormous Brezhnev-era apartment buildings hulk over empty, ground floor department stores. The contrast is striking, but Petersburgers are ambivalent. 

Factories

It may be billed as the city of palaces, but St. Petersburg is home to a huge industrial complex, first among Russian cities. Communist mythology dubbed Leningrad the Birthplace of the Revolution. Its factory workers bought into Bolshevism lock, stock and barrel and fertilized the revolutions here. And these very factories also saved the city during World War II, when Piter’s women stamped out munitions for their blockaded city. What a harsh and thorny place. 

Provincial

Our city was lucky. In 1918, when Moscow was again declared the capital, the stamp “province” was entered in Petersburg passports. That allowed the city to preserve its unique architectural and cultural heritage. The Powers That Be rarely sent dynamite and all of their fashionably destructive ideas from the capital to the provinces. So the only things in Piter that sank into oblivion did so out of carelessness. They did not blow up churches by the dozen here as they did in Moscow. They did not rebuild Petersburg’s boulevards while destroying historical buildings, as in Paris. And they especially did not try to “restore” the city the way Prague has been restored. So now Petersburgers pride themselves in having the world’s largest collection of historically authentic architecture.

Solyanka

They thought the city would be the capital. That didn’t work out. Well at least a fort, then. That worked for awhile. But then enemies stopped trying to enter the city. So the main fortification—Peter and Paul—was used to pickle cabbage and marinate prisoners. The cradle of the revolution is filled with bourgeois monuments. The city has become a living architectural museum, offering students of that art examples of everything from gaudy baroque to bland modernism. We can’t decide on anything properly, so we have a mixed soup with a bit of everything in it. The resulting solyanka is an acquired taste.

Hermitagemania

This city has two types of food: for the body and for the soul. It is, of course, much nicer to talk of the city’s food for the soul, its wealth of museums. But now the cultural politics of the main entrée—the Hermitage Museum — has come to resemble fast food. We take our Rubenses around the world, franchising our beloved Hermitage in London and Las Vegas, and we put the golden seal of the Hermitage on anything that doesn’t move, and a few things that do, including movies. The Hermitage owns the Staff Headquarters on Palace Square and plans are in the works to open an emporium there with restaurants that serve steaks the color of a drop of water on a nymphet’s thigh, topped with Hermitage Sauce. The Hermitage is on the radio, in posters and its souvenir shops are the best in the city. It is the only place where you can buy a t-shirt that allows you to have St. Sebastian crucified in the center of your chest. 

Bliny

Piter’s pastries are famous. But they are not enough to live on. Now, overcoming foreign invaders, the new, old, national street food, at least in St. Petersburg, has become the bliny. You can now buy them on any corner, filled with cheese, ham, salmon, what have you. Local entrepreneurs have also discovered that there is nothing like honey mead to wash down hot bliny. And, if you want bliny in comfort, there are always the bliny restaurants where you can get a side order of bulgur wheat to go with your main course, while listening to jazz (see #19). 

Beer

There is little to say about beer in Piter except this: Baltika forever! This Swedish-financed brewery exploded on the market in 1992 and set in motion a change in drinking habits that is slowly weaning Russians off vodka. Ok, very slowly. And now, you can scarcely travel anywhere in Russia where the name Baltika is not known. Every Baltika lover has their favorite brand, numbered 1 through 10. Especially popular in Piter is number 9, a wild cocktail of pure alcohol and 10 proof beer, obviously designed to incite the blood and imagination of this city’s cold-blooded inhabitants. 

Coffee

In the morning, after a hard day’s night of beer consumption, or after a heavy lunch of pelmeny, or during the evening while anticipating the next cycle of beer drinking, Petersburgers crawl down to their nearest coffee shop. While chain-smoking (did we mention the many cigarette production plants in the city?), they drink endless quantities of coffee. There are several coffee shop chains, like “The Ideal Cup” (Idealnaya Chashka). The design is a Starbucks knock-off, clearly meant to urge you to get a quick cup and get out. But, no, the die-hards sit for hours and, regardless of the weather, slowly, sleepily drink their double latté with cinnamon. It can be such fun to annoy the staff.

Toilets 

A city has so many facets, and no topic will be off limits. Toilets in the area around St. Petersburg have a history older than the city itself. Five years before the city was built, the King of Sweden built public toilets in the forts that once stood here. But the first public toilet in the city was built by Peter the Great and had indoor plumbing (in the early 18th century, mind you!). This famous restroom, in the form of a mysteriously romantic castle, was on the Petrograd side. Besides entrances marked “M” and “W,” this public toilet had two additional entrances, marked “Boys” and “Girls.” The legendary restroom was replaced with the Gorkovskaya metro station. You can draw your own conclusions.

Masyanya 

Not too long ago, an animated web cartoon character named Masyanya became our city’s unofficial mascot. This girl/woman of an indefinable age (somewhere between 19 to 30) is the product of the imagination of St. Petersburg programmer Oleg Kuvaev. She has a squeaky, voice, engages in marginal, illegal, often anti-social behavior and has a bizarre sense of humor typical of Petersburg youth. Think Pogo with attitude. And definitely not PG. You’ll find her and her weird company at www.mult.ru

Metro

We used to get around by streetcar here, but now the metro is the primary means of public transportation. It may be the only thing the Soviet leaders left us of any value, and many of the stations hearken to the era of stagnation, full of their communist imagery and the “iron curtains” that close the stations off from the tunnels (a protection against flooding that is horrific to think about). Impressive with their pomp and heavy-laden with marble and crystal, the Petersburg metro is a monument to those who slaved to do the impossible—dig a metro under the Neva, and to those who achieve the unthinkable—brave its cars during rush hour. 

Kunstkamera

St. Petersburg is full of superlatives: the most delicious bliny, the best beer, the biggest museum, the deepest metro. Which brings us to the veritable Russian Guinness of museums. The Kunstkamera was actually Russia’s first museum, built by decree of Peter the Great, the Tsar Collector. Peter loved to collect oddities and needed a place to put them all. He also wanted his museum to educate people. But peasants and workers stubbornly refused to visit a museum; they had everything they needed at home. Then the museum started giving every visitor a glass of vodka. Needless to say, its popularity soared. Today, the Kunstkamera is a favorite of teenagers who like to gawk at the accidents of nature preserved in jars. Tour guides love to point to these mutations to demonstrate the harms of smoking and drinking to teens. Adults mostly stay away these days. After all, they stopped giving out free vodka long ago.

KGB

There is not a single person in Piter that does not know what you’ll find at 4 Liteiny Prospect — the St. Petersburg KGB. The building is all the more famous now, since the current president of Russia worked in the upper floors of this Stalinist behemoth. Locals refer to 4 Liteiny as the “Big House” and to many it symbolizes the horrors of Soviet repression. Since most prison camps were in Siberia and the first stop en route was usually a visit to the basement of the “Big House,” people would bitterly joke: 

“What is the tallest building in Leningrad?”

“The Administrative building on Liteiny. You can see Siberia from its basement.”

Black

There is nothing more Petersburgian than dark colors, pale faces, long skirts and black, loose-fitting pants. In this city, minimalist fashion is paired with accessories discovered in antiquarian shops. Thus, Piter fashion is discreet and, at the same time, obvious. Designers may wear hippie jeans with patterns taken from Petersburg’s unique, 19th century metal gratings, but columns of thin young girls parade down Nevsky Prospect in long black coats. And so you know they are locals.

White

“White Nights is when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours—a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It is the most magical time in the city, when you can read or write without a lamp at 2 AM, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It’s so quiet that you can almost hear the click of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift ... On such nights, it’s hard to fall asleep, because it’s too light, and because any dream will be inferior to this reality, where a man doesn’t cast a shadow, like water.” 

– Joseph Brodsky, “Guide to a Renamed City (1979)”

White Nights are beautiful. If you are a poet like Brodsky, or just a student who has exams to prepare for, they can be a good thing. 

On the other hand, it is impossible to sleep when it is always light and drunk tourists are stomping around the center under your windows. But, then again, since Petersburg only gets about 60 days of sunshine a year, these strange White Nights are some compensation for our extraordinary swampy sufferings.

Sea

Petersburg is not just a window to Europe, but also a gate to the sea. The city is perched on the coast of the Gulf of Finland and the wind sometimes carries in the smell of rotting seaweed and dirt from the bay. Piter is no Venice, no matter how many guidebooks refer to Petersburg as the “Venice of the North.” Venice is in the South, where oceans are warm and calm and inviting. The Baltic is a cold, forbidding and merciless sea. Recently, a naïve tourist asked to take a romantic walk along the coast, knowing that Piter sat on the coast. A pragmatic Petersburger said “OK” to this request for adventure tourism, and proceeded to drag the foreigner on a 20 minute metro ride, followed by a 5 minute tromp across a trash heap, to where they took a “romantic” look at naval ships patrolling the area around Kronstadt. 

Ksenya

There is an endless list of celebrities from St. Petersburg. Yet there is one name that is especially important when talking about the city’s mythology. It is particularly popular among local feminists, because it is a woman’s name. Holy Ksenya is the most famous homeless person in the city. She died back in the 18th century, but is still a popular figure in St. Petersburg, regardless of the efforts of church and then Soviet authorities to ban her. The mausoleum of Holy Ksenya at Smolensk Cemetery looks a bit like a pagan temple, but it is surely Orthodox. Students come here to squeeze a note through the fence, petitioning for a good grade on an upcoming exam; young ladies beg her for a groom; grey-haired men request something only they will know. Everyone prays for miracles, even Petersburgers.

Jazz

When talking about a city, it is impolite to skip the nightlife. So we cannot escape it either. It is simple to find nightlife in Petersburg. We like jazz and can listen to it in eight different places, but prefer the art-cafe Sunduk, where the owners have decided to store all of their old junk out in the open, starting with their old records and ending with a statue of Gorky with a broken head. It is a nice place to drink vodka and listen to the saxophone. St. Petersburg is a perfect place for jazz; with the climate being what it is, everyone’s always got the blues.

Lenin

One of the main elements of our city’s mythology is, of course, Lenin. He re-entered Russia here to make his revolution. And we were the main city-protector of his name for 70 years. Those even slightly over 20 can still remember reading stories about Grandpa Lenin and dreaming of doing deeds like him. Of all the Lenin statues that stood or stand in this city, the one at Finland Station (where Lenin returned) is the most famous. One of its many nicknames is the “Bald Rock.” So, when taxi drivers refer to going from “the beard to the bald spot,” they of course mean driving from Karl Marx Prospect to Lenin Square at Finland Station.

Criminal

Probably the stereotype of our city held most widely by Russians is that it is “the crime capital” of the country. What is this all about? Black PR arranged by our police to inflate their budgets? I don’t know. There are some shootings, but not more than anywhere else, and we have a long way to go to beat New York City. Obviously, the city could use a little advertising; it wants to be a capital after all. But, no one will let Petersburg be the capital, except perhaps in this regard. And really that would be an undeserved moniker.

“Oh, have no faith in this Nevsky Prospekt! ... It’s all deception, a dream, nothing is what it seems! ... Try to keep your eyes away from the shop windows: the knick-knacks displayed in them are fine to look at but they smack of large sums of money. Pray that the Lord keep you from peeking beneath the ladies’ bonnets! However enticingly a lady’s cloak may billow in the distance, I would never, not on any account, chase after it for a closer look. Keep your distance from the street lamps, I implore you, and hurry past them quickly, as quickly as possible. Count yourself lucky if they only spill their malodorous oil on your fashionable frock-coat. But everything, not only the street lamp, exudes deceit. Nevsky Prospect deceives at all hours of the day, but the worst time of all is at night, when darkness descends upon it like a dense blanket and only the white and beige walls of the buildings can be discerned, when the entire city becomes a welter of noise and flashing lights, when myriads of carriages rattle down from the bridges, the postilions cry out and jig on their horses and when the devil himself is abroad, kindling the street lamps with one purpose only: to show everything in a false light.”

— Nikolai Gogol

Nevsky Prospect