Among the Russians(33)

In the Winter Palace sits an extraordinary lifesize waxwork of the emperor, moulded by the Florentine Carlo Rastrelli. The clothes it wears, perhaps even its hair, are Peter’s own, and its face, hands and feet were cast from wax impressions immediately after his death. It is an outlandish, threatening figure. The man himself seems to confront you. Propped tense and upright in its chair, the great gangling body—he was six foot, seven inches tall—appears on the brink of springing up. The intemperance of a Vesuvius infuses his whole frame. The strangely delicate hands agitate on the chair-arms; their fingers seem to be drumming. His clothes of blue and gold have faded now—appropriate to a man happiest in darned stockings and shabby coats whose pockets he stuffed with state papers. His lanky shins end in small, oddly slender feet. The whole body projects a weirdly mingled grossness and delicacy.

But stranger still is the emperor’s face, for this, too, is in almost unbearable suspense. Its cheeks are unindented, sickly yellow, and his dark brown hair hangs disordered. From under strongly-marked brows the slightly dislocated eyes shine with paranoid intensity. The whole countenance is listening, straining to understand, but barely able to delay the primitive explosions of the body. The features and neck seem on the point of being convulsed by the ferocious tic which preceded his anger. All the gaunt strength of the frame, the manic stress of its limbs, the small, intolerant mouth, attest a brilliant and half-evolved savage, suspended between the will to comprehend and the passion to act.

Such a figure hints that the Westernization of Russia, even in its reformer, went barely skin-deep. And the impression lingers. In 1698, while already championing European civilization, Peter took part in the inquisitorial torture and beheading of rebels, whose flayed backs were roasted over slow flames and whose corpses were hanged in hundreds around Moscow’s gates and kremlin. Even as St Petersburg was rising from its marshes in the borrowed panoply of Athens, he had his own son Alexis beaten to death for conspiracy. His subjects enjoyed no true rights at all. The emperor was an autocrat, and Russia his personal estate, just as it had been the estate of Ivan the Terrible more than a century and a half before, when an English ambassador wonderingly contrasted Russian servitude with the study rebelliousness of his own countrymen.

Some sense of underlying rusticity in the life of St Petersburg troubled the more acute Western visitors always. At its best it showed itself in bursts of informality and frankness, as in those annual balls to which noblemen and peasants were invited equally—‘the Emperor in gold and jewels elbowed by his lowest born subjects,’ wrote an astonished Englishwoman. Those who were not dazzled into blindness by the endless banqueting and polonaising, by the rolling of four thousand carriages and the masked balls for twenty thousand guests, noted that the Russian’s French dress was not matched by French suavity, that wife-beating was universal, that the children were rickety and the aristocracy, in Macaulay’s words, ‘dripping pearls and vermin.’ An Anglo-Irish lady wrote cruelly in 1805: ‘Have you ever seen a clumsy, romping, ignorant girl of twelve years old with a fine Parisian cap on her head? So seems to my eye this imperial realm.’ She gave Russia five or six centuries to catch up.

The same witness wrote, more darkly, that the Russian despotism corrupted morality by equating good and evil merely with favour and disgrace—much as modern Communists may conceive of service to the Party. The crabby Marquis de Custine left a picture from the nineteenth century which resounds with the unhappiness of the twentieth. Fear of the truth, he said, was ubiquitous. The past itself had become undiscoverable. Thought was a crime.

Reminders of old cruelties touch the beauty of Leningrad with a sombre caution. In the red bulk of the Mihailov Castle, a forbidding confection of granite and stone honeycombed with secret passages, the half-mad emperor Paul was throttled by noblemen in league with his son. Near the north bank of the Neva the island-fort of SS. Peter and Paul lours across the river. Its ramparts and bastions march faceless into the water, while above them one of those golden spikes which the Russians love gleams in the air like a poisoned rapier. Under its cathedral’s dome the later tsars and tsaritsas lie in cold, desanctified splendour, entombed under white sarcophagi nailed with gold crosses. They are neither reviled nor revered. Only round the grave of Peter the Great a vase or two of red and white carnations withers. The fortress dungeons held all the early revolutionaries: Bakunin, Pisarev, Gorky; Dostoevsky too. Peter the Great’s son was killed here. Outside its walls the five leaders of the 1825 revolution were incompetently executed. (‘They can’t even hang a man properly in Russia,’ groaned one, as he fell to the ground with only his legs broken.) Now the dungeons are a Soviet showpiece, where delegations from Cuba and Gabon tramp and shiver and make notes of whatever their guides are telling them. All the imported and native architectural beauties of St Petersburg—the inspired flamboyance of Bartolommeo Rastrelli, the neo-classical groupings of Rossi—cannot quell a rankling unease, a feeling that too close behind this European harmony the darkness of an older Russia looms unresolved.



Through the slightest of introductions my days in Leningrad were warmed by an exuberant couple who adopted me with proprietorial completeness, fed me, got me drunk, guided me, washed my clothes. Lucia and Anatoly both worked in theatre administration. He was fifty years old, half Armenian—a plump, ebullient man whose face was usually crumpled in a look of benignity. But his eyes, set deep in their warm wrinkles, were intelligent and faintly irascible, and when he spoke to business colleagues over the telephone, his voice sharpened into unrecognizable authority. Lucia was much younger than him, and beautiful. Fair, regular, hers was a classic Russian face. Her blue-grey eyes shone far apart and her cheekbones stood Tartar-high. She came from an old Leningrad family. Before the Revolution her grandmother had attended the Smolny Institute, the school for young noblewomen founded by Catherine the Great, and had survived afterwards as a teacher. Some heritage of sophistication clung about Lucia. She was perfectly conscious of her beauty. She was tinged, too, with a Chekhovian boredom and dreaminess, and was faintly contemptuous of much that lay about her, as if she instinctively measured it by a Europe which she had never seen.