Among the Russians(40)

It was not Catherine’s humanity or liberalism, I imagine, which preserved her effigy from the anger of the Revolution. In nothing is the inconsistency of Soviet Communism greater than in the emperors it reveres or forgets. No monument remains, as far as I know, to the serf-emancipator Alexander II; yet the harsh and reactionary Nicholas I still rides his bronze charger inexplicably in St Isaac’s Square. The tsars are forgiven, Russian-fashion, in proportion to their power, the power of the motherland emanating through them.

Stalin began the reinstatement. At the height of the Second World War, as Moscow verged on collapse, he invoked Russia’s warrior-saints in the same breath as he did Lenin. After the battle of Stalingrad imperial-style guards regiments were instituted, military orders were named after the tsarist marshals Suvorov and Kutuzov, and officers’ uniforms sprouted élitist epaulettes. Stalin’s propagandists compared him unblushingly to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, and the veneration of Peter—‘the first Bolshevik’—has survived. The tsar’s cottage and little summer palace are preserved as scrupulously as the houses where Lenin lived, and his simplicity of life is recalled in notices on the palace walls—quotations from his servants on his liking for porridge or kraut soup, and how nobody attended him at table. His statue by the French sculptor Falconet, which overlooks the Neva near the Admiralty he founded, is the site of patriotic pilgrimage. Now patinated green-grey, he canters a stallion of fiery glory up a 1500-ton stone plinth, whose steep ascent barely holds in the triumphal energies of horse and rider, and stretches out his arm towards the river. Professional photographers loiter to commemorate visiting groups, and bridal couples come to lay their bouquets at the statue’s foot, which is always drenched in flowers.

Yet the man they honour was an imperial tyrant. He raised Leningrad on the bones of the workers, encouraged Capitalist entrepreneurs to spearhead Russia’s drive into modernity, and tightened the grip of the land-owners over their helplessly enslaved peasants. All this has been ignored, of course, because the emperor reflects and embodies the nation’s greatness.

The same may happen to buildings. The deconsecrated Cathedral of St Isaac, a begrimed hulk of marble and granite, pulls itself together under a golden dome, like a drab babushka in a flashy hat, and is still extolled by Russians for its immense proportions. And the colossal Winter Palace, seat of the emperors and theatre of the most extravagant court of its time, is the lodestar every day for thirty thousand proud and gaping visitors.

The palace was built by Bartolommeo Rastrelli for the luxury-loving empress Elizabeth between 1755 and 1762, and during another century it advanced north-eastward in the successive ranges of the Hermitage, until a stupendous barrage of buildings pushed for half a mile along the granite quays above the Neva. Russia can impose a curious genius on its foreign architects, and Rastrelli’s baroque throbs with the native love for strong colours and for diversifying huge expanses with powerful ornament. Along its turquoise-coloured facades the columns gleam in brilliant, chalk-white tiers or cluster around gateways. Fantastical scrolls and mouldings tumble about the windows, whose pediments are crowned by leering cherubim, and stucco lion-masks with geriatric frowns and toothless mouths scowl and gape from the lunettes in a swirl of plaster manes. Even the sky is not left in peace, but is peopled by almost two hundred bronze gods and heroes, whose olympian gaze harries the rooftops. The whole effect is one of exuberant near-madness, an architectural incontinence which is yet so subtly ordered and impudently accomplished that it achieves an outrageous splendour.

To its south this mammoth confection flanks a stupendous square, embraced by the curving arms and plain majesty of Rossi’s ministries. It is nearly empty. To drive here is to enter a stone and asphalt wilderness with only white lines in the tarmac to indicate direction. And in the square’s centre towers another of those prodigies of Russian size, raised to commemorate Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon. It is the tallest single stone ever cut, a monolithic column of pink-grey granite, 154 feet high to its crowning angel.

The same blinding statistics ramify meaninglessly about the Winter Palace—1500 rooms, 1786 doors, 1945 windows, 117 staircases. Although scoured by fire in 1837, the massed treasures of the Hermitage were saved by soldiers and firemen, and the interiors were soon restored in sumptuous classical taste. Yet inside, its sheer immensity comes as a shock. Long before I had traversed the vaulted and galleried halls of the ground floor, where the kitchens and services once spread, I was drowned in an ocean of variegated marble, my eyes aching and dazed with colour, drenched by ceilings which burst into a delicate glory of plasterwork or arched overhead in rococo vines and a blaze of armatures. Dragons and lions and a hundred mythological beasts stiffened among the foliage; cherubim kicked and squirmed; and the twin-headed Romanov eagle, talons sceptred and orbed, raked the void with his double glare.

After five hours I was washed up in stupefaction at the foot of the ceremonial stair. Circled by alabaster nymphs, its marble steps lifted in mountainous serenity towards painted ceilings where the ancient gods tumbled over Olympus. By now I was wandering in stunned anaesthesia. Around and above me, in room after room, there unfolded a panoply whose every square inch glittered with an insect’s toil of gilded appliqué, the whirl and shriek of stucco griffins and thunder of gold-entangled lions. Raphael, Rembrandt, Leonardo, Rubens—their masterworks swam by me in a pageant of indigestible glory. I simply stared at the ceilings, the columns, the floors under my senselessly trudging feet. I wandered by fantastic torchères and caryatids sleepy with gold, and slithered over shining lakes of precious inlaid wood. All around me crowds of Russian tourists were tramping through the glamour of their repudiated past. Their mild, rustic faces, and the portraits of imperial courtiers, contemplated one another with mutual astonishment. On and on went the rooms, flowering into marble and porphyry stage-sets, reproducing themselves in ormolued mirrors, opening onto parquet pools of ebony, mahogany and amaranth, sinking under the drip and gush of crystal. In the Malachite Room, where vistas of the grey Neva and a troubled sky hung like pictures in the windows, the mantelpieces and columns were vivid with two tons of their green treasure, dug from the Urals. The great ballroom, scene of the innocent transvestite banquets of the empress Elizabeth, shone miraculous with 116 fluted pillars and pilasters and its mammoth chandeliers, blazoned with the arms of all the Russian provinces, filled the room with a ravishing incandescence, like frosted, aerial Christmas trees.