On the Petrograd Side

Peter the Great, who founded St. Petersburg, would love his city today. Fascinated by technology, he would take a hydrofoil ride, stay up until two a.m. to see the bridges rise over the Neva, race through the canals with a speedboat. Fascinated as he was with opening Russia to the world, Peter would definitely have a web site. His e-mail address might be i_da_man.zar. Having read a biography of Peter the Great before we went to SPB, as the Web calls it, my husband and I went looking for Peter's city and found it on the Petrograd side. Inspired by Peter's risk-taking personality, we made our arrangements over the internet with a Russian tourist agency, Nota Bene, www.travel.spb.ru. Everything worked as advertised.

Quick Tips:

Getting a Russian Visa takes time. Apply early. You must have a valid American passport and an invitation or paper showing your hotel reservation, made through a travel agency. Information is available at www.consulrussia.cjb.net Although we read warnings that dealing in U.S. dollars is no longer legal, we found everything from taxi rides to folkart in classy shops priced in dollars. Take some U.S. dollars. ATMs are available at the railroad station and in some hotels for ready access to roubles, but you may only be able to get about at a time.

Best Way To Get Around:

Unfortunately, if you don't speak Russian, the subway and buses are very confusing. We walked a lot and took expensive taxis when the distance was too far. Renting a car and driver for a nine-hour day cost through Intourist at our hotel.

This may be one of the ugliest hotels on earth, but they have refurbished many of the rooms and the views from the river side of the hotel are superb. We chose the St. Petersburg Hotel, on the Vyborg side (across a canal from the Petrograd side), mainly because it is walking distance from the Finland Station. We would be arriving and departing on the Finnish train, Sibelius, from Helsinki. The lobby consists of a high-ceilinged wide, dark space. There is no place to sit down, except the little bar at one end. If you are thinking “lobby bar”—- a light airy space with palm trees and maybe a piano-—forget it. The refurbished rooms have decent, matching furniture, basic industrial carpet and clean bathrooms. There is no air conditioning, so to cool off in our fifth floor room we open the big, crank-open window and promptly knock the poorly-placed drapery rod off its track. I perch in the open window and gaze out at the Hermitage in the distance. The skies are clear and the pastel mansions across the blue Neva glow with a golden tone. Sound effects: Sigh. Hum of traffic. Swat. That last sound comes after the 'Buzz' of invading mosquitoes.

Our room rate includes full breakfast in a very large dining-room-bar on the second floor. The atmosphere there is so cheerful and plant-filled that we suspect a different company runs it. The breakfast buffet is huge, but includes few really tasty offerings.

Overall, I loved the view, liked the location, but wish there were another, more reasonable option on this side of the river. And it would be nice to have air conditioning.

Inside Demjanov's Ukha, we found stained glass windows with fish, bright colored fanciful paintings of fish and delicious pike and salmon on our plates.

'Uhka' means 'fish soup' and our guide took us to sample Demjanov's fish when we requested a non-touristy restaurant.

Our driver pulled up outside a questionable looking building with plaster flaking and paint peeling. We could not see a restaurant sign. Then we walked inside and discovered a delightful reconstruction of a rural cabin. Logs line the walls and people eat at wooden tables with wooden stools for seating.

The fish we ordered was served attractively, with piles of fresh vegetables. It was painful to push the vegetables aside, but we had been warned not to eat fruits and vegetables that might have been washed in tap water, and our caution kept us healthy. Bottled water accompanied us everywhere in St. Petersburg because even the natives do not drink the tap water.

From the caviar appetizer through the soup and fish plates, we had a delicious dinner in a charming room at Demjanov's Ukha.

The restaurant is on the Petrograd side, near the metro station, Gorkovskaya.

"Do you want music or not?" The waiter greeted us with this question as we entered the door of the attractive Antwerpen restaurant, Petrograd side, near the Metro. He meant, "Did we want to sit in the room where a trio was playing, or did we want the quieter room across the hall?" We chose music, as had the only other two people in the restaurant when we arrived about 8:30 p.m.

We found our way to Antwerpen because Lonely Planet guidebook listed it, and because it was only a short walk from the St. Petersburg Hotel where we were staying. The guidebook calls it, "a bit of a flash place," and indeed it is.

We were seated beside a lace-curtained window looking out on the pleasant tree-lined street. Walls of mahogany paneling, fresh flowers in a bud vase on the table and lots of silverware prepared us for menu prices above the usual Lonely Planet budget. As we waited for the appetizer, then the soup, then the main meal, we got the giggles as the waiter kept swooping down upon us and selecting pieces of silver to whisk away and other pieces to replace them. I think we were supposed to be impressed.

The musical trio—saxophone, electric keyboard and girl singer—played Russian/Las Vegas lounge music to the empty tables. The saxophone player impressed us with his soulful wail. The chef, generous with portions, had also been generous with the salt. We felt lonely in the cozy, beautifully decorated place.

Maybe it was just the wrong night.

When Peter the Great decided to build St. Petersburg where the Neva River meets the Baltic Sea, the swampy land still belonged to Sweden. So, naturally, he started construction with a fort to protect his dubious claims to the land.

St. Petersburg will celebrate its 300th birthday in 2003, and the vast Peter and Paul Fortress has never been called upon to defend the city. Instead, it has housed dank dungeons and a beautiful cathedral. The prisoners in the dungeon cells were mostly political. In the new era of Russian democracy and openness, the cells are on view with pictures of former inhabitants posted outside many doors. Peter the Great imprisoned his own son Alexey here, and later regimes imprisoned such well-known Russians as Dostoevsky, Gorky, Trotsky and Lenin’s older brother, Alexandr.

In the center of the forbidding brick-walled fortress, St. Peter and Paul Cathedral harbors the tombs of the tzars and noblemen of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The cathedral’s tall spire, like a golden needle, provides a landmark from all of the city and out to the mouth of the Neva in the Gulf of Finland.

Inside the cathedral’s Russian baroque, gold-adorned walls, people still leave flowers on the sarcophagi of past tzars. With a rudimentary understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet, you can make out the names of Peter I (Peter the Great), Catherine I (his wife), Catherine the Great and other noble names. Colorful banners grouped along the walls represent countries that Peter conquered.

A grassy park in the middle of the fort features an odd modern sculpture of Peter the Great, and rooms feature changing exhibits highlighting Russian history and technology. Don’t miss the model of the first boat built by Peter, which dominates the small building where you buy your ticket. The day we visited a folk music group was preparing to perform between the prison cells and the bastion wall and locals were sunbathing on the narrow beach under the walls. Overall, a much friendlier place than experienced by hundreds of years of prisoners.

Before abandoning us on the street in front of the Menshikov Palace museum, our taxi driver tried valiantly to find someone who could point out the entrance. Unfortunately, most of the passers-by were young students from the nearby St. Petersburg University, who could probably have pointed us to a disco, but not an historic landmark. Suddenly a black-haired woman dressed all in white swooped down, gesturing for us to follow her. Although she only spoke a few words of English, she managed to usher us into the museum and arrange for the manager to find an English-speaking guide.

Our experience emphasizes that the many historical museums, houses, palaces, or St. Petersburg that are meticulously restored and furnished, are there for the Russians. Only adventurous foreign visitors will find them, and only persistent visitors will understand what they have found.

Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s best buddy, was the original crooked bureaucrat. He grew wealthy and powerful because of his friendship. He built the first mansion in St. Petersburg and made it so grand that state events were held here rather than at Peter’s modest Summer Palace across the river. When Menshikov fell from power in 1727, and was exiled to Siberia, the mansion was used for a military school until 1918. In 1967 its new owners, the Hermitage Museum, restored the building to the grandeur of the first third of the eighteenth century. Hand-painted Dutch tiles, Chinese porcelains and elaborate parquet floors are just some of the visual delights.

We felt closer to Peter here than anywhere else in St. Petersburg. After all, a suit of clothes that once draped his lanky 6’5" frame stands in one room and the lathe on which he loved to labor stands nearby. The house is as much a monument to Peter as to his rascally best friend. A quiet garden with benches fills the space between the house and the river esplanade. A great place for resting museum-tired feet after seeing this evocative museum.

"There is no future without past!" exclaims the poster in front of the Political History Museum. This seldom-visited museum, just a few blocks from the Peter and Paul Fortress, fascinates on more than one level. The two mansions that house the collections are a grand example of Russian art nouveau. The great ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya who built the house is remembered. And an honest and complete history from tsars to revolution to glasnost—-Peter the Great to Lenin to Gorbachov is presented.

Matilda K. not only won praise as the greatest ballerina of her age, but also served as mistress to Tsar Nicholas II before his marriage. When the Bolsheviks took to the streets, she abandoned her mansion and fled, eventually settling in France where she taught ballet to people like Margot Fonteyn until her late nineties. Lenin, man of the people, took over the mansion and established his office in a lovely, airy third-floor room overlooking the park across the street. After seeing wall-size photos of street demonstrations, red banners and correspondence of the various political dissidents, we approached Lenin’s office with a real sense of the fervor that fueled the Russian revolution.

Other striking exhibits bring home the horrors of the siege of Leningrad (the communist-era name for St. Petersburg) during World War II, and show every day life in old Russia.