GO RUSSIA:St Petersburg and Moscow are as different in terms of tempo, artistic mood, and sheer stunning looks, as Johannesburg and Cape Town are, writes ADAM ALEXANDER
IF RUSSIA were a novel, it would be a 900-page historical, romantic, Pulitzer-prize winning, unputdownable thriller. It probably didn’t do any harm that my opening chapter was St Petersburg, grand city of the Czars. Or that this was the beginning of the famous “White Nights” there – 80 days starting in June when the city is cast in an almost perpetual daylight of purple-streaked indigo skies.
Nor that the very day I arrived summer appeared to arrive with me, with the temperature shooting up from 14 degrees to nearer 30, not exactly what you're expecting from a city barely two lines of latitude from the Arctic, and more than enough to make you feel exactly like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
As a result, St Petersburg, known also as Petrograd and Leningrad once, appeared to be opening up from its long winter and tentative spring like a beautiful butterfly emerging from its icy chrysalis. There were no fur hats or winter coats here, as you might have imagined, but instead streets full of summer-clad roller-bladers, chic cafe-dwellers enjoying the last place on earth you can smoke, and in a way that just added to the whole spy movie-feel, side-walks that might better be described, as calmly as possible, as jaw-dropping, head-spinning catwalks.
Home to the last of Russia’s royals, the ill-fated Romanov family, and designed almost singularly by their Western-leaning ancestor Peter the Great, the city itself is the next thing capable of completely taking your breath away. The sheer unexpected scale, indestructible beauty and cultural ambition of St Petersburg, especially for anyone not expecting to find a Paris this far east, or a Venice this far north.
And then you see the onion-domes of those unique Orthodox churches such as St Petersburg’s Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, the soldiers (whose uniforms have hardly changed a jot since the Soviet Union), the Ladas with blackened windows, and those deeply penetrating eyes of passers-by, and you know that you couldn’t be anywhere else but in Russia.
And what of the characters of this great novel? From Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great, from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin, from Russia’s mad monk Rasputin to Russia’s favourite poet Alexander Pushkin, names as familiar as they are unforgettable, even to those who have never yet set foot in Russia.
Which, all in all, is why after only three days in a place I could easily have spent three months, I literally had to drag myself out of St Petersburg to head for Moscow next.
Twenty years ago, I arrived in Moscow after a six-day train-ride on the Trans-Siberian from Peking – a very young backpacker with barely two roubles to rub together. I remember there was a food crisis in the city, and virtually all there was to live on was black-market champagne and caviar.
Twenty years later, here I was back again on the same rich Russian diet – only this time living high on the hog in the unbeatably located five-star Kempinski hotels which overlook the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and the Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow (and I mean close enough to throw a stone at almost).
And still I hadn’t got much more than two roubles to rub together . . . not least because Moscow and St Petersburg have since become among the most expensive cities in the world now.
In those halcyon days of old, the famous chandelier-and-marble Moscow subway cost 10 or 20 kopeks (ie nothing), the Bolshoi Ballet cost me $5 (which included a buffet meal), and you could stay in a private room in someone’s house for only $10 – no matter how seriously pissed on vodka these generous subletters were when you arrived. So how on earth would that compare to now?
The high-speed train from St Petersburg to Moscow cost me €88, but as it cut a swathe through an entirely different, much more backward Russia – one still obviously stuck in the 1950s, and possibly even the 1850s – I wasn’t sure what to think, whether to be highly impressed, or depressed. “The rest of Russia, you just can’t imagine how poor it is,” as a fellow passenger put it to me.
Four and a quarter hours later as we pulled into Moscow 15 minutes early, I gave up trying to imagine what it must be like for these modern-day Russian peasants witnessing this sleek, super-fast 200km/h Russian train flying past the windows of their humble wooden shacks, and steeled myself instead now for something faster, grittier and edgier than where I had just come from.
THE FIRST THINGyou notice in Moscow – whose population of 12 million people can swell to 18 million during the day with commuters (compared to St Petersburg's less than five million) – is the crazy driving and heavy traffic, which is almost perpetually at rush-hour levels.
This makes even crossing the road here dangerous, but then forces you into a whole new world underground, where you will not only find Moscow’s famously opulent Soviet-era subway but to my total surprise, thousands upon thousands of young, stylish shoppers perusing vast, luxurious, underground malls which, suffice to say, put our shopping centres to sad and utter shame at home.
Which is the next thing you can’t fail to notice in Moscow – the astonishing, and unexpectedly widespread wealth.
But as soon as I became accustomed to the new heightened tempo, and heightened prices (€3 for a coffee, €5 for a beer), a different atmosphere enveloped me, especially in the relaxed and breathtaking area surrounding the Kremlin and Red Square – one that was much more unhurried and hassle-free than I ever expected. Not to mention – judging by the number of kissing couples – undeniably romantic, and most surprising of all, very familiar.
Even in the more grungy, touristy area of Arbat Street, a one kilometre-long pedestrian street in the city centre, I was charmed by the fact that the locals are still making a living from the same things I saw 20 years ago – sketching people’s portraits, selling Soviet-era souvenirs, and er . . . break-dancing.
As for the warnings about pickpockets, scam artists, bothersome drunks and shakedowns from the police that exist these days on the travel advice sites of Lonely Planet and Wikitravel far more prominently than I ever found them in reality, all I could do was laugh by the time I saw the souvenir T-shirt making fun of our fears here, which says simply: “I have been to Moscow and there are no bears.”
Russia may have changed dramatically, then, but it still all felt like visiting an old friend, one who had grown up to become rich, complicated and hopelessly compromised, no doubt, but had retained his warm, fascinating character and that same irresistible, intelligent intrigue.
“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill once famously said about the Russians, like their famous Russian matryoshka dolls.
SO WHICH ISthe better city to visit – St Petersburg or Moscow?
The Kremlin area of Moscow, with the stand-alone power of Ivan the Terrible’s St Basil’s Cathedral, is as beguiling and magical as anything you’ll find in St Petersburg. Especially if you find yourself standing alone there on the way home as I did at 4am, with only the Kremlin armed guard for company. But otherwise the cities are as different in terms of tempo, artistic mood, and sheer stunning looks, as say Johannesburg and Cape Town are.
And while it might not shake the world in the same way that its 1917 revolution did, something exciting appears to be happening in St Petersburg to suggest it is emerging – after a century of near isolation – from a lot more than just this winter past. What the Irish manager of the Hotel Kempinski in St Petersburg, Liam Madden, ventures is “a city experiencing a renaissance equal to Venice and Florence so many centuries ago”.
Either way, both cities have much to look forward to – the coming World Cup in 2018. The Centennial anniversary of the Russian revolution in 2017. The obvious and rapid decline of the West . . .
All that has happened then is that Russia has gone from a workers’ paradise to a rich-man’s paradise. Where the hell it is going at the moment is anybody’s guess (where the hell are any of us going?). But in the former and current capitals of St Petersburg and Moscow, it appears to be striding there so confidently, stylishly and beautifully, that you just can’t help but want to go with it.
Russia where to . . .
Stay
Kempinski Hotel, Moika 22, St Petersburg, 007-812-3359111, kempinski.com/en/stpetersburg.
Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, Moscow, 007-495-287200. kempinski.com/en/moscow. If you can afford this, imagine a room overlooking the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, former residence of the Czars, or a room overlooking Red Square and the Kremlin in Moscow, in what is undeniably Russia's two most superbly located hotels. Rates from €440 (superior room) to €6,550 (executive suite) in St Petersburg, and from €530 (superior room) to €7,375 (executive room) in Moscow.
Go
The Hermitage Museum, 32-38 Dvortsovaia Naberezhnaia, St Petersburg, 007-812-7109079, heritagemuseum.org. This museum has three million exhibits that would take five years in all to see, I was told. But if you pinpoint your area of interest, such as French Impressionism, you will find yourself surrounded by Gauguins Cezannes and Matisses. Billions of euro of stupendous art, in other words, that all belongs to the Russian people.
Stalin's Bunker, Sovietskaya ul 80, Moscow, 007-499-1665596. This fascinating and utterly unique visit to Stalin's wartime bunker came as part of the GHA Discovery loyalty programme offered by the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski. So unique, in fact, even most Russians dont seem to know of its existence. And no wonder! Of the 2,000 people involved in its secret construction, "we can only guess that they were all killed," my guide told me. But do try and not be blown away by a bunker that held 150 secret tanks, and a 17km underground motorway to the Kremlin.
Do
To get the best out of your visit, try to learn some of one of the most attractive languages on earth: Russian. Such as Privet (hello), Kak Dela (how have you been?), and hardest of all, Dasvidaniya (goodbye). Then maybe go to an opera or a ballet. Drink vodka. Marry a Russian . . .
Visa
Make sure you secure your visa before your visit, which can take a long time and will be your single biggest headache. Contact the Embassy of the Russian Federation, 184-186 Orwell Road, Rathgar, Dublin 14, 01-492 2048, ireland.mid.ru
Get there: Air Baltic (airbaltic.com) flies from Dublin to Moscow or St Petersburg via Riga. Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from Dublin to Tallinn in Estonia, a bus or train journey from St Petersburg
Adam Alexander was a guest of the Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) new loyalty programme GHA Discovery – the first uniting independent luxury hotels across the world, including Ireland’s Doyle Collection, First, Kempinski, Anantara, Leela, Mirvac, Marco Polo, Omni, Pan Pacific, Park Royal, Shaza and Tivoli hotels and resorts. Reservations can be booked at gha.com and more information about GHA Discovery can be found at ghadiscovery.com.