For its 300th birthday present, St Petersburg is getting a hugely expensive facelift, reports Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
St Petersburg is slowly recovering from a hell of a hangover after more than one million people took to the streets on Tuesday night to celebrate the city's 300th anniversary, amid scenes of spectacular public drunkenness - worse even than St Patrick's Day in Dublin.
Nearly every teenager and twentysomething came armed with bottles of beer and vodka to watch a laser and fireworks display on the River Neva. Had they not been so merry, they might have stormed the Winter Palace, just as the Bolsheviks did in 1917.
But the only red flag flying in St Petersburg these days is the old Tsarist one, showing two silver anchors diagonally crossed and surmounted by the golden sceptre of Peter the Great. The Communist red flag, with its yellow hammer and sickle, is nowhere to be seen. Nevksy Prospekt, which was flooded by a sea of humanity at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, is bedecked with bunting and balloons in the white, blue and red colours of the Russian flag as St Petersburg prepares to receive 45 world leaders this weekend, including Bertie Ahern.
Domes and spires throughout the city centre have been dazzlingly re-gilded and historic buildings restored. The world-famous Hermitage Museum - which incorporates the Winter Palace - stayed open all night, offering free admission to its breathtaking collection.
Yet there is popular resentment of the security measures required to protect President George W. Bush and other "bigwigs" - as VIPs are contemptuously called here - and a view among ordinary people that too much money has been invested in prestige projects.
Nearly €1 billion of Russian federal aid was allocated to the St Petersburg 300 bash - hardly surprising really, given that President Vladimir Putin is a native of the one-time Leningrad and served as its deputy mayor under the legendary Anatoly Sobchak, the man credited with restoring its original name.
"No one gets more than St Petersburg," said finance minister Alexei Kudrin. But serious questions are being asked about how the money has been spent; last year, for example, the bulk of some €270 million in federal aid went to the ring road, leaving only €50 million for restoration projects.
There is also evidence that some historic buildings have been undermined by shoddy construction practices - ironically involving new tourist hotels. The expensively restored interior of the Musical Comedy Theatre began cracking as a result of tremors from building work at the Grand Palace Hotel next door. The Glinka Capella has suffered a similar fate and the Shuvalov Mansion may also be threatened.
On most of the 80-odd architectural monuments that were meant to be restored, full restoration has not been completed in time for the jubilee. These include Smolny Cathedral, the vast admiralty building, the Central Naval Museum and even the St Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island, where the city was founded.
Legend has it that Peter the Great, who was only 31 at the time, dug the first two sods himself on May 27th, 1703, placed them in the shape of a cross and said: "Here there will be a city." Then, with his own hands, he started building a small house for himself on the site and ordered everyone else to follow his example.
To the dismay of the Boyar nobles in Moscow, he decreed that the capital of Russia would be moved to St Petersburg - and that nobody would be allowed to enter his new city-in-the-making unless they had a cartload of building materials.
But then, Peter I was the tyrannical ruler who later supervised the torturing to death of his rebel son.
Thus was opened Russia's "window to Europe", a project that would be continued throughout the 18th century by Peter's daughter, Elizabeth, who built the Winter Palace, and by Catherine the Great, who embellished the city with numerous grand buildings along the broad sweep of the Neva, on land that Peter had captured from Sweden.
Incredibly, St Petersburg has no less than 500 palaces, including those built by the Tsars for their own use. The plan of the city is neo-classical, with wide avenues and canals framing vistas of major landmarks and unexpected delights around countless corners. It is almost unimaginably magnificent.
Stockholm and Helsinki may be beautiful, and Copenhagen and Tallinn charming in their own ways, but St Petersburg is unquestionably the jewel of the Baltic, with an incredibly rich artistic heritage to match its architectural legacy. This is the city of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Anna Pavlova and the Kirov Ballet.
Because of its international reputation, the authorities were hoping that a lot of money would come from abroad for the restoration of individual monuments in St Petersburg. But our unsmiling tour guide dismissed this as fanciful. "It is difficult for me to believe there exists in Russia such idiots," she said.
The Germans did contribute handsomely to the restoration of the sumptuous Amber Room of Catherine the Great's Summer Palace in Pushkin, 25 kilometres south of St Petersburg. But then they were putting right a historic wrong, as the palace was looted by the Nazis during the second World War.
The Amber Room was decorated by Empress Elizabeth's favourite architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian she brought in to design her great buildings - just as John Beresford later imported James Gandon to do the same for Dublin. Ironically, Gandon had been toying with the idea of going to St Petersburg instead.
Rastrelli's Amber Room features gilded rococo wood carvings, jasper and agate mosaics and a set of intricately carved amber panels given to Peter the Great by the Prussians in 1716. Like most of the state-rooms of the Summer Palace, it was stripped bare by the Nazis during the long and dreadful siege of Leningrad.
These splendid rooms, including the Versailles-style Great Hall, have been painstakingly restored by Russian craftsmen over the past 30 years. As before-and-after photographs clearly show, no effort has been spared to recreate their splendour, including the extensive use of gold leaf and hand-printed silk wall-coverings.
The same is true everywhere restoration work has been undertaken. The main attraction of St Peter and Paul Cathedral on Zayachy Island may be the tombs of the Romanovs, including Nicholas II, his family and servants - all executed in July 1918 - but its gilded baroque interior has to be seen to be believed.
Every day during this week's festivities, the carillon bells of its soaring spire - two metres taller than Dublin's recent addition - created an almost magical atmosphere within the Peter and Paul Fortress as visitors strolled along a walkway atop its bastion walls, enjoying panoramic views over the River Neva.
One of the highlights of the festivities was a re-enactment by tall ships of the naval battle in 1702 that ended the Swedish occupation of this part of the Baltic and gave Russia its "window to Europe". Accompanied by a booming commentary, cannon shots and billowing smoke, it was stirring stuff for the locals.
Just like the Tsars of old, Putin is using St Petersburg to present the best possible face of Russia, this time with a view to securing more inward investment. It doesn't matter that his more cynical fellow citizens believe that's all there is to it - a face or, more accurately, a façade.
Although proud of their rich heritage, they wonder why a missing link in the city's metro has not yet been reinstated, eight years after a partial tunnel collapse. But it must be some consolation that the flat fare to travel anywhere is only seven roubles (20 cent). Other practical issues that concern many of St Petersburg's 4.5 million residents include the condition of the apartment buildings where they live. For behind the often shabby street façades, inner courtyards tend to be dank and pot-holed.And problems of homelessness persist, with thousands of people living on the streets.
Against that background, the task facing the authorities here in maintaining the architectural patrimony of St Petersburg cannot be over-estimated. There is just so much of it and, with limited resources, numerous historic buildings are inevitably crumbling into a picturesque state of decay.
Lack of attention to maintenance in recent years meant that the city was largely unprepared for the rush to restore monuments in time for the jubilee. Though thousands are employed in restoration projects, there are also fears that the pace will slacken after the festivities.
The monuments include 20 statues of Lenin, down from around 100 during the Communist era. He stands outside the Finland Station, his point of arrival from Helsinki in October 1917, and there's another huge, and quite engaging, statue of him on a square by the Stalinist apartment blocks on Moskovsky Prospekt.
For many people in St Petersburg, particularly among the older generation, it will always be Leningrad, the "Hero City" of the Soviet Union that withstood the Nazis' merciless siege for 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, when Hitler's aim was to "wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth".
The miracle is that it survived at all.