By Joshua Hammer, New York Times
In Print: Sunday, June 26, 2011
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ST. PETERBURG, Russia
The motorized launch cruised toward the Hermitage, the former Winter Palace of the czars, passing under a low arched bridge that I feared would graze my scalp as we glided beneath it. Just ahead, a boisterous wedding party on the deck of a wooden cruiser filled the air with vodka-fueled shouts of “Gorko!,” meaning bitterness, a traditional Russian encouragement to the bride and groom to kiss and thus provide the guests with the opposite of what was being proclaimed.
Then the canal spilled into the vast Neva River, and all of St. Petersburg spread before us. Pink, peach and violet clouds streaked the horizon. Across the river, on Zayachy Island — one of a multitude of small islands in the Neva that fall within St. Petersburg’s metropolitan limits — stood the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, burial place of Peter the Great, the three Alexanders and, most recently, the executed Czar Nicholas, Czarina Alexandra and their children. The golden-spired cathedral glinted in the fading sun. I breathed in the maritime air — a pungent mix of gasoline and ripe river smells — and checked my watch. It was 11 p.m., and the sky was still as bright as that of an early summer evening in New York.
In St. Petersburg, the grand city of the czars, they call them the White Nights, those 80 or so evenings from May to the end of July when the city emerges from long months of cold and darkness and celebrates the brief return of nearly round-the-clock daylight. Residents of Russia’s cultural capital — situated a few latitudinal lines south of the Arctic Circle, at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland — have been welcoming the summer with relief and celebration ever since Peter the Great founded the city in the early 18th century. (The czar named the new capital after his patron saint, St. Peter the apostle.)
For most of the 20th century, however, these celebrations were muted by wars, revolution and the grim imperatives of the Soviet state. The Russian Revolution broke out here in October 1917, when the city was called Petrograd. Between 1941 and 1944, as many as 800,000 people died of hunger, disease and exposure during the nearly 900-day Nazi siege of the city that the Bolsheviks had renamed Leningrad. Under Joseph Stalin and his Communist successors, White Nights were disciplined affairs, limited to a smattering of classical music concerts. Even after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg’s summer remained subdued: The economy had deteriorated so sharply after decades of misrule that many people became dependent on food rationing. For a time, St. Petersburg, which regained its original name in 1991, was even forced to accept humanitarian food aid from foreign donors — hardly the economic environment in which to stage all-night parties.
During the past decade, however, Russia’s booming economy has rejuvenated St. Petersburg, and the White Nights have become more and more lively. Russian entrepreneurs have poured money into new bars, restaurants and hotels. Growing numbers of visitors from abroad, along with well-heeled Russian tourists — their wallets fat with petrodollars — and members of the increasingly mobile Russian middle class head here for summer vacations. The city fathers have seized the initiative, pumping city and state financing into organized events.
Long summer days exist elsewhere in Russia, of course, from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to Yakutsk, but the White Nights have become an intrinsic part of St. Petersburg’s identity — a celebration of the city’s unique beauty and its role as the country’s artistic epicenter.
No other city in Russia enjoys such a breathtaking location. St. Petersburg was constructed on what originally were more than 100 islands formed by a latticework of rivers, creeks, streams and natural canals that flow into the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the Neva River. The Neva, the main artery through the city, wends east-west across St. Petersburg, basically dividing it in half. The southern half, the part most reminiscent of Venice or Amsterdam, is cut by a grid of canals and includes many of the city’s most familiar landmarks. Among them: the Hermitage, Russia’s greatest museum and the former Winter Palace of the czars, along with Palace Square and the Alexander Column; the Kazan Cathedral, modeled after St. Peter’s at the Vatican; and the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, a monument marking the spot of Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881. Here, too, runs the Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main commercial street.
Across the river, the northern part of St. Petersburg consists of a cluster of islands, including Vasilyevsky, Petrogradsky, Dekabristov and Krestovsky. Four drawbridges across the Neva connect the northern and southern parts of the city, while 342 smaller bridges, built over four centuries and made of materials ranging from wood to brick to iron, cross the city’s canals and tributaries.
You’ll find celebrations of St. Petersburg’s White Nights in virtually every corner of this sprawling, watery metropolis. Dance clubs and “beach clubs” stay open until at least 6 a.m. on White Nights weekends. Throughout the night, the Nevsky Prospekt teems with revelers.
There is a profusion of cultural events, from the daylong Dostoyevsky festival on July 3 — a round-the-clock celebration of the local author whom many consider to be Russia’s greatest novelist — to the White Nights Festival, a combination of classical music, opera and ballet performances held from May through the end of July.
The Scarlet Sails, a citywide high school graduation party dating to the end of World War II, takes place at the end of June and draws revelers of all ages. The celebration includes an hourlong fireworks display over the Neva and the passage down the river of a graceful three-masted schooner modeled after one used by the imperial family in the late 19th century.
And that doesn’t even include the variety of street theater, jam sessions and gatherings along the Neva just before 2 a.m. every day to watch the four main drawbridges, all illuminated, rise to allow barges and other big vessels to pass.
This happens throughout the year, of course, but the warm weather and the still-bright skies give the White Nights spectacle an especially celebratory feeling.
“When you’ve got only 80 days of sunlight, you’ve got to make the most of them,” I was told by Sergei Bobovnikov, a dealer in Soviet-era antiques and propaganda art who was born in Kursk, a city near Moscow, but moved to St. Petersburg to attend college three decades ago.
I was joined by Anna Nemtsova, a Moscow-based Newsweek correspondent and White Nights devotee who had lived for many years in St. Petersburg. Over the past several years, the White Nights have become a hugely popular draw for Russian tourists from as far as eastern Siberia, she told me. But the largest representation of visitors comes from Moscow.
“More and more Muscovites are making the weekend commute to St. Petersburg during the summer,” said Nemtsova, who had arrived to meet me via a new high-speed train, which covers the route in four hours and charges 3,000 rubles (about $110, at about 27.6 rubles to the dollar).
She and I made our way by taxi to the city center for an early evening meal — and free vodka shots — at the Idiot, one of St. Petersburg’s more popular bar-restaurants. This five-room basement establishment, off St. Isaac Square and alongside the Moika Canal, one of the Neva’s many tributaries, reflects a new, nostalgic fascination for Russia at the turn of the 20th century. The Idiot was designed to resemble a Dostoyevsky-era apartment: old oak furniture, Singer iron-pedaled sewing machines, shelves of antique books and the occasional, anachronistic bust of Lenin.
Tipsy after our round of vodka shots, Nemtsova and I left the Idiot and commenced a White Nights ritual: the downtown walkabout through the area around the Moika. This original part of the city began to take shape in the early 18th century, when Peter, who was enamored of Dutch culture, laid out a grid of intersecting canals that flow into the Neva and hired Western Europe’s most celebrated architects to line them with palaces and cathedrals. Peter died in 1725, and the capital that he founded rapidly expanded. In 1728, Peter II moved his seat back to Moscow. But four years later, the Empress Anna again made St. Petersburg the capital of the Russian Empire. It remained the seat of the Romanov Dynasty for nearly two centuries, until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
We turned left along the Moika and crossed a short span nicknamed the Drunk Bridge, a rickety iron crossing from which assassins threw the still-living Rasputin — the faith healer to Nicholas and Alexandra — into the river in 1916. Along the nearby Nevsky Prospekt, the new multiethnic Russia — sushi bars, Middle Eastern shisha bars, Chinese tea rooms — was drawing a crowd of customers from around the globe. We found our way to Rubinstein Street, a trendy boulevard that has exploded in recent years with curio shops, theaters and ethnic restaurants.
Here, at a newly opened Georgian restaurant, we discreetly fortified ourselves for the night ahead with a bottle of sweetish red Georgian wine, officially illicit, because Georgian wine imports had been banned by the Russian authorities since before the 2008 war in the south Caucasus, in which hundreds of soldiers and civilians died. It was still too early for most Russians to sit down to dinner, and we were the only guests in the Spartan place. The owner and her daughter tended to us solicitously, as traditional Georgian folk music played in the background. They served up a nonstop procession of heavy, exotic dishes: lobio, a thick red bean soup; piles of meat-filled dumplings, known as khinkali; a cheese and herb bread called khachapuri tarkhunit; and spicy meatballs called abkhazura.
It was around 11 p.m. by the time we left the restaurant and headed back toward the Neva. The sky was streaked with fiery wisps of cloud.
We walked through the eerily deserted Palace Square to a plaza beside the river, facing Vasilyevsky Island, site of the Italianate-style Kunst Chamber, an ethnography museum that includes Peter the Great’s bizarre collection of deformed embryos preserved in formaldehyde. Hundreds of people had gathered in the plaza, one of the most popular vantage points to watch the raising and lowering of the four drawbridges. All eyes were focused on a juggling team that tossed flaming sticks in the air, their acrobatics accompanied by the rhythmic beating of tom-toms played by musicians clad in billowy Ali Baba pants. The look, Anna explained, was inspired by the traditions of the Indian state of Goa, an increasingly popular destination for young Russians on holiday.
The energetic scene on the plaza — illuminated bridges, teeming crowds, stands selling ice cream and American-style hot dogs, the pungent smell of diesel fuel, the hypnotic drumbeating, riverboats fighting for space on the wide Neva — reminded me a bit of the scene alongside the Nile in Cairo, with a similar sense of energy and controlled chaos. As 2 a.m. approached, Anna and I crossed the Palace Bridge and the Stroiteley Bridge to Petrogradskaya Storona, on the northeast side of the city, across the Neva River. We found a large riverboat restaurant called the Flying Dutchman, its wooden-plank deck providing a panoramic view of all four main spans. The sky was darkening, and a huge, butterscotch half-moon loomed just above the Hermitage.
Then, as we sat on a couch on the restaurant deck in the gathering dusk, sharing a shisha and drinking vodka tonics, the Troitsky Bridge beside the museum began its slow ascent. It rose to a 90-degree angle above the Neva, and then, one by one, at 15-minute intervals, each of the three other spans followed. The graceful upward movement of the bridges, each following another with what seemed like perfect synchronicity, the sense of anticipation that suffused the crowds, the interplay of lights and water, all conveyed a magical effect.
Traffic ground to a halt, people gaped from promenades along the river, and then the first of what would be many barges, coming from the Gulf of Finland, swept into view. In near darkness now, Anna and I sipped our drinks and savored the scene — the moment when all of St. Petersburg seemed to stop and enjoy a brief respite from the endless whirl of its summer nights.
. Visiting St. Petersburg, Russia
Where to stay
The Grand Hotel Europe (Nevsky Prospekt, Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa 1/7; grandhoteleurope.com) is widely considered the best place to stay in St. Petersburg. The luxurious, 130-year-old establishment with an ornate facade and a prime location has played host to a procession of European monarchs as well as to many great men and women of culture, including Tchaikovsky and Pavarotti. Rates for a standard double start at 15,300 rubles, or about $557 at 27.6 rubles to the dollar.
The Hotel Astoria (39 Bolshaya Morskaya; thehotelastoria.com) makes a fine second choice. Owned by Sir Rocco Forte, it has grand, old-Russian style interiors and another excellent location on St. Isaac’s Square in the heart of the city, a few blocks from the Hermitage. The 210 rooms and 42 suites at Hotel Astoria start at 20,000 rubles.
Where to eat
The Idiot (82 Moika Canal), popular among both expats and St. Petersburg’s artist crowd, consists of four rooms crammed with antique furniture, oil paintings, chess and backgammon sets, English-language books and assorted Russian bric-a-brac. The menu features excellent Russian and vegetarian cuisine.
Khutor Vodogray (Ul. Karavannaya 2) is a handsome restaurant with whitewashed walls and dark beams suggesting a Ukrainian cottage. Ukrainian delicacies include homemade sausages and black bread with salo, a traditional dish made from salt-cured pig fat.
Probka/Il Grappolo (Ul. Belinskogo 5; probka.org) is a modern wine bar and restaurant offering memorable views of the Church of St. Simeon and St. Anna through its large picture windows. The wine list includes top-flight reds and whites from a dozen countries, and the menu features Italian and European food. Recommended are the pizzas topped with rucola.
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