As the country, with its capital returned to Moscow, re treated to its womblike, claustrophobic, and xenophobi« condition, Petersburg, having nowhere to withdraw to came to a standstill—as though photographed in its nine teenth-century posture. The decades that followed the civi war didn't change it much: there were new buildings bui mostly in the industrial outskirts. Besides, the general hous ing policy was that of so-called condensation, i.e., putting the deprived in with the well-off. So if a family had a three- room apartment all to itself, it had to squeeze into one room in order to let other families move into the other rooms. The city's interiors thus became more Dostoevskian than ever, while the fac;ades peeled off and absorbed dust, this- suntan of epochs.
Quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of seasons. Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination, and a man with normal eyesight can make out at a distance of a mile the number of the approaching bus or the age of the tail following him. In his youth, at least, a man born in this city spends as much time on foot as any good Bedouin. And it's not because of the shortage or the price of cars (there is an excellent system of public transportation), or because of the half-mile-long queues at the food stores. It's because to walk under this sky, along the brown granite embankments of this immense gray river, is itself an extension of life and a school of farsightedness. There is something in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly flowing, departing water that instills in one's soles an almost sensual desire for walking. The seaweed-smelling head wind from the sea has cured here many hearts oversaturated with lies, despair, and powerlessness. If that is what conspires to enslave, the slave may be excused.
This is the city where it's somehow easier to endure loneliness than anywhere else: because the city itself is lonely. A strange consolation comes from the notion that these stones have nothing to do with the present and still less with the future. The farther the facades go into the twentieth century, the more fastidious they look, ignoring these new times and their concerns. The only thing that makes them come to terms with the present is the climate, and they feel most at home in the foul weather of late fall or of premature spring and its showers mixed with snow and its impetuous disoriented squalls. Or—in the dead of winter, when the palaces and mansions loom over the frozen river in their heavy snow trimmings and shawls like old imperial dignitaries, sunk up to their eyebrows in massive fur coats. When the crimson ball of the setting January sun paints their tall Venetian windows with liquid gold, a freezing man crossing the bridge on foot suddenly sees what Peter had in mind when he erected these walls: a giant mirror for a lonely planet. And, exhaling steam, he feels almost pity for those naked columns with their Doric hairdos, captured as though driven into this merciless cold, into this knee-high snow.
The lower the thermometer falls, the more abstract the city looks. Minus 25 Centigrade is cold enough, but the temperature keeps falling as though, having done away with people, river, and buildings, it aims for ideas, <or abstract concepts. With the white smoke floating above the roofs, the buildings along the embankments more and more resemble a stalled train bound for eternity. Trees in parks and public gardens look like school diagrams of human lungs with black caverns of crows' nests. And always in the distance, the golden needle of the Admiralty's spire tries, like a reversed ray, to anesthetize the content of the clouds. And there is no way of telling who looks more incongruous against such a background: the little men of today or their mighty masters scurrying along in black limousines stuffed with bodyguards. To say the least, both feel quite uncomfortable.
Even in the late thirties, when local industries finally began to catch up with the pre-revolutionary level of production, the population hadn't sufficiently increased; it was fluctuating somewhere near the two million mark. In fact, the percentage of long-standing families (those who had lived in Petersburg for two generations or more) was constantly dropping because of the civil war, emigration in the twenties, purges in the thirties. Then came World War II and the nine-hundred-day-long siege, which took nearly one million lives as much through bombardments as through starvation. The siege is the most tragic page in the city's history, and I think it was then that the name "Leningrad" was finally adopted by the inhabitants who survived, almost as a tribute to the dead; it's hard to argue with tombstone carvings. The city suddenly looked much older; it was as though History had finally acknowledged its existence and decided to catch up with this place in her usual morbid way: by piling up bodies. Today, thirty-three years later, however repainted and stuccoed, the ceilings and fa<;ades of this unconquered city still seem to preserve the stain-like imprints of its inhabitants' last gasps and last gazes. Or perhaps it's just bad paint and bad stucco.
Today, the population of this city is around five million; and at eight o'clock in the morning, the overcrowded trams, buses, and trolleys rumble across the numerous bridges carying the barnacles of humanity to their factories and offices. The housing policy has changed from "condensation" to building new structures on the outskirts whose style resembles everything else in the world and is known popularly as 'barrackko." It's a big credit to the present city fathers that they preserved the main body of the city virtually untouched. There are no skyscrapers, no braiding speedways here. Russia has an architectural reason to be grateful for the existence of the Iron Curtain, for it helped her to retain a visual identity. These days when you receive a postcard it takes a while to figure out whether it's been mailed from Caracas, Venezuela, or Warsaw, Poland.
It's not that the city fathers wouldn't like to immortalize themselves in glass and concrete; but somehow they don't dare. For all their worth, they, too, fall under the spell of the city, and the furthest they go is to erect here and there a modem hotel where everything is done by foreign (Finnish) builders—with the exception, of course, of telephone and electric wiring: the latter is subject to Russian know- how only. As a rule, these hotels are designated to service only foreign tourists, often the Finns themselves, owing to the proximity of their country to Leningrad.
The population amuses itself in nearly one hundred movie houses and a dozen drama, opera, and ballet theaters; there are also two huge soccer stadiums and the city supports two professional soccer teams and one ice-hockey team. In general, sports are endorsed substantially by officialdom, and it's widely known here that the most enthusiastic ice- hockey fan lives in the Kremlin. But the main pastime in Leningrad, as everywhere in Russia, is "the bottle." In terms of alcohol consumption, this city is the window on Russia indeed, and a wide-open one at that. At nine o'clock in the morning, a drunk is more frequently seen than a taxi. In the wine section of the grocery stores, you always find a couple of men with that idle but searching expression on their faces: they are looking for "a third" with whom to share both the price and the content of a bottle. The price shared at the cashier's, the content—in the nearest doorway. In the semidarkiess of diose entrances, reigns, at its highest, the art of dividing a pint of vodka into three equal parts without any remainder. Strange, unexpected, but sometimes lifelong friendships originate here, as well as the most grisly crimes. And while propaganda condemns alcoholism orally and in print, the state continues to sell vodka and increases the prices because "the bottle" is the source of the state's biggest revenue: its cost is five kopecks and it's sold to the population for five rubles. Which means a profit of 9,900 percent.