St Petersburg

The referendum, however, was still nonbinding. An official decision on the fate of the city’s name could be made only by the Soviet parliament. Given its makeup, it could not be expected to act anytime soon. But history acted in its own way. In August 1991 the hardliners in Moscow attempted an anti-Gorbachev coup. The attempt failed, but as a result, the Soviet Union, already creaking at the seams, collapsed completely. The isolated Gorbachev lost power, and the leader of the new independent Russia became its recently elected first president, Boris Yeltsin. Russia was free of Communist Party rule after more than seventy years. Yeltsin replaced the Communist symbol, the red flag and star, for the prerevolutionary tricolor flag. Leningrad, which had supported the new leader, was granted its wish this time. It became St. Petersburg once again. The wheel of history had made a complete revolution.

This was a dizzying moment for the city of five million. During the August coup attempt, Mayor Sobchak managed to organize the biggest pro-Yeltsin demonstration in the country; this decisive act brought Petersburg back, after a long hiatus, into the political arena. The courageous, dignified speech, before 250,000 attentive listeners on Palace Square, of the eighty-four-year-old academician Dmitri Likhachev, a noted Christian scholar and soon after the first honorary citizen of the new St. Petersburg, gave the demonstration a cultural and symbolic focus characteristic of the city.

Far-reaching and interesting experiments in privatization soon began. The economic importance of the city as a major port grew sharply after the Baltic republics broke off from the new Russian nation. Alluding to the traditional description of Petersburg as “the window into Europe,” Sobchak said pointedly, “In connection with the changes in the borders, our city is now taking on special significance. It is the only Russian door to Europe.”

As seldom before, ties with Europe became a political priority. Even before the ruble became a convertible currency, post-Communist Petersburg was prepared to restore to circulation the “golden coin of the European humanistic legacy” (in Mandelstam’s phrase). Predictably, this movement created an acute polarization of the city’s political forces.

Opposing the pro-Western and promarket reformers was a small but extremely vocal nationalist movement that flourished in Petersburg. In the fall of 1991 it held a demonstration on Palace Square. Orators assured the crowd that the country was in the grip of a “terror of democrats, faithful servants of world Zionism,” and they declared, “Do you think that St. Petersburg was given its old name in honor of a Russian tsar? No, it is in honor of the Jewish Apostle Peter!”

A witness described a similar gathering: “A woman stood in a crowd, with tight curls, mean eyes, and a squeaky voice—but she spoke and the crowd listened. ‘I am a biologist, I work at the University. We did an analysis in our university laboratory of Jewish blood and listen, it all has a gene of hatred for the Russian people!”131 Attacks on other “foreigners” became more frequent, particularly on cultural matters. Petersburg’s ultranationalistic element was displeased that the new conductor of the Philharmonic after Mravinsky’s death was Yuri Temirkanov, a Kabardian, and that the artistic director of the Maryinsky Theater was the Ossetian Valery Gergiev.

One leading proponent of nationalist thought was Lev Gumilyov, the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. When his historical studies began appearing, they found an interested audience. Gumilyov’s thesis was that the Russian Empire had not been a “prison of nations,” as the liberals had traditionally maintained, but a natural and voluntary association of European and Asian peoples under the benign protection of the tsars. According to Gumilyov, “a united Eurasia headed by Russia was traditionally opposed by Europe in the West, China in the Far East, and the Muslim world in the South.”132 Russia, he thought, did not share a path with Europe, since Russian ideology was based on standards of behavior that were alien to Europeans and borrowed significantly from the Mongols—absolute discipline, ethnic tolerance, and religious fervor.

Paradoxically, the views of Gumilyov, who died in 1992 before his eightieth birthday, restored the line of Slavophile philosophy broken by the Soviets and transplanted it onto Petersburg soil. The fact that his anti-European theories found such sympathy in Petersburg showed how volatile the intellectual atmosphere had become even in so traditionally pro-Western and cosmopolitan a city. A sensation was caused by the premiere in Petersburg of Bell Chimes, a nationalistic “symphony-ritual” (as the composer called it) by Valery Gavrilin, a follower of Georgy Sviridov, a leading Slavophile musician (and former student of Shostakovich) and composer of the Petersburg Songs, set to the poetry of Blok.