The scale of these public buildings is grandiose and cold, the product of unsophisticated architects employed to rival the glories of ancient Greece by building everything at twice its proper size. Simultaneously both cities have a poverty of detaiclass="underline" they are like sets for some fabulous Hollywood film; Washington with its cherry-blossoms, Petersburg with its lilacs. They are the embodiment of nouveau-riche bad taste, built at a time when their planners were all too conscious of the inferiority, the youth, the very barbarism of their nations. In Washington the inside of the Capitol is decorated with atrociously naive paintings by, I understand, an Italian immigrant. In Petersburg, similar naive painting, in the form of ikons and gold-leaf portraits of Romanoffs and their predecessors, was everywhere imposed upon the French-influenced palaces and cathedrals. It was all too big and the embellishments were all too bad. Both cities, moreover, had regulation designs for housing, much of it very elegant, yet those elegant houses had frequently become appalling tenements for the very poorest! No wonder that envy leads swiftly to crime and that the threat of revolution looms most menacing when it is closest to the seat of power. No wonder the rich build themselves sanctuaries, as Howard Hughes built himself a sanctuary high above the streets of Las Vegas. Someone once suggested that Las Vegas was not a sinister, cynical venture, erected to fleece the American public of its money, but the epitome of what an enriched Italian peasant would build to please his mother. Thus the nature of the popular entertainment, the forms of gambling, and the preponderance of pink and gilt one discovers everywhere, reflect the taste of some beaming mama, of some proud son of Sicily.
Naturally, St Petersburg’s gentlefolk did not display the rudeness of taste I associated with the city. Our Russian aristocrats were amongst the most cosmopolitan in the world, travelling regularly to Paris and Berlin, Switzerland and elsewhere. A good many of them were not originally of Slavic origin, but bore German, French, Scandinavian and even British names. Because of the Tsar’s strong feelings, one did not find Jews at Court, but there were Armenians, Poles, Georgians and many more nationalities, all with Russian titles. These people had been encouraged to become Russian citizens since the days of Peter the Great. It at once strengthened and weakened our Empire. Considerable profiteering went on. The great merchant families, the industrialists, even many of the aristocrats, continued making their fortunes by diverting war-materials to their own profit. They did not really believe that the Germans, Austro-Hungarians or perhaps even the Turks would take advantage of Russia. The war was a game, a chance to display their fine uniforms, to impress their womenfolk, to make histrionic self-sacrifice (if they were women) and to glorify the Slavic soul.
This, in the first few months, seemed the prevailing spirit in St Petersburg. As our armies showed themselves to be ill-equipped (partly because of profiteering, partly because of a lack of attention to detail typical of the romantic Russian) and were beaten in battle after battle, just as ten years earlier we had been beaten on the sea by the Japanese, morale went from the euphoric to the melancholic. Only the professional soldiers were left to try to save something of the ‘Russian steamroller’. They were too late.
When he went into exile to Germany after the Civil War, Krassnoff, Hetman of the Don Cossacks, pointed out in his books how decadence had already established itself through the capital, throughout Russia. As always, the smaller landlords suffered worst when the uprisings came. Those who created the situation had already fled. Only the poor, unwitting Tsar, his stupid, superstitious wife and their innocent children paid the full price of their folly. A stronger Tsar, as Krassnoff and other Whites explained, a more dignified Court, and there would have been no revolution at all. We should have gone on to greater glories and, with America, been the envy of the world. I say all this to give a general picture of St Petersburg at the time I arrived and to show that it was by no means only the Lenins and Trotskys who were complaining about the way the country was run. There was hardly anyone in the capital who did not think that something should be done. The Tsar was by no means the most popular ruler we had had. His foreign wife was carrying on a flirtation with a Siberian starets who was not even a proper priest (letters from her to him had been in circulation for three years) and she was a notorious drug-addict, unable to survive without morphine. Amongst the powerful families there was talk of abdication, of electing a stronger, more popular Tsar to ascend the throne which Nicholas, to be fair, had never wanted to occupy.
It should be said here that in those days cocaine-sniffing was a common habit in Russia, Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere. When the Bolsheviks took up the reins of power (like seizing the reins of a mad horse galloping towards a cliff) they used cocaine to a man and woman. There was no commissar without his supply. This is what gave the use a bad reputation. The whole of the high-ranking elite of the Third Reich, for instance, were familiar with the benefits of this distillation of the ordinary cocoa plant. Sometimes it seems to me that twentieth-century history is a history of its use and abuse. It supplied the energy which in turn fuelled the many upheavals (not all of them harmful) which have taken place in my lifetime. My use of cocaine was for a while abated, however, due to the routine I would follow for the next months. On the Monday I set off for my interview with my professor at the Polytechnic Institute. I travelled by steam-tram from the Wylie Clinic terminus.
My first ride on a steam-tram was an exhilarating experience. I went to the terminus early in the morning. The trams were like small single-carriage trains, running on rails and drawn by a boxlike locomotive (possibly a Henschel or an English ‘Green’). These locomotives can still be seen on narrow-gauge lines. In the summer some of the coaches would be open-sided, but in the winter they were enclosed. The locomotive itself had accommodation for about ten passengers. It was always these seats in winter which were the most coveted. There was no heating on the other coach. Needless to say my first trip to the Institute aboard the Number 2 tram was in the rear carriage, close to the door. In my new uniform and my greatcoat I was comparatively warm as we drove through the industrial suburbs. The misty streets were full of huddled figures on their way to factories like the famous Putilov Works. We passed into semi-rural country where bare trees and wooden fences seemed stuck at random into dirty snow and a smell of urine and oil predominated until one reached the middle-class suburbs and eventually, after about three-quarters of an hour, arrived at the Polytechnic buildings. These were unremarkable, institutional edifices and not in the least welcoming. Neither were the few students who watched my arrival. I asked the way to Doctor Matzneff’s office and was directed through various cold corridors, past many bleak, closed doors, until I found one bearing his name. I knocked. I was told to enter a bare, dark green room. I removed my cap, wondering if I should salute, for the professor wore a magnificent naval uniform. It was usual for retired military instructors to take positions in civil schools. Instead, I shook hands with him. He had a faded, sad-eyed look and was not the ogre I had expected. His hair was thin and grey; his moustache drooped and was snuff-stained. He remained standing near a small window which looked out across a courtyard. He could see above the green half-curtain on its brass rail, but I was too short to know what, if anything, he stared at.