St Petersburg An Art Lovers' Guide

From towering temples...

This is sensory overload.

..to gorgeous galleries.

They are just exquisitely painted.

From traditional tunes...

-SHE LAUGHS

-..to contemporary creatives.

Have you ever had a book rejected?

I don't care.

Every great city offers a dazzling mix of world-class

artistic treasures...

..and hidden delights

that reveal its distinctive history and character.

I have really entered the territory of the hunchback of Oude Kerk.

Which would you choose to see on a flying visit?

I'm Alastair Sooke.

And I'm Janina Ramirez.

In this series, we're selecting our personal must-see sights,

using the magnificent art and architecture of three great cities

to understand the forces that shaped them.

Keep one eye on your wealth but

always keep an eye on your

spiritual wellbeing.

We are two art lovers with very different tastes,

-from the modern...

-..to the medieval.

As your guides...

I have lost all sense of direction on this map.

..we will be avoiding the crowds

by hunting for treats way off the beaten track.

And we'll also be finding new ways

of appreciating the most famous attractions.

That's my contribution to the Sagrada Familia.

Between us, we'll show how centuries of political intrigue,

privilege and the struggles of

ordinary citizens are all woven through

the artworks and buildings of these extraordinary cities.

On this mission to get to the heart of a city through its art,

we're in a place where culture has always taken centre stage

as a means of enhancing power and control.

I am so excited about being in St Petersburg.

I have wanted to come here my whole life.

Some children dream of marrying a prince,

I dreamt of coming to St Petersburg.

Nina, your dream comes true and with your own prince.

Ah!

It's a very, very splendid city.

It's so colourful, it's beautiful and everywhere you look,

there are these enormous buildings.

They are blown up on a huge scale.

I think it's worth remembering as well that this place was the seat of

the imperial royal family for

centuries and you see palaces on almost every corner.

But for everything that is gorgeous and gilded and

beautiful, there was bloodshed, revolution, all in this city.

In our time in St Petersburg,

we want to find out how art here has been nurtured and manipulated -

first by the tsars whose dominance

grew with the city itself

and then by the leaders of the Communist era

which was triggered by revolution,

here in the city they renamed Leningrad.

We want to see how artists,

architects and writers have served

their patrons' desire for prestige and propaganda.

And how they have used art

to express radical ideas and oppose regimes,

both past and present.

We're starting with a quick look at

a monument to the man who founded the city, Tsar Peter the Great.

It's known as the Bronze Horseman.

It's not really off the beaten track this, is it?

But we have to start here, in a sense. It would be bad not to.

There he is, rearing up, overlooking the river.

I could not imagine a more iconic image of St Petersburg.

He is looking over the city he founded.

After seizing territory in this area in 1703, Peter decreed that a grand

new capital city be built here, at the western edge of Russia.

The statue was the work of another great, Catherine.

Seeking the utmost in European refinement,

she brought in a top sculptor from France.

What I love about this, it's so obvious he is harking back to the

tradition of equestrian statue from antiquity. He's very grand,

he's almost rampant up there on his rock, quelling nature.

I think the sculpture is amazing, it's a symbol of power,

but the rock is an even greater symbol of power.

That rock originally was a natural megalith,

that was on the Gulf of Finland and Catherine organised a group of serfs

to bring this rock all the way to St Petersburg and over the course of

nine months, this stone was dragged across ice, across water,

across land to get here.

To me, that is Russian power, imperial power at its height.

Our first taste of St Petersburg has given us a dose of art,

empire building, brutality and beauty.

Next, we want to get a handle on the origins of the city.

And why it became a symbol for the status of Russia.

Peter the Great dreamed of building a modern capital that would emulate

the engineering feats of the Dutch,

who were world leaders in urban canal construction.

So we are going out onto the water to find out more about Peter's

visionary plans with local film director Alexander Pozdnyakov.

Hello. Hi, Alexander.

I'm Nina. Lovely to meet you.

Hi.

-Goodness.

-It is just amazing.

-Look at this.

-This is quite stunning.

I think this is more beautiful than Venice.

-What's the building?

-A department store.

-Department store?

-This is the famous place

-where Rasputin was assassinated.

-Oh, my gosh!

We are heading out onto the River Neva

to loop around Peter and Paul Fortress.

This was the first area of the city to be built after Peter captured

a fort from his enemies, the Swedes.

I think we'd both love to get a sense

of why Peter the Great wanted to found a city in this place.

Two reasons at least.

The first reason is the military reason.

He wanted to control this territory,

the second reason was to establish a new capital of Russian Empire here,

because Moscow was a conservative society.

He wanted to bring the western civilisation

on the banks of the Neva.

Is it true that he actually made sure that there couldn't be any big

impressive buildings in stone elsewhere in Russia

-to make sure it all happened here?

-That is true.

He wanted to make it immediately.

And here, he stopped all the buildings of stone across Russia,

because he wanted to build the city for ever.

Peter hired Swiss-Italian architect

Domenico Trezzini to design the mighty fortress defences

and its cathedral

in the style that came to be known as Petrine baroque.

Although building on swampland wasn't ideal,

the location, with access to the Baltic Sea, was.

This is the oldest part of the city.

This little island, Hare Island, this is here.

-That's that?

-Yes.

And on the banks of this little island, I will show you another map.

Peter envisaged a system of canals,

crisscrossing the islands and grand avenues,

or prospects, radiating from the centre.

Serfs and prisoners of war had to dig up the boggy and often

frozen ground, sometimes with their bare hands.

As many as 100,000 are thought to have died, often of starvation.

It's very easy coming here, just to be dazzled,

because it is such a magnificent city,

but my understanding is that this place became known as

the city built on bones.

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

That's a bit flip, isn't it,

we're talking about 100,000 people who lost their lives!

Unfortunately, this is like this,

because, if he was

very slow, I think he could not build this city.

Grandiose building projects

to burnish the glory of St Petersburg

on behalf of Russia didn't stop with Peter.

By the start of the 19th century, the tsars had expanded their empire

to reach all the way from Poland to Alaska.

Our next stop, St Isaac's Cathedral,

was designed to reflect that vast domain

and even with its dome under wraps for restoration,

it's still astonishing to get up close to it today.

I have never seen anything like this.

This is enormous!

-Look at these columns.

-The scale of it is mind-blowing.

Well, there is way too much to explore,

we're going to have to split up.

I'm heading straight into the main space,

which was built to hold up to 14,000 worshippers.

My God!

Look at this place!

St Isaac's may have looked sombre from the outside,

but it's breathtakingly lavish in here.

Gold on every surface.

There is so much colour.

All these different marbles.

Rather than choose a Russian

architect to design this neoclassical colossus,

Tsar Alexander I called in a French designer, Auguste Montferrand.

It took most of the first half of the 19th century to get it built

and no expense was spared.

The sheer amount of precious materials

that has gone into decorating this church is astonishing.

You've got these malachite and lazurite columns,

the materials imported from

Afghanistan, and look at those gates there to the high altar, all gilded.

Something quite unusual, a stained glass window -

you don't usually get that in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Throughout, you really get the sense of Catholic French influence coming

through the architecture.

During the 40 years of construction,

hundreds of serfs and labourers died quarrying and installing the huge

quantities of stone.

At least 60 died from inhaling

mercury fumes while working on the gilding.

The 20th century brought radical change to Russia's churches,

including St Isaac's.

In the years after the revolution

that overthrew the tsars, the communists

rejected religion and all its trappings.

Up there, in the dark, you can just make out a dove.

It represents the holy spirit,

but what's interesting is, after the revolution, that dove was removed.

It was part of a programme by the communists

to transform this building into a museum of atheism.

In its place, they hung a huge pendulum.

So what they were doing was replacing religious symbolism

with a symbol of science and reason.

Although visitors are not usually allowed down

to the cathedral cellars, I've arranged to have a look.

I have come down into this subterranean space.

It's quite eerie and gloomy.

This network of tunnels beneath the cathedral

had a surprisingly important role to play during one of the most

terrifying and tragic chapters, if you like, in the city's history,

the infamous siege of Leningrad, as St Petersburg was known during the

Second World War.

From September 1941 to January 1944,

Leningrad was blockaded on all sides.

Up to a million people are thought to have died,

chiefly from aerial bombings and starvation.

Rations of staples like bread became so scarce,

people resorted to eating the soles of their shoes.

Bodies piled up in the frozen streets.

Despite the horror just outside, beneath St Isaac's,

a group of museum curators created a refuge for thousands of the city's

precious works of art.

Those curators are remembered here and I'm meeting Sergei,

who's heard their stories.

Could you tell me a little bit about what took place within these tunnels

during the siege?

It's so apparent that these curators felt this zeal to protect

the culture that was in the city.

What was life like for them?

Sergei, thank you.

All the best.

The epic scale of St Isaac's makes it a great place for getting

spectacular views of the city.

Particularly as we have been given permission to access a workmen's

walkway, if we can get up there.

-This bottom door.

-He's locking it!

We're being locked in, Nina.

Yes, before the top one can be opened, you see.

He is going to come straight past us and go and unlock the door for us.

OK, OK.

Here goes. Breathe in.

I thought everything was very big, in the scale of this place.

Hello!

Oh, my God!

Yeah, if we can get out of this dark tube.

-Yeah, it's very cramped in here.

-It's worth it, though.

Look, we can even go higher.

-Now we've got a view.

-This is the money shot, really, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-I mean, here we can see...

We can see all of these different landmarks.

-There's the Winter Palace, Palace Square.

-Oh, yes, yes.

What do you make of the interior?

I have genuinely never seen a building like it

and I have been in a lot of cathedrals and a lot of churches.

It's beautiful, but it's left me feeling a little bit cold, actually.

-I'm really surprised.

-Yeah. People say this took a long time.

40 years? That is not a long time by medieval cathedral standards.

And actually, as you get higher up, you can see it's about effect.

It's about show and it's about control.

It's about sitting this building alongside all of these buildings as

this overall city of power.

The Russian Orthodox Church, the tsars, the tsarinas,

did they need to spend all that

money and all that human life constructing this?

Well, you almost sound like one of those Soviet era

anti-religionists.

I was hoping that you were going to be seduced by all of that glitter in

the cathedral, cos meanwhile I was in the darkness and the gloom of the

basement, the tunnels.

But in a funny way, there was something uplifting because you had

all of these curators protecting the

treasures that they kept, which means that,

thank goodness, they're still here today.

Next, I'm heading for an institution founded by the last of the tsars and

expanded by the Soviets - the enormous State Russian Museum.

It's famous for its collection of icons,

but I'm going to look for some

unusual works that reveal how Russia's rulers

forced the ancient art of icon painting to evolve into a new

style of portraiture.

Traditionally, icons always depicted holy subjects,

like this 14th-century St Nicholas.

This is exciting for me.

It's a stunning Russian icon.

All the way around the edge, it's almost like a comic book.

You've got stories, miracles, from the saint's life.

The icon is a teaching aid, but this central figure is what

you're supposed to really meditate on.

And by focusing on him, you are making a connection to the divine.

Icon painters used richly-coloured egg tempera on wood,

often including inscriptions and plenty of gold leaf.

What's distinctive artistically about these objects is how flat,

how two-dimensional they are.

And they are not realistic, natural-looking people,

but symbolic representations of people.

I think that these show the medieval attitude to art.

Art was not art for art's sake,

it was there to instruct and there to aid devotion.

A whole new world opened up for Russian icon artists after 1551

when Tsar Ivan the Terrible decided that they could start to paint real

living secular people, like this jester.

This is known as a parsuna.

Now that is a form of painting that shows a transition in Russian art.

We have left behind the two-dimensional elements of the

earlier icons, because this is more personal.

He has a quizzical look and expression on his face.

But in other elements, like the gold writing up there at

the top and this very solid red colour on his clothing,

that's still harking back to earlier artistic traditions.

This is clearly a work in transition.

Tsar Peter the Great wanted Russia's parsuna painters

to raise their game, so he sent 20 of them to Italy.

Peter's favourite, Ivan Nikitin,

came home with a new expressive style.

I think this is a fantastic painting. It's full of emotion.

It's a painting of Peter the Great on his deathbed.

I think Nikitin's done something special here.

The brush strokes are really light.

And what he's really done is open up the doors to what will become

centuries of fantastic Russian painting.

You can't come to St Petersburg without visiting the seat of power,

where so many of the city's great myths have taken shape -

Palace Square.

When the 1917 revolution came, it erupted here,

with the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace.

Their attack on this most extravagant jewel

in the imperial crown would

spark a wave of communist transformation around the world.

Nina.

Alastair, I'm here. I've wanted to see this building for so long.

The Winter Palace is still a symbol for St Petersburg,

as it's the heart of the city's cultural showstopper,

the Hermitage Museum.

Its collections are so vast,

some say it would take 11 years to see everything properly.

We've only got an hour or two.

This is a huge, slightly intimidating building.

Well, it is fabulously grand.

-Yeah.

-This is your cornucopia of culture here.

I think the idea is precision strikes, that's what we need.

-Yeah.

-We're here to see how the tsars used the Winter Palace as

a place where dazzling art and sumptuous design could boost

their status and their strategic goals.

Thank you so much.

So this is exciting.

We shouldn't really be here, should we?

It's technically closed.

Well, they only allow filming when it's shut to the public, so,

in a sense, we're cheating.

The idea of having it all to ourselves is just overwhelming.

The Hermitage collection was started here by Catherine the Great in 1764.

As it grew, she had to extend the palace to cope.

The tsars used these buildings as their home and for legendary lavish

state and social occasions.

Wow.

This is a staircase, my goodness.

The Jordan staircase,

the main entrance for visitors to this imperial palace.

I mean, this is broadcasting power, wealth,

control of all of the dominions of the world, it feels like.

Dripping with gold, isn't it?

You know, the really weird thing is that Catherine the Great set these

rules down for how people should behave when they came to court.

She said that people that come here had to leave at the door all sense

of rank, any hint of pomposity, and the important thing was to be merry.

It doesn't really communicate that in the architecture, does it?

This place screams that this court is about culture,

art and displaying wealth,

and the idea that everyone was just having a great time here,

how do those two sit together?

Successive tsars revamped the palace according to the latest aesthetic.

Tiring of rococo baroque,

Catherine preferred a neo-classical style when she had

this throne room built.

-Look at this parquet floor as well.

-I know, I know.

There's 28 chandeliers in this space.

It's almost like a wedding cake that's kind of gone mad!

The Pavilion Hall was added on in 1858 by Tsar Alexander II,

with classical and exotic Moorish flourishes.

I think you can certainly see an evolution in the style from the

baroque main part of the palace into this, which is,

it's still got that classical influence,

but my God, is it opulent.

-It's a sign of serious power.

-Shall we explore a bit more?

-We may as well walk the whole way.

-Yeah, let's have a look down.

Having felt the full force of its interior design,

it's time for us to find out what the Hermitage collection reveals

about the political strategies of the tsars.

Catherine kick-started the Hermitage by acquiring prestigious art

collections from all over Europe.

One of her smartest buys was 206 works amassed by British

Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole.

From Rubens to van Dyck, Rembrandt to Raphael,

Catherine had to have the lot.

I'm especially keen to see how

Catherine the Great used art to manage her own image.

She'd had a questionable role in her husband's early death.

She was Prussian, not Russian, so she had a lot to prove.

Here's Catherine, looking particularly great.

This was her favourite portrait.

It commemorates that moment at which she took the throne of Russia,

the coup in which she usurped her own husband, Peter III.

And you can see inscribed on the

tree behind her the date at which this took place.

You have to remember, she has no direct claim to the throne,

so in this image she's constructed it very carefully so she looks like

a true leader, in fact, a true masculine leader.

She's not sitting side saddle, as a woman rider would do.

She's fully astride the horse,

wearing this very distinctive green military uniform, sword held aloft.

She really is showing that she is the right person to rule Russia and

to take it forward.

This is a very different feeling portrait of Catherine.

She's much more relaxed and approachable.

But what's interesting here is Catherine has, again,

played with gender a little bit.

She's dressed in male military attire,

with a traditional Russian fur hat.

So, again, she's asserting herself as the rightful ruler of Russia and

the strongest person to lead.

I've come down to the antiquities halls to see a classical statue

acquired by Peter the Great.

He forced his nobles, who were more used to orthodox icon paintings,

to study the Tauride Venus's pagan curves.

To find out why this statue meant so much to the tsar,

I'm meeting the director of the Hermitage, Dr Mikhail Piotrovsky.

What is important is that Peter wanted it, wanted it very much,

because it was part of, let's say,

the cultural revolution which Peter organised.

He wanted Russia to understand everything

that Europeans understand.

Europe had successes in certain fields - military, technologically -

and to have the same success you have to take something from them.

So that's how you do the reforms.

It's interesting that this arrives in the 18th century

and not long afterwards, within decades,

Catherine the Great has sown the seeds for this museum,

which you're now in charge of.

Cos its role today must be very,

very different for you than it was for Catherine the Great.

Well, in a way, yes, in a way, not.

For Catherine, it was the cultural face of Russia.

That's what it is today.

But in the time of Catherine the Great,

we understand that reputation of a country is based not on economics,

on army, but on the museums which the country has.

Do you feel that you are, in your role as director of the Hermitage,

primarily an art historian,

custodian of a museum, or politician?

Well, this museum is not a museum of art, it's a museum of culture.

I am the person who is responsible

for cultural development of my country.

It's much more important than policy in general.

Culture is much more important than any other thing.

So do you feel you now know much more about Catherine the Great?

I do. I feel like I've developed an understanding of her.

But it's left me questioning the kind of traditional appearance of

her as this wonderful,

enlightened being who brought reason and knowledge from the West.

The way she manipulates art, I mean, it's propaganda.

I suppose the flipside is that she seemed to be genuinely consumed with

what she called a fever, a sickness,

this connoisseur's passion for collecting art.

I mean, this isn't someone who's purely using art just as a means to

-show off, surely?

-I don't think she's using it to show off.

I think what's interesting about

this collection, it remains preserved,

despite the fact that we are standing in a square where

revolutionaries stormed these buildings.

This collection has somehow come to identify Russia.

The fascinating thing, though, is that talking to the director of the

museum, he said this whole place, the Hermitage,

is about Russian state power.

It's almost like he's a politician.

He sees himself as a guardian of the greatness of Russia.

When power was seized from the tsars in the revolution,

many of their most valuable artworks were confiscated and sold off

to wealthy foreign collectors.

Now there's a push to bring some of these treasures back to Russia.

This private museum was set up in 2013 by an oligarch called

Viktor Vekselberg, who spent more than 100 million acquiring some of

the most famous eggs in the world.

I want to find out more about how their creator, Carl Faberge,

grew an international jewellery empire,

thanks to the patronage of the tsars.

I find this totally surprising.

This is the very first of the 50 imperial eggs

created by Faberge for the Romanovs.

It almost feels minimalist, quite modern,

although it was created in 1885.

However, I've decided to focus on some other items in Faberge's

product range for which the eggs were perhaps just clever PR.

Alexey. 'Curator Alexey Pomigalov is going to show me round.'

You, too. It's fascinating in here,

because there are lots and lots of other objects and all of the colours

are extraordinary.

The colour of enamels was one of the secrets of Faberge company.

It was very hard to produce this type of transparent enamel.

This gold colour of enamel,

to make the colour they had to add some uranium.

So this is radioactive?

-I might step away.

-If you put a Geiger counter,

it will tick a little bit faster.

-Seriously?

-Yes.

Nice to borrow these, we're going to the ballet later.

I'm sorry, you can't.

Faberge also created a range of unlikely trinkets,

known as the objets de fantaisie.

This chap really is the most incongruous person in the setting.

It is a Russian peasant, it is called muzhik, and he's dancing.

You can see, he's probably a little bit drunk,

because his head is a little bit away from the correct position.

Yes, his cap has moved around.

-Yes.

-The dancing man was made by Faberge for Nicholas II as one of a

series of coloured stone figurines.

These Russian types are even rarer than the imperial eggs and worth

millions of dollars.

Is there something slightly repellent about a figure like that?

Because it was made and treasured by the elite.

And yet, the reality of life for Russian peasants at the time would

have had nothing to do with the gilded world that we find ourselves

standing in now.

All the court and emperor himself was romanticising these things.

They do not even have an idea of how real people lived at those times,

and this, you can see that the peasant has boots.

Even until the revolution, a lot of peasants had no boots.

You say he's drunk, but he's got these glittering eyes.

-Yes.

-Sparkling with defiance?

Yes. He's focused on something maybe inside his head.

So there's some, almost resentment...

-Yes.

-..encoded in that object.

Alexey, thank you so much.

-You're very welcome.

-I've got to run. Bye-bye.

-Bye.

I think if you spend too long inside that place,

exquisite as all of the objects are, you do risk indigestion.

And the object I found most distasteful

was that poor dancing Russian peasant,

almost like a bear forced to dance for the imperial elite.

It's not that hard, when you're inside there, to realise

the forces at work in Russian society were the same ones that soon

would explode in the 20th century into revolution.

For me, the dramas of the powerful and the common people here have

always come alive in literature.

I keep seeing street names I know from poems and novels,

like the Haymarket, still shabby as

in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment,

and Nevsky Prospect, still teeming with all walks of life,

as described by Nikolai Gogol in the 19th century.

It feels fitting that Alastair's arranged for us to have lunch in the

Gogol restaurant in the centre of town.

-Alastair.

-Hey, Nina, how are you?

Good, pleased to meet you in this very literary restaurant.

I thought this is quite a nice place to have lunch because St Petersburg

really is a city, in many ways, of artifice, isn't it?

You have all of that splendour and magnificence,

but sometimes, I guess, that can have a stifling effect and I suppose

a lot of writers have reacted against that.

I've never felt the contrast between haves and have-nots,

the privileged and the poor,

as strongly as I feel it here in St Petersburg,

and that is fire in the belly of a writer, isn't it?

Fire in the belly. I've got us some vodka.

Yes. Now, this is my idea of heaven, you see,

cos I'm very Polish and I was pretty much weaned on vodka

and these gherkins.

Warms you up on a cold day.

-What's the order, then?

-Vodka.

Gherkin.

Burn.

-Na zdorovie.

-Na zdorovie.

It's very tempting to spend all of your time in St Petersburg thinking

about the great cultural artistic traditions of the city,

but I really want to find out more about the contemporary scene,

so I've come to this place which is the Marina Gisich Gallery.

But rather than going into the main gallery space,

Marina has kindly invited me into her apartment where she has a sort

of semi-informal private gallery of her own.

Following the city's great tradition of patronage,

Marina represents some of Russia's leading contemporary artists.

She splits her time between homes in Switzerland and St Petersburg.

Hello.

-Marina, hi.

-Please enter.

-Alastair.

-Hello, hello.

-Thank you.

-Lovely to meet you.

-OK.

So this is partly a gallery, but this is also where you live, right?

There living, here enjoy.

-OK!

-Some of pieces, for example, it's temporary exposition,

-but some of pieces my collection...

-And art everywhere.

This artist will be present now in this season in different art sphere.

This is quite apocalyptic, isn't it?

You've got this juggernaut, which is crashing, and then this,

I guess a torrent of pigs swarming out.

It's quite political piece.

-Quite strong.

-Do you show a lot of political art?

-Is that acceptable?

-No, no, not a lot,

but I like when artist has his opinion.

No, this is very important to give freedom

for explanation of artistic people.

A slumped Russian bear playing the piano.

Of course, we have a lot of idea of Russia.

A lot of people compare Russia with this beautiful animal, with bear,

quite strong, maybe sometimes too hard, maybe not so intelligent,

but he's very intelligent.

Wow. This is also full of art.

It's really a home collection of art.

Apropos, we have something, also one piece here.

In past time, I spent 15 years

as professional artistic gymnastic.

Me, I'm very Soviet, strong, very ambitious.

So, this is true. I did read that you genuinely were a gymnast for the

-Soviet Union?

-After I moved from sport,

slowly through education to the art.

So why is it important for you to invite people in to see the way that

contemporary art can meld with an ordinary domestic space?

I like to present my style of life, to organise dinner,

to organise cocktails, to invite

artists, to invite people from theatre, and try to mix

maybe sometimes rich people and artistic people,

to try and feel this place like home for art.

You are a very rich and powerful woman,

important in the art world in Russia.

Is it important for you to promote female artists?

No, no, no, no, not at all.

But what is interesting, a lot of gallerists in Russia,

they are women. I think 80% women, maybe even 90% women, 10% it's men.

Because there is this great tradition in the city, of course,

of female patronage stretching all the way back to Catherine the Great.

Is that important as a historical model for you?

A lot of women in Russia, they are in quite an important position.

In art, especially. I mean in contemporary art, not in museums.

In museums, we have men.

It is a traditional area, a royal pastime.

So, Marina, look, it's been a total pleasure.

A pleasure to see you, and welcome next time.

-OK, goodbye.

-A pleasure to see you.

Before we head off to explore the art of St Petersburg's often

traumatic 20th century,

we decided to spend a few minutes trying out

some vintage Soviet-style entertainment.

Well, as with other parts of St Petersburg,

you have these incredibly harsh facades and then something slightly

more real behind the scenes, don't you?

I like this. This is grungy St Petersburg.

And it's such a contrast to all those splendid facades.

In the last couple of years,

there's been a trend here for venues where you can savour the special

version of pop culture created in the USSR of the 1980s.

These are Soviet-era arcade games.

A dream of yours was coming to this city.

A dream of mine was to fly a MiG.

-Oh, my God!

-And surely this dream can come true if I am now...

-Whoa!

-Got you!

Damn you.

Oh, oh!

It's strategic, isn't it?

That's the thing with these games,

they're supposed to teach you skills,

-get your brain working.

-It's a good communist value.

-Absolutely.

-There's time for one more game

and this could not be more Soviet. The Turnip Game.

-The Turnip Game?

-The challenge is

that you have to pull a turnip from the ground.

It's based on a popular Russian children's story.

Oh, I know, yeah, The Giant Turnip where the cat and the dog and the

grandma, they all pull together.

But it's a communist ideal, isn't it?

That only by working together...

-As a family.

-..will the turnip come out.

Oh, God, it's bloody hard!

Oh, I can't go any more than that!

-I'm a mouse.

-You're a mouse!

-Oh!

-Oh, nice!

I think I won the turnip!

And at least we've sampled some everyday entertainment from behind

the Red Curtain.

During the most dictatorial years of the Soviet state,

any hint of dissent was brutally punished.

Yet there were some writers who managed to resist.

I'm going to visit a flat that was once the home of the great modernist

poet Anna Akhmatova who secretly gave a voice to the suffering

of millions.

St Petersburg is famous for its apartment museums,

intimate shrines to great writers or musicians

in the very rooms they once inhabited.

Here's a photo of Anna.

She really is beautiful.

Wonderful, striking eyes, very enigmatic.

Anna and her husband, who was an art

historian, Punin was his surname,

and they were given, if you like,

grace and favour apartments to live here.

Anna really did have a complicated life.

She was a real bohemian in many ways and had a rather exciting love life.

There were three husbands and countless affairs.

But Anna also endured many years when her partner Punin and her

son Lev were imprisoned for anti-state activity.

Unlike many intellectuals who fled the threat of the gulags and the

firing squad, Anna chose to remain in Leningrad.

This was Anna's own room.

She moved in here after her relationship

with her husband Punin collapsed.

And it was from these rooms that she composed the poem for

which she is most famous, Requiem -

a really epic poem that explores the terrors of Stalin's period through a

very personal and heartfelt feminine voice.

Even when she was under threat, where her works were banned,

she continued to compose Requiem and she would write down passages,

recite them to her friends, her loyal followers

who would memorise them.

And then she would take an ashtray and burn the passages so there would

be no remaining evidence that could incriminate her.

I've been allowed to take a quick look at some fragile pieces that

have been brought out for me from the museum's collection.

There is an extraordinary archive of material here.

There's parts of her work that have been copied on to silver birch,

onto the actual bark.

This would have been in a gulag in a prison so it meant that her words

were even managing to make it into there.

But, again, this idea that it had to be portable, easily disposable,

that this was really quite dangerous material to have on you.

It wasn't until 1987 that Requiem was published in Russia.

Now, it's accepted as a classic and is even on the school curriculum.

I'm struck by how vivid this story of the fight to share forbidden

texts still feels today.

Just when the young Anna Akhmatova's poetry was causing a stir,

a group of St Petersburg artists

were leading the world in radical new

approaches to everything from music to ballet, sculpture and painting.

I'm popping into the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum to get a

flavour of their work.

I always think it must have been tremendously exciting to have been

an artist at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia because the

country then was at the vanguard of modernity.

Sucking up all of these different

avant-garde styles from across Europe.

You can see some of them here.

Clear references to futurism, to Cubism, lots of different -isms.

And you find this great prominence

of female artists taken really seriously,

people like Goncharova and Popova.

And as you move into the second decade of the 20th century,

St Petersburg became the centre of the avant-garde,

you find this interest in

geometric abstraction as people start to found new movements,

Suprematism, eventually after the revolution, constructivism.

And it's so obvious when you come here that same fervour that inspired

the revolution of 1917 was totally present within the art world in

Russia at the time.

For me, this next piece is a must-see.

It's by a cult figure called Vladimir Tatlin who was an

inspiration to many others in the avant-garde.

I love this. It's something he created in 1914.

It belongs to a series of pieces that he called Counter-Reliefs.

It's ridiculously, almost, dynamic.

If you look at all of its sweeping forms and curves, the materials,

the metal which suggest a complete sense of modernity.

This is art for the new machine age of the 20th century and it remains

exciting a century, more than a century, after it was made.

There's lots more to see here.

But to find out how this freethinking artistic

revolution fared,

I'm going to have to leave the museum and travel across town.

In this rather rundown corner of Vasilievsky Island,

you can see a constructivist gem called the Red Banner factory.

I think it's fair to say it's seen better days.

I do find this a completely remarkable piece of architecture

because it's so strikingly modern even in its dilapidated state.

It was built as a textiles factory in the '20s and '30s, so it dates

from the Soviet era,

and the whole mood of that period was one of a vision of utopia.

So, if you were an architect working then,

you didn't want to make buildings that harked back to the traditions

of the great neoclassical Baroque glories

of the centre of St Petersburg.

Instead, you wanted to create something like this.

That whole prow at the front makes the building feel like a great ship,

a liner taking Russia into modernity.

Of course, these days,

it absolutely beggars belief that the city authorities have allowed a

building of such obvious distinction to fall into such a terrible state

of disrepair.

There's not much time left on my tour.

And my next stop is quite far away.

OK.

I've booked a cab that should help me get into a more

Soviet frame of mind.

HORN BLARES

I think the really sad thing about constructivist architecture is that

it was relatively short-lived because, under Stalin,

by the late '30s, the official look was heavy, it was quite sombre,

it had an austerity to it.

All of that innovation had disappeared and so the people who

had been the pioneering constructivism before, found they

either had to get in line with this new Stalinist mode, or they

faced being purged, ie, imprisoned or, even worse, executed.

Just as the tsars built this city to advance their ideals,

so the Soviets set about rebuilding the place

they preferred to call Leningrad.

Until the revolution,

this square was named after a church here but it was renamed

Uprising Square and the church demolished to make way

for a metro station.

I'm going to take a quick trip to see how propagandist art became the

backdrop to daily life for commuters here.

When it opened in 1955,

the official name of the network was the Leningrad Metro In The Name Of

Lenin With The Order Of Lenin.

This is one of the deepest subway systems in the world with one

station 102 metres below ground.

I can't believe we're still going,

I feel like we've been on this escalator for ages.

This station was built almost as a palace to the people.

It's beautifully decorated.

It's a real expression of Soviet art.

The communists planned a new centre for the city away from the decadent

imperial palaces.

I'm heading for one of the stations that was built to serve the new

neighbourhoods that were springing up as the city expanded south.

TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT IN RUSSIAN

My God!

Right, well, I have never seen

an underground station with crystal columns in!

This is unbelievable.

You've got the star there of

communism and these laurel wreaths, victory.

And then all the way along the

platform, these incredible chandeliers.

Look at this mosaic, it's amazing.

You've got this female figure carrying a child on her shoulder,

it's Mother Russia. And then underneath, this

inscription that says, "Our cause is just, we have won,"

with the dates there, 1941 to 1945,

the dates that Russia was involved with World War II.

Up at the top, "Peace to the world."

We've been travelling south for miles to the outskirts of the city

as I want to visit a monument that was designed to be just as imposing

as the mightiest statues in the historic centre.

We're approaching the monument now, I can see it.

It's quite stark, like the chimney to a power station on the horizon.

And the truth is that not many visitors to the city really bother

to see it and, in a sense, I can understand why,

it does commemorate this truly grim chapter in the history of the city.

And it does so as well in this especially gloomy '70s style.

OK, thank you.

OK, bye-bye.

The Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad was unveiled in 1975.

Here, sculpture and architecture combine in a defiant tribute to the

soldiers and civilians who held out for so long against Hitler's forces.

I'm surprised, actually, at how tremendously powerful this place is.

In a sense, the design of it is very simple.

It all pivots around this huge steel ring that represents the

siege itself.

But it's not complete because at this side it's broken.

There's a huge space which represent the breaking of the siege itself

after almost 900 days.

So, it's about endurance, withstanding.

And it has quite a powerful, almost ancient, primitive feel.

Even today you can see the way the monument's being used with people

offering flowers.

It's a very affecting place, very powerful.

We're almost at the end of our tour but I've just got time to get a

glimpse of how art is being used as a means of political protest here in

Vladimir Putin's home town.

So, I've headed away from the museums and galleries to visit an

artist who's known for taking a stand against authority.

This courtyard may be in a smart

area but it feels like a hidden world.

OK. This is certainly different to the other places

I've been in St Petersburg.

The artist I'm about to meet, Yelena Osipova,

is known as The Dissident Babushka.

Hello. Lovely to meet you.

Thank you for having me in your apartment.

Yelena has lived her whole life

in this shared apartment, or kommunalka.

She has two small rooms to herself.

Wow.

So much art!

What was the motivation to start painting?

Yelena started making political art after watching the Nord-Ost tragedy

unfold on TV in 2002.

Some 130 theatre-goers and 40

Chechen militants who had taken them hostage

were killed after Russian security forces pumped toxic gas

into a Moscow theatre.

Since then, Yelena's protested against what she sees

as abuses of power.

And she supports other activists,

including the controversial band Pussy Riot.

How do the authorities react when

you present these sorts of slogans and images?

Do you feel fearful or scared when you go out and protest?

Oh, it's been so wonderful to come here and see your art.

I've not got much time so I'm afraid I have to go.

As we're almost at the end of our tour,

we're meeting back at the Hermitage.

I'm quite tired. It's been busy.

-We've packed in a lot.

-We have.

But now we're coming to see something quintessentially Russian.

We couldn't come here and not go to the ballet.

-No.

-We're going to see a production of Swan Lake in the theatre that was

-built by Catherine the Great, so...

-Amazing, amazing.

-Right.

-After you.

-Looking forward to this, thank you.

It's quite steep. There's just time to sneak in behind the scenes.

The Tchaikovsky Ballet Company was

set up three years ago and gives young

dancers an opportunity to gain

experience on the Hermitage Theatre's small

but celebrated stage.

Look, we're in the most fairy tale setting imaginable so I guess

St Petersburg has lived up to your childhood dreams

of what it would be like.

You know what? St Petersburg has actually exceeded my expectations.

I thought it would be beautiful, colourful, exciting.

But, on top of all of that,

I've realised it's all about the contradictions, really.

History and tradition versus revolution and new ideas.

I've surprised myself how much I've been seduced by the sheer spectacle

and glitz of the whole city.

But, at the same time, if you think of the tragic events that happened

here, they're almost as extreme in the opposite direction.

At the top you have the Hermitage,

you have this collection of antiquities, masterworks.

And then you have people who have no other voice,

who will be attacked if they express their ideas openly but they can do

it subtly through literature, through the visual arts.

The sorts of things I saw with my Dissident Babushka,

there are still people trying to be heard.

That, to me, is such an expression of trying to find a voice,

a cultural voice.

We've seen two really extreme different sides to the city.

You have that city of the elite and you also have the outsiders.

But, for both camps, if you like,

culture is at the heart of how they express themselves and that culture

has marked the city indelibly.