One tends to think that Peter built St. Petersburg from scratch using European architects to do it in a European way. In point of fact, Peter drew the plans himself, and little of what was built in his time remains and much of it was primitive. His daughter Elizabeth and Catherine the Great were primarily responsible for the emergence of the eighteenth-century city, whose aesthetic intensity resembles no place Western. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the most famous of St. Petersburg's Baroque architects, who designed the Winter Palace, might be called a Russian; born in Paris, he came to the city at the age of sixteen. Carlo Rossi, the architect responsible for the spread of the city's classic style in the early nineteenth century, was two years old when he arrived. Among the important cities of Europe, St. Petersburg—overemphatic but undeniably alluring—might be compared to a gifted parvenu trying to crack high society. And meanwhile, the tyranny and the barbarism went on and on, while Catherine vied with Frederick the Great to amass the finest collection of Western painting in Europe. A ray of light from the West shone on the city in the late nineteenth century, during the growth of industry and commerce, but with a few flamboyant exceptions, the middle class hunkered down in those dull apartment buildings along the canals, took solace in trips to the spas of the West, and plotted, some of them, the nihilist end of the empire—of its effete aristocracy and ossified bureaucracy. St. Petersburg got Lenin as a consequence. Lenin, who arrived in his famous sealed rail car from Germany, was going to one-up the West by creating a utopia born of a "scientific" reading of history that owed its origins to the Enlightenment. Tyranny and barbarism soon enough took over again, because what was most dependably progressive in Western humanist thinking was left out: moderation, measured judgment, and open-mindedness.

The big Kirov tank and tractor factory on Stachek Prospekt lies cheek by jowl with the delicate palace of Ekaterina Daschkova, who was an intimate of Catherine the Great's. Once, in Krak—w, a Pole told me that the Communists built steel mills near that precious city deliberately to destroy it with pollution—to annihilate its nonproletarian grandeur. I do not believe that to be true, and certainly the Communists who rebuilt from scratch, and at huge effort and expense, the breathtaking imperial castles outside St. Petersburg did not think that way. These people, who gave their children names like Dynamo, adored factories. Long after the West had embarked on the humanism of the Renaissance, they were propelled, in one great upheaval, out of a medieval world. The factories were the awesome cathedrals of their new materialist faith; they went up in the residential sections of St. Petersburg. And at the eerie edges of the city, the long, broad boulevards that accommodate massive tenements were created on a scale that seems meant to equal that of Peter's original city.