Go, poke around where the dead factories and decaying housing projects of greater St. Petersburg suggest the ruins of a lost civilization. If you believe, as Norman Mailer once suggested, that the failure of communism was a demerit for human nature, you've come to the right place to see it.

And now? Lenin is still present, in bronze, urging a phantom crowd in front of the Mayor's office, once the Smolny Institute, from which he set forth to accomplish a coup d"état that is wrongly called a revolution. Another bronze Lenin is still mounted on his armored car, in front of the Finland Station, where the actual locomotive that brought him there is preserved. And there's yet another statue of Vladimir Illich at the Warsaw Station, and he stands, his arm thrown forward in incongruous enthusiasm, outside a vast public building that is now called the Business Center. What is this man still doing here?

While I was in town, the English-language St. Petersburg Times revealed the discovery of a nearby killing Weld, where the remains were found of forty thousand people, some of them adolescents, with bullet holes in the backs of their heads. This was the work, in the 1930s, of the protégés of Felix Dzerzhinski, founder of the Soviet terrorist police, whose statue still stands not far from the Smolny Monastery. Irina Flige, head of Memorial, a local human rights organization, complained to the French press that the authorities, having obstructed the view of the site for years, have ignored it since.

If you ask people in St. Petersburg about the Lenin and Dzerzhinski statues, they keep telling you that they're "history." What clinical psychologists call denial seems epidemic here.

I could not help but detect, too, pride that communism, bad as it was, was something on a grand scale and had made Russia important. These days, a similar impulse seems to be driving the Russians to get a rub-off of glory from the czarist past. A Parisian friend who is a Stroganov by birth was greeted with adulation when she visited part of the enormous portion of the Urals that her family once owned. When the St. Petersburg Stroganov Palace, designed by Rastrelli, is restored this year, she will have an apartment there.

Again I hear in my mind: "To Peter the Great from a grateful Russia." For what? What with the alcohol-driven tyranny of the great Czar Peter, the syphilitic fervor of Lenin, and the incompetence of all the despots in between and after, the greatest communal achievement of the people of this perversely lovely city has been courageous endurance. It reached a peak during the 872-day siege by the Nazis, when as many as 1.5 million citizens died from starvation, disease, and the bombings. The old St. Petersburgers who survived the siege are very proud of their suffering. They look down on those who came to the city afterward to replace the dead.

Art breeds under duress, and this city is all the more proud of having fostered some of the world's great music, literature, and dance. Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Anna Akhmatova (considered Russia's finest woman poet), Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Marius Petipa (the French-born founder of classical ballet), and many other renowned artists walked these granite streets. More recently, St. Petersburg has been one of the best places to hear innovative rock music. Moscow, which gets eight times more money from the government than St. Petersburg, is the uncontested capital for both business and show business, but St. Petersburgers take pride in a higher level of culture. Today, these people, whose economic life is dominated by the Wercest robber barons in history, are searching for what more they can impress the world with, beyond their endurance.