The palace workers turned up at about midnight and set fire to Ekaterina Mikhailova’s garden. Her crime? The rows of tomatoes and the shed where her three goats lived could be seen from the ornate windows of the Konstantinovsky palace across the road.
The palace-turned-presidential residence has been restored to the tune of £120-million to host dozens of world leaders in town to celebrate St Petersburg’s 300th anniversary. And Mikhailova’s food was spoiling the view.
”They gave us no warning,” said Mikhailova (75), who has lived there for 50 years with her war-veteran husband, Vladimir (76). ”Now I have to walk 40 minutes to feed my goats on a different plot. It costs me 250 roubles a month to hire.”
Last week the local administration burned to the ground a dozen garden sheds where locals grow subsistence crops, lest signs of real life in Russia disturbed the foreign guests.
This week’s lavish, seven-day long party, which began on Tuesday, will portray Russia’s cultural capital at its best for its third centenary. The city seems to reek of new paint. Pressure hoses forced years of dust from building walls. Still-soft asphalt covers cracks in the pavement.
Security for the summit is tight. Local people, it seems, are avoiding the town centre, many heading for the countryside or staying at home, leaving rich foreigners and Ingushetian police — drafted in from near Chechnya to replace the ”soft” local cops — to do the celebrating.
St Petersburg residents say they have little to celebrate, however. A local lawyer is helping dozens of them to sue the government for personal losses and restrictions. At the Kremlin’s orders, fences line the route to Konstantinovsky, masking roadside rubbish and ordinary villages. The homeless, meanwhile, have been cleared from the streets.
Critics say the £1-billion budget could better be spent on the city’s crumbling infrastructure rather than its architecture. But harking back to Soviet ideals of popular suffering for the benefit of the state, the Kremlin insists the local upheaval serves a broader purpose.
”St Petersburg was conceived by Peter the Great as the window to Europe and it became for all the world the public face of Russia,” said Valentina Matvienko, the former deputy prime minister and now President Vladimir Putin’s special representative in the region.
There will be payback, implicitly for all of Russia. ”The anniversary for us is not the end of the line,” she said. ”After the [world leaders] like our town, businessmen and financiers will bring their investment and projects.”
The power of projection is important for the Kremlin. After the recklessness of the 1990s, Russia has to appear to be strong and in control again — to remind the world of the proud czarist empire it once was. Putin wants the festival to show off his home town as a gateway to a Western-oriented Russia, finally ready for business with Europe and beyond.
A few basic facts take the shine off the new paintwork. Russia is shrinking: its population has decreased to 145-million this year from 149-million a decade ago; life expectancy for men is 58 years and 11 months; in three years’ time one in 20 Russians will be HIV-positive.
Average incomes are rising but still only amount to about £200 a month in Moscow, dropping to a third of that in the outlying regions. Russians spend £1,7-billion on bribes each year, fostering a corrupt system that has led to the shooting of two senior MPs in Moscow since November.
Economists dispute Russia’s supposed boom. One side says real incomes increased 10% last year and a consumer boom benefits 20% of Russians who consider themselves middle class. The other side argues economic reform is too slow and middle-class Russians use their excess cash to bribe bureaucrats, preventing the money from ”trickling down” to ordinary people who live in relative poverty.
But the saving grace of this public relations exercise could be its key architect — Russia’s most powerful St Petersburger, Putin, whose approval rating is more than 80%.
His administration’s apparent belief that national pride leads to national prosperity, and his consequent fondness for extravagant displays of state wealth, have not embittered many ordinary, poor St Petersburgers.
While the Mikhailovas berate their local administration for torching their garden, they have nothing but adulation for their president.
Vladimir Mikhailova said: ”This would infuriate him and he would have stopped it. [Boris] Yeltsin was a fool. But Putin is a lot better. He doubled my pension.” —