Wednesday, October 14, 2009

City of Citizens


Autumn seems to have arrived.

The day before yesterday we had wet snow all day long, the kind of wet snow apropros of which Dostoevsky cites a Petersburg poet in Notes from Underground. Cold and cloying, penetrating to the bone, sloppy and slick on the sidewalk. The fact that all those literary referents accumulate around the snows of autumn - Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, whoever - makes it no less miserable as an actual experience. I forced myself out for a walk midway through the afternoon, bundled up and with umbrella in hand. Down Zagorodnyi Prospekt to the Vitebsky Vokzal - the elegant art nouveau train station that gets you to the Imperial Palaces at Pavlovsk and Pushkin, and beyond that to Belarus; then back and across the small park around the "Theater of the Young Spectator" - in the 1840's the regimental square where Dostoevsky was taken to be executed, an execution commuted by Imperial pardon to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. Once I'd slipped and slid across the park I ducked into one of the new "Commercial Centers" that have sprouted up over the last ten years. This one includes an "Oceanarium" and play area for kids, a food court and an array of clothing boutiques on the second floor. I browsed until I'd thawed out and then headed home, up ulitsa Marata - a street named after the French Revolutionary - across the street where David and the kids and I lived in 2000 (Sotsialisticheskaia), and along the pedestrian boulevard with the statue of Dostoevsky at the corner by the metro.

As even this brief excursion on a snowy day suggests, you don't go anywhere in this city without encountering mosaics of time, history, text....and the various troubles that have gone with the efforts of men and women of conscience to live in a repressive society. Add to that the troubles of contemporary Petersburg, in which commercial development becomes the latest in a long tradition of disregarding what might be best for the average citizen. On a day of mud and sloppy snow it's unclear just where the city is heading, and if the great leap forward into Capitalism bodes ill or well. Peter's bronze horseman leaps famously into the often murky air above the Neva and Vasilievsky Island, and generations of poets have been loath to answer the question of just WHERE he might be headed.

The question I wonder about is who decides. The burning issue of this autumn in Peter's city has to do with plans to build the largest skyscraper in Europe across the Neva - not quite from where the Bronze Horseman is - but upriver a half-mile or so, across from one of the city's loveliest and most iconic structures, the Smolnyi convent. The project has been undertaken by Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, and would house both their corporate headquarters and various commercial, housing and recreation centers. The British firm that won the design competition was following specifications that called for a 400+ meter structure - more than four times higher than existing city laws allow. The project and the design have been controversial from the beginning, but the past month has been pivotal, since the City Council has OK'd the project, despite protests from various leading cultural figures, the UNESCO World Heritage Site committee, and the Petersburg chapter of the Russian Council of Architects. The results of a poll from last week indicate that over half of St. Petersburgers disapprove of the project (only a quarter support it). Approval of the project, which has been the darling of Petersburg governor Valentina Matvienko, now heads "upstairs" to Moscow, where the Federal Committee on Culture must approve it. Interestingly enough, the preliminary indications are that there might be some resistance there - with the Committee expressing concern that laws have been violated in approving the project. Those laws clearly state that nothing is to be built over 100 meters tall, or that in any way interferes with the historic skyline and "cityscape" of this extraordinarily intact, extraordinarily horizontal city.

Which brings us back in a sense to the question of just who will decide.

On Saturday - a day of glorious fall sun, when stunning weather miraculously coincided with the weekend - I attended a demonstration intended to remind the city that someone other than Matvienko and the City Council should decide. Leaders who break the law lose the right to rule. The demonstration also served as reminder that there are things more precious than the Gazprom development - which various speakers referred to in terms borrowed from the Old Testament prophets: Moloch, hellish, monstrosity. Beyond the anti-capitalist rhetoric, there was also an attempt to remind the city (both the government and presumably the people) of its distinct history and identity, and of the rule of law. In a Russian context this can sound like tilting at windmills. But I care too much about the city - and about Russia - to dismiss this gathering as quixotic. There is something here in process that speaks to (some) Russians' longing for legality and integrity of process; but there was also something that spoke wonderfully to how those protesting compose a language of resistance that is theirs alone. It's an extraordinary language, a 2009 version of Turgenev's velikii, moguchii, pravdivyi russkii iazyk: a powerful, truth-telling language that's the creation of a motley, well-organized, peaceful gathering of lovers of St. Petersburg on a sunny fall afternoon. This is civil discourse, trying to build a civilized process and a humane city-society. It's inflected with Petersburg traditions and global culture, in a patois that is uniquely their own.

And of course a lot of what I love about it is the way it draws classic Petersburg culture(s) into a mosaic of new meanings...

Petersburg: The Northern Venice or the Northern Shanghai?
Okhta Center - My Precious
Petersburg is a Classical City: ceterum censemus gazpromcitiem esse delendam
All Power to the Laws

Saint Petersburg YES; GazPutinBurg NO

And over these playful amalgams of irony and anger sound the speakers' words: speakers from an organizing committee that included all comers, including the Communists (the exception is Limonov's New Bolshevik Party); they quote Joseph Brodsky and Dmitrii Likhachev, a scholar and champion of the city's culture; they write new lyrics to Beatles songs and denounce city councilors who refused to adhere to existing laws. They call for Matvienko's resignation; they ask the thousands gathered to think about what it means to act as "genuine citizens and free people"; they point out the power of monied interests to destroy the city's greenspace; they read poems and refer to the city's tragic and heroic past. They pass petitions and ask people to wear blue ribbons and call for "massive non-violent protest."


Most of all I'm struck by the languages they use, playful and pointed, visual and verbal, languages that draw on the Soviet past and high culture, rock music and communism, the local and the global: one poster shows the great eye of Mordor on top of the GazProm tower, a panoptic eye reaching out over Smolnyi; another one imagines the angel atop the Peter and Paul Fortress breaking the "gaz-scraper" in two; a local rock musician has written a song called "GazPromBaiter" - suggesting that Russians have become Gastarbeiters of the Kremlin. It's a biting and powerful song, that challenges the people who start singing along to think what they've traded for full stomachs and stability.

And along with this mix of pop culture and the Soviet past (one fellow in a gas mask wanders through the demonstration; two guys standing beside me regret they hadn't thought of that - gas masks were standard issue in Soviet civil defense gear) there are poets and film makers and Dmitrii Likhachev, looking mournfully down from a sign on the assembled crowd. Likhachev, medieval historian and cultural conservator, textologist and student of monastic libraries and the culture of laughter in pre-Petrine Russia. Perhaps there is no more fitting juxtaposition than Likhachev and the rock musician and Tolkein's demonic tower: it is time for new laughter in Russia, and a culture that is perhaps finally willing to get over its humorless fatigue at Soviet pseudo-politics. This is a new body politic, making their way towards defending a place they love for many different reasons, figuring out how to make common cause.

I have no idea whether it will make any difference on the shores of the Neva, whether the Okhta Center will be successfully challenged by these fine citizens - or by the Federal Ministry of Culture - or by UNESCO. But something, I want to think, is being created here, that will have impact, and will flourish. A city isn't built in a day, and neither are citizens. In a city whose founding myth involves the imposition of Imperial will and a populace driven to madness or insurrection, maybe there will be a new story.

On this one Saturday afternoon, it seems wonderfully possible.



No comments:

Post a Comment