tray. In 1712, Peter simply ordered a thousand families to the new capital and told them they were “required to build houses of beams, with lath and plaster, in the old English style,” the first recorded instance of a “themed” development. That stuff rapidly succumbed to fire and rot, but St. Petersburg retains the fake-o-la look of an eighteenth-century Epcot Center. The mansions are supposed to be like Italian villas, but they’re crammed wall on wall, as though they were town house condominiums. The czars had pads all over the map— Summer Palace, Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, New Hermitage—each looking like it came from Palaces for Less. And St. Petersburg has canals. The city is sometimes called the Venice of the North. But not very often. This is Venice as interpreted by a U.S. real-estate mogul: “Give me a bigger ditch. And lose the canoes.” St. Petersburg is a city of largeness. You could hold the Reno air races in Palace Square. St. Isaac’s Cathedral is big enough for God to come down from heaven and feel like He was rattling around in there. The hall corridor on each story of the Grand Hotel Europa makes a loop sufficient in size for a high- energy-particle accelerator. (No doubt some interesting quarks could be produced by collisions between protons and room-service waiters.) And Russians are a people of largeness, too—large bodies, large gestures, large voices. In fact, Russians are enormous. Being an average-size American in St. Petersburg is like being a girl gymnast at a Teamsters convention. And these are Russians who were raised on potatoes and suet and bread that you could use for a boat anchor. Envision them after a generation of good nutrition. Twenty years from now, Americans may ask themselves if winning the cold war was worth losing the Super Bowl. To an American used to cute, fussy little Western Europe, Russia is . . . not a breath of fresh air, certainly, since the place is kind of smerdish, but it’s like mail from home. News that your dog died, maybe, but mail from home nonetheless. There’s something very American about Russia, despite a history as deprived and unlucky as ours has been hopeful and rich. The historian Ronald Hingley says the saga of Russia has been marked by “a peculiarly Russian tendency for tragedy to mingle with high farce.” But Hingley is British, and what would he know? That doesn’t sound peculiarly Russian to Americans. It sounds like the Clinton administration. Speaking of pumpkin rollers in the corridors of power, I went to see the house where Rasputin was assassinated. The overblown and butt-ugly Yussupov Palace
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