Back in the USSR:
A lot has changed in St Petersburg since Miranda Sawyer's mother first visited in 1965 – for a start the vultures have all disappeared, and nobody wants her jeans
St Petersburg has stately boulevards, frou-frou churches, pretty canals and loads of art displayed in vast halls of glorious excess. This gives it a familiar feel: of a Western European, weekend break, cultural-tick-box city. But, although it can remind you of Amsterdam, of Berlin, of Brussels, it's not really like any of those places. Because St Petersburg is in Russia.
Russia! My mum and I don fake-fur hats and pose outside the Winter Palace of Peter I. There is no snow and the sky is the colour of Tupperware. It is perishing. Weary-looking horses stand in front of golden carriages, puffa-wrapped schoolchildren cluster and bump like tethered balloons, men in khaki army uniforms stride about, young and raw-jawed. Behind them glitters the Barbie mansion that is the Winter Palace. It links into other palaces that make up the Hermitage museum, stretched along the bank of the River Neva. By December the river will be frozen and won't thaw until April.
My mum has been to St Petersburg before: in 1981, when was she was a teacher in Manchester, she took a group of schoolgirls. "Everyone kept wanting to buy our jeans and coats," she remembers. "And we went to a circus. That had vultures!" Before that, in the summer of 1965, she and my dad drove to St Petersburg, in a Mini. They went via Finland. I really can't believe that they did this, but there are photographs.
The main difference between 1965 St Petersburg and the city of 46 years later is, says Mum, the lack of cars. Back then, people formed crowds around the Mini, and ooh-ed and aah-ed over its transverse engine; during the communist years, no foreign cars were imported into Russia. Now, Ford, GM and Toyota all have factories close to St Petersburg and the centre sometimes locks into a static traffic jam.
Also, she says, in 1965, "there were no signs". In order to do anything – visit sites, check into a hotel, change money, get petrol tokens – they had to get authorisation from the In-Tourist office. They had the address, but couldn't find it and had to beg a sailor, who understood a little English, to take them to the door. When they got there, it was entirely anonymous. No plaque, no display, no indication from the outside that there was anything non-domestic within.
Now, St Petersburg has plenty of signs. Not that we can read them, of course, though some words are easy to guess: KOPE for coffee. PECTOPAH means restaurant, says my mum, and we go to a Ukrainian one, where the waiters wear billowing silk trousers and everyone smokes. I ask for a vodka and tonic, and the waiter is genuinely puzzled. He brings me a glass of vodka, to be knocked back in one go, and a bottle of tonic for afters.
His trousers are fancy. Ours are not. Not one person asks us if they can buy them. This is because there are clothes shops everywhere and because our trousers are not desirable. Today's Russian woman is tall and gorgeous and dressed like a Selfridges Christmas tree. There is no part of her clothing that is plain: everything is stonewashed, or appliquéd, or has diamanté dangly bits, or is made out of actual leopard. Heels are killer. Make-up can be viewed at 100 paces. Our trousers – and us – are just too dull.
I wonder where these Swarovski-studded glamazons go when they hit 35. Because it appears that they are kidnapped and swapped for small, stout, grumpy lady trolls. After a while, I realise all Russian women contain within their DNA both ravishing supermodels and Rosa Klebb – like St Petersburg; like Russia itself. On the way from the airport, we passed mile upon mile of concrete housing blocks: relics of the Communist era and still the places most locals live. And yet, in the city centre, all is a Big Fat Gypsy Architect's wet dream.
With our tour guide, Natasha, we whizz around the city: go to the square that commemorates the Decemberists (nobles who died because they believed in the emancipation of serfs); the Church of the Spilt Blood where Alexander II was mortally wounded. And we visit St Peter and Paul's Fortress on an island opposite The Hermitage, a prime example of the Russian supermodel/Klebb combination.
First up, the cathedral in the centre, an imperious feast of gold and mosaic which contains the tombs of all the Romanov emperors and empresses from Peter the Great until the very last, Nicholas II. Peter the Great, the city's namesake, was a redoubtable dude. Standing 6ft 8in, in a time when most people struggled to get over 5ft 6in, he became Tsar at 10 and founded St Petersburg in 1703, when he was 28. He learned about city planning in Manchester, shipbuilding in Amsterdam and paid for European architects, artists and artisans to come and create his vision of a city: the vision that still brings in the visitors of today. St Petersburg has a population of 4.5m, but 5.5m tourists visit each year.
Peter the Great himself was skilled in various professions, including dentistry, though he is mostly remembered for his shipbuilding. He would go to the shipyards himself, often after a heavy night's drinking and two hours' sleep, and teach the locals. He was modern-thinking, changing the clock to European time, making his courtiers shave their beards off and encouraging the population to come to Russia's first-ever museum, not far from here. The museum housed a display of deformed embryos brought back by him from Holland, and Peter offered a drink and a pastry on entrance. Free cake and booze. There's an emperor who understood his subjects.
After Peter, the ruling Romanovs were, variously, vicious two-faced modernisers or vicious two-faced conservatives. Their tombs are in rows inside the cathedral: gilded, immovable. At a certain point, a law was passed banning females from the throne because they caused too much trouble. The final Tsar was Nicholas II, who was married to Alix, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. Their tombs are in a separate room, at the back, away from the altar. They were murdered in 1917 on the orders of Lenin, their bodies and those of their five children thrown down a disused mine. Only in 2008 were the last two corpses found and identified by DNA samples. Natasha shrugs when she tells us this. "It is sad, yes," she says. "But I think worse for the ordinary Soviet people who lost their children to war or starvation."
Natasha is 28 and pragmatic. She thinks some aspects of Communist Russia were good. Education, for example. Everyone in the country could read and write. But now, Putin has announced literacy is too high, because there is no one willing to sweep the streets (other than immigrants). So he's proposing that parents pay for all their children's lessons other than the basics. This, and the fact that you have to pay for childcare, is putting Natasha off becoming a mother.
Also, she explains, when Communism collapsed, it was decreed that private property was the way forward. Thus, everyone was deemed to be an owner of their flat (previously rented from the state). That's everyone who lived there, including children from the age of 16. Natasha lives with her husband, his mum and grandmother. Four adults, all property owners. But none of them can sell, because of everyone else's claims. There's no room for kids.
Natasha leads us to another part of the St Peter and Paul's Fortress: the political remand prison. Dostoevsky was imprisoned in the original jail, demolished in the late 1800s and replaced with the one we walk around. We poke our heads into dark, individual cells: Trotsky, Gorky, Lenin's brother all spent time here. The prison was carefully designed so that no prisoner ever encountered another; the identities of those incarcerated were even kept from the guards. No communication was allowed, though prisoners tapped messages to each other. The last one left in 1921.
In the evening, we go to the circus. Natasha says: "I would not allow you to go to a private circus. The animals are badly treated there, and I do not like it. There is a state circus in every city in Russia and all the animals are treated well. There is a cat theatre in Moscow. I love cats."
It's half-term, and we take our seats among hundreds of children. And we sit through – no, be honest, we enjoy – two hours of unbelievable entertainment. Goats that trot up and down stairs. Cats that stand on the back of dogs. Monkeys that ride bicycles, bears that do handstands, sea lions that play football, ostriches that, um, run around a bit. It is utterly mesmerising. My animal morals take a thrashing. It is hard to resist clapping a sea lion when it's clapping at you. It is even harder not to love a monkey in a bowtie and waistcoat.
When I was young, I was obsessed by gymnastics. My heroine was Olga Korbut, the first woman to do a standing back somersault on the balance beam. She was enchanting: thoroughly charming, astonishingly gifted, a crowd-pleaser. She was also being abused by her coach. And she's what I think about when I watch the circus in St Petersburg. I ask my mum if she enjoyed it. "Yes," she says. "No vultures, dear. A definite improvement."
We leave, and go into the cold night. Everyone is smiling, and well wrapped-up. The city is stunning and there's so much more to see.
Essentials
Miranda Sawyer and her mother travelled with Baltic Holidays. Their St Petersburg city break, with flights, transfers and four nights' B&B at the Dostoevsky Hotel, starts at £490 (08450 705 710; balticholidays.com)
