Just when the city could cash in on the tri-centenary the Russian President is closing the it to

Just when the city could cash in on the tri-centenary, the Russian President is closing the it to all but invited guests for the duration of the celebrations. By comparison, St Petersburg’s stature is evident: just one of its Baroque canal-side fa?es can trump most other cities, let alone the magnificence of the Winter Palace or the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.Vladimir Putin, St Petersburg’s most notable son, cannot be accused of racing to exploit the wonders of his home town. Yet a lack of official enthusiasm for tourism meant that Russia missed out on the sharp rise in tourism through the Nineties.Travellers can now take cheap flights to Niederrhein, Haugesund and other places that are not natural city-break territory. It was no longer compulsory to endure re-education, and vast tracts of formerly “closed” territory were opened up to visitors. Never mind the astonishingly rich architectural heritage, you could conduct illicit transactions with shadowy figures, and board the Aeroflot flight home jangling with Soviet army memorabilia and cheap “champagne”.But tourism to Russia slumped after the break-up of the Soviet Union. After weeks of viewing tractor factories in Omsk or Tomsk, British tourists were pathetically grateful to arrive in Leningrad.The city was as close as the USSR got to the high life.

The tours usually ended at the city now known as St Petersburg. Groups sympathetic to the Soviet regime were offered ludicrously cheap trips, such as £500 for one month exploring the entire USSR, board, lodging and dodgy internal flights included. They have inherited their city at last, from tsars, dictators and mafia bosses, and they are its best monument.St Petersburg – a city firmly on the tourist mapRussia’s second city was always a linchpin of the (over) organised holidays that kept Soviet tourism in something akin to business through the 1970s and 1980s. But the ordinary people of St Petersburg, for so long a blur of extras and scene-shifters offstage, are tougher than any of them. In frosty rooms, they wore mittens to turn the pages.The streets are granite, the palaces are marble, the statue of Peter the Great is a bronze horseman.

When someone had lamp-oil, the women read softly to each other from the work of Pushkin or Gogol, or from the forbidden poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. Circles of friends shared the last rotten potatoes, brought up the children whose parents had been arrested in the night, buried the corpses frozen under the snow in the courtyard. And then, in 1941, came Hitler’s armies and the great siege, lasting over two and half years, in which as many as a million people may have died of cold and hunger.Women, above all, kept the candle of humanity alight in the city’s terrible 20th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in “Petrograd”, the middle classes fled abroad and the city froze and starved.Renamed, Leningrad became the target for the worst of Stalin’s terror purges. In 1905, Cossacks slaughtered the workers asking for bread and freedom. In 1825, the tyrant Nicholas I turned his cannon on the “Decembrist” mutineers on Senate Square, and filled the Peter-Paul fortress with democrats who had to watch each others’ executions. (Even in Petersburg’s jokes: the Empress Anne made a bridal palace of ice for the court idiot, complete with an ice bed for the couple’s first night).

It is because they know how to stick together in hard times.And there have been so many Cruelty was always at home here. This is not because they live in a “window on Europe”, which in reality has been bricked up since 1917, and is not properly open even now (Moscow has become the post-Communist gateway to the West) And it is not because of their city’s unearthly beauty. They love it deeply, and its awesome scale makes them proud, not daunted.Petersburgers think that they are special. For them, Petersburg is a cosy and intimate place where little things – a basement shop round the corner, a back court with a flowering bush, a circle of women friends living along the same canal – give the city its real character.