IN PETERSBURG TO-DAY

St Petersburg

The fillies are off and strutting their stuff in the Nevsky Prospekt stakes. Stud stallions sip their Baltica beers, draw deep on their life reducing cigs,( average male life expectancy 59-women 77!!) speculating what might be, whilst older geldings wonder what once was possible. Neither petticoats nor Spencers for these gals, the bodies and lingerie are made for display.

Tanned muscles rippling beneath their tight black gear, squads of shaven headed “security men” keep watch on capitalisms automotive bounty and drivers stand ready, as on the grand prix grid, to race their all black limos into the morass of deadlocked traffic.

Gogol describes the mingling of the 19th century destitute, cripples, depraved and desperate with the cream of merchant and military grandees and their dames, intent on spending at Faberge and the chocolateria, what they had had mortgaged their land and surfs for. Now those who have “acquired” mineral and energy enterprises on favourable terms, with dachas and the odd football team in Londongrad, are the successors of that former aristocracy and confront legless beggars in(spurious?) army uniforms, Babushkas who sing, very much off key, in the metro subway to supplement pensions which don’t keep up with inflation .

A line of old veterans sell specialist socialist literature and carry banners extolling the virtues of Stalin and calling for a return to guaranteed state pensions. A well dressed woman displays three handsome poodles with a suggestion that a cash donation might be in order. Going one better another dapper character shows a white mouse sitting contentedly between two docile kittens.

Divers of new European and Japanese cars challenge the nerve of pedestrians on crossings, to the very limit of their bumpers, whilst traffic cops top up their meager salaries by inspecting the papers of drivers of decrepit Ladas and trucks( never the black, tinted windowed Porsches, Lexus, Mercedes and Land Rover 4x4s)