As a ruling family, Russia’s Romanovs made the Windsors seem like church mice. They were the kind of royals our tabloids could only dream of. There was torture and murder; mistresses and lovers, bigamy and sexual scandals; and extravagance that virtually bankrupted the country. The Romanovs careened through the history of St Petersburg — splendid, overbearing, deranged, excessive and fatally flawed.
Last year marked the centenary of the last tsar and his family’s murder by the Bolsheviks. This year, two impressive exhibitions exploring the Romanovs are running in London: one is at the Queen’s Gallery (until April 28; £12; rct.uk), the other at the Science Museum (until March 24; free; sciencemuseum.org.uk). So it seemed the right moment to track down this unruly tribe. As spectral guides to St Petersburg, they can hardly be bettered. Their ghosts seem to haunt every street corner.
The dynasty and the city began with Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century. A quarter of a million serfs, soldiers and prisoners of war toiled night and day on Peter’s city, his “window to the west”, a new capital to break free of “Asiatic” Moscow. Thousands of workers died of illness, starvation and cold, or were devoured by the wolves that roamed the half-built streets. St Petersburg, they say, was founded on bones.
But the result is spectacular. Within decades, it was one of the great cities of Europe. Two centuries later, when the government reverted to Moscow after the revolution, to escape the spell of the Romanovs, St Petersburg was allowed to linger among its old splendours, comparatively untainted by Soviet architectural swagger.
Russian peasants used to believe that Peter had built the city in the heavens and lowered it to earth. On winter evenings, when the squares, statues, cathedrals and opera houses are mantled in snow, it is an understandable fantasy. Set along elegant avenues and canals are no less than 176 palaces, all of staggering grandeur. Imagine the great stately homes of England built within walking distance of one another.
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We find Peter over at the Peterhof, just outside the city. Designed as competition to Versailles, it is a sprawling ensemble in elaborate gardens. Peter was a man who loved a party and a practical joke. At boisterous dinners in the glittering halls, guests were obliged to laugh heartily as they discovered dead mice in their soup and dwarves hidden in mounds of pâté (£12; peterhofmuseum.ru).
It was Peter’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, who commissioned the Winter Palace, the imperial residence towards which the whole city seems to be orientated. It has 1,500 rooms — almost twice as many as Buckingham Palace. Becoming lost among gilded throne rooms and chandeliered bedrooms is part of any visitor experience. When Elizabeth ran out of money — construction costs soared 300% over budget — she built government taverns across Russia, knowing the peasants would drink her back to solvency. One hundred and fifty years later, as revolution broke, the peasants swept up the majestic Jordan Staircase to reclaim their beer money (from £3.50; hermitagemuseum.org).
Elizabeth chose Catherine, a German princess, as the wife for her nephew heir, Peter, untroubled by the fact that they loathed one another. Catherine was a formidable character with a list of lovers that even impressed Casanova. Six months into her husband’s reign, she staged a coup to overthrow him; the brother of one of her lovers would later murder the hapless tsar. There’s a statue of her on Ostrovsky Square, in front of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, a rotund figure with influential advisers clustered at her feet.
Catherine’s appetite for art was just as voracious. Her most enduring contribution to St Petersburg is the collection of the Hermitage. The museum is said to contain 3m items; you would, apparently, need nine years to see them all. But don’t let that put you off. The galleries of Old Masters are unrivalled, while the 20th-century rooms offer works by Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky (£8; hermitagemuseum.org).
Not far from the Hermitage is the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, one of St Petersburg’s best-known buildings, with its onion domes and gilded cupolas. It commemorates the assassination of Alexander II, killed by two bombs on a snowy afternoon in March 1881. He was on his way home to the Winter Palace, where he lived with two separate families, each at opposite ends of the enormous building.
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Money poured in from all over Russia to build the church on the site of the tsar’s murder. The inside — 75,000 sq ft in all — is filled with rich mosaics of Christ, the apostles, saints and biblical scenes. After the revolution, the church fell on hard times. During the 28-month siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, when 1.5m soldiers and civilians died in the city, it became a morgue. Reopened in 1997, its interior is one of the city’s most impressive sights (£3; eng.cathedral.ru).
In the early years of the 20th century, when the last tsar was still resisting talk of a constitution, the royal family fell under the spell of a charismatic but debauched monk, Rasputin. He had the sexual morals of a priapic goat — people claimed he smelt like one, too — and conducted numerous affairs with aristocratic wives. Disturbed by the baleful influence he had on the tsar’s family, a group of conspirators, which included the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri, and Prince Felix, reputedly once the richest man in Russia and married to the tsar’s niece, decided to kill him.
You can visit the scene of the crime in the Yusupov Palace, now a museum. It’s a labyrinth of silks and tapestries, frescoes and Old Master paintings. In the Moorish drawing room, Felix, a devoted transvestite, used to lie on the sofa adorned with his mother’s jewellery (tours from £5; yusupov-palace.ru).
Moth-eaten mannequins of Rasputin and Felix are set up in the basement to recreate the botched murder. The conspirators had invited the monk for a midnight dinner, with the enticement of an introduction to Felix’s wife. His wine was laced with poison. When this failed, Felix, not perhaps a natural killer, shot him. When this, too, failed, Rasputin was chased into the courtyard, shot in the back and dumped in the River Neva. Just over a year later, after the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsar and his family were murdered in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, they were wearing amulets with tiny portraits of Rasputin.
Across the Neva is the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Peter the Great tortured his son to death and generations of political prisoners were incarcerated. In 1998, the bones of Nicholas and his family — now deeply mourned in post-Soviet Russia — were interred in the cathedral (£6; spbmuseum.ru) with the rest of the dynasty. It is the last residence of the dysfunctional Romanovs, gathered together, finally, beneath the great dome.
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Stanley Stewart was a guest of Steppes Travel, which has five days in St Petersburg, staying at the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, from £1,890pp, B&B, including flights and transfers, but not visas (steppestravel.com)