Things Russian have for some reason always had a strange attraction for me, and their glamour had not departed even after so many years. It was pleasant, too, to hear the soft, sibilant Russian tongue again. My first return visit was at mid-summer, and seeing Peter's City wreathed in the tender vivid greenery of Northern foliage, and bathed in sunshine, I wondered how I could ever have mentally labelled it with the epithet "dreary." Rising from the clear swift-rushing waters of the many-channelled Neva, its stately pillared classical buildings outlined through the soft golden haze in half-tones of faintest cobalt and rose-madder, this Northern Venice appeared a dream-city, almost unreal in its setting of blue waters and golden domes, lightly veiled in opal mist.
Russians are not as a rule long-lived, and the great majority of my old friends had passed away. I could not help being affected by the manner in which the survivors amongst them welcomed me back. "Cher ami," said the bearer of a great Russian name to me, "thirty-three years ago we adopted you as a Russian. You were a mere boy then, you are now getting an old man, but as long as any of your friends of old days are alive, our houses are always open to you, and you will always find a place for you at our tables, without an invitation. We Russians do not change, and we never forget our old friends. We know that you like us and our country, and my husband and I offer you all we have." No one could fail to be touched by such steadfast friendship, so characteristic of these warm-hearted people.
The great charm of Russians with three or four hundred years of tradition behind them is their entire lack of pretence and their hatred of shams. They are absolutely natural. They often gave me as their reason for disliking foreigners the artificiality of non-Russians, though they expressly exempted our own nationality from this charge. That is, I think, the reason why most Englishmen get on so well with educated Russians.
Seeing Petrograd with the wearied eyes of experienced middle age, I quite realised that the imposing palaces that front the line of the quays and seem almost to float on the Neva, are every one of them built on piles, driven deep into the marshy subsoil. Every single house in the city rests on the same artificial base. Montferrand the Frenchman's great cathedral of St. Isaac has had its north front shored up by scaffolding for thirty years. Otherwise it would have collapsed, as the unstable subsoil is unable to bear so great a burden. On the Highest Authority we know that only a house built on the rock can endure. This city of Petrograd was built on a quagmire, and was typical, in that respect, of the vast Empire of which it was the capital: an Empire erected by Peter on shifting sand. The whole fabric of this Empire struck my maturer senses as being one gigantic piece of "camouflage."
For instance, a building close to St. Isaac's bears on its stately front the inscription "Governing Senate" (I may add that the terse, crisp Russian for this is "Pravitelsvouyuschui Senat"). To an ordinary individual the term would seem to indicate what it says; he would be surprised to learn that, so far from "governing," the Senate had neither legislative nor administrative powers of its own. It was merely a consultative body without any delegate initiative; only empowered to recommend steps for carrying into effect the orders it received.
And so with many other things. There were imposing façades, with awe-inspiring inscriptions, but I had a curious feeling that everything stopped at the façade, and there was nothing behind it.
Students of history will remember how, on the occasion of Catherine the Great's visit to the Crimea, her favourite, Potemkin, had "camouflage" villages erected along the line of her progress, so that wherever she went she found merry peasants (specially selected from the Imperial theatres) singing and dancing amidst flower-wreathed cottages. These villages were then taken down, and re-erected some fifty miles further along the Empress's way, with the same inhabitants. It was really a triumph of "camouflage," and did great credit to Potemkin's inventive faculty. Catherine returned North with most agreeable recollections of the teeming population of the Crimea; of its delightfully picturesque villages, and of the ideal conditions of life prevailing there.
The whole Russian Empire appeared to my middle-aged eyes to be like Potemkin's toy villages.
My second later visit to Petrograd was in 1912, in midwinter, when I came to the unmistakable conclusion that the epithet "dreary" was not misplaced. The vast open spaces and broad streets with their scanty traffic were unutterably depressing during the short hours of uncertain daylight, whilst the whirling snowflakes fell incessantly, and the low, leaden sky pressed like a heavy pall over this lifeless city of perpetual twilight.
The particular business on which I had gone to Petrograd took me daily to the various Ministries, and their gloomy interiors became very familiar to me.