Strolling past the Mikhailovsky Palace is a fake tsarina. Dressed in a corseted gown and tricorn hat, she is a glimpse of a lost world – a vestige of the centuries during which St Petersburg was the city of the tsars, the royal rulers of a vast Russian Empire. The scale of the tsars’ imperial might is reflected in another architectural landmark, the jade-green Winter Palace, but their legacy is apparent everywhere in St Petersburg.
Nearby stands the lavish Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Clustered beneath its technicolour domes today are stalls of souvenirs of the new Russia – T-shirts showing president Vladimir Putin topless, riding a bear or firing a gun, and nesting dolls depicting well-known rulers: Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev.
Gold glints inside the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood.