White nights on the Neva river - Gold, malachite and amber

White nights on the Neva river begins here.

We Indians love gold. We hoard it, smuggle it, wear it, gift it, flaunt it, like no other people in the world. Or so I thought, until I went to St Petersburg in Russia, last month.

Wherever I turned in this city of the eighteenth century, I saw gilded domes, gold painted decorations, and golden statues and ornaments. And the cathedrals and palaces would have malachite columns, jugs, engravings and what have you.

There were so many shops selling amber as well!

The needle spire of the cathedral of Peter & Paul. Ready in 1733

Nicholas Cathedral, built between 1753-62

How did they not get stolen, looted or defaced during the revolution, I wondered. And where did all this gold come from?

Turns out that gold in Russia and Peter the Great, St Petersburg's founding Tsar, have a strong link. He encouraged the exploration and mining of gold at the turn of the eighteenth century in Russia. According to the Gold Miners Headquarters, he issued a legal document called The Mining Privilegei", in 1719, and this encouraged private prospecting and the eventual discovery of gold in the Ural mountains.

Of the monuments and cathedrals, we saw, the spire of the cathedral in the Peter & Paul fortress complex, is one of the earliest decorative uses of gold, (I think) in St Petersburg.

The dome of St Isaac's. 100kgs of gold leaf were required to gild it. Opened in 1858

And then came the discovery of gold at Ekaterinburg, and malachite as well. I guess this was the time that Catherine II (aka Catherine the Great) reigned supreme.

This interesting tidbit I picked up from the jeweller Glimmerdream, as they traced the history of malachite:

In 1835, miners working the "Nadezhnaya" pit of the Mednorudyansky malachite deposit in the Urals exposed a malachite boulder of the highest quality that would eventually be found to weigh over 260 tons.
It took nine years to free the gigantic pocket from the body of rock without breaking it, and almost twelve years to bring it to the surface. Slabs from this find were used in the interior of the Anichkov Palace, as well as the Winter Palace where it was used to face eight columns and eight pilasters in the Malachite Room -- created by the architect brilliant "master of the interior" Alexander Bryullov in 1837 as a drawing room for Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna (Fredericka Louise Charlotte Wilhelmine, Princess of Prussia) (1798-1860), the wife of Emperor Nicholas I (1796-1855).
This same boulder also supplied enough malachite to face eight of the ten huge Corinthian columns that support the three-tier two-hundred foot gilded iconostasis (the icon wall that separates the altar from the rest of the church) of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. (The other two columns are faced with lapis.)

Malachite Room at the Winter palace - 1839, showing the gilded doors as well
Malachite Room, again. This was the room where the Provisional Government based themselves, in the interim between the fall of the tsar and the takeover by the Bolsheviks The gilded iconostasis within the P&P cathedral

We did not visit the Catherine Palace in the town of Pushkin, but I read that around 100kgs of gold was used to gild the facade of that palace, too! That's crazily over-the-top, I thought. No wonder they had a revolution! The Catherine Palace is also famous for the legendary Amber Room. On my return, I have learnt that Russia -Kalingrad in particular - has almost all the world's mineable amber! Called Konigsberg at the time of Peter the Great, it was from here the Prussian emperor Frederick I gifted the panels to Peter. They were stolen by Hitler's Germans during WWII, and taken back to Konigsberg castle, and were supposedly destroyed in the fire that broke out in the castle in 1945. (The panels in the Catherine Palace now are replicas.)

Worthy of a Dan Brown thriller, is the mystery of the amber room. In fact, there is a book about it. The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure. After reading the Observer's review of the book, I am sufficiently intrigued to want to go out and look for the book, now!

More gold, decorating the top of a wooden cabinet at the Winter Palace

Gilded statues at Peterhof's Grand Cascade

We saw gilded statues all over Peterhof in the gardens. These were originally lead, reportedly, and were gilded later.

But why was there no mass looting and plundering, when the Bolsheviks more or less took over St Peterburg, in 1917?

Were they as disciplined as John Reed makes out in his eyewitness account, "Ten days that shook the world"? Here's an excerpt from "The Bolsheviks Storm the Winter Palace, 1917" EyeWitness to History, that quotes John Reed.

A number of huge packing cases stood about, and upon these the Red Guards -and soldiers fell furiously, battering them open with the butts of their rifles, and pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain plates, glassware.

One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when somebody cried, ‘Comrades! Don't touch anything! Don't take anything! This is the property of the People!’ Immediately twenty voices were crying, ‘Stop! Put everything back! Don't take anything! Property of the People!’ Many hands dragged the spoilers down. Damask and tapestry were snatched from the arms of those who had them; two men took away the bronze clock. Roughly and hastily the things were crammed back in their cases, and self-appointed sentinels stood guard. It was all utterly spontaneous. Through corridors and up stair-cases the cry could be heard growing fainter and fainter in the distance, ‘Revolutionary discipline! Property of the People.’

We crossed back over to the left entrance, in the West wing. There order was also being established. ‘Clear the Palace!’ bawled a Red Guard, sticking his head through an inner door. ‘Come, comrades, let's show that we're not thieves and bandits. Everybody out of the Palace except, the Commissars, until we get sentries posted.’

Two Red Guards, a soldier and an officer, stood with revolvers in their hands. Another soldier sat at a table behind them, with pen and paper. Shouts of ‘All out! All out!’ were heard far and near within, and the Army began to pour through the door, jostling, expostulating, arguing. As each man appeared he was seized by the self-appointed committee, who went through his pockets and looked under his coat. Everything that was plainly not his property was taken away, the man at the table noted it on his paper, and it was carried into a little room.

Or was it, as noted in Wikipedia

"The Palace was pillaged and devastated from top to bottom by the Bolshevik[s]...Priceless pictures were ripped from their frames by bayonets. Packed boxes of rare plate and china...were broken open and the contents smashed or carried off. The library....was forced open and ransacked.....the Tsaritsa's salon, like all other rooms, was thrown into chaos. The colossal crystal lustre, with its artfully concealed music, was smashed to atoms. Desks, pictures, ornaments—everything was destroyed."

The enormous size of the gilded domes and statues possibly saved them from looters? Ironically, the personal collections and the decorative idiosyncracies of the tsars and tsaritsas of the Romanov empire, now serve the people of Russia, bringing in foreign tourists by the busload, and earning huge amounts for the country, as we all collectively gawk at a lifestyle that was.