Playing maritime capital: The Baltic Sea in the touristic representations of St. Petersburg

Maritime St. Petersburg: An historical outline

Since the eighteenth century, the maritime element of St. Petersburg has been among the first characteristics to attract the attention of observers intending to describe the new capital of the emerging Empire. For instance, Friedrich Christian Weber, in his account of the city in the last years of Peter the Great, felt it necessary to note that the sea available to St. Petersburg is not the Baltic itself, but rather an introduction to the sea, or, perhaps, a specific inland sea (Vor-oder Binnen-See). ¹⁵ On the other hand, the sea occupied a certain place in early self-representation of St. Petersburg. For instance, in 1810, Gavrila Derzhavin, the leading Russian poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, conceptualized the moment when the Grand Princess Ekaterina Pavlovna, the daughter of Paul I and the sister of Alexander I, entered the capital downstream on the Neva River from the Lake Ladoga, noting how the Neva led the Royal visitor to the beautiful city, the Gateway to the Sea. ¹⁶

No wonder the sea occupied a prominent place in the perceptions and representations of St. Petersburg as a touristic destination in the era of mass tourism. The nineteenth-century tradition of active utilization of water transportation by the representatives of the social elite inevitably led to the development of commercial passenger ships as a basis for leisure trips to the Northern Capital of the Russian Empire. ¹⁷ Nineteenth-century tourism to St. Petersburg, however, is beyond the scope of this article. Our research focuses on the relatively short period between the 1980 and 2003, which we suppose to be crucially important for the formation of the touristic representation of St. Petersburg as it stands today. Indeed, this time witnessed two significant mega-events that formed the local identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, namely the Olympics of 1980 and the 300^th anniversary of St. Petersburg in 2003. ¹⁸

By 1980, Leningrad was already by far the biggest city in the Baltic Sea area. Therefore, it was quite understandable that when Moscow was selected to host the Summer Olympics in 1980, Leningrad, along with Kiev, Minsk and Tallinn, hosted several football games. Therefore, the importance of the 1980 Olympics for the general development of the touristic industry of the USSR cannot be underestimated. ¹⁹ For Leningrad, it meant the construction of two big modern hotels – Moskva and Pribaltiiskaia – not to mention the new and reconstructed sporting complexes and transportation infrastructure. Importantly, some objects were constructed and completed after the Olympics, providing more long-lasting effect. ²⁰

The next two decades, however, witnessed significant turbulence brought on by Perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the quite painful economic and social transformation of the 1990s. Artur Batchaev and Boris Zhikharevich noted recently that the period between 1992 and 1996 was characterized by the heaviest difficulties, while in 1997 and early 1998 the situation became more stable, and after the catastrophic financial crisis of 1998 sustainable economic growth took place down to 2003. Moreover, they argued, ‘preparation for celebrating the 300^th anniversary of the founding of Saint-Petersburg helped improve the economic situation in the city, because the event attracted significant investment from the federal budget for improving infrastructure’. ²¹

In essence, both the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russia had completely supported the general opinion that ‘mega events exerted significant impacts on exports, foreign investments, tourists and travel balance’. ²² However, local importance placed on the historical past of the city, embodied in its rich heritage, provided a special background as the government endeavoured to modernize cities. Disregarding the fact that urban development necessarily meant rapid territorial expansion, with vast areas of modern buildings surrounding the historical centre, Imperial St. Petersburg maintained its reputation as an ‘untouched’ historical space in the eyes of the local population of Leningrad. Andrei Ikonnikov, the leading Soviet expert in the history and theory of architecture, noted in 1985 that Leningrad in the 1980s was a place where the societal demand for the ‘preservation’ of the historical centre ‘as it is now’, combined with the restriction of changes, created the necessary transformation. The eventual task of Soviet architects, and therefore the socialist authorities behind them, was ‘not to prevent any changes, but to keep the unity of a system, its temporal layers and the level of value’. ²³ In other words, we deal here with political issues. The local population considered governmental attempts to transform the historical centre as part of specific policy towards Leningrad or St. Petersburg as a whole. This meant that the construction of modern infrastructure and the growth of tourism connected to mega events became a challenge for the ideology of heritage preservation and representation. Hence, our basic hypothesis is that delineating the patterns of touristic representations of the city between these two events is instrumental in explaining the evolution of a public vision of the historical past, including its maritime dimension.

We paid particular attention to the theory of cultural play, proposed by Johan Huizinga, in order to consider the heterogeneous data collected as a unity. The very approach to the analysis of tourism as a play activity is not a complete novelty, of course. Anthropologists and historians of tourism have published several important works based on this perspective. ²⁴ Indeed, Huizinga’s description of a ‘cultural game’ as a culturally shaped voluntary activity occurring during leisure or ‘free time’ – which differs from ‘ordinary’ life and can be considered as the ‘direct opposite of seriousness’, and is clearly limited in space and time ²⁵ – perfectly fits the touristic experience, including that related to the consumption of heritage.

Considering the touristic view of St. Petersburg as a maritime centre through the perspective of a cultural play, we have then to analyze several aspects of the story that are critically important to the idea of a ‘game’, as Huizinga understood it. This analytical tool requires the definition of a playground, which shapes the cultural game spatially. On the other hand, we have to discuss the rules of the game – when and how it started and what was the possible price.

The Playground: Locality, materiality and heritagization of the maritime capital

The geographic position of St. Petersburg in the Neva delta to a great extent provokes the presumption that the city is a maritime centre. However, it is notable that in the past it was much more oriented toward the Neva River, which forms the core of its urban space. Therefore, the material part of the geographic structure of the city seems to be more river-oriented than linked to the marine space. ²⁶ However, the heritage perspective reveals the significant role of the immaterial elements of the urban structure in the formation of the city’s ‘individuality’. Indeed, place names ‘in addition to the identification and placement. . . are just as important because they contain traces of the memory of the relationships between Man and Earth’. ²⁷ In other words, the geographical names of St. Petersburg are essential for an understanding of the urban structure as heritage, perhaps more so than the network of streets. Analysis reveals that the place names of St. Petersburg quite clearly reflect the specific maritime character of the city, which can be traced through the Imperial, Soviet and Post-Soviet periods.

For instance, the early eighteenth-century maritime settlement – a residential area for sailors and shipbuilders situated to the West of Nevsky Prospect along the Neva – received the names of Big and Small Maritime (Bol’shaia and Malaia Morskaia) streets. Another example is Galley (Galernaia) Street, which refers to the shipyard and storage area that belonged to the rowing part of the Baltic Navy in the eighteenth century. Therefore, the imperial maritime past in the geographic structure of St. Petersburg is predominantly represented as a part of its rich military history. At the same time, the Soviet continuation of this tradition refers also to its non-military maritime elements. For instance, the name Korablestroitelei (Shipbuilders) Street on Vasilievsky Island comes from the practice of using the professions (preferably proletarian) to name the streets in order to glorify labour (like Ulitsa Stroitelei – the ‘Construction Workers’ Street’ in Zelenogorsk). The name of the Maritime Façade for the impressive late Soviet project of development of the Western edge of Vasilievsky island marks a turn toward the building of a new system of spatial links between the city and the Sea that was eventually continued in the twenty-first century with the completion of the 300^th Anniversary Park – the only park of the city oriented towards the sea.

The maritime-related toponymic tradition continued with the development of transport infrastructure. The first metro line in Leningrad, opened in 1955, included the Baltic (Baltiiskaia) Station, with decorations commemorating the history of the Baltic Navy of Russia, with an emphasis on the role of Baltic sailors in the 1917 October Revolution. ²⁸ In 1979, the station Primorskaia (The Coastal), situated on the Western edge of Vasilievsky Island, near the Gulf of Finland, was decorated with bas-reliefs of famous ships launched from city shipyards. ²⁹ Eventually, in 2011, the station Admiralteiskaia situated in the district of the maritime streets, offered a third reference to the maritime past in the guise of famous Russian admirals. ³⁰

Maritime names for geographic objects form an important base for local identity and by extension the representation of the area to visitors. Ulla Hakala, Paula Sjöblom and Satu-Paivi Kantola have demonstrated recently that place names matter for both local residents and visitors. Indeed, they argue:

from the heritage and branding perspectives, the place name identifies, unites, differentiates and communicates, and from the geographical perspective, it marks the place on the map. The name is an essential element of commitment to a place, and incorporates feelings of togetherness and belonging’ and also works as ‘place branding tools’. ³¹

Through this perspective we consider the maritime place names to be essential elements in the construction of the city’s identity as the maritime capital.

This approach can also be applied to the separate objects and infrastructural complexes associated with the maritime past of the city. In general, we can define three groups of objects, the first being city panoramas. The panoramic views of the Neva banks are basic elements in a general impression of the city. ³² They form a skeleton for the imaginary St. Petersburg that the observer wants to achieve, with various elements observed and ‘read’ in a certain way. For instance, the Peter and Paul Fortress had a clear positive meaning reaching back to Peter the Great’s time, but at the same time the same structure negatively embodied the paradigm of the ‘City of Revolution’. As for the historical maritimity of Leningrad, it was represented through important landmarks. The Admiralty building, with its 76-metre high golden spire crowned by a frigate, dominates the view of the left bank of the Neva and represents the power of the Russian Navy. The Spit of Vasil’evskii Island, with its architectural ensemble including the exchange, storages, Port customs office and rostral columns, is a manifestation of the commercial importance of St. Petersburg as a gateway to Europe. The cruiser Aurora is on permanent display upstream from the imperial centre on the right bank of the river. The vessel helps visitors visualize the role of Baltic seamen in the October Revolution of 1917 and therefore provides a link between the imperial and Soviet maritime past. Those objects play a specific role in the formation of the touristic images of the city. Visuality is their major function, while the actual use of the object is insignificant. Indeed, it hardly matters to the observer that the major naval headquarters had been removed from the Admiralty building long ago, and by 1980 it was occupied by the local naval base staff and the naval academy. The famous ship-crowned spire undoubtedly belongs to Admiralty, not to the Naval academy. The same is true for other elements of the city’s panoramas – they are all perceived as forming permanent structures with a major function, despite the fact that they no longer serve their original functions.

Therefore, iconic sites shape a maritime locality, which forms a skeleton for the spatial distribution of the material objects related to the maritime past of the city. Disregarding the fact that the urban space is completely oriented towards the river, the historic sites of the coastal zone definitely have a lot to do with the sea. Indeed, the very geographic position of the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the fortified nucleus of the city situated on the small island near the northern coast of the Neva, was strategically placed because of the necessity to control the fairway between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga. The same fairway provided the base for the development of St. Petersburg port, initially upstream and later downstream from the fortress, with the main administrative centre on the Spit of Vasilievsky Island. Additionally, the same fairway provided the necessary depth of water for the development of the shipbuilding industry that started at the Admiralty shipyard – a fortified wharf on the southern coast downstream from the fortress. ³³ Later on, the shipbuilding industry occupied the area downstream from the Admiralty, with the major centres at the New Admiralty (now Admiralteiskii shipyard) on the southern coast and the Baltic shipyard on Vasil’evskii Island, the northern coast of the Big Neva branch. ³⁴

The transformation of this vast space filled with infrastructural objects that shape the experience of touristic representation and perception of the maritime capital of Russia, however, was not automatic. This process can be described as a core element of heritagization, ‘a social process whose final outcome is the presentation and interpretation of heritage’. ³⁵ Through infrastructure, we can trace several mechanisms used to conceptualize the central area of St. Petersburg as reflective of its maritime heritage. First of all, some of the objects that are now iconic for the representation of St. Petersburg’s maritime past, like the Admiralty building or the Rostral columns on the Spit of Vasil’evsky Island, were intentionally built to represent maritime power. ³⁶

Secondly, the historical development of the cityscape included a variety of governmental measures directed towards the construction of a specific space of historical memory related to the maritime past. The area incorporates the Central Navy museum, which was founded in 1709 as an important part of the representation of the growing power of the young Empire. ³⁷ Additionally, the area includes several maritime monuments, like the statue of Admiral I. F. Krusenstern, the head of Russia’s first circumnavigation, erected as an important landmark on the Vasil’evsky Island embankment, thus providing an imaginary, yet strong and visible, link between the space of the imperial capital and the powerful narrative of impressive Russian activities in the North Pacific. ³⁸ Eventually, two famous vessels presented on the Neva as memorial objects formed a kind of upstream and downstream borders for the area of the Neva closely related to the maritime past. The cruiser Aurora upstream from the fortress embodies the role of the Baltic Navy in the revolutionary past of the city, ³⁹ while the Krassin icebreaker downstream, just on the border with the busy port area, identifies the role of the city in Russia’s dominance over the Arctic Ocean. ⁴⁰

Thirdly, we see the process of what we may label as a State fixation on heritage status. This legal procedure assigns the added value of historical importance to the objects initially designed as parts of purely technical infrastructure. This process, even though nothing changed physically, led to a significant transformation of the entire cultural landscape of St. Petersburg as a maritime centre. For instance, in October 2011, the Committee for the Protection of the Historical heritage within the St. Petersburg government assigned the status of heritage objects to six buildings on the Novo-Admiralteiskii Island and recommended to consider the completion of this procedure to the seventh. Some of them were initially constructed in the nineteenth century as temporary structures, and the builders did not intend to make them permament. On the contrary, the idea was to demolish them and to build something new when needed. ⁴¹ Of course, these buildings existed for more than a century, but only in the last decade were they considered as a part of the city’s maritime heritage.

In other words, the locality and materiality of the maritime past of St. Petersburg is rather dynamic and sometimes unpredictable. Moreover, a more complex approach is needed to analyze the multifaceted interaction between the metropolitan urban centre and the Gulf of Finland. We can conceptualize this section of the Baltic as an integral part of greater St. Petersburg. We use this name to label the geographic imaginary of St. Petersburg to form an inseparable unity with adjacent landscapes and seascapes through constantly developing technologies. As a result, we have to include the maritime heritage of the coastal area of the Gulf into the matrix of the touristic cultural consumption of St. Petersburg’s past. ⁴² Next, we have to study the rules that formed the essence of the touristic experience.

The rules: Guidebooks from Leningrad to St. Petersburg

Philip L. Pearce noted that being a tourist implies the performance of a specific, yet loosely defined, social role. In general, he argued: ‘it is not easy to fulfil the tourist role. It is ambiguous, it may be organized by others, lampooned by some and require physical adjustment as the individual moves across the thresholds of experience.’ ⁴³ In other words, being a tourist means to behave like a tourist or, perhaps, traveller. We are not going to consider here the scientific discussion of the motivations and types of touristic behaviour. ⁴⁴ What is important for us, however, is the observation, provided by Nicola J. Watson in her analysis of nineteenth-century literary tourism. She notes that as readers became tourists interested in literary destinations, they visited real geographical places that were heavily romanticized like ‘Dickens’ London’ or ‘Hardy’s Wessex’. ⁴⁵ In other words, the travellers observed the real places in order to find an imaginary landscape. We argue that this idea is a good instrument to uncover the history of touristic experience of visiting St. Petersburg as a maritime capital. In other words, we contend that visitors observed the real landscape looking for the touristic imaginary of the maritime St. Petersburg, Through this perspective the texts written to set standards of touristic behaviour formulate the rules of cultural play. Indeed, they describe the ‘right’ methods to utilize opportunities provided by the material heritage (conceptualized as a playground) for the construction of identities and imaginaries. Therefore, we studied guidebooks to outline the rules of the cultural game of heritage tourism. Indeed, we completely agree that:

among all travel information sources, travel guidebooks bear the comparative advantages of tangibility, accessibility, and standardization in including all relevant information a traveler needs to know. . . Apart from being merely functional tools that contain factual and necessary information . . . travelers also consider travel guidebooks to be important due to their ability to provide a general framework to direct their travel . . . which contribute to the image formation of a destination. ⁴⁶

Therefore, analysis of the guidebooks facilitates understanding of the practice of heritage observation that eventually formed the basis for the idea of St. Petersburg as a maritime capital.

Using guidebooks as a source of information about tourism and travel is not novel. ⁴⁷ Indeed, guidebooks are multifunctional and provide information useful for learning, leisure and practical needs. As a result, these sources are used in our research of both tourism and heritage as a means to ‘personalize’ relatively neutral factual information. ⁴⁸ We argue that our perspective, based on the perception of a guidebook as a normative text, requires the most complex analytical approach, recently described as ‘the interdisciplinary socio-historical cultural theoretical approach’ that ‘facilitates examining the books’ production process as well as their role as polysemic cultural texts’. ⁴⁹ In other words, we have to study the guidebooks as a complex phenomenon of social and cultural life, considering the text as an integral part of a dynamic industry that included purely economic and technological data such as number of copies and the details of the production process. This will allow us to analyze the rules that the visitor historically had to obey in order to be considered a ‘good’ consumer of St. Petersburg’s heritage, culminating in the perfect experience of the Baltic metropolis – the maritime capital of Russia.

Importantly, we used the guidebooks prepared for foreign visitors, which belong to a very specific branch of the Soviet publishing industry. Anne E. Gorsuch recently demonstrated that Soviet guidebooks prepared for Soviet citizens visiting foreign countries ‘described the typically touristic. . . but emphasized the political’, providing the base for ‘the performative function of Soviet tourism to Western Europe, what we might call a theater of diplomacy’. ⁵⁰ We argue that a similar mechanism worked for the guidebooks compiled by the Soviet authors for foreigners. Elina Novikova, in her brief study of philological problems related to the translation of the Russian guidebooks into German, noted that in order to make the translation fulfil all the major functions of the guidebook (namely the informational, the advertising and the entertaining), the interpreter has to look at the text through two lenses, as the author and as a perspective consumer. This means, she argued, that the researcher working with these sources must pay particular attention to the socio-cultural contexts of both the original text and the translation in order to make the analysis fruitful. ⁵¹

In the 1970s, as the USSR prepared to greet foreign guests to the 1980 Olympics, local history (kraevedenie) opened a new page in its development. Indeed, this was the time when local historians created the ‘Club of Leningrad Experts’ to discuss a variety of problems related to all aspects of local history. Lenizdat Publishing house opened a department to issue literature related to the history of Leningrad, as did many popular journals and newspapers in the city. ⁵² Therefore, the massive production of foreign-language guidebooks was based on the vast literature prepared and published in Russian, which has an excellent reputation and is still widely used for the touristic representation of urban heritage.

We started our research with numerous editions of a three-day guidebook by Pavel Kann, widely used by Leningrad visitors in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ⁵³ Kann was born in 1911, and by the late 1970s was a well-known Leningrad local historian and indisputably occupied the position of the most authoritative expert in the touristic representation of Leningrad and its surroundings, including remote areas like the Estonian historical town of Narva. ⁵⁴ No wonder that his text, quite well known to Soviet tourists, became the archetype for the representation of the city to international guests. For instance, the identical text was the basis of four editions of the guidebook:

Another source of information for foreign visitors came from the expertise of Moscow local historian Lidia Dubinskaia, who tried to develop a complex vision of the Soviet trip in her guidebook, reprinted often and considered the alternative rendition of the Soviet representation of Leningrad. In our project we used the German edition printed in 1981:

Dubinskaja L., Moskau Leningrad Kiew. Moskau: Verlag Progress, 1982. 216 S. 18,000 copies, sent 29.10.80, signed 09.10.1981, price 1 r. 60 kop., printed in GDR.

Elena Doroshinskaia and Vadim Kruchina-Bogdanov laid the foundation for the third line of reprinted guidebooks for foreigners visiting Soviet Leningrad within the growing tourist industry linked to the Olympics. We used the German edition of 1980:

J. Doroschinskaja; W. Krutschina-Bogdanow, Leningrad und Umgebung. Moskau: Verlag Progreß, 1980. 283.

The new situation of the 1980s and 1990s opened the way for new guidebooks, and in our project we used two of them:

Alla Beliakova, Leningrad. Reiseführer. Moskau: Novosti, 1990. 293 S. Translated from Russian.

The author of this guidebook has for decades been a well-known Leningrad journalist, occupying significant positions in journals and newspapers with liberal and progressive reputations in the Soviet Union. She was known, among other things, as an active participant of the study of the Siege of Leningrad, one of the most tragic and significant pages in the city’s history.

David Schraven, Piter ‘94, Verlag ‘Biant’, Sankt Petersburg, 1994, 5,000 copies, published in Germany, German co-authorship, signed 30.06.1994

Schraven’s book is an example of the representation of St. Petersburg from the 1990s, produced by a German journalist, and it provides a perfect contrast to the Soviet tradition of touristic representation of St. Petersburg.

In order to get a clear understanding of the social and economic context of these guidebooks, we tried to extract essential information from the chronology and output data before analyzing the texts. First of all, we see that the Soviet government did not invite foreign authors to prepare texts for foreign tourists. Indeed, the guidebooks were translated from Russian. Secondly, we see a clear trend towards a decrease in the circulation of guidebooks intended for foreigners around the city. In the 1970s and 1980s, we are dealing with the publication of 10,000–50,000 copies, but by 1994 there were only about 5,000 copies in Germany. Secondly, we see that the production cycle of a book, from putting it into a set to signing it in print, ranged from six months to one and a half years. Thus, even a seemingly canonical, repeatedly approved and reproducible text underwent numerous revisions as it was being prepared. In other words, the rules of the touristic game were produced under strict control over the quality of information. Therefore, in the next stage of our research we reconstruct the ideal performance of tourism in relation to the maritime element of St. Petersburg’s heritage and identity.

The game: Maritime capital step by step

Every visit starts with the arrival, and the arrival to Leningrad, as P. Kann describes it, looks impressively maritime. According to the French language guidebook, Kann represented Leningrad as an important hub of international routes, with the port occupying a special place in city logistics. In particular, tour guides highlighted that after the completion of the Volga-Baltic route, Leningrad became the port city of five seas: the Baltic, White, Caspian, Azov and Black. ⁵⁵ The books further pointed out that every year the port of Leningrad received 4,000 to 5,000 ships from 50 countries around the world. Regular communication was maintained with the ports of New York (via Le Havre, London and Bremerhaven), Stockholm, Lappeeranta and others.

Pages that describe arrival in the USSR by sea and a description of the corresponding routes were printed on blue paper, which distinguished them from the book as a whole. ⁵⁶ To some extent, therefore, this highlights the special attention paid to tourists coming from the Sea. Instructions for foreign tourists interested in trips to the USSR paid particular attention to the maritime connections of Leningrad as well. For instance, the American Tourist Manual for the USSR from 1965 highlights the central position of Leningrad in the Baltic cruise network operated by both Soviet and foreign firms. ⁵⁷ Moreover, as Pavel Kann notes, tourists staying on cruise liners have a cabin throughout the ship’s berth in Leningrad, which means the ship became their hotel, not just the means of transportation. ⁵⁸

The rapid transformation of the Soviet Union, however, broke the state-controlled uniformity of city descriptions. A guide from the early 1990s represented this new reality. The author of the guidebook text imagined the visitor and the reader as a busy person rather than an idle onlooker. This foreigner comes by plane, and the guidebook includes, among other things, the schedule of flights between St. Petersburg and a variety of major cities: Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Helsinki, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Luxembourg, Munich, New York, Oslo, Paris, Vienna and Zurich. In case the visitor prefers to arrive by sea, the authors also describe the Sea-Passenger Terminal (Ploschad ‘Morskoi Slavy) and the River-Passenger Terminal (Prospekt Obukhovskoy Oborony). ⁵⁹

The story of arrival, we argue, deals with the representation of the city as a maritime centre. Indeed, we see the link between the development of cruise tourism and the representation of maritime heritage of the area. Ross Dowling and Clare Weeden demonstrate that ‘the transportation port communication and activities. . . create links between the port-city population and its port, and refer back to the maritime heritage of the city’. ⁶⁰ However, the same can be said for the visitors. The city that is reached onboard a seagoing vessel is undoubtedly maritime in their eyes. No wonder that all versions of P. Kann’s guidebook contain a photograph of a commercial port with shipyards and port cranes. ⁶¹ It is worth noting here that the images in Kann’s guidebooks are in general relatively poor, predominantly representing well-known architectural masterpieces like the building of 12 collegiums, and the Decembrists on Senate Square. All those landmarks, however, are river-oriented, depicting the link between the architectural ensembles of the historical centre and the water space. ⁶² In other words, the visual narrative of a guidebook provides a link between the general impression the tourist gets from the city upon arrival, and the more detailed perception of the key points and objects that form the core of the visitor’s experience in the cultural play of St. Petersburg heritage consumption.

The guidebooks provide a clear and detailed instruction for the point of entry, and the representation of the maritime past occupies an essential place in the visitors’ experience. For instance, all editions of Kann’s guidebook provide some information about the Admiralty, the world-famous landmark of St. Petersburg’s imperial centre. The author pays major attention to the artistic significance of this building without even mentioning the institutions that operated inside it before 1925, when it was the headquarters of the Russian navy. An English guidebook (1980, 2nd edition) mentions the use of the Admiralty building after the Revolution by the Hydrographic Service, the Central Maritime Library, and eventually by the Higher School of the naval engineers named after Dzerzhinsky. The French guidebook (1978, 1982) provides much less detail, paying attention instead to the training of Soviet naval engineers.

Eventually Pavel Kann included a section called ‘Almanac’ (various interesting facts). It was this part of the book that he used to include some information related to the maritime past. For instance, he describes the legend of the Dutch ship that entered the mouth of the Neva with salt and wine and was generously greeted by Peter. From 1850 on, it was custom to reward 1,000 rubles to the crew of the first foreign ship to enter the port of St. Petersburg after the winter. ⁶³

To a great extent the narrative created by Pavel Kann, being translated into many languages and slightly adapted for different audiences, served the foundation for the perception of Soviet Leningrad by foreign visitors for decades. The destruction of the Soviet Union, however, broke the state-controlled uniformity of city descriptions. A guide of the early 1990s contains no information about the industrial part of the city and concentrates instead on the infrastructure of the past, including department stores, exhibition and concert halls, etc. Analyzing the text, one can see a clear transformation of intention. If the guidebooks by Pavel Kann refer to the great city having an impressive imperial past and even more glorious Soviet present, the new guidebooks invites the visitor to have a good time in a comfortable and inexpensive city full of bourgeois luxury.

The maritime past of the city occupies almost no place in the post-1990 texts. Following the spirit of Perestroika, the author mentions the spirit of democracy, revolutions and St. Petersburgers’ love of freedom. Nevertheless, on closer examination, one can find very few traces of the maritime component of urban history and culture. However, these traces are somewhat new for the Leningrad tradition of guidebook writing. For instance, in the section ‘Coach excursions’ the guide contains advertising of a certain Hamburg bureau ‘“Perestroika Sailing”: wir bieten an trainee-program auf den Seglern STS Kruzenstern, STS Sedov und STS Mir. International Maritime service GMBH’. ⁶⁴ Additionally, the guidebook represents the city as a modern centre of the maritime economy of the Russian Federation. The section ‘The Businessman’s Diary’ in the list of ‘Intermediary Organizations’ contains Leningrad’s Chief Maritime Agency. ⁶⁵

The guidebook of 1994 provides an even more striking picture. It contains a huge amount of information about various events and interesting places. In general, this is a guide to informal culture, as there are a lot of texts about rock bands, clubs, legalized drugs, weak and strong alcohol, and more. There is no mention of maritime culture or maritimity, leading one to believe that this part of the city’s identity was no longer considered important to convey to foreign visitors. ⁶⁶

Therefore, we can see a clear trend from the perpetuation of government-controlled information that was to be consumed by tourists in order to make them familiar with the Soviet worldview, to a purely commercial conveyance of information. Indeed, in the 1990s the guidebook became just a commodity written and printed for money. Its purpose was to present a narrative that the visitor could find funny or catchy, but not necessarily useful from a cultural or educational points of view.

The result of this transformation was completely evident by the early 2000s. On 27 May 2003, the 300^th anniversary of St. Petersburg, local journalists of the Northern capital of Russia interviewed Vladimir Putin, who was then in the second half of his first presidential term. In this conversation, he discussed the official vision of the event, highlighting the unique position of the city as a gateway between Russia and Europe, and the positive experience of interaction between the Russian authorities, private companies and European partners in the transformation of urban infrastructure, including the renovation of numerous heritage sites. ⁶⁷ A day earlier, Robert Parsons, then the Moscow correspondent for the BBC, offered a far more critical description of anniversary preparations. The British journalist mentioned the skepticism of the local population, based on the controversial and tragic history of the city. He also paid some attention to the unclear situation concerning massive amounts of money allocated for the jubilee despite post-Soviet poverty and corruption. ⁶⁸ What is interesting for our topic, however, is the fact that neither of these very different texts refers to the maritime part of St. Petersburg’s history and identity. In other words, they describe and conceptualize the Venice of the North as a economic, political and cultural centre, celebrate its rich history and valuable heritage, mention the experience of canals and water control, but do not even say a word about the maritimity of a city that was founded in 1703 as the new Baltic Metropolis.

Conclusion

These observations on the historical development of the representation of St. Petersburg’s maritime past to foreign tourists yield several findings. First of all, we see the process of maritime heritage construction as a combination of two processes. On the one hand, there is the heritagization of the maritime infrastructure. Indeed, the objects that initially had absolutely utilitarian functions get historical and cultural importance over time, and eventually heritage protection status. On the other hand, we see the process of maritimization of heritage. Within this trend the heritage sites being reconsidered and reconceptualized, at some stage get a new sense related to the maritime past. From a long-term perspective, maritime St. Petersburg appears to be very dynamic and changeable on the physical and conceptual level.

Analysis of touristic descriptions and instructional texts reveals another trend in the representation of the maritime past. We can conclude that maritime heritage has a specific role in the general image of St. Petersburg presented to visitors, to some extent being a core element in the desirable image of the city. Indeed, we see a clear link between the place and importance of maritimity in the touristic imaginary constructed for visitors through the texts of guidebooks, and the general ‘imperialness’ of this touristic imaginary. The maritime heritage and the maritime past were relatively well represented through all stages of the touristic experience of Leningrad – the Baltic metropolis of the Soviet superpower. This part of the urban history, however, became much less important for the representations of Leningrad as the centre of democratic Perestroika and, as the possible place for profitable investments and bourgeois leisure. In a word, the representation of St. Petersburg’s maritimity has historically been based on an understanding of ‘profit’ as it existed in the heads of elite groups, be they party functionaries or commercial entrepreneurs. Through this perspective, the ongoing revival of maritime representations after 2010 tells us something about Putin’s Russia.