A convoy of glittering new Mercedes snaked down Nevsky Prospekt, weaving among the dilapidated Ladas and battered buses. The residents of St Petersburg either didn't notice or didn't care to look as the cavalcade glided over the Griboedova Canal and on towards the Admiralty. The shameless flaunting of newfound wealth has replaced queuing and revolution as the most popular pastimes for those Russians who have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet not even the billionaire oligarchs come close to rivalling the sheer wealth and extravagance of the tsars, and nowhere symbolises their excesses better than the palaces that lie beyond the suburbs of St Petersburg.
I joined the part of Russian society still saving up for the Mercedes and caught the bus to Peterhof, 20 miles west on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great was a tsar used to getting his own way, and equally used to executing those who tried to stop him. Not content with building the city that bears his name in the middle of a swamp on the edge of the Baltic Sea, he decided he needed a palace near his naval base at Kronshtadt. Understandably no one disagreed with him. Peter wanted something to rival Versailles, and no expense or lives were to be spared in making it a reality. By 1723 an army of designers and craftsmen had created a palace so magnificent that even the demanding Peter called it his "Seaside Paradise".
I descended from the bus in front of a pair of vast, ornate gates. Ahead of me stretched a formal garden of truly epic proportions, filled with golden fountains, marble statues and avenues of lime trees. It was filled also with an equally enormous crowd of Russian and foreign tourists streaming towards the Grand Palace, whose 300-metre long yellow façade and golden domes gleamed in the sun. As far as displays of wealth are concerned this made a modern-day oligarch's collection of helicopters and football clubs look like pocket-change. Little did I realise that everyone was rushing towards the more impressive façade on the other side.
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