RUSSIA: Residents of St Petersburg complain the renovations are nothing but a facade to hide their destitution, writes Daniel McLaughlin.
St Petersburg launched into a 10-day whirl of parties, parades and political summits yesterday to mark 300 years since the imagination of Peter the Great, and a peasant army of builders, created Russia's Tsarist capital and future cradle of revolution.
Spurred on by President Vladimir Putin, a proud son of St Petersburg, the Russian government has spent more than a €1 billion restoring the crumbling facades and fading interiors of the city's dozens of palaces to prepare for the arrival of 45 heads of state and hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors.
But as festivities began in the reopened Marble Palace, many residents said the next 10 days would be a nightmare of security cordons, SARS checks, transport chaos and VIP-only events.
Officials have simply urged stoicism, a quality instilled in generations of St Peterburgers over a turbulent three centuries.
It cost the lives of some 30,000 labourers to lay the foundations of Peter the Great's 'Window on Europe', and as it rose from a Baltic bog, Italian architects came to dress it in the latest styles and colours from the West. Peter ordered canals built to drain the mosquito-infested marsh and, by the time he died in 1725, Russia was ruled from his stunning new city beside the Neva river.
It remained home to the Tsars until 1917, when Vladimir Lenin fomented the revolution, and he quickly made Moscow the capital of the Soviet Union.
Renamed Petrograd in 1905 and Leningrad after the revolutionary's death in 1924, the city suffered under Josef Stalin's purges and then under a 900-day Nazi siege that killed a third of the population and left many architectural treasures in flames.
The approach of St Petersburg's 300th anniversary sparked a frenzied spate of restoration work after decades of underfunded, stop-start repairs on war-shattered palaces around the city.
Mr Putin will welcome US President George W Bush and leaders of most major European powers to the renovated Konstantinovsky Palace, a Peter the Great creation that some 7,000 labourers have been working round-the-clock to refurbish ahead of this week.
At Catherine the Great's Yekaterinsky Palace, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will join Mr Putin for the opening of a painstaking recreation of the Amber Room that was dismantled and robbed by Nazi troops.
It was Catherine who helped create the stunning state art collection that now resides at the vast Hermitage Museum, which will be the centrepiece for many of this week's events.
However it is not Catherine's name but that of one of her many lovers - Prince Grigory Potemkin - that has been on the lips of many weary St Petersburgers this week, as they compared their titivated city to the facades that Potemkin erected in Ukraine to convince the visiting Catherine of the happiness and prosperity of the villages she encountered.
"Ethically and aesthetically, St Petersburg is living according to the law of Potemkin villages, when feverishly painted facades accompanied human life that was trampled in filth," said Mr Mikhail German, an art professor at St Petersburg's prestigious State Russian Museum. "Our city's facades reek of luxury - our courtyards of destittion," he told Vremya Novostei newspaper.
Ordinary St Petersburgers say officials' determination to impress foreign dignitaries will make the next 10 days a nightmare rather than a celebration.
Several people have told Russian newspapers of how workers built a two-metre high wall around their dilapidated properties to prevent visiting VIPs seeing them on their way from the airport to Mr Putin's Konstantinovsky Palace. Other people have had their sheds and outhouses destroyed and, for weeks now, police have been moving thousands of homeless from the city centre, without offering then anywhere to sleep.
Some 3,500 police have been drafted in from outside the city to combat a perceived threat from Chechen rebels and homegrown extremist groups. Delegations arriving from countries battling the SARS virus will undergo strict medical checks.
City residents complain that many main roads will be off limits to traffic for days, and the major airport will be closed for four days to all but VIP flights.
The only local aircraft likely to be taking off are the planes Mr Putin has put on standby to scatter cloud-busting chemicals over St Petersburg if rain threatens his parade.
Millions of St Petersburgers wonder when this largesse will trickle down to major housing and transport projects that have been stymied for years by a lack of funding, leaving apartment blocks and infrastructure in disrepair.
"The place reminds me of a made-up old woman in a fancy dress and dirty knickers," said Mr German. "There's nothing more unpleasant. The knickers should be better than the dress."