White Nights of St. Petersburg, Russia

THE motorized launch cruised toward the Hermitage, the former Winter Palace of the czars, passing underneath a low arched bridge that I feared would graze my scalp as we glided beneath it. Just ahead, a boisterous wedding party on the deck of a wooden cruiser filled the air with vodka-fueled shouts of “gorko!,” meaning bitterness, a traditional Russian encouragement to the bride and groom to kiss and thus provide the guests with the opposite of what was being proclaimed.

Then the canal spilled into the vast Neva River, and all of St. Petersburg spread before us. Pink, peach and violet clouds streaked the horizon. Across the river, on Zayachy Island — one of a multitude of small islands in the Neva that fall within St. Petersburg’s metropolitan limits — stood SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral, burial place of Peter the Great, the three Alexanders and, most recently, the executed Czar Nicholas, Czarina Alexandra and their children. The golden-spired cathedral glinted in the fading sun. I breathed in the maritime air — a pungent mix of gasoline and ripe river smells — and checked my watch. It was 11 p.m., and the sky was still as bright as that of an early summer evening in New York.

In St. Petersburg, the grand city of the czars, they call them the “White Nights”: those 80 or so evenings, running from May to the end of July, when the city emerges from long months of cold and darkness and celebrates the brief return of nearly round-the-clock daylight. Residents of Russia’s cultural capital — situated a few latitudinal lines south of the Arctic Circle, at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland — have been welcoming the summer with relief and celebration ever since Peter the Great founded the city in the early 18th century. (The czar named the new capital after his patron saint, St. Peter the apostle.)

For most of the 20th century, however, these celebrations were muted by wars, revolution and the grim imperatives of the Soviet state. The Russian Revolution broke out here in October 1917, when the city was called Petrograd. Only a few decades later, between 1941 and 1944, as many as 800,000 people died of hunger, disease and exposure during the nearly 900-day Nazi siege of the city that the Bolsheviks had renamed Leningrad. Under Joseph Stalin and his Communist successors, White Nights were disciplined affairs, limited to a smattering of classical music concerts. Even after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg’s summer remained subdued: the economy had deteriorated so sharply after decades of misrule that many people became dependent on food rationing. For a time, St. Petersburg, which regained its original name in 1991, was even forced to accept humanitarian food aid from foreign donors — hardly the economic environment in which to stage all-night, citywide revelries.

During the last decade, however, Russia’s booming economy has rejuvenated St. Petersburg, and the White Nights have become more and more lively. Russian entrepreneurs have poured money into new bars, restaurants and hotels. Growing numbers of visitors from abroad, along with well-heeled Russian tourists — their wallets fat with petrodollars — and members of the increasingly mobile Russian middle class head here for summer vacations. The city fathers have seized the initiative, pumping city and state financing into organized events.

Long summer days exist elsewhere in Russia of course, from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to Yakutsk, but the White Nights have become an intrinsic part of St. Petersburg’s identity — a celebration of the city’s unique beauty and its role as the country’s artistic epicenter.