3 NOVEMBER 2007, Page 22

In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness

HUGO RIFKIND St Petersburg The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women's clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don't see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don't see much of either, either. In the Hermitage, I saw a girl in thigh-high boots and leopard-print hotpants gazing up at a Canaletto. Had she simultaneously been flying blinis on an leaky gas stove, I think I would have taken a photograph. There. That's it. That's Russia.

I am here as part of the Liberatum Jewel of Russia Festival, one of a delegation shipped out for a few days by the organiser, the endearingly bonkers Pablo Ganguli. Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureishi, Jon Snow, Alex James (of this parish) and ten or 15 others. For the last few days we have all followed each other around, wide-eyed. It is not yet too cold in St Petersburg, but you can tell how much snow is on the way by the drainpipes, each the size of a builder's rubbish shoot. The air is already thick, grey and bleached, not just on the skyline around the golden domes, but right up close, between hand and eye.

My fellow travellers, I sense, were not thrilled to find a gossip columnist in their midst. There must be a technique to declaring your profession in situations like these. I could have done it that first civil morning, when we visited the last home of Dostoevsky, and saw the room in which he smoked himself sick, and haemorrhaged to death from the throat. But no, not me. I had to do it just afterwards, as part of a small giggling group that went across the road into a sex shop. Not so good. Inspires a touch of prickliness.

Everything in that house, said our Russian guide, was made 'in Dostoevsky time'. I have found myself wondering, since then, if many Russian watches are still set to Dostoevsky time. How, exactly, does it relates to GMT? Apparently the great man had to write The Gambler in 26 days, thanks to an ill-advised publishing contract. A facility for speed, then, but only once he had slowly blundered himself into a corner.

We, as a British cultural mission, have certainly been operating in Dostoevsky time. We have travelled everywhere at a terrifying velocity, but we have always ended up, just like poor old Dostoevsky himself, messily late. Our Russian minibus — that has worried me. You never appreciate the little things about a properly regulated British minibus until you find yourself aboard something that doesn't bother with any of them. Windows that open. A door at the back. Enough seats.

The Russian Museum of Ethnography on Inzhenernaya Street has a huge swinging door of solid bronze. Every half-day, I should think, at least one visiting schoolchild, possibly in leopard-print hotpants, must be crushed paper-thin. The post-Blair Briton, I now realise, worries inordinately about that child. Despite his totalitarian past, the Russian couldn't give a damn. We instinctively expect laws.

There was a panel discussion in here, amid waxworks that looked like Eskimo Morris dancers and tents made of skin. Jon Snow, Orlando Figes and a pair of Russians debated nation versus state — what it meant to be Russian, or British, in a multi-ethnic state. There were similarities but also, as it quickly became apparent, differences. The Russians have a palpable desire to remain Russian. For them, it really seems to mean something. It isn't just about unregulated danger, or women who dress each day as though fearful that they might miss out on a sudden opportunity to land a role in soft porn. It is a thing. An essence. It inspires passion.

Travel sometimes helps you think of home. Who is passionate, today, about being British? In England, at least, I have a horrible feeling that nobody is. Even the British Nationalist Party are really English nationalists who are too dim to realise it. There are Unionists from Scotland and Unionists, obviously, from Northern Ireland, but I cannot remember ever having met one from England. Even an old condescending imperialist would be a welcome sight. Where have they all gone?

The Russians are just as baffled as the British, but at least they have a coherent desire not to be. What do all of us, we Britons, want to keep? Where is our British Museum of Ethnography, full of waxworks in kilts and our own Morris dancers, shepherds from Wales, Omagh Orangemen and mullahs from the Midlands? The girls of St Petersburg, if I am honest, often reminded me of the girls of Glasgow or Newcastle. If even a British cultural delegation to St Petersburg finds itself moving in Dostoevsky time, that only leaves us with heath and safety. I am not sure it is enough.

It is a great regret of mine that, while I was at university, nobody ever sidled up to me and asked me if I wanted to be a spy. Throughout my time at Cambridge, in fact, I only ever heard of one person to whom this sort of thing happened. He announced it at lunch the following day. I don't think he meant to. He had been sworn to secrecy, but he had to write his putative handler a note, to say `yay' or 'nay'.

'I don't want to screw this up,' he fretted, wondering aloud whether he should write 'Dear X' (at which point he said the chap's first name) or 'Dear Dr X' (at which point he said his second). Greatest minds in the country and all that.

I never actually wanted to be a spy. I just wanted the approach, for anecdotal value. Espionage seemed a slightly pointless life. Even in 1998 you could tell they'd all soon just be ripping it off from the internet. Suits and spectacles; informational accountancy. I didn't think it was for me.

Still, I have always had a boyish fascination. Thus I have been most distressed this last week to read of the revelations of one Jacques Morel, a music writer, who has been giving evidence at the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Apparently, he actually encountered an MI6 agent in that Parisian tunnel. This chap had a bushy, handlebar moustache — 'like a beer-drinker in Ireland' — and was wearing pointy cowboy boots. Mr Morel is certain of this last point, because he stood on his foot. Less like an accountant, then. More like a lion-tamer. Damn.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times