I have recently returned from a fortnight spent floating around the
Baltic. Because of global warming which seems to be making the Mediterranean very hot — and cheap air travel (which seems to be making it very crowded) I have long suspected that the correct thing to do in high summer is to go north. So this year our whole family departed from Dover on a cruise to St Petersburg and back. This was not a universally popular decision. There was opposition from my daughter who wanted to know why we couldn’t go to Barbados like normal families. But off we went.
One of the greatest pleasures of a holiday afloat is also the most obvious: it is wonderful just looking at the sea passing by. For almost all of the two weeks we were away we sailed along in a shining world of water and sky. Our itinerary didn’t take us quite far north enough to see the midnight sun. But sunset became — instead of the usual fleeting affair — a prolonged experience stretching on for hours. Then there was a brief interval of twilight before dawn came up, and that again lasted for ages and ages. It’s very nice looking at nothing — just light, air and sea. Nothing is in fact one of the great subjects of art — what else did Turner paint?
Many places are better approached by sea, because the sea is the reason that they were built there in the first instance. Of nowhere is that truer than Stockholm: dull when you drive in from the airport, almost supernaturally scenic when you sail in through the thousands of islands of the archipelago. On each there is at least one Swedish holiday house loyally flying a flag. Helsinki is another superbly sited town. Once there, I led the family straight to the railway station, a magnificent example of Nordic Art Nouveau — an interest of mine. Stone giants sprout from its façade, holding street lamps, but resembling the villain’s muscle-bound henchmen in James Bond films. This time my daughter felt I’d gone too far. ‘It’s a station, Dad,’ she observed in the exaggeratedly calm voice people use for addressing the deranged, ‘people take trains from it.’ I was embarrassed into leaving before we’d had a chance to admire the ticket hall properly.
Another charm of cruising is the infantilising luxury of life. Food and drink are on almost constant offer; laundry arrives back at your cabin so perfectly pressed that the clothes look better than they did when you bought them. Your every need is catered for. We became so beatifically calm and relaxed that we found it quite difficult to look after ourselves when deposited on the dock at Dover with our luggage. Coping with ordinary life requires a degree of mild anxiety to be maintained at all times; too much pampering renders one unfit to survive.
Afurther element we were sailing through was history, and fortunately we had learned historians on hand. My function on board was to talk about various kinds of Baltic art, but my colleagues among the ‘Guest Speakers’ tackled the tougher subjects of warfare, conquest, monarchy and revolution. If you want to contemplate just how bad the mid-20th century was, the Baltic States are a good place to do so. These little countries — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia squeezed between Russia and Prussia, had a bad time of it for centuries, but never more so than between 1939 and 1991. After the second world war, Professor Christopher Andrew informed us, resistance in Estonia against Soviet occupation was more intense than in France under German rule. But slowly the resistance fighters — calling themselves the Forest Brothers — were worn down by deportations to Siberia, often not of the men themselves but their loved ones. The last committed suicide in 1978 to avoid capture by the KGB. Then quite suddenly everything changed — without the rest of the world paying much attention (my son bought a T-shirt bearing the words, ‘Lithuania ... hmm where’s that?’, which doubtless expresses a common attitude). Now, a decade and a half after the Singing Revolution — so called from the choral crowds of protesters in Tallinn in 1988 — it would be hard to guess that the Soviet empire ever existed. Its malignancy as a political organisation was reflected in the desperate dreariness of the buildings it erected; but these are rapidly vanishing. In Tallinn a Soviet-era auditorium resembling a squat concrete bomb shelter was pointed out. It is still used, but in wet weather the audi ence have to bring umbrellas. Mind you, the Evil Empire received some lessons in dingy modernity from Britain. In the Fifties and Sixties parties of Soviet planners would visit such new towns as Harlow and Basildon to find out what could be achieved. All the statues of Lenin in Lithuania have been removed to a theme park (which I would greatly like to see).
Quite apart from the destruction and murder they caused, the sheer misuse of human energy by Nazi and Soviet folly is appalling to contemplate. To take a small example, at one point apparently every letter written in Estonia had to be rerouted via Russia and censored. It’s hard to think of a more complete waste of time. Stupidity, it seems to me, is an underrated force in human affairs, and so is heroism.
One nation’s hero, however, may be a villain elsewhere. Lord Nelson’s name is mud in Denmark because the Danes have still not forgiven his bombardment of Copenhagen in 1801 and the removal of the Danish fleet. These points were not much mentioned in our recent celebration of the great man. The other people the Danes have not forgiven are the Swedes, for various military offences committed in the past. The Swedes return this feeling, with interest. The two of them seem in fact just like the British and the French: so similar, viewed objectively, that it is impossible for either party wholeheartedly to like the other.
Singing did not only play a part in the fall of the Iron Curtain, it seems, but also in its political life. Sir David Goodall, a distinguished diplomat who was one of my fellow speakers, recalled that he and his colleagues from East and West at the Force Reduction talks in Vienna in the Seventies were encouraged to foster warmer bilateral relations by performing songs from their native lands. He specialised in ‘On Ilkley Moor Bah’t ’at’.
It’s an odd thought that St Petersburg, founded in 1703, is a newer town than New York. Actually, the two cities have a good deal in common — grandeur, glamour and overwhelmingly imposing architecture. St Petersburg also has that dangerous edge — a seductive menace in the air — that New York had before Mayor Giuliani cleaned it up. My daughter really liked it, unlike neat, safe, quiet Scandinavia.
Martin Gayford is European art critic for Bloomberg.
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