Gazprom's tower to soar over city of Peter the Great

A street vendor shows a traditional Russian Matryoshka doll with portraits of presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev and President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg yesterday
Photograph: Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters

RUSSIA: If historic St Petersburg is an enduring monument to the western tastes and vaulting ambition of its creator, Peter the Great, then the latest makeover of Russia's second city is testament to the political and financial power of President Vladimir Putin.

During eight years in the Kremlin, Mr Putin has injected new life into St Petersburg's economy, refurbished landmark buildings and infused the city with an energy that formerly was felt only in Moscow, magnet for the vast majority of investment into Russia.

Now international firms whose factories dot the outskirts of St Petersburg complain that they cannot find enough qualified workers here in dreary "dormitory districts" such as Kupchino, birthplace of Mr Putin's anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

Eager to please Mr Putin, who filled his Kremlin with former colleagues from his days in the security services and St Petersburg city hall, Russian companies invested enthusiastically in his home town, and have shown no sign of changing tack ahead of tomorrow's expected election victory for his protege.

While welcoming the jobs and cash that the "Putin factor" has brought to St Petersburg, however, many denizens of Peter the Great's so-called Window on Europe are downright appalled by big business's most prominent gift to the city.

The Gazprom tower - also known as "Gazilla" and "the Corn on the Cob" - will stretch 320 metres and 67 floors into the sky just outside St Petersburg's Unesco-protected centre, towering over the ornate blue and white Smolny cathedral, one of the city's major landmarks.

Smolny is one of the finest creations of 18th-century Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, but it stands next to a desolate area of waste ground that Gazprom has its eye on.

Scottish architects have designed the glass Gazprom tower to reflect the waters of the River Neva and change colour through the day as the light plays on it from different angles.

They say it will not only regenerate a run-down region, but also chime with the classic St Petersburg skyline, which they claim is defined by "vertical dominants" - the distinctive spires of fortresses and churches that soar above the low-rise profile of the city.

Surveys suggest most St Petersburgers oppose the project, and Unesco has warned the city authorities that they risk losing world heritage status if the tower is built; many leading Russian architects have also spoken out against the plan, and at a rare anti-Kremlin rally in St Petersburg last year the building was the main point of issue for many marchers.

And still the project continues to make serene progress through the planning stages, and the complaints of many of St Petersburg's five million people are apparently ignored.

What Gazprom wants, it gets, and few people or companies in Russia or abroad are strong enough to stop it.

Under Mr Putin - and the chairmanship of Mr Medvedev - the energy giant has become perhaps Russia's most powerful financial and political weapon.

It has the world's largest gas stocks, supplies a quarter of all the EU's gas needs and manages the longest pipeline network in the world. It wants to deliver more Russian gas to western Europe through new Balkan and Baltic pipelines, plans for which are way ahead of those for a Brussels-backed rival pipeline that is intended to wean EU members off Russia's energy.

Gazprom has also regularly been accused of using its energy clout to blackmail Russia's neighbours into doing its political bidding - something that deeply troubles east European states that spent decades in Moscow's grip and still receive nearly all their gas from Gazprom.

Admirers of Mr Putin say his main achievements have been to bring major industrial assets back under direct or indirect Kremlin control, blunt the political clout of the so-called oligarchs, restore political stability and competently manage a booming economy.

Blessed with record world energy prices, he has presided over a slow but steady increase in wealth for most Russians, and he has stopped at nothing - not the jailing of critical tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, not the dismemberment of his Yukos oil firm and its purchase by state companies, not even the emasculation of civil society and curbing of free media - to restore political and financial power to the Kremlin and the resurgent security services.

It is on this uneven and unjust foundation that Mr Medvedev must make his Russia.

It may give him strength, or pause, to cast an eye over his native St Petersburg and consider that this unsurpassed beauty stands on the bones of the thousands that died building her.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times