Down memory lane
This afternoon, on the last day of our nearly month-long stay in Petersburg, my wife and I took lunch at the Hotel Astoria that is situated at one end of the prestigious and beautiful St Isaac’s square.
Google tells us that the hotel ‘was built in 1912 by the British-based Palace Hotel Company to accommodate tourists for the 1913 Romanov tercentenary. While not an Astor property, it was named to evoke the same sense of opulence and high-society international travel as the famed Astor hotels.’
The cathedral-like St Isaac’s to the right of the hotel at a distance of a couple of hundred meters is Petersburg’s answer to St Peter’s in Rome and is a very important part of the skyline of this city; the mayor’s office is off to the left. Directly across the green space in the middle is the building that was before WWI the German embassy and, in the 1990s, when I worked here, housed the offices of Deutsche Bank. Both uses of that building are now a distant memory.
The Astoria is part of our family history. When we were courting in 1971, the Astoria was one of only two European quality hotels. The other was the Grand Hotel d’Europe, which remains the most prestigious and possibly the most expensive hotel in the town today.
In 1971, the Astoria Hotel was home to the U.S. consulate in Petersburg. It was where graduate students on the Fulbright exchange like myself could come by to pick up mail from home. And they had a Hungarian espresso machine at the bar where you could savor real coffee that was unavailable elsewhere in the city. Needless to say, all of its guests were foreigners. Russians were not particularly welcome and had to pass the face control of the doormen.
In the second half of the 1990s, the city put the hotel up for sale within the privatization program and there was a fairly vicious competition among local crooks and foreign, shall we say ‘investors.’ On the crook side, the notorious Alexander Sabodash made a bid and applied political pressure to take over the hotel. I knew about it, followed it, because Sabodash made his fortune in trading liquor and defrauding his foreign suppliers, of which the biggest dupes were the Canadian company Seagram’s, controlled by the Bronfman family. I was the company’s country manager under a consultancy contract and I was supposed to face down this cocaine snorting Sabodash to collect his never-to-be-paid debts to the company.
For the Western investors, there was the Italian hotelier Sir Rocco Forte.
In the end, Forte won the contest and the Astoria remains in his collection of premium properties. I will say for him that the Astoria today is in excellent condition and is a pleasure to visit, even if their kitchen is not so good as one might hope.
Lest I leave the impression that Russians were corrupt and crooked in the 1990s whereas foreigners were goody-goodies, I urge those of you with an interest in such matters to go to my Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume 2, in which I discuss at length the Swiss bankers who were trying to sell worthless Yeltsin government debt to American pension funds or the slush fund designated for bribing Russian officials held at the London headquarters of another international liquor company I worked for which never left London but was distributed among top corporate officers. Those were the days!
As I have hinted in earlier notes, there is now a profusion of excellent hotels in this city, many of them moderately priced compared to what you pay in Western Europe for this level of quality. At all levels, the clientele is almost exclusively Russian because foreigners are rare birds in Russia these days.
Looking around at who is who in the Astoria today, I was convinced that my choice of the 4-star middle class Oktyabrskaya hotel serves my purposes better. The Russian guests in the Astoria dining room and in the tea lounge at the other end of the ground floor looked very much involved with themselves and, shall we say, snooty. By contrast, everyone at breakfast in the Oktyabrskaya looks keen to engage in conversation to share their impressions of this first ever visit to Petersburg. For someone like myself who has an ‘ear to the ground,’ nothing could be better. We plan to be back in September and our choice of residence is now made.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026