St Petersburg is an astonishing achievement, the product of visionary genius, but it is an artifice, a grand folly, a faintly absurd statement about Russia and about the genius in question, Peter the Great. Although it was conceived partly in the image of great cities like Venice and Amsterdam, its canals thread their way through a stage set built for visual effect rather than playing the role of necessary thoroughfares for the purpose of communication and trade.

The local girls are pretty but they reminded me of dolls or catwalk models as unreal as the city in which they strolled, reinforcing my feeling that there is a hollowness at its heart.

I was invited to a party to meet some of the city’s glitterati, an elegant galère of St Petersburg musicians, artists, academics and writers, most of them dressed in designer fashions, which like their owners, seemed to have dropped in lately from New York, Paris or London.

They were clever and funny but determinedly supercilious, as if that were the style for this year.

An interior designer told me that since the collapse of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” the city had fallen under the malign sway of a governor who imposed “the dictatorship of bad taste . . . We need a dictator with good taste”, he said — and I think he meant it. So what was his taste? “I try to combine misery and luxury together.”

I steeled my sinews to ask a serious question: what were the prospects for democracy in post-Soviet Russia? I tried first with a louche-looking composer of what he told me was “industrial music”. “Well, I don’t want the past to return, but sometimes I am so angry with the people about me that I think we need some big stick, some dictator to beat us,” he replied, with no apparent irony. “Well, perhaps not a dictator but a strong leader, one leader only.”

A painter, who was languidly dangling a small child from his shoulders, picked up the theme: “Nothing has really changed in Russia, you know,” he counselled. “Ten years, 15 years ago, some people — good people — entered politics, but once they were there they changed completely. That’s the impact of power. And it has frozen Russia from the 15th century until now. But don’t speak to me of democracy. I don’t believe the word has any meaning in the modern world.”

I moved on to interrupt a conversation between two exquisitely tailored young women, who told me that I should visit St Petersburg in winter when it was especially beautiful.

However, they added, they themselves would not be there as they would have departed for softer climes, probably India, “because, you know, St Petersburg is dark, cold, wet and depressing for so much of the time that you need one big break”.

Emboldened by the not quite chilled and rather too sweet champagne, I enquired about modern Russia. They said they were very happy with how things were. “And democracy?” I asked, venturing again into that terrain where no Russian I had yet met wanted to dawdle.

Of course I knew that, for the many downtrodden, impoverished post-Soviet citizens in this brave new capitalist world, democracy signified on the one hand American imperialism and on the other anarchy, crime, insecurity, unemployment and inflation. But perhaps these fragrant, well-heeled and apparently so very westernised citizens of the new Russia would have some sympathy with the concept.

“Why democracy?” they retorted in concert. “Is Germany free? Or America?”

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