Your first thoughts of St Petersburg would be of the Tsars; the Hermitage Museum; the sundry palaces in neighbouring towns; of the city’s builder, Peter the Great; and his successor about a century later, Catherine the Great. Both rulers were keen in their different ways to give Slavic Mother Russia a European face, and to embrace European culture. Peter’s project was the city itself, which he built in neo-classical and baroque architectural styles with the help of architects from France and Italy; hence fewer onion-domed churches of the kind that dot Moscow. Catherine’s legacy is the Hermitage, with its mammoth