| A long time ago, back in 1990 and 1991, there was talk of St Petersburg re-emerging as Russia's de facto capital its pre-eminence rooted this time not in Tsarist edict, but in commerce and banking. Multinational companies such as Unilever and Gillette chose the imperial capital over Moscow as Russian headquarters. So did one of the first foreign banking operations set up in Russia, a joint venture between Dresdner Bank and Crédit Lyonnais. The case for St Petersburg was based on its proximity to Europe, port facilities, and a local culture supposedly more cosmopolitan and liberal than Moscow's. Some analysts cited the absence of Moscow's leaden central bureaucracy as another big advantage. They were wrong. Moscow has overwhelmingly dominated the formative stage of Russian capitalism, relegating St Petersburg for the first time in its tragi- glorious history to the position of a provincial runner-up. The pace of life today is noticeably slower in the northern metropolis than the capital and job opportunities offering a ticket to the new middle class are scarcer. "People in Moscow have got used to working with large sums of money fast and accurately," laments Semyon Golubev of SoyuzContract Consult, a division of the well known food distributor which is developing St Petersburg real estate. |