STRUTTING beneath the gilded vaults and glittering chandeliers of St Petersburg’s Konstantinovsky Palace, President Vladimir Putin was all smiles and bear hugs yesterday as he greeted the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies.

The first Kremlin leader to host a G8 summit, he was determined to show that although oil-rich Russia is flexing its muscles again, it has embraced western democratic values.

But a markedly different attitude to President George W Bush, Tony Blair and the other leaders prevails away from the summit in the city’s crumbling side streets. Trust in the West and above all in America has given way to deep-seated suspicion and angry resentment among ordinary Russians.

Asked on the eve of this weekend’s summit how they viewed America, 58% of Russians polled described it as a unfriendly country. In a further sign of the gulf between Russian and western opinion, 50% now believe that Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator blamed for more than 20m deaths, was a wise leader.

The western leaders, who are staying in luxurious mansions in the palace grounds with their own private swimming pools and saunas, are expected to put to Putin their concerns about the erosion of press freedom and human rights in Russia.

The Kremlin’s response will be icy, in line with a decidedly anti-western message being pumped out by the state-controlled media.

“The days when Russians marvelled at the West are long gone,” said Alexei Venediktov, one of Russia’s most liberal journalists. “Now, as in Soviet times, most people here think they are surrounded by enemies who want Russia to be weak. Democracy, western-style, has become a dirty word.”

The expansion of Nato into eastern Europe has led to Russian fears of military encirclement and the geo-political rivalry between the Kremlin and Washington has seeped into virtually every topic of discussion at the summit — particularly the seething tensions over the Middle East and the North Korean missile crisis. Even the much anticipated agreement to admit Russia to the World Trade Organisation ended in failure yesterday.

Western suspicions abound about Russia’s determination to use its natural gas exports to reassert power over Europe. Russia, meanwhile, accuses the West of meddling in the affairs of Ukraine and Georgia, where it claims western funding sparked popular revolutions.

Another source of tension will emerge today when Putin is expected to ask Blair to help secure the extradition of the tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who has asylum in Britain, to face fraud charges in Russia.

Anti-western views about these and other matters can be heard everywhere. Even liberal radio phone-in programmes are filled with the sound of ordinary Russians voicing anxieties about American intentions.

Nowhere is the shift in opinion more palpable than in St Petersburg, Putin’s birthplace. In the early 1990s under Anatoli Sobchak, its liberal mayor and Putin’s political mentor, the city was considered Russia’s most progressive. Today only four of the 50 members of the local assembly are liberals.

Some of Russia’s most shocking killings by neo-Nazi gangs have taken place within a few miles of the manicured lawns where the G8 leaders and their spouses are being entertained.

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