ANDREI DMITRYEV was expecting the usual grilling when he was summoned to the police station in St Petersburg.

The leader of the local branch of the National Bolshevik Party was an obvious target for police anxious to prevent unsanctioned protests during the G8 summit, which starts here tomorrow. But he was shocked by their methods.

“They ordered me to sign a document promising not to organise protests,” the 26-year-old journalist told The Times.

“When I refused, two big guys came in. One pinned my arms behind my back. Then they bent me over a table, undid my trousers, and said they were going to . . . you know.”

Mr Dmitryev signed the document hurriedly and was put on a train to Moscow, one of scores of local activists who say they have been harassed, detained and beaten ahead of the summit.

Such are the lengths to which Russian authorities are going to ensure that world leaders see the best face of St Petersburg when they arrive here this evening. They have renovated crumbling palaces, resurfaced roads and conducted a huge security operation to showcase the progress that Russia has made under President Putin.

Even the weather is guaranteed to be fine — thanks to cloudbusting planes.

But critics such as Mr Dmitryev accuse the Kremlin of creating a Potemkin city that masks the faultlines in its political and economic strategy.

“They paint a pretty picture,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with reality.”

For Mr Putin, St Petersburg is the logical setting for a summit that will be the crowning achievement of his presidency.

The city was not only the capital of the Tsarist Empire, the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution and a potent symbol of resistance to Nazism. It is also where Mr Putin was born, raised, educated, married and first recruited into the KGB.

“All the key moments in President Putin’s life took place here — it’s very close to his heart,” said Farman Mamedov, whose company, Falcon, runs tours of sites relating to the President’s life.

He points to No 12 Baskov Pereulok, where Mr Putin grew up in a cramped communalka, or shared apartment, with three other families. “Look how far he has come,” he said.

Today Mr Putin will greet the other leaders of the most industrialised countries in the renovated Konstantinovsky Palace, outside St Petersburg.

When Peter the Great founded this city in 1703, he wanted it to be Russia’s “Window on the West”, through which to attract European ideas and values. St Petersburg still looks and feels European — far more so than Moscow’s mix of onion domes, Stalinist monoliths and neon-spangled casinos.

Its elegant canals and boulevards are lined with the palaces and churches designed by the Italian and British architects.

During the “White Nights” of summer, the “Venice of the North” teems with Western tourists and students from across the world.

“St Petersburg is not only a window on Europe, as Peter the Great wanted, but, without exaggeration, a window on the whole world,” Aleksei Kudrin, the Russian Finance Minister, said after a recent G8 finance ministers’ meeting in the city.

There is, however, a dark side to the city that critics say embodies the xenophobia, introspection and obsession with power of Mr Putin’s Russia. It has apparently become the skinhead capital of the world, with deadly racist attacks on African and Asian students and on Caucasian and Central Asian immigrants. Human rights groups accuse the Government of tolerating the skinheads to create an “enemy within” before parliamentary elections in 2007 and a presidential poll in 2008.

St Petersburg also has one of Russia’s highest rates of HIV infection and heroin addiction.

An estimated 15 per cent of St Petersburg’s population of 4.5 million still live in communalkas because of a shortage of new housing. Yet the Government is prepared to spend millions of dollars on seeding the clouds to prevent rain during the summit.

Millions have also been spent on repainting buildings on the route that the G8 leaders will take from the airport into the city — another throwback to the authoritarian past. Two centuries ago a Russian minister, Grigory Potemkin, erected artificial villages to impress Catherine the Great on a tour of Crimea.

In another move worthy of Potemkin, the Government has coralled anti-globalisation protesters into a camp in the Kirov stadium 12 miles from the summit site. It is the only venue where they are allowed to demonstrate. Police have spared no effort or expense to thwart protests outside the stadium.

Vladimir Soloveichik, another opposition activist, said that police had prevented about a hundred people from attending the Russian Social Forum, which is running parallel to the G8 summit. He was visited recently by officials who told him to report immediately for military duty. “They’re trying to scare us,” he said.

The authorities deny harassing opposition activists and say they are trying to prevent dangerous extremists from disrupting the summit. “The police’s actions are commensurate with the situation at hand,” Aleksandr Chekalin, the Deputy Interior Minister, said.

“The situation demands particular measures, sometimes intensified. Sometimes it demands that we visit a family in their apartment.”

No one doubts the need for tight security in a country that has suffered terrorist atrocities. The security services have closed the airspace over the city. The River Neva and other waterways are also off-limits.Strelna, the village next to the Konstantinovsky Palace, has been turned into a virtual fortress, with helicopters buzzing overhead and surface-to-air missiles deployed nearby.

But the restrictions on would-be protesters are so tight that they are adding to the questions over Mr Putin’s democratic credentials. “Russia’s main priority is that the summit goes smoothly,” said one diplomat. “The risk is that that eclipses everything else that the G8 is supposed to stand for.”

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