Special: from Russia at The Royal Academy

You’d want to be a spring or summer bride in St Petersburg, really you would. Instead of doing your celebratory round of the sights - Peter the Great’s statue near the river Neva, the sugared-almond façade of the Hermitage, the pretty Palace Bridge, the twin Rostra columns on Vasilevsky Island - wearing a flimsy wedding dress in temperatures that would freeze a champagne cocktail in two minutes, you might be lucky and get 8C in April, a tropical 16C in May.

It’s symbolic, as well. In Old Russia, they saw winter as an old crone chasing away the young woman of summer, only to be hustled off in her turn by the urgent youth and fertility of spring.

“It’s funny, I never really notice the ice on the Neva breaking up,” says Natasha, a friend who lives in the city. “It just seems to happen overnight and you wake up to this incredible green, vibrant world.”

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That’s the feeling I captured on my visit: an intense joy only really intelligible to those who live far enough north to be locked into their cities by winter ice (assuming, in these days of change, that there is ice – the Neva doesn’t always freeze solid) and to endure months of semi-darkness.

Peter the Great, who founded St Petersburg on an unpromising marsh in 1703, forcing the sophisticates of the Moscow court to move north with great reluctance, was said to have been agoraphobic. How perverse a choice was that? As I flew into Russia’s second city, which sprawls across numerous islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, I was struck most of all by its vast, exposed flatness.

In reaction, the city – or the bits of it you see in the postcards – has a hectic, feverish quality. It parties in endless darkness and it parties in eternal light, with White Days festivals in the winter and White Nights festivals in high summer. In spring, its smaller palaces – in Toytown colours, tricked out with gilt and mirrors – throw off the dustsheets; ballet and opera theatres open like musical boxes; the borsch stands swap steaming hot soup for refreshing cold and troikas their runners for wheels.

You do need to choose the right bit of spring. March and April, when ice breakers come nosing in from the gulf and there are dull booms as the city centre ice is blown up, are dramatic and exciting – and cheaper.

The first week of March is Maslenitsa, pancake week, with student balls and the burning of straw scarecrows; on March 8, a public holiday, women are given flowers and presents; then the Mariinsky Ballet Festival begins. The problem is the slush: it’s as dismal as the dregs of a coffee smoothie, sometimes with a lethal sheet of ice beneath. You need walking boots with spikes, or at least wellies.

By April, St Petersburgers are thinking about the coming twilight nights of May and their dachas in the country, and the thing to do in the city is watch the bridges. There are hundreds of them all told, crisscrossing canals and rivers, with 22 big ones across the Neva and eight in the city centre.

One of the sights of spring is to see bridges rising for the first time, allowing shipping in and out of the city. They usually go up between 2 and 4.30am, watched by party-goers on their way home and by cars that have missed the chance to cross.

This year, Orthodox Easter – marked by lengthy church services and the consumption of rich cheese-cakes called pashkars – is on April 27.

By then, the linden trees will be in bud in the city’s two famous parks, Mars Field and the Summer Garden, private yachts will be released into the water from dry dock captivity and early boat trips will start chugging along the canals. Soon the high season for tourists will be in full swing: go quickly, before they get there.

Fast facts

Sophie Campbell travelled to St Petersburg with Steppes Travel (01285 880980, www.steppestravel.co.uk), which offers three nights at the Hotel Astoria from £995, including return flights, transfers and guided tours of the city, the Russian Museum, the Hermitage and Catherine’s Palace at Pavlovsk.

For the Mariinsky Ballet’s spring schedule see www.mariinsky.ru/en. This year’s festival runs from March 13-28.

For more information, see www.saint-petersburg.com.

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