At the Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky, on a street named for Peter the Great, communicants pondered an Olympic Games without Russia, and a Russia without the Olympic Games. It was the hour of the Holy Liturgy on a rainy morning and bells echoed off the golden domes above. But for whom they tolled – for blameless sportswomen and men undeservedly stripped of their chance to compete on the global stage, or for the remorseless shattering of the peace of Europe by a belligerent judoka and czar – was no easy task to discern.
The stolid church, whose construction was begun in 1847 during the reign of Nicholas I of the Romanovs, sits a few blocks to the northeast of the Arc de Triomphe. For one hundred and ten of those years, just across the quiet rue Pierre le Grand, a restaurant called A La Ville de Petrograd has provided nourishment to the devotional clientele. Russia and France are hardly strangers, à table or on the battlefield.
The beatified Nevsky himself – portrayed on an icon in the cathedral as young, brown-bearded and wielding a titanic sword – campaigned against the Germans and Swedes in the 13th century and was voted the greatest Russian of all time in a 2008 television poll after producers appealed to the public to vote for anyone but the early front-runner, Josef Stalin. (By 2017, Stalin had regained the top spot, with a certain V. V.
Putin tied for second place with the poet Pushkin.) The Russian Orthodox ritual encompassed more than two hours .