Architecture: Och, don't ruin the city of Tsars: Scottish firms may be called in to restore St Petersburg's magnificent heritage. Gavin Stamp wonders if Russia is wise to look West

One of Scotland's traditional exports is architecture. Fine work by Scottish architects can be found all over the world, in particular in Russia - a point that an exhibition in Edinburgh about two Scottish firms hoping to work in St Petersburg is naturally keen to emphasise.

There was William Hastie, who helped to plan Moscow; there was the mysterious Glaswegian Adam Menelaws, who worked for mad Tsar Paul and his successors, Alexander I and Nicholas I. And, above all, there was Charles Cameron, architect to Catherine the Great, who introduced advanced Neoclassical taste to Russia and carried out exquisite work at the imperial palaces of Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk.

Or was there? Cameron, in fact, was a bogus Scot - a fraud and a bounder. He was born in London, claimed a fictitious connection with the Camerons of Lochiel, 'misbehaved' with one of the daughters of the architect Isaac Ware, put his own father into a debtors' prison and altogether behaved so badly that he only had a future in a faraway country such as Russia.

Never mind: what is significant is that he chose to pose as a Scot, for that was the way to get on in 18th-century Europe. And the Empress was delighted with his work. 'I have an architect here named Kameron, born a Jacobite, brought up in Rome . . .' she wrote in 1781.

St Petersburg, where Cameron died in 1811, had been founded by Peter the Great by the cold waters of the Baltic Sea as a 'Window on the West'. It is an extraordinary, paradoxical city: at once a cruel product of ruthless authoritarian rule and a dramatic gesture to show that Russia was part of the civilised West. And to emphasise that connection, foreign architects were invited to design its buildings: Scots, Germans and, above all, Italians - Rastrelli, Quarenghi, Rossi. So now that Leningrad has reverted to its former name, it may seem appropriate that Western architects should be seeking to follow in the footsteps of that talented and disgraceful adventurer, Charles Cameron.

The exhibition at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh features two Scottish firms. One is the Hurd Rolland Partnership, which seems to be well in with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is part of the St Petersburg Development Group, which was invited to undertake a study into the 'privatisation of property' in the city that has resulted in the identification of 22 buildings ripe for commercial development.

The other firm is RMJM Scotland, which is well in with Unesco and has been invited to prepare a masterplan for the restoration and development of that incomparable palace museum, the Hermitage. This envisages the creation of a new entrance to the Winter Palace, roofing over the Hanging Garden of the Small Hermitage and converting part of Rossi's huge Neoclassical General Staff Building (a vast crescent that encloses Palace Square) into a museum of applied arts.

I suppose all this is perfectly reasonable, although I am depressed by the notion of having to enter the Hermitage through a hole in the ground in the courtyard of the Winter Palace - for the fashion now, of course, is to copy the Louvre pyramid in Paris and force visitors to go straight into the museum shop in the basement rather than use the magnificent entrances.

Several other reflections are prompted by this exhibition. One is that Scottish firms and British capital do not need to go as far as the Baltic to find a decaying city full of fine buildings crying out for creative commercial exploitation. I think of Alexander Thomson's Egyptian Halls or Charles Rennie Mackintosh's old Daily Record building - let alone the Sheriff Court - in Glasgow. Another is why the Russians need British architects to tell them how to look after historic buildings when their record at conservation is rather more impressive than ours.

Fourteen years ago I spent a week in what was then Leningrad. It was one of the most extraordinary and haunting experiences of my life. The drabness, poverty, degradation and injustice resulting from the imposition of Communist Party rule were everywhere evident - but so was a ravishing, inspiring, unique beauty.

Although the city was ringed by vile high-rise housing estates which might have been commissioned by Glasgow Corporation in the Sixties, the surprise was that the huge centre of the classical city was almost completely intact. Street after street was lined with brightly-painted facades of stucco and granite, and the authoritarian geometry of wide streets, focusing on the gilded spire of the Admiralty, was softened by a network of canals, crossed by exquisite bridges of granite or cast iron. There seemed to be nothing to spoil this urban paradise of water, granite, stucco and iron - and the new buildings of the Fifties and Sixties were in harmony with the old. All it really needed was something in the shops.

Yet this was a city that had endured a dreadful 900-day siege during the Second World War, in which German shells and bombs daily pounded the streets and more than half a million people died of violence, cold or starvation. And then, when the war was over, the damaged buildings were superbly repaired and restored. I do not think this was because of Communism, but because the architecture of Leningrad mattered to its proud, long-suffering citizens.

Similarly, the Tsarist palaces that had been deliberately wrecked by the Germans were carefully and lovingly rebuilt over a long period. What was poignant were the little exhibitions recording the names of the craftsmen who carried out this work. That these luxurious showy piles were commissioned by Tsars and designed by foreigners did not matter; they were built by Russian craftsmen and so were part of the heritage of the Russian people.

The contrast with Britain is significant, for here a shameful number of beautiful buildings damaged or destroyed by the Luftwaffe were not rebuilt. And Edinburgh - another unique classical city with which St Petersburg is sometimes compared - was hardly touched in the war; yet while the citizens of Leningrad were repairing their great city, the Athens of the North was being mutilated by the demolition of St James' Square, Leith Street and George Square, and the spoiling of Princes Street. Here the enemy was not Nazi Germany but market forces and selfish university dons, aided and abetted by planners and architects.

One of the inevitable disappointments since the New Dawn of 1989 has been the prospect of rampant capitalism, having fouled our own historic nests, eagerly preparing to despoil those beautiful cities of the former Eastern Bloc that Communism inadvertently preserved: Prague, Budapest and now St Petersburg. Of course architecture is not everything; of course ordinary Russians want all the glittering trash of the West that their rulers so long denied them. One cannot complain about human nature, and I fear it is only when fine streets have been polluted by McDonald's and Burger King that ordinary Russians will understand how worthless so much of the culture of the West really is.

But do we need to send them our architecture as well? I do not deny that St Petersburg is desperately run-down and needs money, but it is surely patronising for us to tell the Russians how to care for historic buildings. I just wish we cared as much about Scotland's architectural achievements as the Russians clearly do about theirs.

'Window on the West' is at the City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, Edinburgh, until Saturday (7 May), open 10am-5pm (031-225 2424).

The author is senior lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. This article first appeared in the Glasgow 'Herald'.

(Photographs omitted)