Young & Lost

There was a time, nearly 300 years ago, when Petersburg became the capital of the vast empire of Peter the Great. But today St. Petersburg is known among Russians mostly as the country's crime capital. Statistically, the image is wrong. There are more dangerous cities and places. But Petersburg has a deadly and infectious air of lawlessness and hopelessness. It is a town where murders are brutal and public--a deputy mayor hit by snipers, an opposition leader gunned down on her stairwell. The crimes are rarely solved.

Peter's inspiration for the city probably came from Amsterdam. But his ambition quickly grew. It was to be the Paris, the Venice of the North. As usual in Russia, nameless Russians from remote villages were sacrificed to the leader's dreams. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands died. St. Petersburg, the 19th century historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote in words that fit today, "is a city founded on tears and corpses." It was, many felt, a fitting legacy of Russia's greatest reformer, who dragged his empire into the modern age by a mixture of will-power and terror--an all-powerful ruler who toward the end of his reign set aside each Monday for work in the dungeons of his secret police.

Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and Russia's President, is a St. Petersburg native. He made his name as one of the energetic reformers who gave the city a rolling start as communism collapsed. But these days that momentum is gone, replaced by the languid inertia of drink, drugs and sex. Putin is desperate to change his country. The kids in these photos are desperate to change their lives. That should be a recipe for hope, but in this lawless, rotting city, it has become a prescription for despair.