St. Petersburg, Russia's urban jewel, has a real estate problem PETERSBURG - From a deep second-floor window of a Russian noble's old mansion on the west side of the square, you look straight on at the dark, looming majesty of St. Isaac's Cathedral, stolid under its huge golden domes. Beyond, at a slight angle, lies the fabled Hotel Astoria, a Style Moderne red-brown northern stone masterpiece from 1912. To the right, past the statue of Nicholas I on a rearing horse and across the Blue Bridge, your eye catches the imperious Mariinsky Palace, flying the gallant ­anchor-and-grappling-hook flag of St. Petersburg. To the left lies the spring-green Alexander Garden, and past it flows the broad Neva River. You are in the Red Hall of what is now the Institute of Art History, a magnificent embodiment of the 19th century's finest decorative arts. And if you're a developer, you might find yourself thinking: Does a square that is so historically appealing and beautifully intact really need this much culture? Couldn't the scholars who study here go somewhere else so that this handsome old marble house could be put to more, shall we say, lucrative use? That, at least, is what Tatyana Klyavina worries about. Until June 18, she was the director here, but she made such a fuss over what she believes to be plans to destroy her institute, and to turn the mansion into a hotel or banquet hall or addition to the new Gazprom building that towers right behind it, that finally the Ministry of Culture fired her. That, of course, did little to reassure the institute's up-in-arms employees that her fears were groundless. Developers and preservationists tussle the whole world over, but feelings run especially high in the city founded by Peter the Great as Russia's window to Europe. In a country studded with concrete apartment houses, St. Petersburg is a riverside jewel - once dreary and dusty after decades of Soviet neglect but now spiffed up again. Yet with all that spiffing comes a dizzying increase in property values. Which leads Klyavina and others to worry that St. Petersburg won't survive its own real estate potential. Add to that a government and bureaucracy that are notoriously corrupt and almost universally disbelieved. So when the Ministry of Culture announces that of course it has no plans to eject the institute and make some money off a new use for the mansion - well, that would seem to spell trouble. "The minister says that, his deputies say that," said Klyavina, who left after 21 years. But what they actually do does not provide any grounds to trust them. Fears of a broader assault on St. Petersburg's legacy are brewing. This month, Russia prepared a draft document for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's world heritage conference that looked like the beginning of an attempt to remove great swaths of protected historic Petersburg property from the organization's list. Definitions became much more vague, and preservationists were in an uproar. "It's a fight for property for investors and developers," said Sergei Gorbatenko, who runs the St. Petersburg branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. A fight for money - that's the root. And, of course, corruption. Corruption penetrates the whole question.