The day before was spent mostly in the country near St. Petersburg, green and a bit soggy but well-tended and open.

Today, we stayed in the city, taking in three of the major cultural sites, along with what must have been every other tourist from the six major cruise ships docked in the port. All of us on the same schedule, it seemed.

It made for a bit of mayhem, in which most attention was focused on keeping with your tour group and skirting or fighting through the others. With only occasional and fleeting attention given to whatever famous something or other that redounded to the glory of art, culture and the city of St. Petersburg.

The worst?

The Hermitage, one of the world’s great museums. And, it would seem, also one of its worst run.

We left the boat, hurried through passport control and waited for our guide, Sasha, and driver, Sergei.

They took us as quickly as possible to the Hermitage, in the heart of the city, but it was the rush hour, and we needed most of an hour to go about five miles.

The Hermitage was the Winter Palace, back in the time of the czars, and eventually three more buildings were joined to it, making it a sprawl. It has 3 million artifacts, anyway, according to Sasha.

The trouble began immediately. We were put on the sidewalk by Sergei, then joined the mob of cruisers who were struggling to get in the front door (early opening for us!) and out of the cold. A docent was attempting to keep order but was being shouted down by tour guides and tourists, and finally our group of 16 got in, and Sasha said it was often like this, and recalled seeing a fistfight between a German and an American at that very spot.

This was not a moment for the claustrophobic. The foyer was jammed by hundreds of people, who could barely move, and some of them had no scruples about pushing. Everyone seemed to want to go in a different direction, and the guides’ signs, held aloft for their charges to rally to, seemed to be beyond our capacity to chase.

What seemed like 10 minutes but was probably two or three finally resulted in our squirting down the steps and into the cloakroom, where we all handed over our jackets and backpacks. We were advised to use the toilet there, because we would not see another for a very long time (toilets being infrequent, in Petersburg, it would seem) … and then were were looking at art. Sorta.

We saw the Rembrandts, and we saw the Hermitage’s two Da Vinci pieces, and its one Michelangelo and its one Caravaggio, but every tour guide must go through similar training, because we all were piling up in front of the same 6×8-inch canvasses, shuffling forward to get a look at somebody’s Madonna and Child, and feeling the hot breath of the next group right behind us.

So many people were shuffling through the place that it soon became uncomfortably warm, and we wondered just how unpleasant it might be to visit the place in the summer.

The people who run the museum are not always good about English translations of information with pieces of art. As if they haven’t quite gotten a grip on what they have. Some rooms had nothing more than names with a painting or sculpture. A few had English translations, and maybe even the name of the artist and the title of the work.

So, we struggled down one side and then fought back up the other, and more than once we had to retrieve someone from our group who had dropped out of this or that scrum to sit on a couch over by some art not so important that a crowd formed around it.

Within 30 minutes, I wished it were over, but we did three hours of it. And we saw the Rembrandts and the Da Vincis and the Michelangelo … but just before we left, our tour guide turned us loose in front of a very impressive collection of Impressionists, as well as several dozen Picassos. “Some people like it, some don’t,” she said, clearly placing herself in the second group as she told us she would wait at the room at the end of these apparently anti-social or degenerate works. (It has been barely two decades since the communists lost power; maybe old prejudices against anything not Socialist Realism die hard.) Oh, and nearly all of the Impressionists and Picassos were “nationalized” from the collections of two capitalists who fled Russia after the 1917 revolution. “Serves ’em right” was the subtext.

Anyway, the Hermitage … lots of stuff, but horrendous crowd control and little helpful information, and the only thing worse than being in there with mobs would be trying to figure it out alone.

We caught up with the driver on the other side of the gigantic square behind the museum, and this time Sasha realized she had to make allowance for lunch or some members of our group might become violent. We tried one pierogi store, but it was already overrun by tourists (some from our ship), and we went to another outlet of the same restaurant, several miles away, and then we ate pastry stuffed with chicken/rice or mushrooms or fruit, and that fortified us for the afternoon.

Next up was the Church of the Spilled Blood, which is not about Jesus but, rather, about Czar Alexander I, who was fatally wounded not far from the palace, prompting his son and successor to build a church on the spot where Alex had been shot.

It is a marvel. Yes, it was crowded, too, but it has pretty much everything you could want in a Russian church. The spires and onion domes, colorfully painted and 7,000 square meters of mosaics inside.

Sasha pointed out the spot where, more or less, the czar was shot, and then noted that the place took 24 years to build but restoring it took 25. It had fallen into something close to ruin during the communist era, when the reds had recoiled from the place’s unabashed connection to religion and royalty. It was used, in the interim, as a hospital during World War II, but also as a vegetable store. As if they could somehow embarrass the Church of the Spilled Blood into going away.

It is a great place and, like the Catherine Palace the day before, something I knew nothing about before seeing it. The Spilled Blood had that Kremlin “now I’m in Russia” look from the outside, and the masses of religious mosaics inside — including on the whole of the ceiling.

We had one more official stop, at the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, the starting point of Petersburg, back in 1703. (Yes. Boston and New York City are older than St. Petersburg.)

The church there is notable for 1) not looking like a Russian church because it was built by a Swiss, and 2) being the burial place for all the czars and czarinas from Peter forward. Big blocks of solid rock, with the various royals actually in the ground beneath. (“Orthodox Christians believe you must be buried in the earth,” Sasha said.)

Turns out, not all that many plots are needed for every czar from Peter to Nicholas II, the last. Peter and Catherine (both “great”) took up about 75 years by themselves, and since Nick 2 was shot (with his family) in 1917 … that’s just a bit more than 200 years of rulers, and they get all the graves in the four corners of the church.

It is a curious place, a bit morbid, especially with the exhumed bones of Nicholas II and his family in a special room — because Orthodox church leaders are not sure the bones are the last of the Romanovs, even after DNA testing, according to Sasha.

Our final stop was a gift shop, where we could buy, if we braved more of our fellow tourists, about 500 kinds of nesting dolls including those from several sports teams — including the Los Angeles Dodgers. No. Really.

(I had to see who was inside the Dodgers nest, so I took it apart. First came Matt Kemp, then Andre Ethier, then Adrian Gonzalez, then Clayton Kershaw and, the tiny little one in the middle, Juan Uribe. I’m thinking this is a couple of years old; these days, Kershaw should be the big one, and Yasiel Puig has to be in there somewhere.

We bought some Christmas ornaments with the last of our rubles — those we were not going to give to Sasha and Sergei as tips, that is.

Sasha was a bit of a disappointment. Near the end of the day, our second, during a quiet period, I asked her what was taught in schools these days about the Soviet regime. Which ranged from vile to monstrous. Stalin probably killed more people than did Hitler and the Soviets all but enslaved Eastern Europe for 45 years.

Said Sasha: “Some of it was good, and some of it bad. Like anything else. The good was free health care and education, and Russia defeated the Nazis and became the world’s strongest country. And there was some bad. That’s all. Now things are different.”

Hmmm. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. (Or, just as likely, comments critical of the country’s past can cost a guide her job.)

Back to the boat, and we left on the tide, and with events in the Ukraine, and Russia’s current president seeming intent on a path to expanding his country’s current borders … maybe cruise ships will have to give Russia a pass, again, sometime soon.

I was glad to get in and see at least one Russian city, perhaps the most European city in the country.

It was not drab. It was not dreary. It was not many of the things we expect in Russia. Daily life looked livable, and often sophisticated. And we had a sense that if we knew how the city worked, we could have seen what we saw with far less sturm und drang.

I would consider coming back.