Last week, we left Moscow for a four-day stay in Russia’s other historical center: St. Petersburg. Though the two cities are just an overnight train apart, their characters are dramatically different. Unlike Moscow, which evolved gradually from its origins as a 12th-century fort, Petersburg is an умышленный (deliberate/intentional) city built in a matter of years on the orders of Peter the Great, starting in 1703. Peter envisioned his city as a “window on the West” (Lincoln, 20), a city that would physically and philosophically connect Russia to its European neighbors. During our visit, over three hundred years after Petersburg’s founding, we saw signs of Peter’s European vision everywhere. Straight avenues follow granite-lined canals, and the city’s architecture is almost uniformly Neoclassical. But behind Petersburg’s granite embankments and colorful facades, we caught glimpses of another side of the city, exemplified by the dark inner courtyards hidden from the street. Together, these two contrasting images—a grand imitation of the 18th-century Europe Peter adored and a place of suffering among the city’s lower classes—form the true character of the city.
Numerous 19th-century Russian writers described this dual character of Petersburg in their work. Pushkin’s narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman” praises “Peter’s creation” as a proud, austere “empress,” but then tells the story of a poor clerk who finds no sympathy in the city after his love is swept away by the devastating flood of 1824. Andrei Belyi in Petersburg and Nikolai Gogol in “The Overcoat” and other short stories describe Petersburg as a fractured, sinister city. These writers painted Petersburg as a “detached place in which a perverse fascination with rank outweighed all human feeling. It was an anonymous city of endless squares…” (Lincoln, 123).
The unnoticed suffering of these literary characters mirrors the unseen work of the thousands of peasants and day laborers who built the city up from the swamp surrounding the Neva River in the 18th century. During the early stages of the city's construction, between ten and thirty thousand serfs and criminals were marched into Petersburg each year to complete the brutal work of reclaiming land from the marsh. Workers drove 16-foot wooden piles into the ground, drained the swamps, and built the first buildings, all using rudimentary tools and suffering from water-bourne cholera and giardia (Lincoln, 20-21). In those years, the Neva's regular floods swept away workers' rough encampments. Despite all of these natural obstacles, Peter's will held firm; he was determined to bring his dream of a European capital to life at all costs.
By the time Peter moved the capital to Petersburg in 1712, the city was still mainly an impressive group of beautiful facades, buildings, and streets, taking up the main islands, with groups of wooden hovels and dirt paths on the surrounding, smaller islands. And as there were no bridges to connect any of the islands (as per the Tsar’s own wishes, inspired by the city of Amsterdam), the visible gap between rich and poor only became more deeply engrained into the city’s image as the city developed (Lincoln, 23). Peter, anxious to see his city grow, devoted 5% of the annual state budget to construction in Petersburg, and actually paid thousands of artisans, merchants, and nobles to move themselves, their families, and entire retinues to the new capital to jumpstart Petersburg’s economy and society. (Even bridges were, begrudgingly, built.)
While Peter preferred to live lived in small wooden cabins, the city’s first Governor General, Aleksandr Menshikov, set the example for the rest of the city in living decadently. Petersburg’s geographical location did ensure a steady supply of European goods. But import costs were high, and food prices were exorbitant as well, making living costs in the new capital absurdly expensive. This trend of extravagance continued throughout the short reigns of Peter II and Anna, and then was ultimately bolstered under Elizabeth. Known as the “Night Empress,” Elizabeth was famous for her lavish and frequent balls, and her passion for the ornate. In an effort to become ever more European, Elizabeth tasked countless Italian and other Western-trained architects – Rastrelli, her favorite, among them and proponent of the incredibly ornate Russian baroque style – to remodel and expand the capital, finally stitching together the pockets of huts and buildings that Peter’s city was into façade-line European metropolis it was envisioned as.
In fact, “by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, St. Petersburg had become everything Peter the Great had envisioned: a fortress, a bustling port, a window on the West, a center of government, and a model for everything Russia might be (or ought to become) (Lincoln, 348). Tsarskoe Selo and the palace at Peterhof were demonstrations of this vision. Working with Rastrelli, Elizabeth is quite possibly responsible for changing the face of Petersburg more than any other leader in the city’s history. To do that, however, she spent so much that Catherine the Great actually cut back state expenditures when she took the throne. Elizabeth’s massive displays of wealth were so impressive that Petersburg aristocrats began literally spending themselves into bankruptcy in order to keep up with the most current fashions.
While Catherine did indeed cut state spending, she did not do it by much. She is perhaps best known for spending state millions on the creation of the Hermitage, her own private art collection. She purchased Diderot’s library with the understanding that he would retain it until his death. She acquired another 7,000 volumes from Voltaire’s relatives after his death. She bought collection after collection of paintings by European masters, commissioned countless reproductions of Italian frescoes found in places such as the Vatican. And when she could no longer justify the expenditures, she convinced lovers to buy them for her.
Catherine’s massive spending gave birth to great imperial treasures – the gallery at the Hermitage and monuments such as Falconet’s “Bronze Horseman” to Peter. However, this extravagant court spending went on as thousands of regular Petersburgers lived and toiled in the dark slums and trash filled courtyards of Dostoevsky and Gogol. The city’s water supply was foul, and cholera ran rampant. For every room with an ornately framed window looking out onto a well planned and majestic boulevard, there were three more small rooms in the back, which had only views of the stuffy courtyard, if any windows at all.
Indeed, Catherine’s desire to be viewed as an Enlightened Leader in tune with the needs of her subjects was purely superficial. For while, in the 1760s, she imported the works of Diderot and Voltaire, and expected her court and nobility to discuss such thinkers, the moment she realized in the 1770s that Enlightenment thinking, taken to its logical end, was a threat to autocracy, she banned the authors she had promoted just a mere decade before, even removing Enlightenment-inspired statues and art strewn around her palaces. While the intellectual façade died with Elizabeth’s reactionary actions, the compulsion to display wealth beyond means continued well into the next century. In fact, by the 1900, many noble families of Catherine’s time had so spent themselves into bankruptcy, that they now bolstered the ranks of the faceless millions living in back room apartments and slums.
While the eras have changed, much of Petersburg’s character has remained much the same over the years. Petersburg did not weather the transition to a non-Soviet state. Throughout the 1990s, many Petersburgers were living on only 50 dollars a day, and basic medical procedures such as EKGs and CAT scans were hard to find (Lincoln, 363). Yet as western stores and companies began to move in, and streets and buildings were gradually renovated. The water is still undrinkable, and the average income is still not very high. Many of the city’s poor have gotten poorer. But important buildings, museums, and historical landmarks have been restored to their proper glory. And Petersburg lives on through those memories as the city of Peter, Russia’s Window to the West, the City of Catherine, of the Revolution, and of the Blockade. In a private conversation with our Leningrad-born tour guide, he lamented that Petersburg had just recently lost its time-tested character, that Petersburg today is no longer alive. It clings to the last fragments of that soul via the museums, the palaces, and the ornate buildings lining every street. Lincoln notes that Petersburg has been known “as a ‘city of palaces’ … a ‘city of barracks’” (25). We would add that it is a city of facades.
For more reading...
An Overall History of the City: http://www.saint-petersburg.com/history/index.asp
Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman," translated by Waclaw Lednicki: http://web.ku.edu/~russcult/culture/handouts/bronze_horseman.html
On the Hermitage: http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/
On Peter the Great: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/peter_the_great.htm
