When Peter left English waters on 25 April 1698, the Austrian representative in London reported on Peter’s visit to his government: ‘They say that he intends to civilise his subjects in the manner of other nations. But from his acts here, one cannot find any other intention than to make them sailors; he has had intercourse almost exclusively with sailors, and has gone away as shy as he came.’43
Even before his premature return to Russia, Peter instructed the sadistic and drunken governor of Moscow, Fyodor Romodanovsky, to be ruthless in his reprisals against the newly rebellious Streltsy. When Peter arrived, he supervised the public executions himself. However, the gruesome scenes described by ‘civilised’ foreign visitors should not have shocked or even surprised them. Along with ideas about science and shipbuilding, Peter brought back from Europe personal experience of the Western tradition of execution as public spectacle – in December 1697, the City Fathers of Amsterdam had invited the tsar to witness a public branding, beating, hanging and beheading.
During the month of October 1698, 799 streltsy were executed.44 At Preobrazhenskoe, fourteen chambers were set up where the leather whip, or knout, was used to beat rebels, who were then slow-roasted over a fire. As Johan Korb, secretary of the Austrian Legation observed, ‘Peter himself cut off five heads’, and went on to note that other executioners were so ham-fisted that the axe fell in the middle of a miscreant’s back rather than on his neck. Rebels were ‘tied alive to the wheel’. There were ‘horrid lamentations throughout the afternoon and the following night’ as they ended ‘their miserable existence in the utmost agony’. Reflecting on the scope of all the punishments, Korb noted that the exterminations hardly seemed draconian, ‘considering the daily perils to which the Tsar’s Majesty was hitherto exposed’.45
3
DANGEROUS ACCELERATION
1700–25
By the tsar’s decree, the Russian year 7208 became 1700. It was a leap back to the future and a dangerous acceleration. Peter knew that in order to become great, Russia should trade with the progressive yet incessantly warring nations of Europe. He needed to export Russian goods, and import ideas and expertise. So rather than calculating from Russia’s choice for the creation of the world all those 7,208 years earlier, Peter decided to date events – as in Europe – from the birth of Christ and end Russia’s ‘banishment outside the passage of time’.1 But when he adopted the Julian Calendar in 1700, the trend elsewhere was to convert to the Gregorian Calendar. His choice made him out of date. Russia lagged behind until some three months after the revolution when – if you blinked on 1 February 1918, – it became 14 February, the day the Bolsheviks went Gregorian.
Peter declared that, on 1 January 1700, when Red Square would be illuminated, ‘everyone who has a musket or any other fire arm should either salute three times or shoot several rockets’.2 Russia’s new age would begin with a bang. Securing a temporary peace with the Ottoman Empire, the tsar promptly declared war on Sweden. At first things went badly and the Russians lost the Battle of Narva in November 1700. Exhilarated by his success, Charles XII of Sweden turned his attention towards Poland, leaving Peter free to modernise his army and manoeuvre against the poached Russian lands of Karelia and Ingria.
Modernisation had been the priority since Peter returned in 1698 from his Great Embassy. The focus was on ‘one of the darling delights of this monarch’3 – the navy. Built by foreign experts and manned almost entirely by foreign sailors, it succeeded in frustrating a Swedish attack on the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk in 1701. In the same year, the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation was set up under the direction of the Scot Henry Farquharson and two graduates of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital, Richard Grice and Stephan Gwynn.4 Peter’s key shipyard at Voronezh on the Don was placed under the direction of Dutch, Danish and English craftsmen – among them Richard Cozens, whose child, Alexander – sometimes rumoured to be the tsar’s own son – grew up to become the first notable British landscape painter, and father of the most talented of picturesque watercolourists, John Robert Cozens. The importance of the English contribution to Russia’s navy is confirmed by the castrato Filippo Balatri, who witnessed Peter at Voronezh, axe in hand, building a sixty-gun ship under the guidance of an Englishman.5 The sea captain John Deane wrote to Lord Carmarthen, ‘I’ll assure Your Lordship it will be the best ship’6 among the large number being built.
Muscovites, known to be ‘great enemies to all innovation’, reacted strongly when they were compelled to adopt European dress. Russian diplomatic representatives were despatched to European capitals – not without an inevitable culture clash. Likewise, when foreign envoys were received in Russia, the outcome was not always happy. In 1702, Herr Königseck, the representative from Saxony, fell from a drawbridge and drowned. While his effects were being gathered, a portrait of a lady fell from one of the dead man’s pockets. To the tsar’s astonishment, the likeness was that of his own long-term mistress, Anna Mons. When several letters were discovered written in Anna’s hand, in ‘the tenderest style’ and addressed to the envoy, the ever-promiscuous tsar placed Anna and her relatives under house-arrest. During their interview, which could have ended with Anna being sentenced to death, Peter ‘melted into tears’ and empathetically forgave her, ‘since he so severely felt how impossible it was to conquer inclination’. He vowed: ‘you shall never want, but I will never see you more’.7
In the summer of that same year, an orphaned Livonian kitchen and laundry maid called Martha Skavronskaya married a Swedish trumpeter in Marienburg. Their union lasted all of eight days, until the trumpeter left with his retreating regiment.8 The Russians, under Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev, advanced on the town and Martha was taken. Bright-eyed and lively, she attracted male attention and was passed up the Russian chain of command until she was registered as a laundress in the household of the corrupt Alexander Menshikov. He introduced Martha to Peter, who was immediately captivated by her vulgar sense of humour, her capacity for drink and her lust for life. He fell desperately in love.9 Martha changed her name to Catherine and secretly, then later publicly, married the married tsar.
In the late sixteenth century, when Ivan the Terrible set up trade with England through the port he established at Arkhangelsk, the voyage to and from that often ice-bound haven involved perilous navigation round the far-flung North Cape of Norway. Aware that Russia had much to sell abroad – grain, hemp, hides, tar, timber, rhubarb, caviar and isinglass – Peter sought a more accessible sea port.10 His thoughts turned to the mouth of the short River Neva, which ran seventy kilometres through the sodden clays and marshy wilderness between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. The choice was, in many respects, ridiculous. Nearly sixty degrees north, the site was – as the poet Anna Akhmatova later put it – ‘particularly well suited to catastrophes’.
The River Neva in the early 1700s showing St Petersburg, Nyenskans and Shlüsselberg at the mouth of Lake Ladoga.
The undeveloped Neva Delta.
For half the year the Neva delta was ice-bound, and for the rest, the ‘newa’ – Finnish for swamp – was a mosquito-ridden marsh. Understandably, the region was almost uninhabited. Apart from Swedish invaders in their fort at Nyenskans, there was only a scatter of lost little fishing villages on the shores of Lake Ladoga and along the banks of the Neva. In order to secure the site, Peter had to break the Swedish stranglehold on Karelia on the northern bank of the Neva, and on Ingria to the south. By 1 May 1703 the tsar had captured the fort at Nyenskans and moved about four kilometres downriver, to where the Neva branched around several small islands.
This was the story: Peter came ashore on Yanni-saari – Hare Island – near the mouth of the Neva. In that wilderness he hacked out some turf from Mother Earth, then shaped it into a cross, beneath which he buried a stone casket containing relics of St Andrew. Peter declared, ‘Here will be a city,’ and, to mark this new beginning, built a gateway out of birch11 – a tree symbolising light and fertility. As the tsar p
assed through the arch, an eagle descended to settle on his arm. He then cut down two magic willows, one to mark where the Cathedral of the Trinity would be sited and the other to indicate where his humble log cabin would stand.
Such hokum smacks of the charged climax of a symbol-fraught opera, and not as a record of the almost chance landing of a tsar at war, in a wet and windy marshland – if he landed at all. On the Feast of the Trinity, 16 May 1703 – the significant date chosen for the founding of St Petersburg – the tsar may have been in the shipyards on the shores of nearby Lake Ladoga. But there was craft behind this cosmic public-relations exercise. St Andrew was the patron saint of Russia who – according to tradition – had visited and planted a cross in the country. The interment of the saint’s relics provided excellent credentials for Peter’s unlikely city. The bones of St Andrew were the first of many on which Petersburg’s foundations were to be laid. Three centuries later, this city built on the skeletons of its first labourers would bury yet more bones – victims from Stalin’s purges, dumped in mass graves on the very island where Peter, founder of the Russian secret police, was believed to have come ashore.
The date chosen for Peter’s advent was riddled with Christian significance. St Nicholas of Mozhaisk – patron saint of seafarers and the protector of northern Russian lands – was favoured in having not one saint’s day, but two. One of these occurred in early May, and in 1703 it fell within the octave of the moveable Feast of the Trinity.12 Looking beyond Christianity to local Finnish folklore, we find the tale of a giant who created a city instantly. Such myth-making and symbolism were politically useful to a tsar rumoured by his enemies to have been a changeling, plucked from the German Suburb of Moscow – a European substitute for the girl born to Tsar Alexei and Natasha.
The tsar’s first choice for his fort was on the dagger-shaped island of Kotlin, thirty kilometres out in the Gulf of Finland. A contemporary sketch plan – possibly in Peter’s hand – shows a grid of streets and canals that looks surprisingly like a map of modern-day Manhattan. But while Kotlin was a reasonably strategic choice for a naval base, nobody showed much enthusiasm for settling on a cold, windy island in the middle of the sea.13 Not that they were much more excited by the soggy mainland round about. Visitors from Europe were appalled by the ‘vast and horrid forests and deserts’ of a region where, during summer months, ‘the sun raises the vapours’ from ‘the low and marshy ground’ and ‘the sun hardly sets’. As for winter, the days were short and the sun was seldom seen, because of ‘thick fogs with which the air is filled and darkened’.14 But there were some assets. The Neva was – according to the Scottish traveller John Bell – ‘a noble stream of clear, wholesome water’ containing ‘a great variety of excellent fish’, including abundant salmon. The woods on either bank were ‘stored with game such as hares, which are as white as snow in winter, and turn brown in summer’.15
For the scattered peasants and fisherfolk, life was measured by cyclical, seasonal time – spring followed winter, which followed autumn, which followed summer, which followed spring. Suddenly it was 1703, European-time, as Peter imposed an urban chronometer on his outpost. As 1703 became 1704, then 1705 and 1706, life became scheduled and hectic, as the population was urged to beat the clock in an endless scurry of meetings and encounters. The tsar of an antediluvian and introverted country yoked necessity to impossibility and established a fort and a port that rapidly evolved into a capital. It would be a new type of city in an old country – a fact that would play havoc with its identity and its inhabitants throughout its first three centuries. It was the absurdities and obsessions of this remarkable tsar that gave birth to St Petersburg, a city created by a drunken man trying to walk a straight line. His feverish imposition of change created a time-warp – absurd juxtapositions of the modes and habits of different ages – which has remained a feature of St Petersburg since the moment the tsar stamped 1703 on time out of mind.
The first phase of building corresponded to the period of the Great Northern War, during which Peter was on the defensive. General Kronhjort’s large Swedish force was camped threateningly on the northern side of the Neva, while Vice-Admiral Nummers – commanding a flotilla – lay at anchor in the bay. The Russians soon gained a foothold on Kotlin and started to construct the fort of Kronstadt to guard the approaches to the delta. Despite gains against the Swedish, there was no escape from the bitter south-west wind that blew up the Gulf of Finland towards ‘St Petersburg’ – first mentioned as such in a letter written to the tsar towards the end of June 1703. Two months later, the settlement suffered its first flood. With such natural and human adversaries, the outlook was bleak.
Peter’s priority was to engineer a fort to protect the settlement. Styled on the impressive citadels devised by Louis XIV’s celebrated military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, the Peter and Paul Fortress was – in the first instance – constructed of earth and wood. St Petersburg’s handwritten newspaper, the Vedomosti reported that 20,000 sappers toiled to build the fort during that first summer.16 Add the hundreds of fellers and loggers floating tree trunks to the site and you had – in the middle of a barren wilderness-a population explosion. The tsar summoned Russian, Tartar, Cossack, Kalmuk, Finnish and Ingrian labourers, who were joined by Swedes and Livonians fleeing towns devastated by the war. Peter sent an order to Prince Romodanovksy – ‘Mock-tsar’ in Peter’s All-Drunken Assembly, and head of the newly created Secret Office – to reassign 2,000 criminals destined for Siberia to St Petersburg to work on the fort. Toiling ‘in the utmost misery’, labourers lacked food, housing and even adequate tools. Without wheelbarrows, they transported earth – scarce thereabouts – in the ‘skirts of their clothes and in bags made of rags and old mats’.17 The fortress was completed in five months. The bodies of workers killed by malaria, scurvy, dysentery or Swedish attack were wrapped in muslin sacks and packed into cavities in the foundations. Reasonable estimates for the human cost of the initial building of St Petersburg run to 30,000 deaths. The fort was the impressive beginning of a settlement that was officially named St Petersburg – after the tsar’s patron saint – on the Feast of St Peter, 29 June 1703. Informally, it was referred to as ‘the capital’ by September of the following year.18 Upon hearing the news, Charles XII of Sweden declared, ‘Let the tsar tire himself with founding new towns, we will keep for ourselves the honour of taking them later.’19
By 1704 dockyards were operating on the opposite side of the river, on a site that would – within five years – become the Admiralty. Craftsmen, mechanics and seamen came to settle with their families. Labourers who survived malaria and frostbite during the first year stayed on to build houses for the nobility and the traders summoned by the tsar to people his city.20 As early as New Year’s Day 1705 there were fifteen substantial wooden houses on Petersburg Island to the north of the fortress, a number that increased tenfold in the next five years. In autumn, isolated by the rising waters of a flood, the clusters of houses became a miniature archipelago. During winter freezes – with a sound like gunshot – their wooden beams cracked and snapped. Wandering freely through this uncertain community were stray wolves, wild dogs and unattended cattle. But most strangely – striding through groups of sackclothed workers – were men in full-skirted knee-length, shot-silk coats, matching breeches and spattered stockings. These were Dutch, German or Italian artisans, with their balletic gesticulations, surveying the scene, attempting to wrest some kind of order out of chaos.
Among those trying to impose sense and elegance was Domenico Trezzini, the first of many major European architects whom Peter and his successors engaged to shape St Petersburg. Born to a humble family in Lugano, Trezzini had worked in Copenhagen, where he absorbed the sober, northern Protestant form of the baroque style of architecture. Encouraged to employ the Dutch principles that Peter so admired, Trezzini worked in Petersburg from 1703 until his death in 1734 – three remarkable decades, during which a wooden settlement, rashly and rapidly thrown up in a wilderness, was h
altingly transformed into a bustling capital. Working in collaboration with the tsar, Trezzini imposed ratios of 2:1 or 4:1 for street width to building height. The houses of the wealthy – their façades aligned along straight streets – began to be constructed from bricks and tiles. Canals and sluices were planned, so that the settlement came to be known as the ‘Amsterdam of the North’. But while the countryside of Holland could be secured by its dykes, a French visitor to Petersburg commented that it was impossible to escape impromptu flooding from the Neva. Three years after it was founded, the community suffered its third sizeable flood, with water rising more than two and half metres. Nevertheless, construction proceeded ambitiously and obstinately, and Peter created a Chancellery of Urban Affairs headed by Trezzini. Its purpose was to monitor and coordinate projects – particularly useful when Peter was off fighting on several fronts. Beside the ongoing Swedish struggle, he fought the Ural Bashkirs between 1705 and 1711 and, in 1706, faced down a revolt of the Streltsy in Astrakhan, over compulsory German dress and the removal of beards.21 The tsar’s dream for St Petersburg was born of his desire to create a civilised peace.
Since the concept of an ordered garden or park in which to promenade was unknown in Russia, the planning of St Petersburg’s Summer Garden was a novelty. To supplement the endeavours of 400 labourers, there were 100 carpenters, sixty masons, sixteen plumbers along with a further sixty workers required to work on the fountains.22 With the aid of his Garden Office, the tsar collected European treatises and plans and personally made a large and often-outrageous contribution to the project.23 In 1708, with the city barely established, he sent to Moscow for ‘8,000 singing birds of various sorts’. In 1712, 1,300 mature linden trees were imported from Holland, along with chestnuts from Hamburg, cypresses from southern Russia, oaks from Moscow, and lime and elm trees from Kiev. The Dutch gardener Jan Roosen, who developed the scheme in 1712-13, incorporated the first masonry structure in the city – Peter’s small Summer Palace.24
St. Petersburg Page 3