A grotto was added to the garden by Andreas Schlütter, who was lured to St Petersburg in 1713 after one of his buildings collapsed in Berlin. Consisting of three small rooms, the grotto was embellished with exotic shells and coloured stones, which kaleidoscopically flashed and reflected its interior pools. Built alongside the Fontanka River-so named because it fed the fountains of the garden – the grotto was destroyed by major flooding in 1777.25 Schliitter also embellished the Summer Palace with twenty-nine bas-reliefs punctuating the spaces between the ground-floor and first-floor windows and celebrating Russian victories in the Great Northern War. French flourish and affectation – trees pruned geometrically, and gravel paths curving past ornamental flowerbeds – were added to the prevailing Dutch style of the garden, after Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond arrived from France in August 1716.26 Le Blond brought intimate knowledge of the schemes and ideas of his master, André Le Nôtre, the doyen of French gardeners and the man responsible for the formal gardens at Chantilly, Fontainebleau and Versailles. With the involvement of the Italian Niccolò Michetti – the hydrodynamic engineer who lost out on the commission for Rome’s Trevi Fountain – the Summer Garden was becoming a truly pan-European achievement. It was Michetti who scoured Italy for the classical statuary that graced the alleyways, his choices often shocking visitors of a conservative, orthodox sensibility. Peter had a labyrinth created containing sculptures of the animals found in Aesop’s Fables. He would conduct small groups to these carvings and explain their significance. Most importantly, the gardens became a place for fun after dark. Peter hosted outdoor parties where people would mix informally, play games and drink his health from a communal tub.27 Guests were locked in and were expected to get drunk and marvel at the fireworks and music. While it was the tsar’s habit to rise early and work hard, the afternoon and a good part of the night he gave to pleasure, taking ‘to his bottle heartily’.
By 1708, of all the territory the tsar had reclaimed, only the environs of St Petersburg remained in his hands and Peter was obliged to go on the offensive, devastating Ingria to make forage difficult for his adversary. Then, after a particularly severe winter, when Charles XII’s army laid siege to the town of Poltava in April 1709, the Swedish were routed by the Russians. Although fought ten years before the Treaty of Nystadt ended the Great Northern War, the Battle of Poltava decided its outcome. In fact the Swedish Army surrendered to the ‘Mock-tsar’, Romodanovksy, while a very tall officer – Peter, incognito – looked on, amused. Peter often played with role and rank, raising those who were unsuitable, incapable or self-interested to positions of shadow power. He elevated a humble youth like Menshikov to a princedom, turned a landlubber like Fyodor Apraksin – a man credited with consuming 180 glasses of wine in three days – into an admiral.28 They were all part of Peter’s mirror-image mockcourt, a sleight-of-hand that allowed the tsar – while seeming to play the fool – to keep a tight grip on the reigns of power.29
Success at Poltava was celebrated first in Moscow, as facilities for formal pageants were still minimal in Petersburg. It was June 1710, fourteen months after the battle, before a regatta and fireworks finally commemorated the victory in the new capital. It was a signal moment, confirming what Peter had boasted to Admiral Apraksin, ‘Now, with God’s help, the final stone in the foundation of St Petersburg has been laid.’30
View of the Admiralty in 1717.
On the site of the early dockyards, an area shored-up with thousands of piles and filled with rubbish, earth and corpses, the Admiralty was built.”31 Entered over a drawbridge, it was a large wooden complex of sail- and rope-makers, carpenters and caulkers – all of whom contributed to the men-o’-war being built on the scaffolds and launched from the slips. Yet in 1710, of the tsar’s twelve frigates, eight galleys, six fire-ships and two bomb-vessels, only three frigates were ready for service.’32 Developing the Admiralty was therefore essential, if Peter was to realise his ambitions for a Baltic fleet. During the following decade more than 50,000 shipwrights and craftsmen arrived to materialise his dreams.
In spring 1710 Petersburg’s population of around 8,000 was doubled by the seasonal labourers who, once again, arrived to continue the frenetic building programme.”33 As dry terrain was at a premium, they were obliged to live and build on marshland, which resulted in ‘streets exceeding dirty’. Nonetheless, the first stone houses began to give a sense of permanence to the settlement. A mansion for the Governor General of St Petersburg, Alexander Menshikov, and Peter’s Summer Palace were both begun. The tsar also decided to rebuild the Peter and Paul Fortress in stone, using material taken from the captured Swedish settlement at Nyenskans.34 Bastion walls were built nearly twenty metres thick and, in the extensive inner ward, the wooden cathedral was demolished to make way for Trezzini’s flat-fronted masonry structure, topped by a towering golden spire, which was eventually completed in 1733. When struck by lightning almost a quarter of a century later, the 123-metre tower burned down. A decade after that, Catherine the Great ordered an identical spire, which was finished in 1776 and has since remained one of the capital’s most visible landmarks.
Menshikov’s palace, fronting the Neva on Vasilevsky Island, was built ‘of stone after the Italian manner, three stories high’.35 Grander than the tsar’s Summer Palace, it suited a man ‘possessed with a boundless ambition’ and insatiable avarice. Menshikov began life either as a pastry cook’s street-vendor or as a stable boy – a good number of contemporary commentators favouring the vision of him crying, ‘Puffs!’ and selling ‘cakes made of minced meat . . . about the streets of Moscow’. The story goes that Peter heard him singing in a lane and, when he asked if he could buy the basket as well as the pies, Menshikov demonstrated the cunning that would carry him to the top. His ‘business was to sell pies, but he must ask his master’s leave to sell his basket; yet as everything belonged to his prince, his majesty had only to lay his commands upon him. The tsar was so pleased with the answer, that he immediately ordered him to court.’36 Menshikov rose rapidly to become Peter’s right-hand man, the quintessential manipulator in the subversive mock-court. Stealing voraciously from both the state and the people, Menshikov became a formidable kleptocrat.
Peter the Great overseeing the construction of St Petersburg.
Festivities for the marriage of the Royal Dwarf, Yakim Volkov, at the Menshikov Palace in 1710.
Ironically, Menshikov’s mansion was not completed until 1727 – just in time for its owner’s fall. But one room that was finished early on was the ‘spacious hall’ for ‘great entertainments’, where the tsar – who delighted in his small-roomed, low-ceilinged Summer Palace – was obliged to hold receptions and celebrations. When, in 1710, Romodanovksy commanded dwarfs from across Russia to attend the marriage of the Royal Dwarf, Yakim Volkov, it was celebrated in the Menshikov Palace. The seventy dwarfs who attended were placed at miniature tables in the hall, overlooked by the court guests, who much enjoyed watching them get drunk.
Menshikov’s palace was used for another marriage that autumn: the negotiated union of Peter’s niece, Tsar Ivan’s daughter, Anna Ivanova, to Frederick William, Duke of Courland. This time, the dwarfs played a more active role in the entertainment. In the days before the marriage, two of them drove about the city issuing invitations. On the wedding day, the smallest dwarf acted as Master of Ceremonies, leading the bride and groom to the celebrations. At the dinner, a huge pie was served from which two female dwarfs sprung, attired in the latest French fashion, to sing, dance and recite verse. Female guests were compelled to drink to excess, but it was the groom who came off worst. Less than a month after the wedding, he died on the road to Courland – quite possibly from alcohol poisoning.
The tsar used drink in order to intimidate. The Danish envoy, Just Juel, attempting to escape the punishment of downing one and a half litres of vodka from the notorious Great Eagle, hid in the rigging of a tall ship, only to find the tsar – Eagle between his teeth, and his pockets stuffed with bottles – scrambli
ng up the ratlines after him.37 Juel expressed scant respect for Peter’s attempts at refinement, recording that his rabble ‘shrieked, bellowed, guffawed, puked, spat’ as they pelted handfuls of food at one another in a greasy dining-room brawl.38
In 1711, another important arranged marriage took place. This time it was between the indolent tsarevich Alexei – the son Peter despised – and the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Brunswick-Lüneburg who imported many German names and habits into the Romanov court: the Chief Steward became the Ober-Gofmeister, and the powerful Groom of the Chamber became a Kamer-Junker. German was employed at court – Peter was pretty adept, and ‘even the illiterate Menshikov spoke and understood’ the language. Of Peter’s bosom companion, Catherine, the Frenchman François Villebois observed that she ‘spoke fluently’ in four languages, ‘namely Russian, German, Swedish and Polish and to those it may be added that she understood some French’.39
It was only after the victory at Poltava that Catherine was brought to Petersburg from Preobrazhenskoe to live permanently with the tsar. But her life in the new capital was upset in 1711 when Peter left on a campaign against the Turks. Catherine accompanied him, leaving their children in the care of Menshikov and his wife, Daria. In The Maid of Marienburg – a seventeenth-century play of less-than-modest literary merit – a character suggests that ‘Heaven gave to Catherine the charms of a fine person, wit and vivacity, a feeling heart and masculine understanding.’40 When, in July 1711, the Russian Army was surrounded by Turkish forces on the River Pruth in Moldavia, it was rumoured that the seductive and determined Catherine met the commander of the Turkish forces and sued for peace.41 Robust and gutsy, she was a worthy match for Peter.
In February 1712, dressed in the uniform of a rear admiral, the tsar publicly married his beloved in a simple ceremony at the Menshikov Palace. Two of their children – Anna Petrovna, aged four, and Elizabeth, hardly old enough to walk – briefly carried their mother’s bridal train. Peter and Catherine sat at a table shaped like a crown, and Charles Whitworth, England’s ‘Ambassador Extraordinary’ to Russia, observed that the ‘most pleasant’ aspect of this nuptial was that ‘no one was forced to drink to excess’. Catherine, a commoner and a foreigner, was now married to the Tsar of Russia, whose first wife, Evdokia, still lived, incarcerated in the convent at Suzdal, then moved to a more remote nunnery on the shores of Lake Ladoga. The union Peter made with his second wife was not a marriage designed to stabilise and strengthen the state, but a declaration of earthy, passionate love.42 As Peter’s character observes in The Maid of Marienburg, ‘Happy is the Prince who has discovered a woman’s mind that loves not the Prince in the man – but who loves the man in the Prince.’43
People persisted in their reluctance to settle in St Petersburg. Upper-class Russians complained that the upstart city was 700 kilometres from their favourite merchants in Moscow, and from their comfortable estates in the rolling countryside around the old capital. Peter threatened the Muscovite nobility with the alternative of moving to his city or losing their titles. Not surprisingly, they relocated and the merchants followed. But they grumbled. Around Petersburg not much could be grown in soil that was wet and cold – turnips, white cabbage and cucumbers were possible, but little else.44 There were mushrooms in the woods and some game and fish, but otherwise food had to be brought in by sledge in the winter and carried by lake and river during the summer. If settlers found themselves travelling through a fen as they neared their destination, the city itself was no less boggy. Any seemingly dry ground for a kitchen garden proved impractical for digging, as the water came in ‘at a two foot depth’.45’
Under such conditions, it is not surprising that people needed to be coerced to settle. In late 1712, Peter sent for more merchants and craftsmen to serve the city, to which he had summoned another thousand of the best noble families. When, in 1714, he ordered yet another thousand of the wealthiest families to come, some spent 60 per cent of their savings on what was clearly a costly move.46 With losses of such an order, potential settlers showed continued reluctance to relocate, forcing Peter to declare that if ‘Russians of the old stamp’ had not moved to his city by 1725, they would have their houses demolished and would be forced to live in huts in the marshes of the undeveloped parts of Vasilevsky Island. Meanwhile, the all-important workers appeared similarly unenthusiastic. In 1712 and 1714, one-third of the conscripted workforce simply did not show up.47 It was not until 1717 that Prince Cherkassy, Head of the Chancellery of Urban Affairs, suggested to Peter that forced labour was less efficient, and ultimately more costly, than hired labour.
Arriving in St Petersburg in 1714, Friedrich Weber – the Hanoverian representative to Russia – ‘was surprised to find instead of a regular city as I expected, a heap of villages linked together, like some plantation in the West Indies’.48 Certainly, many visitors from Europe would have had the impression of arriving in a colonial capital, with its bizarre reinvention or parody of the occupying culture. By contrast, when John Bell arrived in Petersburg in July 1715 to join an embassy that Peter was sending to Persia, he found the capital ‘well peopled, and had not the appearance of a city so lately founded’. These two contradictory impressions combine to give a just picture of the city’s erratic early development. Kilns and furnaces were baking bricks at an incredible rate. However, the soundness of much construction work was compromised by poor mortar and the cavalier habit of working through the cold winters. Repairs to buildings lately finished were necessary immediately. Though encircled and congested by the foul camps of its ill-treated workforce, a social life and a season began to establish themselves in a capital which – after a decade of construction – took on some semblance of grace. Masquerades and musical evenings were enjoyed in the grander residences. Peter’s sister, the amateur playwright tsarevna Natalya Alekseevna, gave Weber the chance to attend the kind of European-style entertainment to which the fledgling court aspired. After the obligatory vodka, guests sat down to a first course consisting of ‘hams, sausages, jelly-broth, and divers sorts of meat dressed with oil of olives, onions and garlic’. After a good hour, ‘the soups, roast meat, and other hot victuals, which make up the second course’ were served, followed by dessert. The ‘beauties of Petersburg’ were desperate to adopt French fashion, and Weber noted that they struggled awkwardly with their hoop-petticoats. But it was their painted or decayed black teeth that gave them away – ‘sufficient proof, that they had not yet weaned themselves from that notion so fast riveted in the minds of the old Russians, that white teeth only became blackamoors and monkeys’.49
In the year in which the Hanoverian representative arrived, Peter came sailing up the Neva in triumph, having beaten the Swedish fleet at Hangö, in July 1714. In that summer, as the Venetian polymath and anglophile Francesco Algarotti later wrote, to the English courtier Lord Hervey, the tsar ‘really beheld the completion of his works’.50 The house-count tallied 34,550,51 but as the city expanded on various islands and on either bank, the Neva delta became more problematic. Well over a kilometre across at its widest point, the major branch of the river separated the different quarters of the city at a time when only the small waterways were spanned by fixed bridges. The sole method of crossing the Bolshaya Neva was by one of the twenty state-controlled ferry boats, which charged a modest two to four kopeks52 and promised a dangerous voyage in the turbulence of spring thaws and autumn floods. Furthermore, Peter – who would only allow the nobility to arrive at court by barge – wanted his subjects to sail. From 1718 he provided the boats on which they could learn. New arrivals from land-locked Moscow felt much intimidated when they were forced to undertake Sunday excursions in the gulf, and were irate when they were punished for missing two Sundays in a single month. Members of the highest ranks were expected to maintain their own vessels and to participate in naval celebrations. When the river was frozen, special craft were built for skating or sail-boating across the ice.53 Indeed, communication in the city, as throughout the region, was much impro
ved by cold weather, when boggy roads hardened to enable carts and baggage trains to travel without floundering in the mud. In summer months, sandbars at the mouth of the Neva meant that ships drawing above seven feet of water were unable to dock. The deep-water port at Kronstadt provided one solution. Another was the discharging of cargo from ships anchored in the bay, which resulted in a congestion of small craft and flat-bottomed lighters.
Such inconveniences, coupled with the annual blockade by the winter freeze, made it clear why the city was struggling for credibility. Crazy Peter misruled his mock-court in a capital that seemed, to many practical people, to be nothing but a mock-port. To them, St Petersburg was an ongoing and inconvenient prank, played out in the wilds of the Ingrian marshes. The river was, however, the city’s raison d’être and took on a sacred significance. An important annual celebration was the Consecration of the Waters, which took place at Epiphany. Headed by the tsar, the Preobrazhensky Guard marched to the middle of the frozen river, where they formed a square and watched as a hole was cut, through ice more than half a metre thick, to the river below. An arched shrine was constructed out of cut blocks of ice, as the bells of St Petersburg pealed and priests processed to the impromptu shrine, celebrated Mass and consecrated the water flowing beneath. Cannon fired, muskets discharged, and mothers brought their babies to be baptised. Those who survived the freezing water were promised a blessed life. When the priests and the guards withdrew, the people – including the sick and the lame – flocked to the opening and filled buckets and cups with the restorative water, which would not be seen again until May.
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