St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  Some ten days after the Consecration of the Waters in 1715 there was the burlesque wedding of Nikita Zotov, an eighty-four-year-old drunkard and ex-tutor to the tsar, who occupied the throne of ‘Prince Pope’ in Peter’s All-Drunken Assembly. His bride was a ‘buxom widow of 34’. The wedding procession was led by ‘Mock-tsar’ Romodanovsky, who reclined in a sledge attended by four bears on their hind legs, which were prodded and goaded to make them roar. As they processed towards the fort, snare-drums battered out a welcome. Everyone in the procession was encouraged to make a noise, and wild animals roaming close by began to bellow. A Scot, Peter Henry Bruce, recorded that the functionaries appointed to welcome the company ‘were four of the greatest stammerers in the kingdom; the four running footmen were the most unwieldy, gouty fat men that could be found; the bride-men, stewards, and waiters were very old . . . and the priest that joined them in marriage was upwards of one hundred years old’ and blind. The grotesquery continued for ten days, as the revellers progressed from house to house, drowned in the bacchanalia of past ways. There were also lavish and anarchic festivities in November 1715 for the birth of Catherine and Peter’s child, Peter Petrovich. Again, dwarfs were an important part of the entertainment. On the table where the men sat, a huge pie was placed. A ‘well-shaped woman dwarf’ emerged ‘stark-naked, except’ for ‘her head-dress and some ornaments of red ribbons’. She made a speech and filled her audience’s glasses from wine bottles stashed inside the pie. Before the ladies, on their tables, a naked male dwarf performed a similar service. There were toasts and fireworks, and everyone ended up paraiytically drunk.54

  In the very month that Peter Petrovich was born, the tsar began manoeuvring against the son he had had with Evdokia Lopukhina, the tsarevich Alexei. Bruce had met the young man in Moscow and found him ‘slovenly’ and surrounded by ‘debauched ignorant priests’, who – if he mounted the throne – would help him ‘restore Russia to its former state’. Peter wrote in anger to his son, who refused to join the military effort against Sweden asking, Who can I leave my country to, when I die? ‘To a man, who like the slothful servant, hides his talent in the earth . . . You do not make the least endeavours, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy at home.’55 Having set out his concerns, Peter waited a little longer to see if the tsarevich would mend his ways. ‘If not, I will have you know that I will deprive you of the succession.’ Alexei’s drinking intensified and, when his father ordered him to join a monastery, he fled to Europe.

  In September 1715, the Petersburg flood waters rose so high that a two-masted ship was swept against a house and beached on a boggy street as the waters receded. Cattle were drowned, people were lost and fortifications, built at a high human cost, were washed away. Despite such setbacks, the following month Peter sent out an order across Russia for 12,000 more families to settle in his capital.56 During 1716, there were grandiose plans for enlarging the areas close to the Peter and Paul Fortress – on Petersburg Island to the north, on the tip of Vasilevsky Island to the south-west and around the Admiralty on the opposite bank of the river. These appear on a map of the city produced in Nuremberg in 1720, based on a German original made two years earlier. While the plan is a reasonably accurate record of the state of building around the Admiralty and near the Fortress, the gridding of marshy Vasilevsky Island was as much a fantasy as the insert drawing of the lighthouse fort of Kronstadt,57 which appears like something cooked up by Jules Verne.

  In 1717, Le Blond produced a more sophisticated and typically French plan for Vasilevsky Island. Owing much to the fort designs of Vauban and the gardens of Le Nôtre, it placed the imperial palace at its heart. Both the layout of Versailles and Le Blond’s scheme for Petersburg would inspire his compatriot, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, in his planning of the new American capital, Washington DC – although Le Blond’s scheme remained unrealised.

  I.e Blond’s plan for St Petersburg.

  Several edicts, aimed at making the city safer, warned residents not to allow livestock to wander the streets, unless accompanied by a herdsman. Nonetheless, packs of marauding wolves, thirty to forty strong, were seen in broad daylight. In 1715, a woman was devoured by a pack within sight of Prince Menshikov’s palace. A sentry guarding the Foundry on the south bank was attacked and, when another soldier went to his aid, he was mauled and torn to pieces.

  The transformation of a frontier settlement into a Dutch-style baroque city was accelerated by the 1714 ban on construction in wood in certain sectors.58 Wattle-and-daub walls raised on stone foundations and roofed with tiles became the norm for humbler dwellings, while stone was used for the houses of the rich. A countrywide shortage of masons prompted a ban on building in stone elsewhere in Russia and – as the material was scarce in the marshy environs of St Petersburg – people coming to the city by sea or land were required to bring stone with them, as a contribution to the construction. The duty levied from 1714 required three stones of no less than two kilos each, from every cart arriving in the city. Ships, depending on their size, were obliged to deposit between ten and thirty stones.

  The scale, style and ambition of a house were determined by the social rank of its owner. Humble taxpayers lived in one-storey houses. Those who were better off added dormer windows in the roof. Le Blond designed two-storey mansions with dormer windows and œils-de-bœuf for the elite.59 However, in the poorer quarters, wooden houses were crammed so close together that a fire breaking out in one would easily ignite its neighbour and rapidly fan into a conflagration. When a spark was spotted, watchmen rang bells and drummers circulated, beating the alarm. Carpenters and soldiers of all ranks hastened to the blaze and isolated the fire by pulling down adjacent houses. When in residence, Peter joined the soldiers and workmen, tackling the blaze, hatchet in hand.60

  The settlement’s main tap-house stood close to the bridge connecting the Peter and Paul Fortress with Petersburg Island. Owned by the tsar, it sold wine, beer, spirits, tobacco and cards. The beer brewed there was too strong to be thirst-quenching and Weber found the hygiene wanting. Beer stood in an open tub and people ladled it into their mouths, some running down their dirty beards and back into the tub. If day-labourers were short of money, they would pawn some item of clothing, which was then hung around the brim of the vat – often dipping into the liquid, sometimes tumbling in – until, at the end of their day, the workmen returned with their wages to redeem their sodden rags.61

  Near the tsar’s tap-house and to the north-west of the wooden Trinity Church was the Great Market, a vast square timber building with four gates leading to an interior yard. Around this space ran two levels of shops, with galleries to protect customers from snow and rain.62 On the eastern edge of the nearby Tartar quarter was the Rag Fair, a crowded and dangerous flea-market:

  A certain officer of the Grenadier Guards, who is German, once returned from that Place without either hat or peruque, and the very same day a woman of fashion had the like misfortune in losing her head-dress there. Two Tartars on horseback had met the said two persons at different places, and, whipping off their respective head-ornaments with great agility, left them exposed to the laughter of the mob, and even within their sight offered their spoil to sale.63

  The centre of early St Petersburg showing the Tartar Market.

  To the south of the Tartar quarter, near the banks of the Neva, was the new slaughter house, and a market where pots and wooden utensils, lentils, oatmeal and the wheat and rye used for making bread were to be found.64 Supplying the city with sufficient flour was a problem that would not be solved until the reign of Catherine II. Indeed, shortages of food in the city led to the implementation of price controls in April 1722, giving way to a more sophisticated regulation of profits the following year. Peter curbed abuses in the cereal markets and – in one of his last acts before his death in January 1725 – forced local producers to bring their goods to market early and sell to the public in small quantities at the price posted each morning. Only after midday could t
hey negotiate wholesale prices with retailers. Flour was thenceforth sold by weight rather than volume, and fluctuations in price were monitored in order to control the cost of baked goods. Cheats were publicly flogged by a knout and their goods were confiscated and donated to the hospital.65 Travelling along one of the main thoroughfares of the city in 1726, the French traveller Aubry de la Mottraye saw the three heads of Victualling Commissaries impaled on stakes. Guilty of mis-administration, they were beheaded after a public flogging with the knout, the standard punishment in Russia at that time. Not unlike a cat-o’-nine-tails, the knout had whip ends that were produced from strips of ass’s skin boiled in vinegar and mare’s milk. The guilty were led onto a wooden scaffold, where their feet were fastened to the ground. Men were stripped to the waist, and women to their petticoats. First one shoulder was lashed, then the other. With a moderate punishment, de la Mottraye reported that there was ‘an abundance of blood’ streaming from the victim’s back. With a severe penalty, one saw ‘small pieces of his flesh flying out’. If it was ‘ordered to the utmost rigour, it becomes generally mortal’. The executioner strikes the criminal on his sides ‘under the ribs and cuts the flesh to the very bowels.’66

  As a stimulus and strategy for embellishing St Petersburg, the journeys abroad made by the tsar in 1712-13 and 1716-17 were vital. The timing of the earlier trip suggests that there was an element of swagger in the enterprise. Russia was perceived as a new and major force in the European balance of power, following its triumph at Poltava. Certainly the iconography associated with the tsar changed after that victory – the god’s face in The Triumph of Mars, painted on the ceiling of the Menshikov Palace, resembled Peter’s face.67 Peter now travelled to Europe not as a humble shipwright, but as a powerful monarch seeking glorification through art and science. He visited Dresden and Vienna. He saw Versailles. He studied the declaration of regal power manifest in the grandiose landscaping of palace gardens.

  The French king Louis XIV, like Peter, had been scarred by violence when he was a child. As a result, he decided to quit his capital and establish a new one. Less radically than Peter, he chose a site only fifteen kilometres from Paris, at Versailles. Finished in 1682 after fourteen years of construction, it was the jewel in the French crown, the envy of the civilised world. The impact of its geometrical terraces, vast walks, pools and fountains was prodigious. It was achieved – as St Petersburg would be – with an enormous workforce at a sizeable human cost. The logistics were not as challenging as those at the mouth of the Neva, but workers at Versailles likewise lived and laboured in miserable conditions, and malaria claimed many victims. However, while Louis XIV built securely on the bedrock of European tradition, in Russia Peter effected a stylistic volte-face. While the method of St Petersburg’s construction was unreservedly Russian, the emerging rectilinear and geometric pattern of Peter’s city was Western.

  In Paris, Peter bought Gobelin tapestries and invited some of the weavers to settle in his capital. He was painted by the French portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud.68 Pictures were purchased – mainly Dutch works by painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck, Jan Steen – along with the first of many Rembrandts acquired by Russian monarchs, David’s Farewell to Jonathan. Peter also collected painters such as the Frenchman Louis Caravaque, who settled in St Petersburg in 1716 and stayed until his death in 1754. The purchasing of Western art, and the presence of European painters and craftsmen, had lasting repercussions for the development of Russian culture. As with the study of navigation, Peter also sent Russian painters abroad to learn.69 The ‘founder of Russian portraiture’, Ivan Nikitin, was among the first to spend a few years abroad and return to deflect the course of Russian painting from the icon and the stylised portrait, or parsuna, towards a manner reflecting the trends and movements of European art.70

  Peter was an eighteenth-century Citizen Kane, ransacking western Europe for treasures to fill his newly established Xanadu. His curiosity knew no bounds. Book-buying played an important part in these extended shopping trips. Peter’s library – a large proportion of which was devoted to architecture, gardening and shipbuilding – included an edition of Vitruvius’s De architectura (The Ten Books on Architecture), the only major surviving work on the subject dating from classical antiquity.71 In Holland, Peter purchased a large collection of natural specimens from Albertus Seba, an apothecary in Amsterdam, along with the Ruysch collection, which he had first seen in 1697. In Calais, he engaged a man called Nicolas Bourgeois, who stood well over two metres tall. Plagued by terrible headaches, Bourgeois died in Petersburg, where his body was dissected.72 As de la Mottraye recorded when he saw the remains in 1726, Bourgeois had a ‘very big heart and large stomach and his privy part was very small’.73 Today, Bourgeois’s impressive skeleton is standing on exhibition in the Kunstkammer.

  While many people were impressed by the Russians in Europe, the precocious ten-year-old Markgravine Wilhelmina of Bayreuth gave a scathing account of Catherine in Berlin in 1718:

  It’s enough to look at her to see her humble origins. Her tasteless dress seems to have been bought at a junk dealer’s; it is old-fashioned and covered with silver and dirt. A dozen orders are pinned on her and the same number of small icons and medallions with relics; all these jingle when she walks so that you have the impression that you are being approached by a pack mule.74

  Not content just to wage war on nature by building on the banks of the Neva, Peter also set about creating a constellation of palaces around his capital: Oranienbaum for Menshikov; Tsarskoe Selo for his second wife, Catherine; Strelna for his daughter, Elizabeth; and Peterhof for himself. In engravings, Oranienbaum appears bombastic, as if clamouring for attention – effects altogether suited to its first owner, the ostentatious nouveau-riche ‘prince pie-seller’. But despite being the work of architects sprung from conflicting traditions – the Italian, Giovanni Fontana, and the north German, Gottfried Schädel – the result is, in fact, harmonious and sober. Seen from the sea side, Oranienbaum stands a commanding three storeys high, with extensive semioval wings on either side. A grand staircase descends to the formal French garden and a small canal leads to the harbour on the Gulf of Finland. Built on a bank, the façade turned inland presents a more modest single storey in which most rooms were small, but richly furnished.

  In May 1710, during that more secure time after Poltava, the tsar chose a site and began to plan his palace at Peterhof. The modest main building, which was begun in 1714, stood on a hill twenty metres high, nearly a kilometre from the coast. It comprised a ground floor destined for servants and a first floor, with sweeping views of the Gulf of Finland, for the tsar’s family – Kronstadt to the left and Petersburg to the right. In terms of the difficulty of building, it was St Petersburg all over again. Much of the land had to be drained, layers of clay removed and earth and fertilisers imported by barge. Tens of thousands of maples, lindens, chestnuts, fruit trees and bushes were lugged and ferried from Europe. The Grand Cascade, a magnificent complex of fountains, was constructed under the supervision of Russia’s first hydraulic engineer, Vasily Tuvulkov, who used more than 4,000 sappers to construct the intricate canalisation which fed the cascade from springs on the Ropsha hills, more than twenty kilometres away. The workers, like those who constructed the capital, lived in appalling conditions, ate miserable food and were prey to steamy heat, bitter cold and disease. Many died onsite.

  Peter valued the understated power of northern baroque architecture complemented by magisterial gardens. He possessed an album of views of Versailles and, at Peterhof, he ambitiously ordered Le Blond to make the park finer ‘than the French King’s’. Indeed, so impressed had Peter been by Versailles that he gave the pavilions at Peterhof French – rather than German- names: Marly, Monplaisir and Hermitage. As with his concept for the capital, Le Blond devised an imperial scheme, a stage for the spectacle of sovereignty.75 His garden subdued nature by subordinating it to his artistry and declared Peter’s ambition, refinement and power. To this end, Le Blond e
stablished nineteen specialised workshops filled with master craftsmen, whom he brought with him from France, but he died of smallpox in the winter of 1719, two years before the first phase of building was complete. Peterhof’s fountains, terraces, grottoes and cascades were more than a match for Versailles – an expression of Peter’s triumph over the northern marshes, an elegant vindication of his folly.76 By importing classical statuary, the Russian tsar accessed a new fund of mythology and a new order of learning. However, by allowing Versailles to influence the gardens at Peterhof, the tsar turned away from the republican restraint of the Dutch style, towards the assertion of the kind of power associated with France and its Sun King. Eluding progressive enlightenment, Peter was moving forward and yet stepping backwards. The ensemble was a declaration of a new scale of power, an attempt to create an earthly paradise, even though Peterhof became just another ordered setting for wild release. The Hanoverian representative, Friedrich Weber, was invited to a lunch at which he and the other guests were ‘so plied with tokay wine . . . that at our breaking up, we were hardly able to stand’. Nevertheless, the guests were each obliged to empty another quart bowl offered by Catherine, ‘whereupon we quite lost our senses, and were in that pickle carried off to sleep, some in the garden, others in the wood, and the rest here and there on the ground’. The drunken company was, at length, woken by the tsar, who gave seven of them hatchets and led them to a wood, through which he marked out a 100-metre passage leading to the sea. Peter began to clear the bracken at once, but his hungover workforce ‘found so unusual a drudgery very hard for people, who had not half recovered their senses’. They struggled as best they could, only to be rewarded at supper by ‘such another dose of liquor as sent us senseless to bed’. After an hour and a half, they were roused to drink the night away until, at breakfast, they were welcomed with large cups of brandy and invited to take the air on a hill near the palace.77