St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  At Peterhof, as with Oranienbaum, a small canal ferried visitors to a protected harbour in which a boat would be waiting to return them to Petersburg. At the base of the Grand Cascade, two diagonal avenues spread out towards the pavilions of Monplaisir – crammed with newly acquired paintings – and the Hermitage, which took the overflow. During the next 200 years Peterhof was embellished by the architects who made St Petersburg great: Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Andrei Voronikhin and Giacomo Quarenghi. The ultimate absurdity is that the palace was only finally completed in the early twentieth century – just in time for there to be no royal family left to occupy it. To heap tragedy on the oddness of such timing, two decades later, Peterhof was occupied by Hitler’s troops for twenty-seven months. They wrecked the interior, destroyed the fountains and statues and chopped down some 14,000 maples, lindens, chestnuts and fruit trees – many of which had been imported from Germany at enormous cost and effort by Peter the Great. As a result, in 1944 Peterhof became Petrodvorets, in order to obliterate the German association. Today, while the park appears much as it did at the end of Peter’s reign, the palace has been restored to reflect later embellishments.

  Peterhof: the Marly Pavilion after the Nazi occupation and restored since the war.

  A decree of 1714 established compulsory education for the children of the nobility, government clerks and lesser officials. Children between the ages of ten and fifteen were to be taught mathematics and geometry. Foreigners were employed as tutors, and the offspring of the upper classes soon became familiar with German and French. But the quality of the education varied enormously. People who had been actors, ualets-de-cbambre and hairdressers passed themselves off as teachers – the dazzle of a foreigner was sufficient to ensure that no references were checked.78

  Despite the ongoing problem of alcoholism, which blurred Weber’s visit to Peterhof, there were attempts to order and control behaviour. The first Russian book of etiquette was published in 1717. Originally with a print run of 100 copies, this guide book prepared young men for polite society and instructed the opposite sex in the ways of modesty and chastity. It proved so popular that 600 copies were printed two years later, and 1,200 more in 1723. For the young men, conversation – particularly in a foreign tongue – along with fencing and horseriding were de rigueur.79’ Ignoring the example set by the tsarina, young women were expected to behave demurely and to avoid frivolity and pranks. Dancing was encouraged, to promote genteel interaction between the sexes and develop finesse in control of the body. At table, diners were to refrain from licking their fingers or picking their teeth with a knife, and using the back of the hand was prohibited when wiping the mouth. Napkins appeared, to replace the long beards once used.80

  In the new Europeanised milieu, women were coaxed from the obscurity of their homes. This occurred through the assemblée, an informal gathering at which people from the upper echelons of society – from the tsar, down to master craftsmen and rich merchants – would meet and converse. Assemblée started at four in the afternoon and did not continue beyond ten in the evening. There were games of chess, cards and elegant European dances. Fashionable women were squeezed into corsets in order to maximise the allure of their new, low-cut gowns. As this fashion spread beyond St Petersburg, the conservative Daria Golitsyna complained that she was ‘reduced to showing my hair, arms and uncovered bosom to all of Moscow!’81 Naturally drawn to more raucous and riotous entertainments, Peter and Catherine nonetheless danced on at assemblées when others collapsed in exhaustion.82

  For other sections of the population, enjoyments such as drinking and gambling came under the control of the Police Chancellery, set up in 1718 in a determined attempt to control unruly behaviour. Despite the example of Peter’s All-Drunken Assembly, riotousness and lewdness in the capital were regulated. The tsar instructed the police to close all ‘suspicious houses’ and ‘obscene establishments’. Prostitutes were banned from mixing with the army, and those who disobeyed were driven naked from the capital.83 At festive times, people were drawn to popular entertainments by quick-witted barkers, who sat them down on rough wooden benches in front of makeshift booths to gawp at puppets enacting old Russian folk tales.84 On the south bank of the Neva, in the fields beyond the settlement, pugilism was tolerated – even promoted – by the authorities. It was seen not only as a social safety-valve, but also as a way of making ‘better soldiers’. Baths, or banya, were a source of relaxation for the Russians and a curiosity to foreigners. After a beating with birch branches, which stimulates ‘the circulation of the fluids, gives elasticity to the organs, and animates the passions’, bathers sweated out the grime of their rough life in a steamhouse, before plunging into the chilly waters of the river. Weber was astonished ‘to see not only the men, but also the women unmarried as well as married . . . running about . . . stark naked without any sort of shame’.85

  The pan-Russian census of 1719 revealed that, on Petersburg Island, nearly one-fifth of the inhabitants were under sixteen. This was the first generation born in the newly created city. Among them were orphans, many of whom were taken on as servants. Children as young as ten were purchased from those sheltering them, and were lucky to be offered some kind of employment, as begging was banned in the capital. Anyone caught giving alms to the poor received a five-rouble fine. Life was undoubtedly tough for those not born into privilege, and even as St Petersburg was enjoying its first flush of splendour, the seeds of later revolt were being sown. Ivan Pososhkov was the enterprising son of a silversmith who worked his way up the social ladder, all the while observing and considering the realities of life in Russia. The upshot was his sociological study, On Poverty and Wealth, written in 1724 and intended for the tsar. In the tract, Pososhkov declared that the ‘tsardom is wealthy when all the people are wealthy according to their own standards’ – in other words, society is safe and sound when members at every level prosper. Disparaging excess and indifference, Pososhkov criticised tax evasion, the selling of shoddy goods, the superstitions of the clergy, corruption at the court and the illiteracy of peasants. He suggested that, for ‘the sake of national preservation, both monks and merchants should be kept away from excessive drinking and luxurious life’, and that it would ‘be desirable to introduce among merchants the idea that they should aid and not ruin one another’.86 Such ‘worldly asceticism’ proved unacceptable to the more rapacious authorities.87 Pososhkov was arrested soon after Peter’s death and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he died in 1726. On Poverty and Wealth remained unpublished until 1842, when its observations impressed the intelligentsia of a generation who, having witnessed the initial tremors of revolt, were taking the first steps towards priming the country for revolution.

  Nevertheless, the new Police Chancellery was, in part, created to control some of the very abuses identified by Pososhkov. Set up under the supervision of a Portuguese sailor, Anton de Veira, whom Peter had met in Amsterdam, the under-resourced office had wide responsibilities. It controlled crime prevention and law enforcement, fire-fighting, waste-disposal, street upkeep and canal maintenance, as well as the promotion of hygiene and the control of disease.88 It was, in fact, the task of the Police Chancellery to transform a wild frontier town into an orderly court city. In 1721, a regular rubbish collection was implemented, with carters and vagrants detailed to gather refuse placed outside houses. Hygiene improved. Streets were cleared of unattended cattle. Dirty, smelly market stalls stitched together out of old rags were replaced by new canvas constructions. House owners were expected to make a contribution to the environment by planting trees and shoring up their portion of the embankment, if they fronted a river. Peter ordered 600 street lights to be hung, so that his city was becoming a tolerable place in which to live – but at a cost. It was estimated that the Petersburg Chancellery of Urban Affairs was spending nearly 5 per cent of Russian state revenue.89

  For serious criminal offences, the tsar often meted out the punishments himself. When Peter returned from sixt
een months in Europe in October 1717, the English writer John Mottley recorded that he ‘found the complaints of his people very high against the Ministers with whom he entrusted the government’. The tsar spent the rest of the year ‘in redressing, with indefatigable application, the great disorders committed in the state and in punishing the authors of them’. He was in the Senate every morning at four o’clock, hearing and examining cases. But these were complex, and an extraordinary Court of Justice was established and administered by officers of the guards. ‘So absolute was the power of the tsar,’ Mottley suggested, ‘that he obliged the members of a venerable Senate, composed of the heads of the greatest families in Russia, to appear before a lieutenant as their judge’.90 To combat malevolent court intrigues, the tsar had his own special agents. Yuri Shakhavskoy was awarded the Order of Judas in Peter’s mock-court as his family had, once upon a time, betrayed the Romanovs. Given that legacy, it was amusing that he was appointed as Peter’s informer. Shakhavskoy spied on senior officials and plied his suspects with drink. He taunted them and broke them, thus earning himself the title of Peter’s Chief Executioner.91

  In 1718, Peter lured his son, the tsarevich Alexei, back from exile and promptly imprisoned him in the Peter and Paul Fortress. During his interrogation by torture, the tsar, who made quite a hobby of pulling teeth, personally tore off his son’s nails. A ‘confession’ was extracted, which reads like a prototype of those presented in the Stalinist show trials of the mid-twentieth century:

  . . . my inclinations run solely upon bigotry, idleness, frequenting priests and monks and drinking with them . . . by degrees I came to abhor not only my father’s military affairs and his other actions, but even his very person . . . unwilling to imitate my father in anything, I endeavoured to obtain the succession by any other method whatsoever than what was fair.92

  While the authorities were unanimous in finding ‘that the tsarevich Alexei Petrovich deserves death for his crimes’,93 the tsar wanted to leave nothing to chance. Peter Henry Bruce, the tsar’s Scottish artillery commander, was present at the Fortress on the afternoon of 7 July 1718 when ‘his majesty, attended by all the senators and bishops’ visited the apartment in the fort where Alexei was being kept prisoner. The ‘violent passions of his mind . . . had thrown the tsarevich into an apoplectic fit’. Three messengers had been despatched to the palace to inform Peter that Alexei begged to see his father and seek forgiveness. Peter arrived, reiterated the tsarevich’s crimes, forgave and blessed him and then departed. After that, Marshall Weyde of the Russian Army sent Bruce on an errand to ‘Mr Bear, the druggist, whose shop was hard by’. Bear’s dispensary was smart and well stocked, its shelves lined with pots of fine Chinese porcelain.94 When Bruce handed Weyde’s message to the chemist, the man ‘turned quite pale’. A little while later, the marshal arrived to collect a covered silver cup, which he carried into the prince’s apartments, ‘staggering all the way.. . like one drunk’. Shortly afterwards, a messenger was sent to inform the tsar that the prince, ‘after great agonies, expired at five o’clock in the afternoon’. Bruce ended his eyewitness account with the ominous coda: ‘few believed’ that Alexei ‘died a natural death, but it was dangerous for people to speak as they thought’.95 Such danger would haunt St Petersburg for three centuries.

  Apart from being the offspring of Peter’s detested first wife, Evdokia, Alexei’s biggest error had been his desire to return the court to Moscow and to the old style of government. Moscow was still an important administrative centre, and the relocation of the government to the new capital was only slowly realised. Moscow was also much larger and continued to play a crucial role in Russian ceremonies and pageants. Coronations took place in its Kremlin until the Revolution. Yet in the early eighteenth century the old capital was a jumble of monasteries, taverns and dense, winding streets.96 To improve its situation, Peter began to impose some of the guidelines that governed building in St Petersburg, and Moscow thus benefited from initiatives in the new capital. Slowly the ‘post-Byzantine Mannerism’ of Moscow’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architecture was replaced by the Russian ‘imperial’ style, which took its lead from northern European baroque. St Petersburg, however, remained the centre of Westernisation, a place where high winds carried the groans of dying Russian labourers and the lilt of European minuets.

  When John Bell returned to Peter’s city in December 1718 after a three-year absence, he found it much changed. During the previous year, 6,000 wooden houses had been built on the outskirts – ‘beam upon beam, rough without, and smoothed within by the help of a hatchet’, roofs being constructed with thin strips of fir laid on flammable birch bark or topped with turf.97 Shipbuilding had progressed astoundingly, with thirty ships of war and 300 galleys completed. Necessary but disagreeable abattoirs at the mouth of the Moika River were concealed by false residences with fake windows – the first instance of a kind of deception, or ‘Potemkinisation’ – that was to become so familiar in Russia and the Soviet Union. By 1720 there were about 60,000 houses, including ever more ‘magnificent palaces’. Weber noted that conditions had changed so much since his arrival in 1714 that a visitor would ‘think himself in the midst of London or Paris’.98 Much the grandest project at this time was the designing of the Kunstkammer, to house the anatomical collections purchased in Europe and the minerals and fossils found in Siberia. The tsar’s private midnight visit to a Dresden cabinet of curiosities made a big impression on him, and a Dresden-born architect, Georg Mattarnovy, began designs for Petersburg’s own Kunstkammer. Like Schliitter and Le Blond, Mattarnovy died after a short time in the Russian capital and the building was developed by another German, Nicolas Herbel, by the Russian, Mikhail Zemtsov and by the Italian, Gaetano Chiaveri, who produced elaborate ideas for the tower dividing the immense two-winged building, which was not finished until 1727.99

  The foundation of schools and academies, along with the construction of buildings to house such august bodies, accelerated towards the end of Peter’s life. The Engineers School was founded in 1719, the Artillery Laboratory in 1721. A decree of 28 January 1724 announced the Academy of Sciences. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had urged the tsar to establish such an institution, in order to train men to carry out God’s will that ‘science should encompass the globe’.100 The Academy of Sciences comprised three departments: mathematics, physics and the humanities. It was to be run by researchers and teachers who would discuss learned issues, instruct pupils and be responsible for assembling a library. It would open officially on 2 November 1725 – ten months after Peter’s death.

  In 1718, Peter created the first three administrative colleges: War, Foreign Affairs and the Admiralty. By 1722, there were eight more.101 Trezzini won the competition for the building in which to house the colleges – a 500-metre-long edifice that owed much to the architect’s experience of Copenhagen. Designed by 17Z4, the exterior was finished eight years later. The interior was completed in 1742, by the first Russian architect to qualify in that profession, Mikhail Zemtsov, who had been sent by the tsar to study in Stockholm and whose Petersburg practice trained the first generation of Russian architects.102

  Of course Peter interfered in the day-to-day running of the colleges and had agents in place to lobby and report on any corruption or malfunctioning.103 Given Petersburg’s latitude, winter days were short, and the tsar was onsite before dawn. If the officials weren’t hard at work, the tsar ‘would thrash them soundly with his cane, a thing that he has done a hundred times to the great Prince Menshikov’.104 Captain John Deane observed that after early-morning visits to the colleges, Peter would hurry to the Admiralty to consult with shipbuilders and work ‘hard with the axe or adze, scarce allowing himself time to eat’.105

  If the tsar, his architects and his planners were triumphing, St Petersburg’s biggest adversary refused to yield. In early November 17ZI, the French envoy, La Vie, watched the water in his lodgings rise to a level of one metre. For Russia’s religious conservat
ives, who found St Petersburg unnatural, if not diabolical, it seemed as if nature had come as an avenging angel. The 17Z1 flood caused a huge amount of damage, but it was nothing compared to the great flood of October 1723. In that ninth flood since Petersburg’s founding, the waters rose to what would be the seventh-highest level of the 300 floods suffered by the city throughout its entire history. Yet the construction continued. A playhouse was opened on the Moika in 1723. The tsar’s art collection – growing too sizeable for Peterhof – was shown in the first public picture gallery in Europe, which opened in St Petersburg in 1724. On display were 120 mediocre Dutch and Flemish canvases.106 The end of the Great Northern War facilitated an intense phase of construction, as Russia confirmed possession of Karelia, Ingria, Livonia, Estonia and Courland. Ironically, it gave Peter three very workable Baltic ports at Narva, Riga and Reval – present-day Tallinn. But by then the tsar’s ‘paradise’ was beginning to thrive, and the opening of a 2.8-kilometre canal between Tvertsa and the Tsna at Vyshnii Volochek meant that cargo could be carried up the Volga from the Russian heartland to St Petersburg without portage. Suddenly it seemed as if Peter’s choice of capital was not completely absurd.