St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  Deschisaux arrived in St Petersburg in 1726 to find splendid ships in the harbour and an extremely well-ordered Admiralty, which his compatriot, Aubry de la Mottraye, likened to the Arsenal of Venice. The Winter Palace, built after designs by Mattarnovy, was being refurbished, but – according to Deschisaux – was ‘nothing remarkable’.15 In fact, the state of the city remained precarious. The Peter and Paul Fortress with its church by Trezzini lay unfinished, for want of money. Evidence of crime and punishment was everywhere: bodies decomposed on the wheel, others dangled rotting from the gibbet, and spiked heads provided stark warnings to all passers-by.16 In the summer heat, the smell of rank human flesh merged with the butchery of the abattoir.

  An English visitor suggested that Petersburg had been ‘built in spite of all the four elements . . . the earth is all a bog, the air commonly foggy. The water sometimes fills half the houses, and the fire burns down half the town at a time.’ Despite short summers, sodden soil and long, dark winters, Catherine encouraged the development of the city’s gardens. De la Mottraye paid tribute to the achievement, asserting that ‘if there is a tolerable piece or spot of ground that can be called pleasant or fertile it is entirely owed to art’.17 Yet violent contrasts persisted in a city where clusters of intense activity were tenuously connected by man and kept apart by nature. After admiring the Dutch-style gardens with their trellises and bowers, Deschisaux could not help noticing the ‘monstrous’ animals and strange vegetation in adjacent fields. The city’s first overwhelming flood brought home to its inhabitants – once again – the absurdity of their predicament. The flash flood of November 1726 was even larger than the great flood of 1721. Taking refuge in his attic, Deschisaux was convinced that the tidal bore that broke the banks of the Neva was powerful enough to sweep away the foundations of his lodgings.18 Distinct channels of the river united in one vast sea, from which the tops of buildings emerged like lighthouses. The swell engulfed the city and boats were carried where, hours before, people had strolled. Muck was swept up by the swell and deposited as the surge receded, leaving a grey, mud-coated metropolis. Such were the scale and damage caused by this flood that Catherine redoubled efforts to shore up the banks of the river with timber pilings.

  The Kunstkammer.

  The empress also encouraged two projects dear to the late tsar’s heart.19 The first was the search for a north-east passage to reach and establish trading ties with North America, which they knew as ‘New Spain’. Catherine equipped an expedition that departed in 1725 under the Danish explorer Captain Bering, but she would be dead before there was any news of the explorer. It was during his second expedition in 1741 that Vitus Bering reached the coast of North America – a discovery which led to Russia’s annexation of what is now Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.’20 The second project was the landmark opening of the Academy of Sciences and the ‘rarity chamber’, or Kunstkammer. The first truly monumental structure completed in St Petersburg, this 100-metre-long building impressed a French visitor as ‘one of the most superb edifices of its kind in Europe’. The collection it housed included plants, animals and instruments, as well as Turkish cannonballs from Peter the Great’s Pruth River campaign. Among the anatomical displays was a sequence showing the progress of the embryo from one week to nine months, assembled by Ruysch in Amsterdam.21 It was the kind of exhibit prohibited by the Orthodox Church, which feared that a soul could rise from rest to reclaim its physical body – the kind of exhibit that would thus contribute to the promotion of a scientific way of thinking.22 Freaks were well represented: a two-headed calf, ‘a lamb with eight legs’, another ‘with three eyes’, a dubious ‘flying dragon’23 along with a ‘serpent with wings’, both generally thought to be the devil incarnate. De la Mottraye was amazed by the ‘generative parts of an hermaphrodite . . . an human foetus of a she Moor four months old the clitoris whereof was come out as long as the privy member of a boy of that age’ and by a ‘Calmuck child of about nine months with two bodies and two heads with all their respective parts well formed’.24 The size and particularity of such a collection were a reflection of a ruler’s status, and Peter the Great had sent Johann Schumacher – librarian and curator of his cabinet of curiosities – all over Europe to gather such exhibits. Schumacher was instructed to bid in auction and buy, buy, buy. The Kunstkammer opened to the Petersburg public at no charge. Indeed, visitors were offered coffee, wine or vodka, but even such blandishments did not stimulate much local interest.25

  The Academy of Sciences, established in the palace of the deceased widow of Ivan V, stood adjacent to the Kunstkammer. Catherine often sat empty-eyed or dozing through its learned discourses, which were frequently presented in Latin. In any case, Catherine – midway through her short reign – was tumbling headlong into oblivion. She sustained Peter’s regimen of hard drinking without taking much time out for ruling, although she did preside over what was left of the All-Drunken Assembly, at which Princess Nastasha Golitsyna, Catherine’s ageing jester, out-drunk everyone. Natasha guzzled through the night and into the next day, until she collapsed in a heap under the table.26

  Catherine became so persistently intoxicated that she would pass out while having sex with her lovers.27 When her legs were not so swollen that she was unable to rise from her bed, she enjoyed appearing in the trappings of an empress. Her riding habit was of silver cloth, her robe fretted with gold Spanish lace, and a white plume swayed seductively above her hat. She often mixed the soldier with the sexpot, wearing low-cut dresses beneath a regimental jacket when reviewing her guards. On one such occasion, in February 1726, a bullet from a gun salute narrowly missed the empress’s head and killed an unlucky merchant standing nearby – perhaps an accidental discharge, perhaps attempted murder.28 There were certainly indications of discontent. In a contemporary woodcut, Catherine was pictured as the repulsive and cannibalistic folkloric figure Baba-Yaga, riding on a pig to attack Peter the Great.29 Previously supportive of the empress’s succession, the archbishop now made critical public statements about her lifestyle. After he was sentenced to death, Catherine commuted the penalty to incarceration in an underground cell in Arkhangelsk. Half starved and fouled by his own excrement, Feofan died there in 1726.

  As Catherine’s health continued to degenerate and life began to blur, she appointed the dead tsarevich’s son, Peter, to be her successor, intending him to make a match with Menshikov’s daughter. Weakened by alcohol poisoning, asthma and venereal disease, Catherine caught a chill in that habitual death-trap of Russian rulers, the Blessing of the Waters on the Feast of Epiphany. After a prolonged illness, she died on 6 May 1727. Her reign had been too short and too dissolute to have accomplished much and, without Menshikov, it would have amounted to very little indeed. Catherine’s most important contribution to the state had been as Peter’s soulmate. She matched him drink for drink and went with him on campaigns. Enduring the rough, she also enjoyed a tumble. John Mottley suggested that her lowly origins, ‘so far from being disgraceful to her’, reflected a ‘greater lustre upon her own merits’.30 Voltaire even claimed that Catherine was ‘as extraordinary as the tsar himself’. Regarded by many as a peasant fertility goddess, the empress was the mother of the fatherland.31 Ironically, this mother gave her name to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where the Romanovs – the dynasty into which she miraculously married – would one day be anihilated.

  Within a month of Catherine’s death, Menshikov was appointed to the highest possible rank – Generalissimus – and his daughter, Maria, became engaged to the twelve-year-old tsar.’32 Predatory and puffed up with power, Menshikov began to act ever more outrageously. He appropriated gifts intended for Peter II. He invited the ruler to Oranienbaum and, when the boy snubbed the invitation, ‘Menshikov stupidly sat in the throne prepared for Peter – an act that did not go unmarked’ by his enemies. When he later travelled to Peterhof to speak to the young ruler, he was, once again, snubbed. The boy refused to stop his hunt and receive his guest. Ignored, Menshikov returned to Petersburg
to prepare a reception for the emperor, only to be confronted by General Saltykov, who had orders to repossess furniture and convey it to the Summer Palace. That same evening the general returned to arrest Menshikov. For offences both ‘criminal’ and ‘political’, the most powerful man in the land was stripped of his titles and exiled to Siberia, where he died in 1728.

  While this drama was unfolding, the most significant change to St Petersburg was the creation of a pontoon bridge that crossed the Neva to connect the Menshikov Palace on Vasilevsky Island to the Admiralty. Vulnerable to the freeze and turbulent thaw, the bridge had to be repositioned every spring until, in 1850, a permanent structure was at last put in place. But the floating bridge came too late to serve the capital, as Peter II decided to establish his court in Moscow, after his coronation there in January 1728. This delighted the many traditional families who detested Petersburg – particularly the all-powerful Dolgorukys who, like Menshikov, fostered dynastic ambitions.33 In ‘Petropolis’ building slowed, factories closed and merchants lost money, as the exodus cut the population to a half of what it had been when its founder died. The splendid capital-in-the-making rapidly became a provincial city in decay. St Petersburg seemed ready to take its place in history as the most evanescent of any major city. While many of its mansions became uninhabited and many of its unfinished buildings deteriorated to the point of collapse, there was one significant project that had been commissioned by Peter the Great and which came to fruition while his grandson’s court was in Moscow.

  The iconostasis for the Peter and Paul Cathedral was commissioned in 1722 and begun in the autumn of that year in Moscow by a team of more than fifty carvers, carpenters and gilders. Completed in January 1727, segments were transported by sleigh or barge to St Petersburg, where it proved impossible to install them, as the cupola of the cathedral was still open to the sky, and the plastering – a problem at the best of times in Petersburg’s damp climate – consequently remained unfinished. The iconostasis was a remarkable departure from Russian tradition. In place of a screen separating the sanctuary from the congregation, the structure was based on the triumphal arch and was probably so ordered by Peter the Great, in imitation of those temporary structures erected to celebrate his victories. Above all, implicit in the concept of the iconostasis as triumphal arch was the apothe-osising of Russia’s first emperor. Peter was – as the polymath and poet, Mikhail Lomonosov, later claimed – ‘an incarnation of God on Russian soil’.34

  Pontoon Bridge across the Neva, 1753.

  The subjects depicted on the panels were as innovative as the structure itself. The Romanovs were placed alongside more conventional Christian iconography, and Peter the Great is seen against a Dutch baroque façade, celebrating the architectural style of his capital. St Alexander Nevsky – patron saint of both Peter and his city – is depicted as a secular prince, wearing the style of clothing the tsar himself would have worn.35 By the time the cathedral was at last ready for the mounting of the iconostasis, the furious tempest of September 1729 had all but submerged St Petersburg and confirmed to the pro-Muscovite faction that Peter II had been wise to abandon such a vulnerable capital.36 And so the gilded proclamation of Peter’s triumph was installed in an abandoned city that seemed destined to become a ghost town.

  In Moscow, the powerful Prince Alexei Dolgoruky drew the young tsar into his circle and indulged him with endless hunting parties. He presented his seventeen-year-old daughter, with whom Peter fell in love.37 Thus Catherine Dolgoruky replaced Maria Menshikov as Peter II’s bride-to-be, but the triumph of the Dolgorukys was short-lived. Only days before the solemnisation of the marriage – after blessing the waters during the Epiphany celebration in the River Moskva in January 1730- Peter II caught a chill, just as his great-grandfather Tsar Alexei had, and ‘on the nineteenth, the day appointed for his marriage’ he died.38 Peter left no heirs, had made no testament, and the Dolgorukys’ dreams all but evaporated. Emerging from the bedchamber in which Peter II lay dead, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky – in a desperate attempt to salvage the grab for power – drew his sword and proclaimed, ‘Long live the Empress Catherine!’39 To no avail. Prince Dmitry Golitsyn proposed summoning the daughter of Ivan V, the infirm tsar who had briefly co-ruled with Peter the Great.

  The plan was that Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland, would be obliged to accept the rule of the eight members of a Supreme Privy Council, without whose permission she would remain powerless to levy taxes or declare war. When she arrived in Moscow, a document was produced stating that, if she did not comply with the conditions laid down by the Privy Council, she would be denied the accession. Supported by guards officers and about 600 nobles who were worried that ‘instead of one autocratic sovereign’, they would face ‘tens of absolute and powerful families’, Anna refused.40 She declared instead that, as her subjects had ‘all unanimously begged’ her ‘to deign to assume the autocratic power in our Russian Empire as it had been held of old by our forefathers, we have, in consideration of their humble pleas, deigned to assume the said autocratic powers’. Anna had proclaimed herself empress.

  ‘They say the court will go to Petersburg this winter,’ wrote Mrs Rondeau, wife of the British Consul:

  if so, my affairs will oblige me to follow them . . . The Dolgoruky family are all banished and the poor empress of the day with them. They are gone to the very place where Prince Menshikov’s children are. So the two ladies who were successively contracted to the young tsar may chance to meet in banishment. Would not this make a pretty story for a tragedy?41

  The population that had left the city with Peter II returned with Anna, who intended to make St Petersburg her court for nine months of each year. The architect Trezzini was to prepare the palaces for her arrival in mid-January 1732. Commerce would thrive, building would recommence and Anna, with her whims and her passion for freaks, would rekindle something of the spirit of the city’s founder.

  The moment she set foot in her capital, there was spectacle and theatre – everything from her dazzling entry procession, to Italian opera, ballet and her favourite grotesque farces. The arrival cavalcade took Anna through five elaborate and specially constructed triumphal arches. Although these had become politically less appropriate in Europe by 1732, the Romanovs were still in the halting process of establishing the majesty of their court, and such structures suggested Petersburg’s notional descent from the power and the glory of ancient Rome. Their theatricality echoed extravagant and fashionable stage settings by designers such as Giacomo Torelli and Inigo Jones. As she passed through the first arch, the empress – like an ancient conqueror arrived to take possession of St Petersburg. The procession began at I p.m., before the arch erected at the Anichkov Bridge. The city’s postal director led off, his staff fanfaring their post horns. Foreign merchants, mounted dragoons and foreign diplomats followed. On one side of the empress’s carriage rode Karl Gustav von Löwenwolde, commander of Anna’s newly formed Izmai-lovsky Guards. On the other side rode the empress’s adviser and lover – grandson of a stable boy and a married father of three – Count Ernst Johann von Biron. The procession followed the city’s longest and straightest thoroughfare, the Great Perspective Road, passed through another arch beside the Admiralty and marched on to the St Isaac of Dalmatia Church to hear Mass. At every halt or new stage of the parade there were cannon volleys and musket salutes. At length the empress reached the Winter Palace, which had been refurbished for her arrival.42 There was a ball, followed by fireworks, while a multitude of soldiers on the frozen Neva manoeuvred themselves into a giant pattern spelling AHHA.43 The capital had been well groomed and, all through the day, crowds celebrated the fact that their city was waking from four years of slumber.

  During St Petersburg’s ‘interregnum’ there had been three important improvements. The first was development of the press. The Vedomosti – the newspaper that had appeared in one form or another since the founding of the city – had folded in 1727. For months the capital remained without a paper and then, ju
st as the court deserted the city, the St Petersburg Vedomosti appeared as a larger, twice-weekly publication with a print run of 300. Reaching a circulation of 2,000 by the end of the century, it published in Russian and German until the Revolution.44

  The second development was the opening of an important stretch of the Ladoga Canal, which ran along the southern shore of the lake from Shliisselberg on the Neva and gave shipping a safe alternative to Ladoga’s sudden squalls and dangerous silting.45 Such a protected passage for goods from the Russian heartlands lessened the likelihood of famine in the capital.

  The third development was the creation of the Cadet Corps in 1731, housed in the Menshikov Palace, which had been empty since the prince’s exile. Francesco Algarotti observed that providing accommodation for 200 students made better use of the space ‘than the displaying to the eyes of the nation the luxury of a favourite’.46 Cadets began their course at thirteen, with classes in calligraphy, Russian, Latin and arithmetic. In their second year they learned geometry, geography and grammar, before passing on to more focused subjects in their penultimate year: fortification, artillery, history, rhetoric, jurisprudence, ethics, heraldry and politics. Students would then spend their final year specialising in the subjects in which they excelled, though they continued German and French, which were obligatory at every level. The majority graduated to military and civil ranks, while the most brilliant went on to further studies at the Academy of Sciences.

  The Cadet Corps became the unlikely setting for early developments in an art that St Petersburg would make its own – ballet. In the first instance, a dance school had been established to instruct the daughters of the aristocracy. The French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé was hired by – and taught – Peter the Great’s daughter, the crown princess Elizabeth. Landé was given a salary of 300 roubles and rooms in the Winter Palace.47 Shortly afterwards he started to instruct boys at the Cadet School, in order to provide the court girls with dancing partners.48 So successful were both endeavours that in 1738 the ballet master offered to take on six boys and six girls under twelve and teach them for a three-year period.49 Thus was founded the St Petersburg Classical Dance and Ballet School. It went on to admit children from the orphanage, train the first Russian soloists, and grew into the Imperial Ballet School.