View down the Nevsky from the Fontanka in the mid-eighteenth century. The Anichkov Palace is on the left.
The city’s industry, which had previously been devoted to the manufacture of indifferent building material, began to produce luxury items when the Lomonosov Imperial Porcelain Factory opened in 1744. It produced tableware for the court with monochrome motifs, and used gold leaf beaten down from coins in the imperial treasury. The empress became anxious about the number of hazardous factories in the centre of her capital – among them an armaments foundry and a munitions plant, which she banished to the outskirts in the mid-1750s,66 Elsewhere in the empire, heavy industry and manufacturing grew prodigiously, using the involuntary labour of serfs or assigned peasants; but in St Petersburg it was trade with Europe that continued to dominate business.
As Elizabeth approached fifty, the age at which her father had died, the blur of glitter and gossip was taking its toll. She was in constant abdominal pain. Her face was swollen. She was seen less and less. Ravaged by sex, superstition and drink-self-indulgence on a grand scale – she died in December 1761. Although the centre of St Petersburg had been mapped out, many of its landmark buildings had yet to be built, and the next stage of this city’s precocious development would be accomplished under the influence of a prodigious empress who would refine the court and capital.
The Grand Duchess Catherine had a vested interest in painting a particularly dire portrait of her husband – the heir apparent – in her Memoirs, yet much of what she wrote was confirmed by others. Catherine judiciously understood that life presented her with the choice of ‘perishing with him, or by him, or else saving’ herself, her children, ‘and perhaps the state from the disaster that all this Prince’s moral and physical faculties promised’. From the age of ten, Peter had been fond of drink and swiftly became an incurable alcoholic. Attendants found it impossible to prevent him drinking and, in his debilitated state, the only teacher to make a mark was ‘Landé who taught him to dance’. Peter loved toys and dolls, and mounted ‘insipid’ spectacles with marionettes. Catherine noted that he arranged all his toy soldiers on very narrow tables to which pliable brass strips were fixed. When these were twanged, they sounded like gunshots, and Peter celebrated ‘court ceremonies by making these troops shoot their rifles’. He enacted a changing of the guard with these toys every day, attending the parade – Catherine wrote – ‘in uniform with boots, spurs, high collar, and scarf, and those servants admitted to this lovely exercise were obliged to dress in the same manner’.67 At Oranienbaum in the summer, Peter drilled servants in Holstein uniforms and expressed a dangerous admiration for Russia’s enemy, Frederick the Great of Prussia.68
Sexually cold towards Catherine, Peter developed a great lust for the Countess Elizabeth Vorontsova, who spat, stank, had a squint and was covered with smallpox scars. More positively, she loved to drink and exhibited a great eagerness for sex with the high-pitched, lank-haired grand duke. When she was replaced by Madame Teplova, Peter stuffed his rooms with military paraphernalia, in a desire to give the new woman pleasure. He also proved to be something of a voyeur, drilling holes through a locked door so that he could enjoy Empress Elizabeth’s amorous moments with Razumovsky and invite his entourage to share in ‘this indiscreet pleasure’.69
Clearly, Peter was to make an unworthy occupant of the throne of All Russia. For one whole winter he became absorbed by plans ‘to build a country house near Oranienbaum in the form of a Capuchin monastery’, where he, Catherine and their court would dress as monks and nuns. When Catherine discovered a large rat that Peter had ‘hanged with all the ceremony of an execution’, and asked what it meant, the grand duke replied that the ‘rat had committed a criminal act and merited the ultimate punishment according to military laws . . . it had climbed atop the ramparts of a cardboard fortress on a table in this room and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch on one of the bastions’. Catherine could not keep herself from ‘bursting with laughter for the extreme folly of the thing’.70
Russia was to be saved from its disastrous new tsar by a political act that was becoming so familiar it could almost be taken as a new norm: the coup. Meanwhile, Peter – plastered at Elizabeth’s funeral – kept interrupting the service by shrieking with laughter and sticking his tongue out at the priests.71
6
THE CITY TRANSFORMED
1762–96
‘We have eight months of winter, and four months of bad weather,’ quipped Russia’s fourth empress, Catherine1 – called ‘the Great’ not only to mark her flirtation with the Enlightenment and her impressive territorial gains, but also to stamp her in the same mould as the founder of St Petersburg. Peter’s greatness broached the improbable. Catherine’s greatness emblazoned the capital’s first unsteady century. Yet, however much the fortunes of the city had ebbed and flowed since Peter’s first landfall, its weather remained constant: – ‘rude . . . unsettled and unfriendly’. A cold wind blew up the Gulf of Finland, only to be ambushed by the savage blast that came howling out of Siberia. Winter could start on 1 November and not abate until mid-April. ‘Cold! Desperately cold!’ grumbled William Richardson, who was travelling with Lord Cathcart, England’s Ambassador Extraordinary to the Empress of Russia. Richardson recorded a temperature of – 32° on the Réaumur Scale in March 1771 – a challenging – 40° Celsius. With a low so extreme, in a month associated with the spring equinox, it is hardly surprising that the writer took pains to emphasise the brevity of Petersburg’s mildest season: ‘the weeks, you will observe I don’t say months, of the summer’.2 Short perhaps, but intense, and the mosquitoes were ‘agonising’. Knowledgeable travellers offered advice on the subject: when ‘the gnat is fixed, it is better to allow it to take its belly full of blood, and go away. If it is killed upon the spot, some part of the proboscis frequently remains in the wound, and causes more acute pains than would be felt otherwise.’ But the insects were soon gone. Winter – at that latitude – came with ‘awful rapidity’: ‘you take farewell of Summer at night and hail the grim tyrant in the morning’. The Neva delta became ‘one crystalline mass’, and a visitor from the capital could speed to Kronstadt along the carriage road marked out over the frozen gulf on ice as ‘smooth and level as a bowling green’. Once there, he would find the Russian Navy ‘firmly bound in the harbour, dismantled of its rigging, and hung round with icicles’.3
In St Petersburg, pedestrians skidded on the slippery cobbles in hasty and ‘perpetual flight’ from the wild driving of more than 4,000 winter cabbies – a rough and rowdy bunch of peasants from the surrounding countryside – who, unable to work their frost-bound land, brought horses into Petersburg to drive the droshkies they hired out for a mere kopek a ride. Passengers were smacked and sliced by the sharp air, as the drivers raced against their competitors. Ladies did benefit from the protection of ‘paint inch thick’, which if it did nothing for their beauty – prevented ‘them from being frost-bitten’. Male vanity, by contrast, almost doomed those who were afflicted: ‘A Russian beau of the first magnitude despises warm dress, as it spoils his shapes – he struts in silk stockings, a hat and cockade; and, as often as the cold will permit, he throws his fur coat aside, to display his silk breeches, and satin vest.’4 During the freeze, the nobility and the grandest merchants placed their coaches on special ‘sledge-frames’, the number of horses in harness determined by the owner’s rank – from six for a chancellor or field marshal down to one for a humble merchant. Dignitaries would keep their attendants waiting out in the arctic air for ten hours, huddled over braziers which scorched their hands and faces and left their limbs numb. During the winter of 1781, two coachmen died while awaiting their master.5
Ice hills on the frozen Neva and ‘whirligig chairs’ at a summer fair, c. 1807.
On the frozen Neva at Epiphany, a carpeted walkway led from the Winter Palace to a temple made of gilded wood and crowned with a cross. It was there that Casanova saw children being baptised in a hole cut through the ice bel
ow. He watched, horrified, as a baby slipped through the priest’s hands into oblivion, and was much surprised to find the parents in ‘an ecstasy of joy . . . certain that the babe had been carried straight to heaven’.6 The ice-crusted Neva also hosted huge and splendid fairs where people hurtled down steeply angled ice-hills, ten metres tall. Lying in the lap of a practised guide who leaned back with his arms outstretched, the intrepid skittered down the glassy surface on a round toboggan, gathering speed, yelping with fright trying to catch a gulp of gelid air. Between these artificial hills there were railed-in race courses where punters placed bets.7 The Empress Catherine, escorted by hussars, drove through the crowd in a sledge to observe her subjects, too busy ‘drinking, singing and laughing’ to fight. Constrained by the extreme cold, the revellers did ‘not tipple for hours’, but swallowed ‘as much in two or three minutes as completely does the business they came about’8 and then went on their way.
Such festivities enlivened the long winter months for the many workers who kept the city going – the dvorniki and the budocbniki being among the most visible. The dvornik was an essential factotum for all prosperous families. He would fetch water, clean the yard, open the gate, light the lamps, turn the spit and, in cold weather, chop wood and monitor the ovens that warmed the house. These heaters were vast contraptions four metres high by two metres wide and worked by virtue of a valve that was closed when the wood burned down to charcoal. If a careless servant shut this valve before the wood had fully charred, then, as Casanova observed, ‘the master sleeps his last sleep, being suffocated in three or four hours. When the door is opened in the morning he is found dead, and the poor devil of a servant is immediately hanged, whatever he may say . . . a necessary regulation, or else a servant would be able to get rid of his master on the smallest provocation’.9
The responsibilities of the dvornik did not end with his domestic chores. It was also his duty to assist in fighting city fires, sweep the streets around his master’s property and inform the police when a guest arrived – either from the country or from abroad.10 Dvorniki were aided in their civic duties by the budochniki – watchmen armed with halberds – who manned circular wooden shelters on major street corners and struck the half-hours on a board or triangle of iron. In winter, such booths provided little protection against the piercing wind. Outside major establishments, guard boxes were altogether warmer, being built of granite and roofed with iron.11
In 1763, a small fire-fighting branch of the police force was established, but home owners were still obliged to provide fire-watchers and fighters from their domestic staff when the need arose. Indeed, throughout the 1760s and ’70s, proprietors had a multitude of civic responsibilities, as there were few policemen patrolling and civic funding was erratic. That changed somewhat in 1780, with a report entitled ‘Concerning the City of Petersburg’, a precursor of the important 1785 Charter of the Towns, which recommended management of urban affairs by representative bodies. However, St Petersburg’s City Council or Duma, which first took office in 1786,12 gained full control of the city’s finances only in 1803, and until that time diverse sources of income were sought. A portion of customs revenue, as well as taxes on craftsmen, alcohol and public bathhouses, were used to finance improvements to the city streets, maintain the canals, build new sewers and clean and light important thoroughfares. By 1785 there were more than 3,000 globular lamps fixed on wooden posts in the centre city, and military recruits, seconded to the police, swelled the ranks of the lamplighters.13
Chimney sweeps moved from house to house. Dog-catchers scoured the streets. Coopers circulated and – using only a hatchet – repaired the casks and utensils of householders. Kalatchniks wandered through the city, selling bread made from the superior ‘Moscow flour’.14 Farmers journeyed to the city to sell their goods directly, although there was no shortage of middle-men keen to muscle in and rake off a profit. Since Anna’s reign, each quarter of the capital had enjoyed its own market, but the city’s most important bazaar remained the gostiny duor – or ‘merchant’s yard’ – near the Admiralty. Destroyed by fire in 1782, it was rebuilt on the Nevsky as a two-storey brick and plaster structure, containing many shops under its pillared galleries. With the concentration of trading came the problem of monopolisation. Among the traders, twenty-two men owned 451 of the 1,204 stalls in the gostiny dvor. During the 1780s one man – Savva Yakovlev – owned 9 per cent of all outlets.15 In an echo of her father’s encounter with Menshikov, Elizabeth had been so entranced when she heard the sweet cries of Yakovlev selling meat pies that she ordered him to make pies for the palace, thereby launching his business empire.
Each spring, peasants arrived from far afield to hire a piece of land on which to cultivate vegetables to sell to the city.16 Blocks of ice from the winter freeze were installed in house cellars to store fresh produce purchased during the summer. In the winter, greens, fruit, meat and fish were sold frozen at the Great Market on the newly commercialised section of Nevsky Prospekt stretching towards the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Thousands of skinned, rock-hard animals were piled according to their kind, with a sample carcass left standing to indicate the identity of each frozen heap. Others were packed tightly together, on their hind legs, as if the beasts were rearing, desperate to flee after being flayed alive. In complete contrast to these scalped carcasses, a gaudy throng of vibrantly dressed patrons – everybody from the imperial family right down to simple merchants – came to purchase frozen food that was one-third cheaper than the fresh produce offered in other markets.17 If a customer wanted only a portion of the beast, the vendor would hack it off with a hatchet, sending splinters of frozen flesh flying in all directions.18 Customers returned home with their frozen purchases and thawed them in cold water prior to cooking.
Early on in Catherine’s reign, luxury items began to be sold in private shops and houses.19 The legality of this practice was questionable, but when a prosecution was brought against a Frenchman in 1766, he won the right to trade from home. About a hundred merchants swiftly followed suit. Craftsmen and vendors advertised in the Vedomosti and word-of-mouth also carried news of talented artisans and well-stocked shops. Signs, regulated in size and style, were permitted in the better streets and – with artisans allowed to live and work near their wealthy clients – the city centre became more commercial. By 1789 it was estimated that there were more than 1,000 tailors – 840 of them Russian. There were 149 barbers to trim the whiskers of the vain young men, and sixty-four hairdressers to tend the ever-complicated locks of the ladies.20 Independent vendors scattered across the city began to compete successfully with the monopolies and bazaars. But in these early days of commercialisation there were confusions. During the 1790s there were four independent establishments trading under the name ‘The English Shop’ – their business booming, after Catherine’s ban on the import of post-Revolution French goods in May 1793. One of the shops was run by Mrs Sarah Snow, who advertised her wares in the Vedomosti: English fabrics, millinery and notions, as well as household items, toys, ‘sporting weapons’ and ‘the latest editions of English books’. Other English shops sold brass and pewter, as well as wall clocks that were advertised as ‘playing various attractive arias’. Merchants from all over the world settled in St Petersburg, but the British were predominant, satisfying the craze for English products. Indeed, demand was so great that unscrupulous tradesmen tried to pass off Russian imitations, just as street vendors do today with Asian Hermès fakes. Hatchett’s of Long Acre in London was appointed imperial coach-maker and supplied not only Catherine, but also members of the nobility, such as the spendthrift Prince Grigory Potempkin.21 There were English grooms to teach the English style of riding, as hundreds of English horses were imported each year. Anglophilia spilled over into entertainment when Mr Fisher’s Company of English Actors performed in the Russian capital from the autumn of 1770 until early 1772. With ‘great diligence and much tinsel’, the players refurbished an old barn beside a merchant’s house on the Moika and made
it into ‘the likeness of a theatre’, in which they acted Shakespeare as well as popular contemporary plays. Catherine herself made an impromptu visit to watch the company,22 which sadly broke up when the actors started quarrelling. There was also an English Inn, which offered that rare treat, coffee; an English Club, where billiards and cards were played; and the esoteric and erotic Most Puissant Order of The Beggar’s Ben-ison and Merryland – a select British club indulging in salacious readings, voyeurism and masturbation.23
In 1762, the capital had witnessed yet another dynastic drama when Catherine, exasperated by the drunken foolery of her husband, Peter III, felt compelled to reign in his place. She had the nerve, the will and the support to rule. But there were, against any claim she might make, two legitimate heirs to the throne: Peter III and Ivan VI, both grandsons of Russian tsars. Catherine – from Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg – was merely the niece of Empress Elizabeth’s long-dead fiancé. She had, however, been living in St Petersburg for seventeen years by the time her unsound, pro-Prussian husband became Peter III. While he wished to get rid of Catherine and her son, Paul, there were powerful factions at court who baulked at the idea of being ruled by someone considered, in many quarters, to be a treacherous ninny. Catherine’s lover, Grigory Orlov – aided by his brothers – won the crucial support of the Preobrazhensky and Izmailovsky Guards, and the action began. The empress described the manoeuvre in a letter to her former lover, Count Stanislas Poniatowsky of Poland – written to dissuade him from coming to the Russian capital while matters were ‘in a state of ferment’:
St. Petersburg Page 13