St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  By 1790, St Petersburg was larger than Moscow.114 Without a Kremlin and concentric rings of buildings encircling it, the capital was expanding in a manner that was different from any other Russian city. The legacy of Eropkin’s three-pronged attack on the undeveloped environs meant that areas housing the poor were forever being pushed further outwards. Filthy, cramped and temporary, they were densely populated by state-owned peasants who were often grouped according to occupation. Crowding was inflated by vagabonds – peasants without passports issued by a lord or village official – who came to the capital for seasonal employment or fled from the poverty of the countryside, only to die in greater misery in city slums. Among those legally allowed to work, miserable wages or insufferable conditions led to the first stirrings of labour unrest. In 1771, eleven spinners downed tools in protest over the low quality of the raw materials they were expected to use.115

  The police opened two workhouses in which to detain the strays and drunkards who were no longer tolerated on the streets, but Petersburg’s jails left much to be desired. When the English prison reformer John Howard visited in 1781, he was appalled by an enthusiastic demonstration of the sadistic instruments owned and used by the chief of police – the knout, branding irons, nostril-cutters and medieval bone-breaking equipment. Six years later, a new two-storey pentagonal prison with a covered exercise yard was built on the Moika Canal, and did meet with Howard’s approval. Each cell had a stove, a stone chair and table, and a pipe that relayed religious services, in an attempt to reform inmates. As a tribute to the modest crime rate, this new prison remained quite empty, although a separate detention centre for petty criminals pending trial was well used.116

  The police presence was strengthened modestly during Catherine’s reign. The night watch numbered 500, with an army backup, and people felt they could walk in safety at any hour – though some men took the precaution of putting an officer’s cockade in their hats as a deterrent against attack. The Winter Palace, however, fell victim to a gang of robbers operating among its numerous interior decorators. While reported crime remained low for a sizeable city, wealthier people started to keep guard dogs and lock their doors.117

  Central streets were largely paved, but a good number of others were only timbered over. The best-kept thoroughfares were the main prospekts and major roads leading out of the city. Drainage and refuse remained a problem. On a prestigious part of the Neva Embankment near the Winter Palace, piles of discarded building materials and trash were heaped up, even though Catherine had intended to improve the environment.118 In the late 1760s, the empress promised Voltaire, ‘I will do everything possible to enhance the quality of the air . . . We have been draining the marshes around the city for three years already and we cut the pine forests that cover it in the south. And now there are already three extensive areas inhabited by settlers where one used to be unable to walk without sinking in water to the waist.’119

  In 1780, the Fontanka Canal was dredged and lined with stone. The project for cladding the banks of the Neva in granite, begun under Felten in 1763, was far from complete in September 1777, when the river rose nearly four metres. A ship from Lübeck was carried into the woods on Vassilevsky Island.120 Others were swept onto the embankment in the middle of the night by waters that broke the basement windows of the Winter Palace and flooded its cellars.121 Catherine started to pray while people died in their beds, as more than 100 small houses were washed away. After that disaster, a more comprehensive warning and rescue system was put in place. When the water rose to a dangerous level, cannon would be fired, flares ignited and drummers despatched to beat the alarm throughout the city. Two oar-powered lifeboats were commissioned.122 Yet in September 1792, when a flash flood swelled water above the Neva banks, the granite lining had still not been finished.

  Peter the Great’s hopes for a powerful navy and a thriving merchant marine had all but evaporated by the mid-eighteenth century. Out of the 425 trading ships sailing into St Petersburg in 1752, only five were Russian.123 During Elizabeth’s reign impressive work by hydraulic engineers at Kronstadt created a canal well over a kilometre long, capable of admitting ten stricken ships of the line. But it was hardly used and Kronstadt’s dry dock, capable of servicing twelve ships, remained idle.124 It was only by virtue of a complete refitting of Russian ships at England’s Portsmouth shipyards that Catherine’s navy was able to sail into the Mediterranean in 1770 and win the major victory over the Turks at Chesme. British Admiral Sir Charles Knowles was persuaded by the empress to come to Petersburg, overhaul Russian shipbuilding and revive Kronstadt.125 Catherine was Peter the Great’s worthy heir and, in the last years of her reign, the empress sat confidently in her palace, while the cannonading between the Swedish and rehabilitated Russian fleets off Kronstadt rattled the windows and rifled her ears.126

  Military victories in the south increased Russia’s cereal production, and thousands of barges and corn barques carried harvests north to Petersburg. Access to Black Sea ports meant that exotic items from Mediterranean lands – olive oil, almonds, capers and raisins – were transported by inland waterway to the capital. As for Baltic trade, without a stock exchange and with ineffective attempts to set up Russian banks during the 1750s, Petersburg merchants were obliged to borrow money in Holland. To help remedy the situation, in 1787 Catherine set up the Imperial Loan or Assignation Bank, the first institution in Russia to promote the circulation of money and stimulate commerce.127 Shortly afterwards, nearly one-tenth of the ships sailing into the mouth of the Neva carrying delicacies such as oysters, cheeses, coffee, chocolate and gingerbread were Russian.

  The Neva, however, carried more than delicacies. Drinking water taken from the river was considered safe – particularly if it was drawn from midstream – but it contained the parasite that had proved so unwelcoming to Denis Diderot, Giardia lamblia, which had first been observed under the microscope of Peter the Great’s Amsterdam acquaintance, Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek. The parasite is spread by animal faeces, so it is hardly surprising that the Neva was infected, as it drains water from north-west Russia and south-east Finland, regions rich in wildlife. Water taken from the Moika – severely polluted through the dumping of waste and human excrement – was boiled to kill germs and flavoured with vinegar to disguise its taste. Domestic sanitation was primitive, even in the wealthiest establishments. When John Parkinson, Fellow and Bursar of Magdalen College, Oxford, paid a visit to Count Osterman, he recorded that he was ‘almost poisoned by the stench of the necessary’, adding that in spring, ‘when it begins to thaw, the nuisance is insufferable’.128 Even when the first drains were dug in 1770, they only carried refuse by the shortest route to the Neva. It was not until a few years later that a system transported sewage much further downriver in conduits dug almost a metre below the surface.129 Suffering from frequent stomach aches and with two mortal diseases threatening her subjects, Catherine began to pay great attention to the question of health.

  Peter II had died of smallpox. Empress Elizabeth had lost her fiancé to smallpox, and it had disfigured the already unprepossessing Peter III. A folk remedy known as variolation – in which someone was immunised against the disease by rubbing fluid from the pustules of the infected into superficial scratches made on the skin of a healthy person – was widely practised in China as well as on the southern borders of Russia. Although Catherine had slight regard for doctors – echoing Rousseau in calling them ‘charlatans’ and preferring a spartan diet and fresh air to medical interference – the threat of smallpox was so daunting that, in 1768, she summoned the Englishman who had perfected the process of variolation in the West, Dr Thomas Dimsdale. He variolated the empress and the Grand Duke Paul. Catherine fell ill immediately. After she slowly recovered, a thanksgiving service celebrated Dimsdale’s success;130 and Derzhavin, in a forgettable poem of 1789, praised Catherine’s courageousness: ‘To save the health of her world, / She drinks the poison without fear.’131 Nobles followed the empress’s example and St Petersburg’s
Inoculation Hospital opened to treat the children of the nobility, officers and artisans, not to mention serfs – ‘property’ that their owners wished to protect. Dimsdale was made a Baron of the Russian Empire and returned to the capital in 1781, to variolate Catherine’s grandson, Alexander.132 Success in St Petersburg set the example, and hospitals opened in towns and cities across Russia. Science was beginning to triumph. A court pageant was staged – Prejudice Overcome, in which Minerva (Catherine), Ruthenia (Russia) and the Genius of Science conquered Ignorance and Superstition.133

  The second major threat to health was the plague, which was carried to Moscow in 1770 by soldiers who had served in the south. As it crept closer to the capital, with suspected outbreaks near Pskov and Novgorod, the authorities were quick to react. Checkpoints were established on the main roads to monitor those travellers – post men, tax collectors and government officials – who were obliged to make the journey between the old and new capitals. A quarantine house was set up in St Petersburg, and incoming goods were treated with fire, smoke and vinegar. As the authorities watched anxiously, autumn dragged towards winter and the deepening cold kept the plague at bay.134 By the end of the 1770s the first general public hospital was established in the capital, financed by the Crown. It was located south of the Fontanka. Close by, Russia’s first mental institution opened and operated under an enlightened regime.135 Another 300-bed hospital was built in stone during the 1780s, with an annex opening in 1790 providing a further 260 places in wooden dormitories, erected in the grounds of the College of Medicine. There were nine beds in each airy ward. There was hot and cold water, and patients enjoyed sheets that were changed regularly, water jugs and hand bells on their bedside tables.136

  In a publication which riled Catherine – Voyage en Sibérie – the Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche attacked Russian sexual habits. He suggested that venereal disease was widespread and that ‘unlawful’ sexual relationships threatened the well-being of the state.137’ Catherine took the first steps in combating the situation by setting up a sixty-bed hospital for men and women near the Kalinkin Bridge on the Fontanka, dedicated to the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. It was a discreet hospital,138 to which patients were admitted without revealing their identities, and in which they wore a cap inscribed with the word ‘secrecy’.139 Catherine also made it illegal to use a house for ‘indecency’ or to live off immoral earnings and yet Russia’s first great social critic, Alexander Radishchev, wrote of ‘painted harlots on every street’ in Petersburg and Moscow.140 Prostitutes caught plying their trade would be sent to factories and, if it was ascertained that they had given venereal disease to a soldier, they would be treated and then sent to work in the mines in Siberia.141

  One major source of cleanliness and well-being that continued to intrigue and outrage foreigners – Chappe d’Auteroche among them – was the banya. The Reverend William Tooke, who published his View of the Russian Empire during the Reign of Catherine the Second in London in 1800, noted that ordinary Russians took few medicines, but rather frequented ‘the sweating bath’, which was ‘so much a part of the system of living, that it is used by people of every age and in all circumstances . . . as often as possible’, which meant at least once a week. Poorer people visited communal baths set up beside streams or rivers, while those ‘of the middle station . . . and the great’ constructed ‘vapour-baths . . . in their own houses’. The interior heat of 40-50° Celsius was maintained ‘by the throwing of water every five minutes on the glowing hot stones in the chamber of the oven’. The bathers lay ‘stark naked’, and numerous foreigners were outraged.142 Nathaniel Wraxall’s letter of July 1774 reported a scene of ‘promiscuous bathing of not less than 200 persons of both sexes’, where men and women paid little heed to the segregated spaces and sat ‘in a state of absolute nudity’ among one another.143 If they did respect the segregation of the bathhouse, then ‘both men and women’ ran out ‘perfectly naked to plunge together into the river’.’144 The reaction of visitors had changed little since the first reports of banyi filtered back from Peter the Great’s court – except that, as the Russian capital became increasingly Westernised, the indignation intensified.

  Ivan Letunov’s Banya, 1825.

  The sexual mores of Russia in the late eighteenth century were, however, vastly different from those of western European countries. When Casanova visited, he was sold Zaira, a fourteen-year-old maidservant whom he was forced to examine in order to verify that she was a virgin – a state which would justify her father’s 100-rouble price tag. In return for her undivided loyalty, Casanova was to feed her and let her to go to the banya and the church once a week. When he asked if he was obliged to take Zaira with him when he left St Petersburg, the Venetian was told that should he wish to do so, permission would have to be sought, as Zaira was also ‘a slave to the empress’.

  Apart from the girl’s superstitious nature and jealous tendencies, the relationship was seemingly a good one, and Casanova delighted in Zaira’s increasing use of scraps of Venetian dialect. Indeed, he confessed that the girl permitted him to live ‘soberly’ all the time he was in St Petersburg, even though he almost succumbed to the charms of an effeminate young officer, who felt called upon to prove – in no uncertain terms – that he was not a woman, and who then proceeded to offer that proof for the pleasure of the visitor. When Casanova left the city, he was refunded the 100 roubles that he had paid for Zaira and – on condition that she was willing – wished to pass her on to the aged ‘but still vigorous and sensual’ architect Antonio Rinaldi, who was smitten with the girl. Zaira stated that if Rinaldi really loved her, he could talk things over with her father. The architect wasted no time, and lived happily with Zaira for the remainder of his days.145

  An ‘officer has for sale a 16 year old girl, formerly belonging to a poor house, who knows how to knit, sew, iron, starch and dress a lady; she has a nice figure and a pretty face’.146 This typical newspaper advertisement appeared in St Petersburg in 1797. The selling of girls such as Zaira was part and parcel of the system of serfdom – an institution that bore a great resemblance to that of slavery in America, except that serfs were liable for tax and conscription. Serfs were subject to an autocratic sovereign and the will of their immediate owners. Either in state or private ownership, they accounted for a staggering 90 per cent of Russia’s population.147 Catherine wrote to her Procurator General, Prince Vyazemsky, that serfdom was an ‘unbearable yoke’,148 but the empress, being neither democratic nor egalitarian, did little to ameliorate the system. The end of the eighteenth century was a politically volatile period for European powers: there were revolts against taxation without representation in the English colonies, and against the monarchy in France. During her reign Catherine experienced two striking affronts to her authority – one in the form of armed rebellion, the other in print.

  The insurrection of the great pretender and ex-soldier Emilian Pugachev, the self-styled Peter III, was unprecedented in scale and violence. Attracting a large number of Yaik Cossacks, Kazakh nomads and Bashkirs, Pugachev’s following swelled to 20,000. His methods were brutal, killing more than 1,500 nobles, including women and children. Some were bludgeoned, many were hanged or shot, and others were stabbed to death or drowned. Pugachev was not the first to proclaim himself Emperor, but he was the most outrageous. Shortly before his eventual capture and execution, he issued an emancipation proclamation: ‘We, Peter III, by the Grace of God Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia etc . . . . with our monarchical and fatherly love, grant freedom to everyone who formerly was in serfdom.’149 When his forces were eventually beaten at Tsaritsyn in August 1774, hundreds of Pugachev’s followers were put to death or knouted. As for their leader, he was executed, then quartered.150

  Some sixty years later, Pugachev was pictured as the villain with a kind heart in the earliest great work of historical fiction in Russian, Alexander Pushkin’s novella The Captain’s Daughter. Its hero, Peter, encounters Pugachev before he becomes the great preten
der. Guided through a snowstorm to an inn by a brigand, Peter rewards his guide with a hareskin coat and then they part company. Later, during Pugachev’s uprising, they meet again by chance. The rebel leader has not forgotten the young hero’s kindness and helps Peter rescue his loved one from the dangers of the insurrection. A complex portrait emerges of the man beneath the brigand, as Peter attempts to save Pugachev. Consequently Peter is convicted of treason. By chance, the heroine explains her loved one’s plight to a lady whom she encounters on a bench in the park at Tsarskoe Selo. The lady is none other than the empress herself and she promptly releases the hero from jail. Pushkin’s decision to present Pugachev as a loveable tyrant shows he fully understood that, behind the inhumanity of the rebels, stood the inhumanity of their masters. The rebellion may have occurred a long way from the capital, but as a precedent for armed insurrection, Pugachev’s revolt would have enormous consequences for St Petersburg. Pushkin’s heartfelt plea, ‘Heaven send that we may never see such another senseless and merciless rebellion,’151 reveals that the writer felt what Catherine herself had so clearly understood about serfdom, that if ‘we do not agree to reduce this cruelty and moderate a situation intolerable for human beings, then sooner or later they will do it themselves’.152 Dangerously, she did little to solve the problem.

  Nearly twenty years after Pugachev’s insurrection, the empress was outraged by a flagrant attack in print. Catherine had taken trips into the heartlands of her domains, where she was cheered by the very peasants for whom she showed such little active compassion. In villages and towns that she visited during her six-month progress to Sevastopol in 1787, with fourteen carriages, 1Z4 sledges and forty other vehicles intended to impress foreign dignitaries, she was met by apparently contented crowds. Although there were probably no ‘Potempkin villages’ – empty shells with impressive façades, like streets on Hollywood backlots – Prince Potempkin worked hard to put on a happy show for the empress.153 But beneath the superficial adoration, labourers were starting to flex their muscles. In that very same year, 400 workers gathered in Petersburg’s Palace Square to petition Catherine with their grievances against the pay and conditions imposed by the contractor Dolgov, who was building the granite banks on the Fontanka and the Catherine Canal. Seventeen protesters were arrested and charged with illegal assembly and conspiracy. Orders were issued against such gatherings and an inquiry was set up. However, with winter coming on and the urgent need to complete the job, the charges were dropped, and Dolgov was instructed to improve his working practices.154 The protest – small as it was – hinted at labour’s latent power.