St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  The St Petersburg Vedomosti kept its readership up to date with events as they unfolded in post-revolutionary France. The country – which had inspired some of the most outrageous extravagance of the Russian court – was now fashionable as the nemesis of autocratic excess, as revolutionary literature circulated among the burgeoning intelligentsia of St Petersburg. Against such ferment, Alexander Radishchev – a wealthy young noble who served at court – took advantage of the 1783 law allowing people to set up printing presses and in 1790 published a series of letters recounting A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. He thereby became Russia’s first great revolutionary writer.

  On Radishchev’s journey there were no spick-and-span peasants, no cheering crowds to greet him as he travelled to the soul of the people:

  Look at a Russian; you will find him pensive. If he wishes to purge his melancholy, or, as he would say, to have a good time, he goes to the tavern . . . A barge hauler who goes to the tavern with downcast head and returns blood-splattered from blows in the face may help to explain much that has seemed puzzling in Russian history.155

  Radishchev predicted revolution, unless changes were made. He believed that only sweeping reform could forestall inevitable catastrophe. Catherine – who had understood as much – accused Radishchev of being the new Pugachev. Adding philosophical diatribe to his appraisal of the country, Radishchev included a Blakean ‘Ode to Liberty’ in his publication. It was quite possibly added after he sent A Journey to the censor, who, in any case, imagined from the title that the book was an innocent piece of travel writing. Catherine’s outraged annotations to her copy of the text reveal that she found the Ode ‘manifestly revolutionary’. She asked: how can power be ‘joined with liberty for mutual advantage’?156 She was not about to find out. As soon as the anonymous author of A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow had been identified, he was arrested. Only twenty-five copies of the book had been sold and Radishchev agreed to destroy the rest, so that he could be joined by his family during his exile in Siberia. It was not until 1858 in London that A Journey was published in Russian by that ‘father of Russian Socialism’, Alexander Herzen. By then, among writers and thinkers, the journey towards revolution was under way. If Pushkin had been taken by the human side of Pugachev, he was also inspired by Radishchev. In 1817, the poet wrote his own ‘Ode to Liberty’ and – towards the end of his short life – was busy making notes and beginning to write a return journey from Moscow to St Petersburg.157

  Radishchev’s timing was bad. Russia was fighting the Turks in the south and the Swedish in the north. His attack on absolutism and the social structure of Russia, written against the backdrop of revolution in France, was bound to meet the harshest response. Catherine – physically sickened by the execution of Louis XIV and the bloodbath that ensued – felt that an absolute and iron grip was indispensable. She was interested in consolidating the richness of the Russian state and the power and prestige of its ruler. People threatening the state were put under surveillance. In 1796, a system of formal censorship was introduced, and all private presses – previously supported by the empress – were shut down. The long battle between autocracy and the Russian intelligentsia was under way.158

  As her principles became increasingly inflexible, Catherine – a fierce guardian of her image – used portraits to evoke a kindly, benevolent ruler.159 She dressed with dignity. She inhabited a warmer, quieter world and appeared as a matronly Mother Russia, even as she sought lovers who were ever younger, less suited to her intelligence and less loved. As Charles Masson has it in his Memoirs, at an ‘advanced period of her life’ the empress spent her days with three ‘young libertines . . . while her armies were slaughtering the Turks, fighting with the Swedes and ravaging Poland’. The empress held masked parties during which the select company ‘romped and engaged in all sorts of frolics and gambols’. There was, Masson claims, ‘no kind of gaiety which was not permitted’. Furthermore, the empress formed a more mysterious group, the Little Society, of which ‘the particulars are not fit to be repeated’. They were allegedly so scandalous that Masson burned ‘his memoranda which could have afforded any information on the subject’.160

  Vladimir Borovikovsky’s Catherine II Promenading in the Park at Tsarskoe Sclo with the Obelisk to Count Rumyantsev’s Victories, 1794.

  Private lifestyle apart, the extravagant writer of these keyhole memoirs leaves a chilling assessment of Catherine’s reign:

  O Catherine! dazzled by thy greatness, of which I have had a near view, charmed with thy beneficence which rendered so many individuals happy, seduced by the thousand amiable qualities that have been admired in thee, I would fain have erected a monument to thy glory; but torrents of blood flow in upon me and inundate my design; the chains of thirty millions of slaves ring in my ears, and deafen me; the crimes which have reigned in thy name call forth my indignation.161

  The rhetoric is heightened to such a pitch that Masson’s vision echoes the exultation at Catherine’s death expressed by the young Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He rejoiced ‘as at the extinction of the evil Principle impersonated!’ Catherine’s crimes were listed – among them ‘the poisoning of her husband, her iniquities in Poland . . . the desolating ambition of her public life . . . the libidinous excesses of her private hours! ’162

  The Scottish traveller Andrew Swinton noted that by 1790 St Petersburg had become part of the European Grand Tour and that – except for Constantinople – no city in Europe contained a greater mix of foreigners. Petersburg’s energy encouraged the Dutch doctor Pieter van Wonzel to believe that in two centuries it would be ‘the first city of the universe’. Diderot, however, found a capital in panic-the inhabitants ‘trying to find out if the ground is really firm under their feet’.163 Casanova was likewise pessimistic about a city that he suggested was ‘built with the childish aim of seeing it fall into ruins’. The Venetian, whose native city was similarly under threat, believed that, sooner or later, St Petersburg’s ‘soil must give way and drag the vast city with it’.164 Nevertheless, during Catherine’s reign there had been a huge consolidation of the architecture, culture and general civility of the capital. In the grand streets, among the palaces and in their parks, space had been dignified. St Petersburg was a magnificent and theatrical city, aspiring to be the crowning capital of Europe.

  During the three decades after Catherine’s death, its defining buildings would all be completed and the Nevsky Prospekt would become one of the most fashionable and exciting streets in the world. The stage would be set for Petersburg’s great nineteenth-century drama. The agitated voices of its writers and thinkers would resonate through the ample spaces and dark byways, turning Peter’s port into the ‘Petersburg’ of Russian literature – glittering, rich, but as dismal and desperate as the underbelly of Dickensian London. The court would still dominate the city, but the city would soon learn to speak for itself.

  7

  MADNESS, MURDER AND INSURRECTION

  1796–1825

  St Petersburg was resplendent during the final years of Catherine’s reign. On summer days the wealthy enjoyed elegant excursions on the Neva, protected under silk canopies from harsh sun or sudden showers. Crew occupied the forward part of the boat and rowed with such dexterity ‘that even English sailors’ acknowledged their superiority.1 Musicians brought on board to entertain the company with their clarinets and tambourines found themselves in competition with the powerful voices of these gaudily dressed oarsmen.2 When – in the brief heat of the early-summer White Nights – there were nocturnal outings, the Neva resounded with song.

  Although distances within the city were considerable and the weather was indecisive, strolling became a popular activity. The gardens of the Cadet Corps buildings were opened to a ‘motley throng’ on Sundays and – as in the Summer Garden – people paraded their latest finery to the strains of military bands. The islands in the small branch of the Neva had become a popular weekend retreat. There was the ‘romantic wildness’ of Ka
menny Island, on which a summer carnival was held at Count Strogonov’s villa. There were tents erected for the food and a wooden pavilion – open at the sides – for dancing. Krestovsky Island offered similar entertainments, with delicacies sold from stalls set up in Count Razumovsky’s park. On Yelagin Island and in the rural Vyborg sector there were pleasure gardens with Turkish music, dancing and fireworks.3 The Russian capital had taken on the buzz of a thriving city – an exciting emporium driven by the demands of a voracious court. On the Nevsky Prospekt it was impossible to move twenty paces without passing a magasin de modes, selling silk hats, embroidered waistcoats and assorted trimmings. There were English and German furniture showrooms, instrument-makers and Russian shops of all kinds in the gostiny dvor. Within a century, St Petersburg had achieved what many cities take hundreds of years to accomplish: it had become one of the great capitals of the world.

  That disappeared overnight. As it would again. In a significant instance of bad timing, Catherine intended to make a formal statement on the first day of 1797 exiling her son Paul to Lithuania and elevating her grandchild, Alexander, to heir apparent. But only weeks before the date chosen for the announcement, a stroke destroyed Catherine’s ability to communicate and she died some hours later.

  Paul’s first act as emperor was the exhumation of the man he needed to be his father – Peter III, grandson of Peter the Great. This action was not, as one English eyewitness ventured, ‘a testimony of Paul’s affection for the memory of his father’, but rather ‘an act of hostility against his mother’. The forty-three-year-old tsar laid Peter’s opened coffin beside Catherine’s catafalque in the Mourning Room of the Winter Palace and ordered two of the tsar’s surviving assassins to stand guard beneath the inscription ‘Divided in life, united in death.4 Thus the fiasco of Paul’s reign began with the spectacle of the new emperor wailing over the remains of his murdered father, who – quite possibly – had played no part in his conception. A rumour circulated that Paul was not even the son of Catherine II, but rather Empress Elizabeth’s secret baby: gossip that sought to explain the sovereign’s uncharacteristically maternal attitude towards the child. Some historians claim that Paul was ‘beyond all reasonable doubt the son of Peter III and Catherine II’,5 others that ‘presumptive evidence’ suggests he was the offspring of Sergei Saltykov.6 In a contemporary memorandum to the French Cabinet, the diplomat Gérard de Champeaux noted that Peter was impotent, whereas Catherine was not. One possible motive for the suppression of her Memoirs during the nineteenth century was that they suggested Paul was illegitimate.7 If Paul was not the son of Peter III, then successive tsars would not be Romanovs or Holstein-Gottorps, but simple Saltykovs.8 Yet pug-nosed Paul resembled Peter III and not the tall and handsome Saltykov. What is more, the courtier Charles Masson suggested that Catherine’s hatred for ‘the very sight of Paul’9 was sufficient proof that he was indeed Peter’s son.

  Stressed and nervous from infancy, Paul had a short fuse. Insomnia and nightmares pestered his childhood and youth. He was kept away from Catherine, surrounded by spies and isolated by his petulance and his explosive tantrums. George Macartney recorded a vivid moment when Paul’s paranoia magnified a perfectly rational fear. Upon being invited to a masquerade, the grand duke told his tutor, ‘there is a great monster called the small-pox, walking up and down the ball-room and . . . that same monster has very good intelligence of my motions, for he is generally to be found precisely in those very places where I have the most inclination to go’.10

  In 1776, Paul had married his second wife – the niece of Frederick the Great, Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg – who took the Russian name Maria Feodorovna when she was received into the Orthodox Church. Five years later, the couple went on a European Grand Tour, which included a visit to the house in Zaandam where Peter the Great had briefly lodged.11 In Paris they purchased drawings from the studio of one of Catherine’s favourite artists, Jean-Baptiste Greuze. They bought Sèvres porcelain and furniture from Dominique Daguerre – their enthusiasm provoking a lively interest in the Russian capital for French fixtures and fittings. Travelling with the grand duke and duchess was the connoisseur Prince Nikolay Yusupov, whom Paul later charged with the upkeep of the Hermitage galleries – no easy stewardship, as the tsar, on a whim, decided to split the collection between his various palaces. In Venice the grand duke had attempted to purchase the extensive sculpture collection of Filippo Farsetti, but the republic would not grant an export licence. Years later, after the French annexation of Venice in 1797, the purchase became possible, and 371 crates of sculpture arrived in St Petersburg, which Paul promptly donated to the Academy of Arts.12

  Returning from their Grand Tour to a cold reception from Catherine, whose court and policies Paul had consistency criticised abroad, the grand duke and duchess settled in Gatchina. When Paul took possession of Rinaldi’s austere palace, he employed his favourite architect, Vincenzo Brenna, to embellish the complex. Forty-two kilometres south of the capital and set overlooking ponds and gracious parkland, Gatchina not only provided the grand duke with a base at some remove from his mother, but also allowed him to develop-both positively and negatively. He was a good landlord to the estate’s 3,000 inhabitants, concerning himself with the health and education of all classes and aiding people if they encountered financial hardship.13 The ease created by these measures was, however, compromised by the strict discipline of a life controlled by passports, guard posts, curfews and a demanding dress code. At Gatchina, Paul was able to drill a private army to the highest standard.14

  Carl Shulz’s View of Gatchina Palace from the mid-nineteenth century.

  In the first year of his short, erratic and unfortunate reign, the city of St Petersburg was subjected to a torrent of rules which overwhelmed the administration and bewildered the inhabitants. State secretary Dmitry Troshchinsky claimed there were 48,000 new orders and laws during that first year.15 As with estimates for the number of Catherine’s lovers, the sum of laws and decrees passed during Paul’s four-and-a-quarter-year reign varies wildly, but there is no doubt that excessive legislation poured from the troubled waters of a brain that was desperately seeking structure and precision. Like Peter III, Paul’s ‘Prussianness’ aimed to restrain inchoate ‘Russianness’ and curb a dangerous cosmopolitanism. His officers looked like German soldiers from the age of Frederick the Great. He built ‘barracks, guard houses and, above all things, sentry boxes’, although – as Heinrich von Storch observed – these buildings were of timber and would ‘scarcely last longer than their builder’.16 The easy-going pleasures of the well-to-do which had characterised much of Catherine’s reign disappeared, as St Petersburg was brought to order by a monarch increasingly held to be off his head.

  Paul had a wooden theatre pulled down simply because Catherine had built it.17 Count Rostopchin suggested that ‘one might think he was searching for ways of making himself loathed and detested’. Charles Whitworth, the British Ambassador, showed tolerance for the new emperor – until his patience ran out. Soon after Paul’s accession, Whitworth wrote that ‘great allowances must be made for the peculiar delicacy of his situation’. Less than three years later, Whitworth was complaining that his sole occupation – ‘to mark the constant turn and change of the Emperor’ – was no easy job.18 By March 1800 Whitworth confirmed that ‘the emperor is literally not in his senses . . . His disorder has gradually increased and now manifests itself in such a manner as to fill everyone with the most serious alarm.’ While some of the more extreme instances of Paul’s lunacy were concocted by enemies or exasperated subjects, an English visitor’s opinion of the emperor having ‘a slight approach to insanity in the organisation of his mind’ was clearly nothing but the finest example of British understatement. Impetuous and often rude, Paul was given to making impudent and infantile remarks. Once, deciding to play coachman to the court engraver, James Walker, Paul suddenly tapped on the carriage window and declared, ‘Do you know, Squire Walker, if I chose, I could spit in your face.’1
9 Again, sense was lurking in this apparently fatuous statement. The emperor was obviously delighted that the glass windows of the coach would protect his guest’s face. Nonetheless, Paul’s reign was – like one of Paul’s own tortured dreams – a nightmare.

  The tsar transformed the capital into a fortress. The city was locked down with barriers and guard posts, and there were infantry, police and Cossacks on every corner. When Casanova had planned to quit Petersburg in 1765 he was obliged to post the information in the Vedomosti a fortnight before his departure.20 It was a procedure that afforded protection to the city’s merchants. With Paul on the throne, such an advertisement was required to be placed in the paper on three separate occasions.21 When Paul demanded that a passport be issued to inhabitants temporarily leaving the city to visit friends or country houses round about, people started to rail. They suffered further from an inconvenient and degrading decree, which stipulated that whenever the emperor or a member of the imperial family passed, subjects were required to stop and kneel – dismounting if they were on horseback, descending if they were in a carriage. In bad weather the duty was unpleasant, but failure to comply resulted in arrest.22 As the German dramatist Auguste von Kotzbuë arrived in Petersburg after a difficult trip, the Grand Duke Alexander galloped past. Von Kotzbuë, neither recognising him nor being aware of the rule of obeisance, narrowly escaped punishment.23