As summer approached and the sun parched the usually moist St Petersburg soil, thick dust clouds of street dirt coated hot pedestrians – and those who could do so left the city. By June, the Petersburg season had ended. Returning from a trip to Moscow, Porter found the capital particularly deserted and lacklustre in the summer months.59 But those who were forced, by profession or poverty, to stay there did find amusement. Alexander arranged a gravelled walk around the southern perimeter of the Admiralty, where stalls for amusement and refreshment were set up. John Quincy Adams enjoyed boating parties and picnics to the islands.60 Catherine Wilmot’s sister, Martha, saw the emperor review the Cadet Corps, turned out in their green-and-scarlet uniforms. On the same day, she had the good fortune to watch a manned balloon flight over the capital, the two men on board privileged to see the extensive cityscape of Messrs Trezzini, Le Blond and Eropkin laid out beneath them, as on a map.’61
If the Wilmot sisters enjoyed being out and about, Martha took no joy in Russian dining. In the summer of 1803, she wrote that two soups were always brought to the table: ‘one composed of herbs . . . ornamented and enriched by lumps of fat’, while the other was dumplinged with ‘petit patées of bad paste’. Next came ‘a fowl smothered in butter and boiled to rags’, followed by a vegetable so well disguised it was impossible to identify it. That was followed by roast meat, wild-boar ham and ‘such a train of dishes . . . as keeps one hours at table’.62 At court, however, Alexander laid less emphasis on interminable banquets and introduced the idea of the buffet supper, which started with hors d’oeuvre, followed by four courses reflecting the emperor’s personal love of French cuisine. Drunkenness was not tolerated, and it was rumoured that the emperor removed drunkards from the lists of those in line for promotion.63 As for the humbler inhabitants of the capital, the ‘culture of the kitchen garden’ was ‘brought to such perfection’, and the baking was so good, that Storch suggested it was ‘impossible anywhere, even in Paris, to eat better bread’.64
The tradition of offering hospitality accounted for a considerable part of the expenditure of great households. Anyone of good manners and appearance who had been presented and accepted by such a household had the right to dine there, uninvited, on any occasion. The custom led to the kind of absurd situations to be found in nineteenth-century Russian novels. A poor foreign officer seeking admission into the Russian service kept himself in St Petersburg for two years, by virtue of Count Razumovsky’s hospitality. During that time, Razumovsky noticed the man at his table, spoke with him in his library and found the stranger to be most knowledgeable about military matters. Never once did the count ask his name or enquire about his circumstances. One day, the man disappeared and Razumovsky missed him. Nobody knew who he was or where he lived. At length, the stranger returned and a more personal conversation was struck up between host and guest. At once – after two years and one meeting – the man was commissioned in the Russian Army.65
Entertaining in such a multilingual city was not without its difficulties. John Quincy Adams remembered the awkwardness of presenting the US Consul at Arkhangelsk to Count Romanzov. As the latter had no English and the consul scarcely any French, their exchanges were halting.66 French had become fashionable Petersburg’s lingua franca, although Russian, German, English, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Turkish and Swedish – to name but a few – were also heard. Walking along the Nevsky Prospekt in the first years of the nineteenth century provided an aural mix as varied as that of London’s Oxford Street or the Parisian Grands Boulevards in the twenty-first century. The Nevsky proclaimed St Petersburg as a city of strangers, and its places of worship testified to that diversity: there were Armenians, Orthodox, Protestants, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and – among the tradesmen in the markets – Muslims.
The city was growing. In the first years of Alexander’s reign, the population was floating between 2.00,000 and 270,000- that considerable spread flagging the uncertainty of the estimate. What can be established with some confidence is that peasants and military personnel outnumbered merchants and townspeople by three to one, and that the population was volatile. In 1811 – the year before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia – St Petersburg was counted the fifth-largest city in Europe, with 336,000 inhabitants. It was divided into eleven parts and fifty-five quarters, of which the First Admiralty Quarter remained the most exclusive.67 Construction and maintenance continued, using simple, time-honoured procedures. More often than not, the workmen’s sole tool was a hatchet and, in place of elaborate scaffolding to repair fractured stucco, an angled beam onto which thin steps of wood were nailed provided access to all levels of a façade. Otherwise, a plasterer sat on a strip of wood tied to a rope dangling from an overhang and bobbed around in mid-air as he smoothed the damaged surface 68 – a procedure still seen in the city today.
William Hastie – a Scot who worked as a stonemason for six years at Tsarskoe Selo and then became its chief architect – was appointed to the Office of Waterways in 1804. Hastie’s study of cast-iron bridge-building, which had developed in England and Germany during the 1790s, resulted in designs to replace the wooden bridges over Petersburg’s canals. Among them was the twenty-seven-metre-long, twenty-one-metre-wide Police Bridge over the Moika on the Nevsky Prospekt, which opened in late 1806, and the Red Bridge on Gorokhovaya Street with its four granite pillars. The moat around the Admiralty was filled in and its fortifications removed in 1806, and there was a port for galleys at the undeveloped western end of Vasilevsky Island.69 As the Peter and Paul Fortress now stood in the centre of a sizeable city, it was even less useful for defence than it had been in the early days. However, it was a structure suited to a prison, and it continued to house the imperial mint. Every day 300 workers stripped off as they arrived and were given thin, unpocketed shirts and shorts, which made pilfering almost impossible.
An unskilled worker could earn anything between fifteen and eighty kopeks a day and feed himself well on cabbage soup, dried fish or buckwheat kasha for about seven kopeks. The poorest slept for one kopek on one of the hard beds crammed in three huge vaulted basements which stood beneath the Haymarket. A door porter collected admission and took care of security. Close by there was a trader selling leftovers and cuts of meat too putrid to be offered anywhere else. These were chopped into morsels so that they could be eaten easily with a toothpick – all knives were confiscated at the entrance. After a fitful sleep in a rat- and roach-infested stench, 1,000 workers were discharged into the dawning city.70
Under Alexander, Petersburg was satisfactorily policed. A Court of Conscience was in place to moderate misguided calumny and the petty delinquencies of youth.71 The authorities regularly raided taverns, in an attempt to control prostitution and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Petty thefts occurred in crowded public places, but crime continued to be low. However, one brutal murder – committed in 1806 – drew the most sensational punishment. The coachman of the allegedly cruel Count Ablenovsky struck his boss with the iron key used to tighten the bolts on carriages, strangled him with the reins, robbed him and then fled to Lake Ladoga, where he was apprehended. Sentenced to be ‘knouted without mercy’, the guilty man was paraded through Petersburg, then taken to ‘an open and muddy plain’ near the Neva to be flogged. As a huge crowd of spectators gathered, the executioner bound the murderer to a board and began to beat him. After only a few minutes, ‘nothing was heard except the bloody splash of the knout on the senseless body of the wretched man’. The punishment continued for a good hour, before the torturer was instructed to stop. At that point the apparently lifeless body was branded, and gunpowder was rubbed into the wound to mark the man indelibly. After that, an instrument resembling ‘monstrous curling irons’ were thrust up the man’s nose, while two officers tore the nostrils from his head, an act so painful that the prisoner revivified and was carted off towards Siberia. Not surprisingly, at the first staging post on the following day, he expired.72
Upon acceding to the throne, Paul had relieved t
he architect Charles Cameron of all his duties. Although the tsar briefly relented in 1799 and commissioned Cameron to design a bridge at Pavlovsk, it is likely that the Scot went home and returned to St Petersburg only when Alexander summoned him to be Chief Architect of the Admiralty. Approaching sixty, Cameron proved unequal to the task and worked on smaller projects, such as the cathedral at Kronstadt and the repairs to fire-damaged Pavlovsk. He died a recluse in Petersburg in 1812, his architectural library auctioned off by the appropriately named Jean Grabit of 78 Nevsky Prospekt.73
The man who replaced Cameron to oversee the building of the new Admiralty was Andreyan Zakharov. A gold medallist from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, he was appointed chief architect for all naval building in the capital in 1806. The renovation and restructuring of the 407-metre-long Admiralty with its central tower took seventeen years to complete. A bas-relief runs around the tower, celebrating the creation of the Russian Navy under Peter the Great, who is seen receiving a trident from Neptune. At each of the four corners there are statues of classical warriors, including Alexander the Great: a mistaken nod to the emperor who was named more for the Russian warrior and saint, Alexander Nevsky, than for the Greek general. New motifs and mythologies – discovered when Napoleon invaded Egypt – had begun to influence European artists and designers. One of the first instances in Russian architecture was the inclusion of Isis, the Egyptian god of water and wind, among the twenty-two statues representing the elements and seasons placed around the tower above the Admiralty’s triumphal arch.74 Another Russian architect, Andrei Voronikhin – possibly the illegitimate son of the great patron of the arts, Count Stroganov – finalised plans for Kazan Cathedral, which was to stand on the Nevsky Prospekt. The design merged Paul’s beloved colonnades of St Peter’s in Rome with the dome of Soufflot’s Eglise Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. The new cathedral would provide a home for the venerated icon Our Lady of Kazan, which was brought to the capital during the reign of Peter the Great. Kazan’s powerful and airy colonnade embraced a theatrical space which – sixty years on – would provide a dramatic platform for early socialist orators.
Unlike Cameron, the ageing Quarenghi made an important contribution to St Petersburg during the early years of Alexander’s reign. As well as the Imperial Chancery, there was a new building for the daughters of the impoverished gentry at the Smolny Institute, the colonnade of the Anichkov Palace and the Horse Guards Riding School, or Manège. Built between 1804 and 1807, this last remains one of the finest classical buildings in the capital. The statues of the horsemen Castor and Pollux, which are sited in front, are fine examples of the statuary that appeared all over Alexander’s capital.75
As for the palaces surrounding the capital, John Quincy Adams found Oranienbaum to be in better condition than Peterhof, but despaired that the furnishings were ‘magnificence in all its stages of decay, from the mere change of fashion to the perishing rags and tatters of crimson satin curtains and chair covers’. At Peterhof he found ‘once-gilded wainscotting and doors,. . . Chinese lacquering and pictures perished upon the canvas, from the damps of uninhabited apartments’.76 While Martha Wilmot marvelled at the gardens which displayed ‘works as indeed I could not have supposed it possible for art to produce – fountains . . . gladiators with swords of water’, Adams found some of the contraptions risible. One such was the fountain with ‘three leaden ducks pursued by a dog, which are movable and made to imitate the barking of a dog and the quack of ducks’. The effect, he wrote, besides ‘being ridiculous, is very bad.’77
Once a year in the summer, when Alexander gave a great public ball, the gardens at Peterhof were illuminated, and the well-engineered causeway from Petersburg became choked with traffic. As dusk fell, the gardens became a blaze of glimmering light, as the soft harmonies of Russian hunting music horned from the depths of the park. Light glinted on the shimmering leaves and struck the white bark of the birch trees. Beyond the jewelled spray of the Grand Cascade, well-lit ships of the line were anchored offshore. A similar, smaller fête was held for the diplomatic corps. Adams attended, marvelling at the 300,000 lamps and the 1,600 servants detailed to illuminate them. As Robert Ker Porter remarked, ‘in the luxury of light no country is so lavish as Russia’.78
The seemingly gentle, blue-eyed emperor who invited people to these Peterhof celebrations had been born in 1777. Rather as Empress Elizabeth had done with Paul, Catherine whisked Alexander and his younger brother, Constantine, away from their parents and managed their upbringing. Their governor, Count Nikolai Saltykov, was encouraged to teach Alexander to ‘learn while playing’ and to foster virtue rather than inculcate knowledge. 79 In any case, this somewhat unconventional education was interrupted by Alexander’s marriage to Catherine’s choice of bride, Princess Louise of Baden, who took the name Elizabeth Alekseevna.80 It was an unsuccessful marriage, although the couple were reconciled towards the end of their lives when the emperor’s mysticism led him to break up with his giddy mistress, Maria Naryshkina.81
Alexander expressed his desire to ‘govern the nation according to the laws . . . of the august Catherine the Great, our grandmother’. A university was created in the capital, and the architect Vasily Stasov was commissioned to add a wing to the imperial palace at Tsarskoe Selo to house an elite lyceum set up to train the sons of the nobility for service. The school’s first pupils included future Decembrist conspirators, other radicals and the poet Alexander Pushkin. Alexander I also lifted the restriction on publishing and the import of books, but only to introduce pre-emptive censorship by the government through the newly formed Ministry of Education.82 Serf auctions and serf-for-sale adverts were forbidden and the abolition of serfdom was discussed. In March 1803, the Free Cultivators’ Law was passed, enabling landlords to free serfs and – in return for a ‘redemption’ payment – give them a strip of land to cultivate. But the scheme hardly stimulated widespread change. By 1825, fewer than 50,000 serfs had been freed and, of those, nearly one-third were on the estates of Prince Alexander Golitsyn.83
The man responsible for attempting to deflect Alexander from Catherine’s autocratic regime was the self-made son of a village priest, Mikhail Speransky, who wished to make Russia both efficient and humane. Repelled by serfdom, Speransky famously wrote, ‘I find in Russia two classes: the slaves of the sovereign and the slaves of the landowners. The first call themselves free only in relation to the second: there are no truly free people in Russia, apart from beggars and philosophers.’ Speransky prepared a new code of law, which he based on Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804, but his proposals were not adopted. Napoleon intruded on the peaceful processes of the Russian court, and Alexander found himself at war.84 A decade of his reign was preoccupied with Napoleon, who began his campaign against Russia with the massacre of the Austro-Russian alliance at Austerlitz in December 1805. Alexander – who put himself at the head of his armies and ignored the advice of the venerable General Kutuzov – was humiliated by his defeat at Friedland into making an uneasy truce at Tilsit in June 1807. The treaty was roundly condemned in Russia, and anti-French sentiment ran high. In St Petersburg salons there were rumours of plots against the tsar.85
Madame de Staël, the Frenchwoman of letters and fervent opponent of Bonaparte, arrived in the Russian capital in 1811, the year before Napoleon renewed hostilities. She found herself enchanted by a city in which ‘a wizard with a wand had conjured all the marvels of Europe and Asia in the middle of a wasteland’. She felt convinced that Petersburg’s very existence presented ‘proof of the ardent will of the Russians which knows nothing to be impossible’. The house she was renting overlooked Falconet’s Bronze Horseman. As Madame de Staël gazed at the sober buildings of Senate Square, she reflected on the silence of a city void of brave and raucous young men, who had gone to join the army that the tsar was urgently rebuilding.86
When presented to Alexander, she found the beleaguered ruler a fine example of ‘goodness and dignity’. She visited his mother, the conservative Maria Feodorovna,
in her apartments in the vast Tauride Palace and was much impressed by the white-pillared hall with its indoor garden, where ‘the frigid airs of winter never breathe’ and ‘a luxuriant maze of oranges, myrtles, and clustering vines’ was to be found. She studied Petersburg society and concurred with Storch that love – as Europeans understood it – was rarely seen. Scorch had observed that men often neglected to pay women ‘little attentions’, so the ladies, in return, were ‘dryness itself’.87 The poetry and prose were still not in place to instruct and sustain a sentimental or profound love. Many Russians still acted impetuously and were still prompted by lust. Madame de Staël visited the Institute of St Catherine on the Fontanka, where 250 girls were ‘brought up under the gaze of the empress’, and she found their elegance and grace remarkable. Her only sadness was that St Petersburg’s exceptional beauty was soon to be threatened by ‘the arrogance of a man who . . . like Satan’ claimed all the kingdoms of the earth.88
In May 1811, when John Quincy Adams was taking his morning constitutional along the Fontanka Canal, he encountered – as he often did – Emperor Alexander out for a stroll. They discussed the growing tension between England and America and the possibility of war. Ten months later, meeting on the quay, a struggle much closer to home was preoccupying the tsar: a ‘war is coming which I have done so much to avoid . . . we expect to be attacked’. Less than a month later, Alexander told Adams that he was about to leave St Petersburg to join his army.89 Napoleon had placed his troops in Germany in a state of readiness and arrived in Dresden on 9 May to lead his men into Russia, on to Moscow and thence to the Russian capital, St Petersburg. That was his plan.
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