ST. PETERSBURG

Europe's "long nineteenth century" witnessed both the apogee of the Russian Empire and the beginnings of its collapse. Sharing the empire's fate in every major respect was its capital, St. Petersburg. Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as a naval base and trading post, St. Petersburg had become, by 1914, the empire's largest city as well as its administrative headquarters, a bustling Baltic seaport and booming industrial site, an international center of art and fashion, and the crucible of a revolution that many historians would judge the single most important event of the ensuing twentieth century.

foundations

No major city of the modern world is more closely connected with its founder than St. Petersburg is with Peter I (known as Peter the Great), tsar and first Russian emperor (r. 1682–1725), whose patron saint is commemorated in the city's very name. Many of St. Petersburg's extant buildings date directly from Peter's time, including the central fortress and its church, where he is interred; his domik, or the little house that was his first home in the city; the Summer Palace, built for him from 1710 to 1714 by the city's first architect, Domenico Trezzini; and suburban Peterhof, as Peter called it, the complex of palaces and parks overlooking the Finnish Gulf that was his favorite retreat. The origins of numerous other important buildings, if not always their present structures, also go back to Peter's time: the Winter Palace; the Admiralty; the Academy of Sciences; the Kunstkamera, or natural history museum; the Menshikov Palace, residence of the region's first governor; the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, burial place of Russian heroes; and the Building of the Twelve Colleges, erected to house the administrative offices—of war, justice, foreign affairs, and so on—created in conjunction with Peter's drastic reorganization of Russia's central government and now, like Peterhof, part of St. Petersburg State University. Countless other mementos of Russia's first emperor are to be found in the city as well—museum exhibits, historic sites, shop signs, street names, and monumental statues, including, most famously, the statue of Peter known as the Bronze Horseman, which was dedicated in 1782 by Catherine II (known as Catherine the Great) and later celebrated in a long poem of that name by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), who is often called Russia's greatest poet. Even the popular nickname in Russian for St. Petersburg, "Piter," from the Dutch form of his name that he liked to use when corresponding with his close companions, evokes the sailor-tsar. These elements of St. Petersburg today all constitute tangible links with Peter the Great; all are enduring reminders of his life and reign. Yet more, in both its inception and its subsequent history, St. Petersburg embodies the revolution in Russia's government, culture, and international standing that was engineered by his regime. The whole city has an abiding historical significance, in other words, that goes well beyond its connections with the person of its founder.

"I love thee, creation of Peter,
Thy severe and stately aspect,
The mighty Neva coursing
'Twixt its granite banks;
The iron lacework of thy fences,
Thy wistful, moonless nights…."

Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale, 1833.

Russia before Peter's reign was a vast yet sparsely populated kingdom centered in medieval Moscow, its sole city of any significant size and accessible from the centers of either European or Asian civilization only by a very long and perilous journey. Muscovite Russia's relative isolation was thus cultural as well as geographical: a "rude and barbarous kingdom," in the words of a later sixteenth-century English visitor; its capital, in those of a later seventeenth-century German resident, "built without any architectural order or art." Thus from the outset St. Petersburg's elegant parks and public buildings, broad boulevards, and symmetrical layout sharply distinguished its architecture from that of cloistered, cluttered, picturesque old Moscow (or any other Russian town). Even its very location, where the Neva River empties into the Baltic Sea's Gulf of Finland, at the extreme western edge of Russia—in fact, on land recently conquered from Sweden and aboriginally inhabited by Finns—is indicative of Peter's determination to make his city the capital of a cosmopolitan European empire.

And so it progressively became. Between 1703 and Peter's death in 1725 anywhere from ten thousand to thirty thousand workers labored annually on the construction of the city, their efforts directed by the thousand or more architects, masons, and interior decorators recruited for the purpose in Italy, Germany, Holland, and France. The architects included, besides Trezzini, a Swiss-Italian lured from the Danish king's service in 1703, Alexandre Le Blond, hired by the tsar's agents in Paris in 1716; Andreas Schlüter, a sculptor and architect famous for his work in Poland and Prussia; Niccolò Michetti, recruited in Rome; and Mikhail Zemtsov, the ablest of their Russian pupils. Almost as important were the first engineers, hired in England and the Netherlands, who built the sluices, canals, and dikes needed to tame the Neva delta on which the new city arose. The diverse skills and nationalities of these and the other first builders of St. Petersburg imparted to its architecture a distinctive baroque style, one that combined with its canalized seaboard site to produce, as it was soon said, a "second Amsterdam" or "another Venice." St. Petersburg's first builders also made the city the architectural trendsetter of the Russian Empire. Right down to the empire's demise in 1917, new construction even in Moscow would replicate the successive European architectural styles—baroque, neoclassical, empire, modernist—dominant in the capital by the Baltic.

"Petersbourg may with reason be looked upon as a Wonder of the World, considering its magnificent palaces, sixty odd thousand houses, and the short time that was employed in the building of it." (F. C. Weber [German diplomat], 1720)

"The richness and splendour of the Russian court surpasses description. It retains many traces of its antient Asiatic pomp, blended with European refinement. An immense retinue of courtiers always preceded and followed the empress [Catherine II]; the costliness and glare of their apparel, and a profusion of precious stones, created a splendour, of which the magnificence of other courts can give us only a faint idea." (Dr. William Coxe [English visitor], 1784)

"The prevailing taste here is the brilliant and the striking: spires, gilded and tapering like electric conductors; porticoes, the bases of which almost disappear under the water; squares, ornamented with columns which seem lost in the immense space that surrounds them; antique statues, the character and attire of which so ill accord with the aspect of this country, the tint of the sky, the cos tumes and manners of the inhabitants, as to sug gest captive heroes in a hostile land…."

(Marquis de Custine [French visitor], 1839)

"Is there anything more buoyant, more brilliant, more resplendent than this beautiful street of our capital?… The gay carriages, the handsome men, the beautiful women—all lend it a carnival air, an air that you can almost inhale the moment you set foot on Nevsky Prospect!" (Nikolai Gogol [Ukrainian-Russian writer], 1842)

"Petersburg lived a restless, cold, satiated, semi-nocturnal life. Phosphorescent, crazy, volup tuous summer nights; green tables and the clink of gold; music, whirling couples behind windows, gal loping troikas, gypsies, duels at daybreak, ceremo nial military parades marching to the whistling of icy winds and the squealing of fifes before the Byzantine gaze of the Emperor—such was the life of the city… in 1914." (Alexei Tolstoy, The Road to Calvary, 1921)

Indeed, it was as the new cultural capital of Russia that St. Petersburg best embodied the Petrine revolution. The first systematic training in Russia in modern (post-Renaissance) European painting and sculpture as well as in architecture and the graphic arts was instituted in St. Petersburg, a development that culminated in the foundation by Peter's daughter, Empress Elizabeth, of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (1757). The St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, after its founding in 1724,

rapidly became the institutional hub for the development of mathematics and the natural sciences in Russia. The academy was the home, too, of Russia's first law professors, historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, and modern literary specialists. Equally critical was St. Petersburg's function, from its founder's time, as the wellspring in Russia of modern European music and dance as well as the visual arts, all of which would flourish brilliantly in the new capital until reaching their climax in the "Silver Age" of the decades before 1917, an age associated with such masters as Vasily Kandinsky in painting, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Sergei Diaghilev in dance.

apogee

St. Petersburg's international prestige, like that of the empire itself, reached its apogee in the century or so that elapsed between the accession of Catherine II in 1762 and the death of Nicholas I in 1855. Catherine especially left her mark on the city. To Empress Elizabeth's colossal, flamboyantly baroque Winter Palace (designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli) Catherine added a more intimate if still palatial "Hermitage," the first of three such additions (successively designated the Small Hermitage, Large Hermitage, and New Hermitage), together with an elegant court theater, which was subsequently also attached to the Winter Palace complex and named the Hermitage Theater. Giacomo Quarenghi built the theater in the restrained neoclassical style that Catherine favored, and he alone designed forty-five buildings in the city, mostly aristocratic palaces but also a splendid new home for the Academy of Sciences and another for what later became the Imperial State Bank. Other distinguished architects, Russian and foreign, designed the magnificent Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, the Marble Palace, and the Taurida Palace, each built for a leading court favorite, and the Smolny Institute, a school founded by Catherine for the education of noble-women, which the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin took over as their headquarters in 1917. Equally if not more important for St. Petersburg's future were the massive granite embankments built on Catherine's orders to restrain the turbulent Neva River and its tributaries, thereby providing protection from the recurrent floods that inundated the city. At Catherine's death in 1796 St. Petersburg's population had risen to more than two hundred thousand, up from forty thousand in 1725; its amenities rivaled those of any great city in Europe; and visitors had begun to call it, evoking the fabled metropolis of the ancient Middle East, the Palmyra of the North.

The similarly long reigns of Catherine's grandsons Alexander I (1801–1825) and Nicholas I (1825–1855) confirmed St. Petersburg's status as the seat of a mighty empire, an empire that by 1815 had defeated, more so than any other land power in Europe, the empire of Napoleon. This great victory was variously commemorated in the Russian capital, most notably by the erection of the huge Alexander Column in the immense square adjoining the Winter Palace. Two enormous churches were also built to affirm, if not loudly proclaim, Russia's arrival as a great European power. The first, completed under Alexander I, was a sternly neoclassical edifice called the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan (after a revered icon of that name) and prominently located on St. Petersburg's central thoroughfare, the Nevsky Prospect, whose perpetual throngs of every rank and nationality testified to the empire's vast size, multiethnic character, and international importance. A second, even grander church, constructed in a late neoclassical style of the most opulent materials available, arose under Nicholas I, whose reactionary policies at home and abroad earned him the nickname "the Gendarme of Europe." The Cathedral of St. Isaac, as it was called, was much less a church than a magnificent, Roman-style imperial monument. Its dome, the third largest in the world, provided a new focal point for Russia's increasingly sumptuous if not overbearing capital.

Numerous other major buildings, also still standing, were put up in St. Petersburg under Alexander I and Nicholas I in the empire style—the new or rebuilt Admiralty, Ministries of War and Foreign Affairs, offices of the Senate and Holy Synod (administering church affairs), General Staff Headquarters, and Stock Exchange—along with several

theaters, a ballet school, and still more military barracks, triumphal arches, and hero statues. Vast new parade grounds for staging the elaborate military exercises much favored by both emperors were laid out. Following grandmother Catherine's example, both rulers also made important additions to the Winter Palace complex, known today as the State Hermitage Museum. Simultaneously a major architectural monument and world-class art collection, the Hermitage remains the most impressive of St. Petersburg's many memorials to its imperial past.

industrialization and revolution

St. Petersburg's Palace Square, adjacent to the Winter Palace and site of the Alexander Column, was also the site of "Bloody Sunday," as the massacre by imperial troops of demonstrating workers one Sunday in January 1905 was quickly dubbed. The city's population had grown enormously in the half-century or so since the death of Nicholas I: from an estimated five hundred thousand inhabitants in 1857, of whom the great majority were either officials, soldiers, or servants and their families, to nearly one and a quarter million in 1900, of whom roughly a third were industrial workers and their dependents. St. Petersburg had always been the center of the empire's carriage trade, catering to the official-noble elite and innumerable foreign visitors, as witness the famous jewelry shop founded by Carl Fabergé (1846–1920). But by 1900 the opulent core city was surrounded by a rapidly growing belt of factories, among which the giant Putilov metalworks alone employed some thirteen thousand men. Heavy industry prevailed, with attendant environmental pollution; worker slums had sprung up; and streetcars, telegraph and then telephone wires, massive apartment blocks and department stores, and all the other appurtenances of industrial modernity had penetrated even the city's central districts. Rising crime rates, worker strikes, and other manifestations of popular unrest had been quick to follow, culminating in the Revolution of 1905. The revolution ushered in Russia's brief period of quasi-constitutional government (1906–1916), during which the lower legislative chamber, the Imperial Duma, met in the Taurida Palace built by Catherine II for Prince Grigory Potemkin, conqueror of the Crimea (or Taurida). In the summer of 1917 the same palace housed the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (worker, peasant, and soldier councils), in whose name, in October of that year, Lenin would seize power from the Provisional Government that had taken office the previous February and was meeting in the Winter Palace.

By the early twentieth century, in other words, the majestic imperial capital of Pushkin's poems had been transformed into the turbulent metropolis depicted in Andrei Bely's allegorical novel Petersburg, first published in serial form in 1913, and in Alexei Tolstoy's darkly evocative The Road to Calvary (a trilogy, the first part of which was published in 1921). Nicholas II, Russia's last emperor, who came to the throne in 1894 and abdicated in February 1917, never liked the city that St. Petersburg had become, much preferring to live instead in the peace and quiet of his suburban palace-estate. He and his family also spent unprecedented amounts of time in the old capital, Moscow, in specially renovated apartments in the Kremlin. Picturesque old Moscow had once more become, in an age of rampant nationalism, the national capital of Russia, the sentimental heart of the Russian nation, an attitude that paid little heed to the realities of the multiethnic empire. Nicholas II was scarcely alone among Russians in experiencing the emotional pull of the old capital and in doing his part to promote a revival of traditional Muscovite forms in art, architecture, and decoration. The revivalist movement even succeeded in planting, in the heart of St. Petersburg itself, a gigantic edifice built in neo-Muscovite style, the Church of the Resurrection, which opened in 1907 (and is also known as the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, in recognition of its location on the site where Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists in 1881). The soaring cupolas and rich ornamentation of the Church of the Resurrection, restored in the late twentieth century after decades of Soviet neglect, stand in utmost architectural contrast to the austere, horizontal classicism of the surrounding buildings. Also highly indicative of the nationalist movement in late imperial Russia was the renaming of the capital itself, when war against Germany broke out in 1914, from the Germanic "St. Petersburg" of Peter the Great, now felt to be unacceptably foreign, to the more purely Russian "Petrograd."

It was as Petrograd that St. Petersburg witnessed the trauma of World War I and the Revolution of 1917. And it was the revolutionary government of Lenin and his Bolsheviks that in 1918, fearful of a German conquest, moved Russia's capital back to Moscow, where it remains. In 1924, following Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in a transparent attempt to replace the aura of Peter and all it stood for with that of the founder of the Soviet Union. It was as Leningrad that the city endured the subsequent decades of Soviet rule and underwent the terrible German siege of World War II. Yet Leningraders, living amid innumerable mementos of their city's cosmopolitan past, never forgot St. Petersburg; in 1991 they voted to restore the city's original name. Russia's "Window on Europe," as it was first called (by an Italian visitor) in 1739, had been reopened.

See alsoCities and Towns; Moscow; Pushkin, Alexander; Russia.

bibliography

Bater, James H. St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change. Montreal, 1976.

Bely, Andrei. Petersburg. Translated by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad. Bloomington, Ind., 1978.

Buckler, Julie A. Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape. Princeton, N.J., 2005. Nineteenth-century St. Petersburg as a "living cultural system."

Clark, Katerina. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Cultural developments in the early twentieth century.

Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture. Chicago, 1988. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the building and early history of St. Petersburg.

Cross, Anthony, ed. St. Petersburg, 1703–1825. Houndmills, Basingstoke, U.K., 2003. A collection of essays published to commemorate the city's tercentenary.

Kaganov, Grigory. Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts. Translated by Sidney Monas. Stanford, Calif., 1997.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia. New York, 2000.

Norman, Geraldine. The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum. New York, 1998.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitri. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. Translated by John Goodman. New York, 1996.

Volkov, Solomon. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York, 1995.

James Cracraft