Early St. Petersburg

Today’s installment concludes St. Petersburg Founded,
our selection from Peter the Great by Kazimierz Waliszewski published in 1898.

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Previously in St. Petersburg Founded.

Time: 1703
Place: St. Petersburg

Up to Catharine’s reign inundations were chronic in their occurrence. On September 11, 1706, Peter drew from his pocket the measure he always carried about him, and convinced himself that there were twenty-one inches of water above the floors of his cottage. In all directions he saw men, women, and children clinging to the wreckage of buildings, which was being carried down the river. He described his impressions in a letter to Menshikoff, dated from “Paradise,” and declared it was “extremely amusing.” It may be doubted whether he found many persons to share his delight. Communications with the town, now rendered easy by railways, were in those days not only difficult, but dangerous. Campredon, when he went from Moscow to St. Petersburg, in April, 1723, spent twelve hundred rubles. He lost part of his luggage, eight of his horses were drowned, and after having travelled for four weeks he reached his destination, very ill. Peter himself, who arrived before the French diplomat, had been obliged to ride part of the way, and to swim his horse across the rivers!

But in spite of all these considerations, the importance of which I am far from denying, I am inclined to think Peter’s choice a wise one. Nobody can wonder that the idea of retaining Moscow as his capital was most repugnant to him. The existence of his work in those hostile surroundings — in a place which to this day has remained obstinately reactionary — could never have been anything but precarious and uncertain. It must, after his death at least, if not during his life, have been at the mercy of those popular insurrections before which the sovereign power, as established in the Kremlin, had already so frequently bowed. When Peter carried Muscovy out of her former existence, and beyond her ancient frontiers, he was logically forced to treat the seat of his government in the same manner. His new undertaking resembled, both in aspect and character, a marching and fighting formation, directed toward the west. The leader’s place, and that of his chief residence, was naturally indicated at the head of his column. This once granted, and the principle of the translation of the capital to the western extremity of the Czar’s newly acquired possessions admitted, the advantages offered by Ingria would appear to me to outweigh all the drawbacks previously referred to.

The province was, at that period, virgin soil sparsely inhabited by a Finnish population possessing neither cohesion nor historical consistency, and, consequently, docile and easily assimilated. Everywhere else — all along the Baltic coast, in Esthonia, in Carelia, and in Courland — though the Swedes might be driven out, the Germans still remained firmly settled; the neighborhood of their native country and of the springs of Teutonic culture enduing them with an invincible power of resistance. Riga in the present day, after nearly two centuries of Russian government, is a thoroughly German town. In St. Petersburg, Russia, as a country, became European and cosmopolitan, but the city itself is essentially Russian, and the Finnish element in its neighborhood counts for nothing.

In this matter, though Peter may not have clearly felt and thought it out, he was actuated by the mighty and unerring instinct of his genius. I am willing to admit that here, as in everything else, there was a certain amount of whim, and perhaps some childish desire to ape Amsterdam. I will even go further, and acknowledge that the manner in which he carried out his plan was anything but reasonable. Two hundred thousand laborers, we are told, died during the construction of the new city, and the Russian nobles ruined themselves to build palaces which soon fell out of occupation. But an abyss was opened between the past the reformer had doomed and the future on which he had set his heart, and the national life, thus violently forced into a new channel, was stamped, superficially at first, but more and more deeply by degrees, with the Western and European character he desired to impart.

Moscow, down to the present day, has preserved a religious, almost a monastic air; at every street corner chapels attract the passers-by, and the local population, even at its busiest, crosses itself and bends as it passes before the sacred pictures which rouse its devotion at every turn. St. Petersburg, from the very earliest days, presented a different and quite a secular appearance. At Moscow no public performance of profane music was permitted. At St. Petersburg the Czar’s German musicians played every day on the balcony of his tavern. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the new city boasted a French theatre and an Italian opera, and Schloezer noted that divine service was performed in fourteen languages! Modern Russia, governed, educated to a certain extent, intellectually speaking emancipated, and relatively liberal, could not have come into existence nor grown in stature elsewhere.

And to conclude: Peter was able to effect this singular change without doing too great violence to the historical traditions of his country. From the earliest days of Russian history, the capital had been removed from place to place — from Novgorod to Kiev, from Kiev to Vladimir, from Vladimir to Moscow. This phenomenon was the consequence of the immense area of the national territory, and the want of consistency in the elements of the national life. From the beginning to the end of an evolution which lasted centuries the center of gravity of the disjointed, scattered, and floating forces of ancient Russia perpetually changed its place. Thus the creation of St. Petersburg was nothing but the working out of a problem in dynamics. The struggle with Sweden, the conquest of the Baltic provinces, and the yet more important conquest of a position in the European world naturally turned the whole current of the national energies and life in that direction. Peter desired to perpetuate this course. I am inclined to think he acted wisely.

This ends our series of passages on St. Petersburg Founded by Kazimierz Waliszewski from his book Peter the Great published in 1898. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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