%FOUNDING OF ST. PETERSBURG%
A.D. 1703
K. WALISZEWSKI[1]
[Footnote 1: Translated from the Russian by Lady Mary Loyd.]
So radical and so vigorous were the changes made by Peter the Great in Russia that they roused the opposition of almost the entire nation. Moscow, the ancient capital, was the chief seat of this protesting conservatism; and Peter, resolved to teach his opponents how determined he was in his course and how helpless they were against his absolute power, formed the tremendous project of building a wholly new capital, one where no voice could be raised against him, where no traditions should environ him. He chose an icy desert plain looking out toward the waters which led to that Western Europe which he meant to imitate, if not to conquer.
No other man—one is almost tempted to say, no sane man—would have ventured to erect a capital city in such an impossible place and on the very frontier of his dominions. That Peter not only dared, but succeeded, though at an almost immeasurable cost, makes the creation of the great metropolis, St. Petersburg, one of the most remarkable events of history.
It was the chances of the great northern war that led Peter to St. Petersburg. When he first threw down the gauntlet to Sweden he turned his eyes on Livonia—on Narva and Riga. But Livonia was so well defended that he was driven northward, toward Ingria. He moved thither grudgingly, sending, in the first instance, Apraxin, who turned the easily conquered province into a desert. It was not for some time, and gropingly, as it were, that the young sovereign began to see his way, and finally turned his attention and his longings to the mouth of the Neva. In former years Gustavus Adolphus had realized the strategical importance of a position which his successor, Charles XII, did not deem worthy of consideration, and had himself studied all its approaches. Peter not only took it to be valuable from the military and commercial point of view: he also found it most attractive, and would fain have never left it. He was more at home there than anywhere else, and the historical legends, according to which it was true Russian ground, filled him with emotion. No one knows what inspired this fondness on his part. It may have been the vague resemblance of the marshy flats to the lowlands of Holland; it may have been the stirring of some ancestral instinct. According to a legend, accepted by Nestor, it was by the mouth of the Neva that the earliest Norman conquerors of the country passed on their journeys across the Varegian Sea—their own sea—and so to Rome.
Peter would seem to have desired to take up the thread of that tradition, nine centuries old; and the story of his own foundation of the town has become legendary and epic. One popular description represents him as snatching a halberd from one of his soldiers, cutting two strips of turf, and laying them crosswise with the words "Here there shall be a town!" Foundation-stones were evidently lacking, and sods had to take their place. Then, dropping the halberd, he seized a spade, and began the first embankment. At that moment an eagle appeared, hovering over the Czar's head. It was struck by a shot from a musket. Peter took the wounded bird, set it on his wrist, and departed in a boat to inspect the neighborhood. This occurred on May 16, 1703.
History adds that the Swedish prisoners employed on the work died in thousands. The most indispensable tools were lacking. There were no wheelbarrows, and the earth was carried in the corners of men's clothing. A wooden fort was first built on the island bearing the Finnish name of Ianni-Saari (Hare Island). This was the future citadel of St. Peter and St. Paul. Then came a wooden church, and the modest cottage which was to be Peter's first palace. Near these, the following year, there rose a Lutheran church, ultimately removed to the left bank of the river, into the Liteinaia quarter, and also a tavern, the famous inn of the Four Frigates, which did duty as a town hall for a long time before it became a place of diplomatic meeting. Then the cluster of modest buildings was augmented by the erection of a bazaar. The Czar's collaborators gathered round him, in cottages much like his own, and the existence of St. Petersburg became an accomplished fact.
But, up to the time of the battle of Poltava, Peter never thought of making St. Petersburg his capital. It was enough for him to feel he had a fortress and a port. He was not sufficiently sure of his mastery over the neighboring countries, not certain enough of being able to retain his conquest, to desire to make it the centre of his government and his own permanent residence. This idea was not definitely accepted till after his great victory. His final decision has been bitterly criticised, especially by foreign historians; it has been severely judged and remorselessly condemned. Before expressing any opinion of my own on the subject, I should like to sum up the considerations which have been put forward to support this unfavorable verdict.
The great victory, we are told, diminished the strategic importance of St. Petersburg, and almost entirely extinguished its value as a port; while its erection into the capital city of the empire was never anything but madness. Peter, being now the indisputable master of the Baltic shores, had nothing to fear from any Swedish attack in the Gulf of Finland. Before any attempt in that direction, the Swedes were certain to try to recover Narva or Riga. If in later years they turned their eyes to St. Petersburg, it was only because that town had acquired undue and unmerited political importance. It was easy of attack and difficult to defend. There was no possibility of concentrating any large number of troops there, for the whole country, forty leagues round, was a barren desert. In 1788 Catharine II complained that her capital was too near the Swedish frontier, and too much exposed to sudden movements, such as that which Gustavus III very nearly succeeded in carrying out. Here we have the military side of the question.
From the commercial point of view St. Petersburg, we are assured, did command a valuable system of river communication; but that commanded by Riga was far superior. The Livonian, Esthonian, and Courland ports of Riga, Libau, and Revel, all at an equal distance from St. Petersburg and Moscow, and far less removed from the great German commercial centres, enjoyed a superior climate, and were, subsequent to the conquest of the above-mentioned provinces, the natural points of contact between Russia and the West. An eloquent proof of this fact may be observed nowadays in the constant increase of their commerce, and the corresponding decrease of that of St. Petersburg, which has been artificially developed and fostered.
Besides this, the port of St. Petersburg, during the lifetime of its founder, never was anything but a mere project. Peter's ships were moved from Kronslot to Kronstadt. Between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt the Neva was not, in those days, more than eight feet deep, and Manstein tells us that all ships built at Petersburg had to be dragged, by means of machines fitted with cables, to Kronstadt, where they received their guns. Once these had been taken on board, the vessels could not get upstream again. The port of Kronstadt was closed by ice for six months out of the twelve, and lay in such a position that no sailing-ship could leave it unless the wind blew from the east. There was so little salt in its waters that the ship timbers rotted in a very short time, and, besides, there were no oaks in the surrounding forests, and all such timber had to be brought from Kasan. Peter was so well aware of all these drawbacks that he sought and found a more convenient spot for his shipbuilding yards at Rogerwick, in Esthonia, four leagues from Revel. But here he found difficulty in protecting the anchorage from the effects of hurricanes and from the insults of his enemies. He hoped to insure this by means of two piers, built on wooden caissons filled with stones. He thinned the forests of Livonia and Esthonia to construct it, and finally, the winds and the waves having carried everything away twice over, the work was utterly abandoned.
On the other hand, and from the very outset, the commercial activity of St. Petersburg was hampered by the fact that it was the Czar's capital. The presence of the court made living dear, and the consequent expense of labor was a heavy drawback to the export trade, which, by its nature, called for a good deal of manual exertion. According to a Dutch resident of that period, a wooden cottage, very inferior to that inhabited by a peasant in the Low Countries, cost from eight hundred to one thousand florins a year at St. Petersburg. A shopkeeper at Archangel could live comfortably on a quarter of that sum. The cost of transport, which amounted to between nine and ten copecks a pood (36.07 pounds), between Moscow and Archangel, five to six between Yaroslaff and Archangel, and three or four between Vologda and Archangel, came to eighteen, twenty, and thirty copecks a pood in the case of merchandise sent from any of these places to St. Petersburg. This accounts for the opposition of the foreign merchants at Archangel to the request that they should remove to St. Petersburg. Peter settled the matter in characteristic fashion, by forbidding any trade in hemp, flax, leather, or corn to pass through Archangel. This rule, though somewhat slackened, in 1714, at the request of the States-General of Holland, remained in force during the great Czar's reign. In 1718 hemp and some other articles of commerce were allowed free entrance into the port of Archangel, but only on condition that two-thirds of all exports should be sent to St. Petersburg. This puts the case from the maritime and commercial point of view.
As a capital city, St. Petersburg, we are told again, was ill-placed on the banks of the Neva, not only for the reasons already given, but for others, geographical, ethnical, and climatic, which exist even in the present day, and which make its selection an outrage on common-sense. Was it not, we are asked, a most extraordinary whim which induced a Russian to found the capital of his Slavonic empire among the Finns, against the Swedes—to centralize the administration of a huge extent of country in its remotest corner—to retire from Poland and Germany on the plea of drawing nearer to Europe, and to force everyone about him, officials, court, and diplomatic corps, to inhabit one of the most inhospitable spots, under one of the least clement skies, he could possibly have discovered? The whole place was a marsh—the Finnish word neva means "mud"; the sole inhabitants of the neighboring forests were packs of wolves. In 1714, during a winter night, two sentries, posted before the cannon-foundry, were devoured. Even nowadays, the traveller, once outside the town, plunges into a desert. Far away in every direction the great plain stretches; not a steeple, not a tree, not a head of cattle, not a sign of life, whether human or animal. There is no pasturage, no possibility of cultivation—fruit, vegetables, and even corn, are all brought from a distance. The ground is in a sort of intermediate condition between the sea and terra firma.
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 centre 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.