A century and a half ago the low marshy shores of the Neva, and the islands formed by the branches into which it separates just before it empties itself into the Gulf of Finland were inhabited only by a few scattered Finnish fishermen. But commanding the entrance to Lake Ladoga, it was a military position of some importance, and the Swedes had long maintained there a fortress, the possession of which had been often unavailingly contested by the Russians, up to 1703, when Peter the Great made himself master of it. He determined to found upon this desolate spot the future capital of his vast empire, and at once commenced the task, without waiting for peace to confirm the possession of the site. He assembled a vast number of the peasantry from every quarter of his empire, and pushed forward the work with the energy of an iron will armed with absolute power. The surrounding country, ravaged by long years of war, could furnish no supplies for these enormous masses, and the convoys which brought them across Lake Ladoga were frequently detained by contrary winds. Ill fed and worse lodged, laboring in the cold and wet, multitudes yielded to the hardships, and the foundations of the new metropolis were laid at the cost of a hundred thousand lives, sacrificed in less than six months.
With Peter to will was to perform; he willed that a capital city should be built and inhabited, and built and inhabited it was. In April, 1714, a ukase was issued directing that all buildings should be erected in a particular manner; another, three months later, ordered a large number of nobles and merchants to erect dwellings in the new city. In a few months more another ukase prohibited the erection of any stone mansion in any other portion of the empire, while the enterprise of the capital was in progress; and that the lack of building materials should be no obstacle, every vessel, whether large or small, and every peasant's car which came to the city, was ordered to bring a certain specified number of building stones. The work undertaken with such rigid determination, and carried on with such remorseless vigor by Peter, was continued in the same unflinching spirit by his successors; and the result was the present St. Petersburg, with its aspect more imposing than that of any other city on the globe, but bearing in its bosom the elements of its own destruction, the moment it is freed from the control of the iron will, which created and now maintains it:—a fitting type and representative of the Russian Empire.
The whole enterprise of founding and maintaining St. Petersburg was and is a struggle against nature. The soil is a marsh so deep and spongy that a solid foundation can be attained only by constructing a subterranean scaffolding of piles. Were it not for these the city would sink into the marsh like a stage ghost through the trap-door. Every building of any magnitude [pg 449] rests on piles; the granite quays which line the Neva rest on piles. The very foot-pavements can not be laid upon the ground, but must be supported by piles. A great commercial city is maintained, the harbor of which is as inaccessible to ships, for six months in the year, as the centre of the desert of Sahara. In the neighboring country no part produces any thing for human sustenance save the Neva, which furnishes ice and fish. The severity of the climate is most destructive to the erections of human hands; and St. Petersburg, notwithstanding its gay summer appearance, when it emerges from the winter frosts, resembles a superannuated belle at the close of the fashionable season; and can only be put in proper visiting order by the assiduous services of hosts of painters and plasterers. Leave the capital for a half century to the unrepaired ravages of its wintry climate, and it would need a Layard to unearth its monuments.
But sure as are the wasting inroads of time and the climate, St Petersburg is in daily peril of an overthrow whose accomplishment would require but a few hours. The Gulf of Finland forms a vast funnel pointing eastward, at the extremity of which stands the city. No portion of the city is fifteen feet above the ordinary level of the water. A strong westerly wind, blowing directly into the mouth of the funnel, piles the water up so as to lay the lower part of the city under water. Water is as much dreaded here, and as many precautions are taken against it, as in the case of fire in other cities. In other cities alarm-signals announce a conflagration; here they give notice of an inundation. The firing of an alarm-gun from the Admiralty, at intervals of an hour, denotes that the lower extremes of the islands are under water, when flags are hung out from the steeples to give warning of danger. When the water reaches the streets, alarm-guns are fired every quarter of an hour. As the water rises the alarms grow more and more frequent, until minute-guns summon boats to the assistance of the drowning population.
So much for the lower jaw of the monster that lies in wait for the Russian capital; now for the upper:—Lake Ladoga, which discharges its waters through the Neva, is frozen over to an enormous thickness during the long winter. The rapid northern spring raises its waters and loosens the ice simultaneously; when the waters of the Gulf are at their usual level, the accumulated ice and water find an easy outlet down the broad and rapid Neva. But let a strong west wind heap up the waters of the Gulf just as the breaking up of Lake Ladoga takes place, and the waters from above and from below would suffice to inundate the whole city, while all its palaces, monuments, and temples would be crushed between the masses of ice, like “Captain Ahab's” boat in the ivory jaws of “Moby Dick.” Nothing is more probable than such a coincidence. It often blows from the west for days together in the spring; and it is almost a matter of certainty that the ice will break up between the middle and the end of April. Let but a westerly storm arise on the fatal day of that brief fortnight, and farewell to the City of the Czars. Any steamer that bridges the Atlantic may be freighted with the tidings that St. Petersburg has sunk deeper than plummet can sound in the Finnish marshes from which it has so magically risen.
The Inundation of 1824.
Nor is this merely a matter of theory and speculation. Terrible inundations, involving enormous destruction of life and property have occurred. The most destructive of these took place on the 17th of November, 1824. A strong west wind heaped the waters of the Gulf up into the narrow funnel of the Neva, and poured them, slowly at first, along the streets. As night began to close in the rise of the waters became more and more rapid. Cataracts poured into doors, windows, and cellars. The sewers spouted up columns, like whales in the death-agony. The streets were filled with abandoned equipages, and deserted horses struggling in the rising waters. The trees in the public squares were crowded with those who had climbed them for refuge. During the night the wind abated, and the waters receded. But the pecuniary damage of that one night is estimated at twenty millions of dollars, and the loss of lives at eight thousand. All through the city a painted line traced upon the walls designates the height to which the waters reached. Were ever house-painters before engaged upon a task so ghastly? But suppose that, instead of November, April had been written as the date of this inundation, when the waters from the Lake above had met those from the Gulf below; St. Petersburg would have been numbered among the things that were—Ilium fuit.
Nothing of the kind can be more imposing than the view of St. Petersburg from the tower of the Admiralty upon some bright June day, such as that on which I first beheld it from that post. Under foot, as it seemed, from the galleries, lay the Admiralty-yards, where great ships were in process of erection, destined for no nobler service than to perform their three months' summer cruise in the Baltic, and to be frozen immovably in the harbors for six months out of twelve. The will of the Czar can effect much, but it can not convert Russia into a naval power until he can secure a seacoast, and harbors which can not be shut up to him by a single hostile fortification. Russia can not be a maritime power till she is mistress of the entrance to the Baltic and the Black Sea.
To the right and the left of the Admiralty stretch the great squares upon which stand the principal public edifices and monuments of the capital; the Winter Palace, with its six thousand constant occupants; the Hotel de l'Etat Major, whence go forth orders to a million of soldiers, the Senate House, and the Palace of the Holy Synod, the centres of temporal and spiritual law for the hundred nations blended into the Russian Empire; the Church of St. Isaac, with its four porticoes, the lofty columns of which, sixty feet in height, are each of a single block of granite, and the walls of polished marble; its cupola covered with copper overlaid with gold, gleaming like another sun, surmounted by a golden cross, and forming the most conspicuous object to the approaching visitor, whether he comes up the Gulf, or across the dreary Finnish marshes; yet, high as it rises in the air, it sinks scarcely a less distance below the ground, so deep was it necessary to drive into the marsh the forest of piles upon which it rests, before a firm foundation could be secured. Here is the Statue of Peter—the finest equestrian statue in the world—reining his steed upon the brink of the precipice up which he has urged it, his hand stretched out in benediction toward the Neva, the pride of his new-founded city. Here is the triumphal column to Alexander, “the Restorer of Peace,” the whole elevation of which is 150 feet, measuring to the head of the angel who—the cross victorious over the crescent—bears the symbol of the Christian faith above the capital cast from cannon captured from the Turks. The shaft is a single block eighty-four feet in height—the largest single stone erected in modern times; and it would have been still loftier had it not been for the blind unreasoning obedience to orders, so characteristic of the Russian. When the column had been determined upon, orders were dispatched to the quarries to detach, if possible, a single block for the shaft of the length of eighty-four feet, though with scarcely a hope that the attempt would succeed. One day a dispatch was received by the Czar from the superintendent, with the tidings that a block had been detached, free from flaw, one hundred feet long; but that he was about to proceed to reduce it to the required length. The sovereign mounted in hot haste to save the block from mutilation, and to preserve a column so much exceeding his hopes. But he was too late; and arrived just in time to see the sixteen feet severed from the block, which would otherwise have been the noblest shaft in the world.