St Petersburg

Peter turned out to be an amazing monarch, and not only by Russian standards. He seemed to know everything and be able to do anything. As a young man he had mastered fourteen trades, including woodworking, carpentry, and shoemaking. He considered himself a good surgeon. They say Peter left a whole sack of teeth he had pulled; he loved to practice dentistry, terrorizing his courtiers. But the tsar prided himself particularly on being the best shipbuilder in the land. The launching of every new ship was also an excuse for a great drinking bout. Usually stingy, Peter spared no expense on these occasions.

As no Russian monarch before or after him, Peter was full of contradictions and paradoxes. On occasion he could be merry, gentle, and kind. But more often he was horrible in his wrath, frighteningly unpredictable, and needlessly cruel, personally torturing his enemies in hidden chambers. Of course, he had to fight for power and sometimes for his life. Barbaric incidents like the Moscow uprising of the Russian irregular army in 1682, when soldiers with fearsome pikes speared many of Peter’s relatives and tore them apart before his eyes, must have greatly influenced his character and behavior. Still, his dominant trait was unlimited confidence in his own righteousness. As a true Russian autocrat, he considered himself the absolute sovereign whose subjects were deprived of every right. By providential design, he could not be wrong; therefore his every wish had to be obeyed, no matter what the cost.

At times Peter seemed to be a simple, sincere, and accessible man. But he also perceived himself as a demiurge, a kind of divine actor whose stage was not only Russia but all Europe and more. Not for nothing did the chancellor, Count Golovkin, upon bestowing the honorific “the Great” on Peter speak glowingly of a Russia that had “come out of the Darkness of Ignorance onto the Theater of Glory of the whole world” under the emperor’s leadership. Peter was challenging, demanding, deliberately outrageous. This love of the grand gesture marked all his actions. A dramatic change of form was no less important than a change of content as far as Peter—the actor on the world stage—was concerned. In fact, he was apparently convinced that the form often determined the content. This conviction of Peter’s was to become an integral part of the entire future Petersburgian culture.

Despite the opinion of many later historians Peter loved Russia, its talented people, its colorful language, the country’s rituals and its food, particularly shchi (cabbage soup). But he hated Russian filth, indolence, thievery, and the fat, bearded boyars in their heavy clothes. He hated Moscow, too, the ancient Russian capital where he was almost murdered, and its rebellious soldiers, whom he constantly suspected of conspiracies against him.

So Peter started with a vengeance to change Russia’s traditions and symbols. He ordered the boyars’ beards to be cut (and at the same time the beards of the rest of the population, save the clergy and the peasants) and forced them to dance minuets at the Parisian-style “assemblies” he instituted. He gave his army a new uniform (and, of course, new weaponry) of the Western type, a new banner, and new orders, and he modernized the Russian alphabet. All these mostly symbolic transformations signaled in no uncertain terms the coming of the new age for Russia.

But the greatest expression of Peter’s sovereign willfulness, his Russian maximalism, and his addiction to the supersymbolic gesture was, ultimately, the founding of St. Petersburg. Retrospectively, this feat became loaded with a multitude of interpretations and explanations; but the idea of establishing a new city just then and on just that spot seemed in fact to be no more or less than the act of an incredibly rich, reckless, and sometimes lucky gambler risking it all in one supreme wager. Peter wanted to astonish Russia and the entire civilized world, and he succeeded.

In fact, this seemingly crazy idea had developed gradually. The first impulse toward a concept of a city that would be completely novel, even avant-garde, for Russia came to young Peter back in Moscow. There he would sneak off into the foreign settlement, where German, Dutch, Scots, and French craftsmen, merchants, and mercenary soldiers lived, to enjoy their company and friendship.

A clearer image of his ideal city, one that had nothing in common with the muddy, dangerous Moscow, where Peter’s enemies could hide in the crooked streets, formed during the young tsar’s trips to Europe, particularly to Holland. First Peter started to fantasize about a place like Amsterdam: clean, neat, easily observable and therefore controllable, on the water, with rows of trees reflected in the city’s canals. Then Peter’s vision grew much grander: His city would soar like an eagle: it would be a fortress, a port, an enormous wharf, a model for all Russia, and at the same time a shopwindow on the West.