St Petersburg

And always after a relaxing drinking interlude came more stressful, exhausting work. Peter once described himself as a man pulling uphill while millions pulled downward. But those passive and obedient slaves considered themselves innocent victims of the tsar’s whims, the most trying of which was the creation of St. Petersburg. The underlying hostility toward the new city was expressed in folk legends and prophecies that crystallized simultaneously with the construction of Petersburg even before it was completed.

According to one such instant legend, perhaps the most popular, Eudoxia, Peter’s first wife, whom the tsar forcibly exiled to a convent, cursed the new city: “Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!”8 This pronouncement clashes head-on with Peter’s no less famous “The city will be here!” Word of mouth spread about the kikimora, a dreadful mythic creature that hopped into the bell tower of the Trinity Church (Petersburg was founded on the day of the Trinity).9 This was also supposed to foretell the quick destruction of the city, and nature itself suggested the source: the almost annual floods repeatedly wreaked havoc in the city.

The grim “underground” mythology about Petersburg persisted in spite of the official imperial mythology, which was sparkling and optimistic. In the official hierarchy, Peter the Great was a demiurge and his creation, Petersburg, stood as a result of nothing less than divine inspiration. In the folk consciousness, every change Peter wrought on Russia, and especially the new, rootless capital that had devoured so many Russian lives, was the result of the devil’s machinations. So the masses nicknamed Peter the “Antichrist tsar.” The belief in the imminent end of Petersburg, which would also bring the end of the world, was widespread in Russia at that time. Resentful comments overheard about the “cursed city” or the “Antichrist tsar” brought complainers swiftly before the dreaded Secret Chancellery both during Peter’s lifetime and after his death in 1725. They were then beaten mercilessly with the knout, burned with hot irons, broken on the rack, or had their tongues torn out. But the anti-Petersburg talk didn’t cease. Although it was suppressed, it created a constant accompaniment for the continuing expansion and beautification of the capital.

In the sixty years after Peter’s reign, Russia had six rulers, the result of early deaths and palace coups. Of them, if we omit Peter’s niece, the tall and heavy Anna Ioannovna (during whose reign, 1730-1740, Petersburg was twice desolated by suspicious fires, which greatly simplified the official policy to transform the city from wooden buildings to stone), only one consistently pursued Peter’s dream of a modern “New Rome”—his daughter the Empress Elizabeth, who came to the throne with the support of the palace guards in 1741.

The blonde beauty Elizabeth, merry, “voluptuous” (according to Pushkin), physically strong like her father but, unlike him, uninterested in affairs of state, gave the Italian architect Francesco Rastrelli, her favorite, a free hand to fulfill his exquisite architectural projects. Temperamental and capricious, Rastrelli built luxurious royal residences in a lacy Baroque style outside Petersburg—in Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo, later celebrated in the poetry of Pushkin, who lived there, and in the twentieth century by Anna Akhmatova.

In twenty years, Rastrelli, who did not hesitate to spend Elizabeth’s treasure, managed to change the face of Petersburg: he added a dose of southern fantasy to its northern European solidity. Rastrelli’s triumph was his project for the Winter Palace—the imperial residence on the Neva. Begun in 1754 and completed in 1817, after the architect’s death, this grand building does not seem bulky or pretentious despite its more than one thousand rooms and almost two thousand doors and enormous windows.

The light blue walls of the Winter Palace seemed to dissolve in the generous sculptural order. It glowed against the pale northern sky and steel gray river. The white columns were arranged in a syncopated rhythm that created an unexpected effect of motion. When one looked at the Winter Palace, it appeared to be flying, an impression compounded by its shimmering reflection in the Neva.