St Petersburg

The Winter Palace cost two and a half million rubles, equal to the value of forty-five tons of silver. This expense and others like it had to be glorified in prose and poetry and captured in engravings and paintings. The first members of the Russian intelligentsia, created by Peter, gladly accepted their commission: to describe his Petersburg. Hadn’t Petersburg opened the way for talented people, no matter what their origin? they argued. Hadn’t Peter founded the Academy of Sciences, the first Russian newspaper, the first public museum and library—all in Petersburg? Pushkin expressed this attitude succinctly: “the government is ahead of the people; it likes foreigners and cares about the sciences.” Hurrying after the government, the intelligentsia in its widening rift with the masses did not simply reproduce the smart facade of Petersburg; it improved on it. This imperial “socialist realism” was probably begun by the engraver Aleksei Zubov, whose enormous work Panorama of Petersburg (1716) depicts with punctilious naturalism not only actual buildings but those that were only in the planning stage at the time.

Peter the Great, having eradicated much of the old Russian culture, quickly scattered new seeds into the soil, and the young shoots took root in Petersburg. The writers of that period delighted in the newness of their capital, relished its rapid growth, and took pride in its lush palaces and brimming cultural life. The dark current of anti-Petersburg folklore apparently did not reach them or was rejected as “barbaric.”

These writers identified with Petersburg to the point of dissolving into it. Even if they were bought off by the government, they didn’t feel it—their enthusiasm was unadulterated. Their service to the state, which for them was identified with imperial power and symbolized by Petersburg, was devoid of cynicism.

In the verses of Antioch Kantemir, Vassily Trediakovsky, Mikhail Lomonosov, or Alexander Sumarokov describing Petersburg, archaic in style now but still full of energy and feeling, the tendency to find parallels with mythological gods and goddesses is striking. Even in his lifetime Peter was compared to God. So only one more step was needed for the city of St. Peter to be forever identified by his descendants as the city of Emperor Peter. This remarkable shift in stress exists to this day.

That is why eighteenth-century odes to the tsar and his new capital are imbued with the themes of “divine law,” or Providence, whose power brought about the city’s foundation. Also, there is the sense of almost childlike wonder at the miracle of the instantaneous appearance of Petersburg in an inhospitable setting. It was the early bards of the capital who started referring to Peter as “miracle-working builder,” an image that Pushkin used masterfully and from a completely different vantage in The Bronze Horseman.

Peter the Great did not need flattery while alive and even less when dead. His heirs were not so self-confident. So the emotional tone of our sincere court writers rose higher and higher until it reached its limit—at least for prerevolutionary Russian literature—in its praise of the Empress Catherine II, who, like Elizabeth, was brought to power by court guards inspired by gifts and champagne.

Catherine, who reigned thirty-four years (1762-1796), is the best-known Russian ruler in the West after Peter.10 Her notoriety is based primarily on innumerable romantic escapades and the extravagant favors she showered on her lovers, including the talented Grigory Potemkin, the propaganda genius after whom the inglorious “Potemkin villages” were named. As hardworking as Peter and endlessly vain, Catherine was also pronounced the Great. And as with Peter, the evaluation of her significance in Russian history depends on the historian.

The opinion of twenty-three-year-old Pushkin—as much a historian as a poet—is aphoristically sarcastic:

If ruling means knowing human weakness and using it, then in that case Catherine deserves the awe of posterity. Her brilliance blinded, her friendliness attracted, and her generosity attached. The very voluptuousness of this clever woman confirmed her majesty. Creating only a weak resentment among the people, who were used to respecting the vices of their rulers, it caused vile competition in highest circles, for one needed neither intelligence, nor achievements, nor talents to obtain the second place in the government.