By Nancy Shute
Bathed In pale northern light, the city appears ethereal, its palaces shimmering in pale shades of green, yellow, and pink, and the slim golden spires of the Admiralty and the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul piercing the mist. It's easy to see why St. Petersburg inspired many of the world's finest artists: Dostoevsky and Gogol, Nijinsky and Nureyev, Pushkin and Akhmatova, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Its unlikely beginnings make the sight all the more poignant.

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Three hundred years ago, this was a place where no sane person would have wanted to live. The marsh lay just off the icy, storm-blasted Gulf of Finland, and what little firm ground there was disappeared regularly beneath the floods. The nearest approximation of civilization was hundreds of miles away. Yet it was here that Peter the Great chose to build his "darling," his "paradise," the imperial city that for three centuries has embodied the soul of Russia.

What lifted St. Petersburg from the swamps was countless loads of fill, pilings of oak, the sufferings of hundreds of thousands of workers--and Peter's vast energy and intellect. Today the city, crumbling after decades of Soviet inattention, could use some of Peter's drive if not his ruthlessness.

In the late 17th century, Russia was a vast, rich country that lacked a major seaport. Archangel, on an arm of the Arctic Ocean called the White Sea, was too far north to be truly useful--iced in for six months of the year. But Peter wanted a window on the West for reasons that went beyond the practical. As a boy, he had been fascinated by tales of seafarers and faraway lands. In his teens, he neglected his princely duties to learn sailing and boat building, and in his early 20s he traveled to Holland and England to study the shipwright's trade. His country was suspicious of outsiders, even requiring foreigners in Moscow to live in special "colonies." But Peter was fascinated with these strangers and spent many days talking with residents of Moscow's German Colony about the new ideas and inventions sweeping 17th-century Europe.

Peter, who stood over 6 foot 6 and couldn't sit still for more than two minutes, put all his strength into acquiring a seaport. He first tried wresting a piece of the Black Sea coast from the Turks. When that plan failed, his eye lighted on the swampy Baltic coast. The area lies at the same latitude as the upper shores of Canada's Hudson Bay, but the waters are ice free for much of the year, and the site controlled access to the Russian interior via the Neva River. The Swedes had held that ground for almost a century. But in 1703 Charles, the brilliant young Swedish king, made a fateful miscalculation, treating Peter's new interest in the region as a minor threat. Moving south from Lake Ladoga, the Russian Army captured the last Swedish outpost on the Neva in early 1703. On May 16, Peter ordered the construction of a fortress on Hare Island, one of dozens in the Neva delta.

The work was wretched. To build the low-lying island above the tidal reach, men had to scrape up dirt elsewhere, digging with only their hands and carrying it in their shirts. But within five months, a hexagonal fort of earth and timber, crowned by cannons, guarded the river. Peter lived in a one-story log house just outside its walls. (The house and the Peter and Paul Fortress, rebuilt with 40-foot-high stone walls, still stand.) That fall, Peter's dream was realized. At the helm of the frigate Standard, he became the first Russian czar to sail the Baltic.

But Peter's aspirations went further. He no longer wanted just a fort or a wharf. He wanted a city. It would stand far removed from the intrigues of the priests and nobles in Moscow and serve as a laboratory for his grand vision of a modern, scientific, European-style state. "It is an age of gold in which we are living," Peter wrote to Prince Alexander Menshikov, his second in command. "Without loss of a single instant, we devote all our energies to work."

Work he did, like a demon. If Peter had been a CEO, he would have been the world's worst micromanager, sketching his ideas for buildings and dictating details down to the types of flowers for the new city's gardens. But Peter had the good fortune to be an absolute monarch, with a treasury that almost matched his visions.

He also seems to have had an instinct for hiring the right help. Domenico Trezzini, an Italian-Swiss who had designed a palace for the king of Denmark, signed on as Peter's master of building, construction, and fortification just a month before the founding of St. Petersburg. Even as the laborers were struggling to build foundations for the fort in the muck of Hare Island, Trezzini was supervising construction of a small church within the fort. His later efforts were far grander, including the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Peter's Summer Palace, and the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, which holds the tombs of most Russian monarchs. Trezzini's work, which combined the serene, almost austere designs then popular in northern Europe with graceful Baroque detailing, set the tone for the "northern Baroque" style that epitomizes St. Petersburg.

Building a city from the ground up also requires labor, a lot of it. Anyone who has waited in vain for the drywall guy to show up might envy Peter's method for acquiring workmen. He simply ordered them by fiat. "From all parts of his empire an unhappy stream of humanity--Cossacks, Siberians, Tatars, Finns--flowed into St. Petersburg," wrote historian Robert Massie. Two shifts of workers, 15,000 each, were ordered for the summer of 1706. The conscripts were promised a travel stipend and six months' wages. After that they could return home--if they survived. They spent nights in rough shacks and long days digging canals like those Peter had loved in Holland or pounding in 16-foot oak foundation pilings. Many succumbed to scurvy, dysentery, or malaria. At least 25,000 perished, giving Petersburg the label "a city built on bones."

Peter made up for the site's lack of building materials by ordering all arriving wagons and ships to bring building stones with them. The nascent city also needed inhabitants. There again, Peter simply ordered them up. In March 1708, he commanded hundreds of noblemen and wealthy merchants to leave Moscow and their comfy country estates and join him in the north. Peter dictated the size of the houses they were to build, with a nobleman owning more than 500 serfs obliged to build a two-story manse. Plans of approved designs, drawn by Trezzini, were provided.

Wolves at the door. The nobles loathed St. Petersburg. Food was scarce and outrageously expensive. There was no good source of fresh water. The hastily built wooden houses were firetraps. (Peter's lanky form was often seen among the fire crews, wielding an ax to stop the spread of fire by demolishing nearby houses.) There were no bridges across the swift-flowing Neva; noblemen returning from receptions drowned when the small sailboats that Peter deemed proper capsized. And even the adamantine will of the czar couldn't keep nature at bay. The Neva flooded regularly, sweeping the new trees and flowers from Peter's beloved Summer Garden and sending the city's inhabitants clambering onto their roofs. In winter, hungry wolves prowled. In 1715, the creatures devoured a woman in broad daylight on Vasilevsky Island. "Petersburg will not endure after our time," declared Peter's half-sister Maria, one of the city's unhappy involuntary colonists. "May it remain a desert."

When Peter died there in 1725 the city was still rough hewn. But it flourished under his successors, notably Catherine the Great, who assembled much of the extraordinary art collection in the Hermitage Museum in the Winter Palace. Petersburg became achingly lovely, the haven and inspiration for generations of poets, painters, and musicians.

The city's 300th anniversary this year has prompted a much-needed renovation effort, with government, private firms, and foreign organizations sprucing up dozens of historical sites and upgrading basic necessities, like the heating and plumbing in the Hermitage. But the city needs more than a face-lift. Many of Petersburg's Soviet-era factories are shuttered, and Moscow far outstrips it in political and economic clout. Debate now rages over whether Petersburg should pin its hopes on increased tourism or on small businesses and "creative industries" such as architecture, film and video, and publishing. It's an argument that Czar Peter no doubt would have loved to have heard--and would have settled himself.

DRAWING BOARD

CUTTING-EDGE CITY

Before inventing the safety razor, King Camp Gillette envisioned an ideal city in his 1894 book, The Human Drift. "Metropolis" would house most of the country's population in 24,000 close-packed skyscrapers, contain vast public gardens, and run on the natural power of nearby Niagara Falls. Gillette reasoned that if mankind were perfectly organized in such a place, crime and strife would disappear. -David Grimm