Cities of Dreams
Turning a vision into a city demands an iron will. Peter the Great created his showplace, but the human cost was heavy
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.
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.
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