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
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."
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