Petersburg

St Petersburg was not a town that grew until someone noticed it. It was a decision, taken in wartime, to plant a city where a river meets the Baltic and to make that plant the face Russia would turn towards Europe. In 1703, during the long struggle with Sweden, Peter captured the Swedish fortress of Nienshants on the lower Neva and gained control of the delta. Shortly afterwards, on 16 May by the old calendar (27 May new style), he laid foundation stones for the Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island. That date is taken as the city’s founding. He wanted a sea outlet to the west, a window on Europe in the phrase later used for the place. He also wanted a settlement that would not behave like Moscow: a port, a dockyard, a fortress and, soon, a capital commanded into being on water and mud.

The war made the site possible. Without a foothold seized from Sweden, there would have been no Russian city at the Neva’s mouth, only someone else’s forts on someone else’s shore.

The land was not empty, and it was not Russian in any simple sense. The region around the head of the Gulf of Finland — Ingria, Ingermanland, Izhorskaya zemlya — had been thinly peopled for centuries, passing from Novgorod to the Muscovite princes, then, in 1617, into Swedish hands. Swedish fortresses watched the Neva. Finnish-speaking Ingrian communities and other local people used the forests, shores and river channels according to seasons no chancery in Moscow had ever fully listed. A capital here was not a Russian village promoted. It was a borderland overwritten with a European street plan and a Russian garrison. The overlay was policy. It did not erase the climate, the floods, or the fact that the ground had belonged to other sovereignties and other lives.

The Peter and Paul Fortress was the first fact on the ground. Raised on a small island just off the right bank, inland from the gulf, it was meant to bar enemy ships and to give the new settlement a hard centre. In the spring of the following year Peter established the fortress of Kronshlot, later Kronstadt, on Kotlin Island, to protect the approaches to the delta. Around the city fortress, and across the water, an Admiralty shipyard took shape on the opposite bank; a tiny wooden house was built for Peter himself in the early days and still survives as a relic of how provisional the beginning was. The first dwellings were single-storeyed and made of wood. Stone came as soon as the tsar could compel it. This was a wartime foothold pretending, with remarkable confidence, to be a metropolis. Guns and palisades came before palaces. The palaces would have to wait their turn.

Labour was not recruited in a free market. Peasants were compelled to supply the state with civil conscripts as well as soldiers: workers for fortresses, canals, ships and the new city. Craftsmen were brought from across Russia and from abroad because the site had no spare masons waiting in a guild hall. Disease, cold, wet ground and exhaustion killed many; how many, honestly, we cannot count, and we should not invent a total to make the cruelty look tidy. Later writers liked to say the city rested on a swamp of bones. That is a metaphor with a cruelty underneath it, not a census. The climate did the rest. Marsh, flood and an inhospitable northern sky made every season a construction problem. Men died. Others fled. The work continued because the tsar did not treat weather as a veto.

Water was both the reason for the city and its ordinary enemy. The Neva splits into channels; the ground is low; the gulf can drive a flood up the river with little warning. Drainage canals were not an ornament. They were an attempt to make streets exist. A capital ordered onto islands had to be rebuilt after water as well as after fire, and the first generations learned that a beautiful plan does not raise the land. Ice locked the harbour; thaw turned yards to soup; a storm could undo a season of piles and planks. The inhospitable climate was not a backdrop. It was a tax levied every spring and every autumn on whoever had been sent to live there.

Mikhail Makhaev’s view of the Neva, published in 1753, shows the city a generation after Peter’s death. The granite embankments, the filled-out palaces and the composure of the prospect belong to heirs, not to the wooden first winters. Use it to see what the plan became. Do not mistake it for 1703.

From the start the city was planned as an imposing capital: a regular street pattern, spacious squares, and broad avenues radiating from the Admiralty. Architects, craftsmen and artisans were brought from all over Russia and from many foreign countries to construct and embellish a town that did not yet exist except as an order. Canals were cut through the marshy left bank for drainage. Stone buildings replaced timber as soon as masons could be concentrated on the site. Lots were assigned; houses were required; a street existed on a plan before it existed underfoot. This was European urbanism as a command, not as the slow thickening of a market around a monastery. Moscow had grown from a fortress and a river trade. Petersburg was surveyed, assigned and compelled.

The grand palaces that later fill postcards arrived after the founder. The first stone palace, still preserved, was completed in 1714 for Prince Aleksandr Menshikov, the city’s first governor. Peter’s own Summer Palace belonged to that early, relatively severe generation of building. The Winter Palace, the great baroque ensembles, the coloured façades that make the city look inevitable in later art — those are largely the work of a later eighteenth century, when architects working for later sovereigns inherited a plan and had the peace and treasure to decorate it. Peter left a dockyard-capital in progress. His successors left the stage set. To confuse the two is to let a later century steal Peter’s mud, and to forget how much of the postcard is inheritance rather than founding.

Government functions moved. In 1712 the capital of Russia was transferred from Moscow to the new city on the Neva, though Sweden only formally ceded the area in 1721. There was no single theatrical afternoon we can honestly costume as the moment a stolitsa was born; there was a policy of making ministries, courts and the sovereign’s presence sit beside the Baltic. Members of the nobility and the merchant class were compelled to move and to build houses for themselves. A family that had been a fact of Moscow found itself ordered to become a fact of a floodplain. Until the peace, those houses stood on a claim as much as on piles. The old capital did not vanish. It lost the claim to be the only centre from which the realm was ruled.

To sit government on the Neva during a war was to bet that the site would still be Russian when the diplomats finished. Courtiers who built houses were building on guns, ships and stubbornness as much as on timber piles. Moscow kept its churches, its markets and its weight. It no longer kept the monopoly of being the centre. The tsar could watch the gulf from his new city; the realm was told to watch him watching it. A capital is a habit of attention. He meant to change the habit by changing the view. Whether every office moved on a single timetable matters less than the direction: government was to live where the ships were.

Alexey Zubov’s 1716 engraving of the Peter Gate is already an argument for permanence: sculpture in the pediment, guards, a stone mouth for a fortress still being finished. It is contemporary, and it is still a proud view. The first seasons were mud, timber and guns covering a building site that could still have been abandoned if the war had gone the other way.

Alexei Zubov’s panorama of 1716, the hero image of this chapter, is a different kind of evidence. It is a contemporary engraving, made while Peter was alive, and it shows a city already eager to look finished: river, ships, low ranges of building, the fortress as a mark on the water. Treat it as a proud view from the reign, not as a photograph and not as the later imperial postcard. It is as close as we come to seeing the policy while the paint was still wet. Compared with Makhaev’s later composure, Zubov still shows a working waterfront more than a museum façade.

Moscow had grown. Petersburg was commanded.

The command had an economic edge as well as a ceremonial one. A harbour was constructed. Peter took measures to curtail traffic through Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, previously Russia’s major port, so that the new city’s quays would take the trade. Work on a canal through the Valdai Hills began in 1703 and, by 1709, gave the capital a direct water route towards central Russia and the Volga basin. Industry followed the Admiralty: foundries, powder, tar, the servicing of a fleet. None of this was the organic thickening of a market town that had already earned its harbour. It was an attempt to force a window onto the Baltic and to make Russia’s foreign trade, and Russia’s government, look out of it.

Honesty about the human price does not require a fake total. Workers died in numbers the surviving lists do not let us name with confidence. Ingrian ground was taken into a Russian capital while the war that justified the taking was still unfinished. Floods returned, as they still do. The city that resulted was beautiful later, and brutal at the start, and both facts can be held at once. Petersburg was built as policy: a fortress, a yard, a forced migration of nobles, a levy of peasants, a street plan drawn for a Europe Peter had visited and intended to face. Organic growth is what happens when people gather because they need to. This gathering happened because they were told to, and because the telling was backed by soldiers, lists and the threat of a ruined career in Moscow.

What remains is the strangeness of success. A stolitsa ordered onto islands in a cold gulf did become the imperial capital for two centuries, and it did teach Russian culture a second native city, facing water rather than the Kremlin’s brick. Later painting and later stone make the founding look inevitable, as if the Neva had been waiting for a prospect to match Makhaev’s copperplate. It had not. A wartime foothold was driven into Finnish and Ingrian land, paid for in labour and death, and then named as the centre of the realm. The name stuck. The cost was never only architectural.