St Petersburg and the Russian Court, 1703-1761

P. Keenan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311603
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

This book focuses on the city of St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire from the early eighteenth century until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. It uses the Russian court as a prism through which to view the various cultural changes that were introduced in the city during the eighteenth century.

1

Location: Situating the City

As founder of St Petersburg, Peter I consciously, and arguably also subconsciously, attempted to control both the city’s space and its inhabitants, in pursuit of certain goals. These goals were in part related to his wider reform agenda – that of transforming Russia into a stronger entity, domestically and internationally – but were also emblematic of a desire to use the city as a testing ground for certain specific ventures. Whilst St Petersburg began life as a fortified port on the Baltic coast, considerable efforts were made by Peter I and his successors to provide it with the appearance, institutions and activities of something much more in keeping with a royal residence or a capital city. The cities that Peter himself visited during the Grand Embassy of 1697–8 provided a natural starting point for some of the inspirations for his new project. This list of cities includes both large capitals and some of the smaller, but significant cities in central Europe: Riga, Mitau, Königsberg, Amsterdam (specifically Zaandam), London, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Vienna and Rawa. These cities provided a range of experiences and examples that would prove important, to varying degrees, in Peter’s planning. Whether as international ports, commercial centres, seats of learning or sites of courtly culture, they provided a tangible flavour of the possibilities available to the young Tsar.

This chapter examines the creation of the various spaces, buildings and institutions within St Petersburg and how they subsequently influenced the development of the city. As a newly founded city, St Petersburg offered a prime opportunity to plan and regulate its existence. The location of the major organs of the Russian state in the new city naturally led to an increase in official scrutiny in this respect also. Arguably the most important institution for such attention – the royal court – will be examined separately in Chapter 3. From the layout of its street plan to the appearance of its major buildings, from the question of how to populate the city to the emphasis on ‘well-ordered’ behaviour in everyday life, St Petersburg was a deliberate, if not always well-coordinated or consistent project. One of the principal stumbling blocks for the planning process was the natural situation of the city. The Neva River occupied a central place in the city’s geography and divided the city into distinct sections, which were not always well connected or easy to navigate. As a result and almost by necessity, the river became a major element in both the everyday and the festive life of the city. An alternative ‘natural’ space within St Petersburg was provided by the royal gardens, which were used as a symbolic representation of the harnessing of nature for beneficial purposes, and as part of Peter I’s attempt to portray the new city as an earthly ‘paradise’. They were also an important social space within the city, which will be examined in more detail in Chapter 4.

The relocation to St Petersburg also had an impact on the social life of the elite, in particular with the emergence of several new types of social gathering, both at court and in the houses of leading noble families. The developments of this period highlight the relationship between compulsion, regulation and acceptance of the new social context by the Russian elite. The city also housed the newly established Academy of Sciences, which was to help establish the city as an important centre for scientific study during the eighteenth century. However, on an exemplary level, the Academy also served as a model of educated, not to mention civilised behaviour, and its public activities served to highlight this to a domestic and international audience. Finally, as a result of the presence of both the royal family and the military, civil and court elite, the new city naturally hosted many of the celebrations associated with them. Whilst the specifics of the court calendar will be addressed in Chapter 3, it is important to give some context for the spaces in which these state occasions took place. While the setting of St Petersburg was ‘new’, in chronological terms, the form and content of these aspects reflects a more complex relationship between tradition and innovation.

A ‘regular’ city?

The example of Europe is frequently highlighted as an influence on Peter I’s thinking about his new city. Its architectural appearance and various institutions also drew on existing models, in one form or another. St Petersburg has often been compared to other European cities, despite a lack of any clearly discernible influence on Peter I or any of his close advisers. For example, Italian visitors to the city during the eighteenth century did not share the views of some contemporary commentators who drew comparisons between St Petersburg and Venice on account of the city’s waterways and canals.¹ According to some contemporary observers, Peter’s preferred model was Amsterdam – a seaport built on international trade.² But these cities had evolved over centuries, whereas St Petersburg was a new project – it allowed the possibility of planning its overall design, rather than redeveloping an established urban site.³ Another source of inspiration came from the various architectural and fortificatory treatises in the Kremlin library.⁴ Peter added to his personal library by purchasing a considerable number of works on architecture during the Grand Embassy. Several of these texts were then translated into Russian, thereby establishing a new lexicon of architectural terms in the Russian language. To take one example, Giacomo da Vignola’s famous Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (‘Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture’, first published in 1562) was printed in Russian translation in 1709 and reprinted twice more during Peter’s reign, in 1712 and 1722.⁵

The next step was to put these plans into action, which began very early in the city’s existence. Almost as soon as the earthworks for the fortifications had been dug, Peter was ordering plans from his military engineers for what would soon become the Sts Peter and Paul Fortress (1; see Key to Maps on page 217). More extensive planning was hindered by the exigencies of war, with Russia’s position on the Baltic the subject of a series of successful campaigns and sieges under Field-Marshal Boris P. Sheremetev. In order to coordinate the various elements in the construction of St Petersburg, Peter I had established the Chancellery of Urban Affairs in 1706, renamed the Chancellery of Construction in 1723, under the direction of Ul’ian A. Seniavin, with the Italian Domenico Trezzini as its chief architect.⁶ The Chancellery was responsible not only for city planning and building designs, through its architects, but also with managing the wider workforce and building materials. As a result, it had a very large budget, by civilian standards, of around 5 per cent of state revenue by the early 1720s.⁷

Victory at the battle of Poltava, in late June 1709, was the turning point in the Great Northern War that convinced Peter himself that the city was securely established and that he could turn his attention to its overall design.⁸ From this point onward, there was a move to commission unified plans for certain sections of the city, such as the Admiralty (2), or for the city as a whole, in line with Peter’s desired features and, crucially, financial constraints. The desired features of the ‘regular’ Baroque city, discussed above, were reflected in the well-known plan submitted by the French architect Jean LeBlond in 1716. It was based largely on the development of Vasil’evskii Island, thus reflecting another of Peter’s initial ideas for the centre of his new city, with a geometric pattern of streets and canals, surrounded by extensive fortifications in the contemporary French ‘Vauban’ style. The geographical situation of the city, particularly the complications associated with the marshy terrain and the width of the Neva River, and the enormous expense that such a plan would have incurred made it impossible to adopt fully, especially since construction work in the city was already well underway by the time that LeBlond arrived in Russia. Nevertheless some elements were retained, as shown by the canal and street grid that developed on Vasil’evskii Island from the middle of the eighteenth century onward.⁹

Contemporary legislation also reflected the intention to create a regular appearance for the new city. The types of houses that should be built by different groups in society and what sort of materials they should use was legislated on from 1714 onwards. House plans were commissioned from the architect Domenico Trezzini for groups such as ‘common’ (podlye) and ‘notable’ (imenitye) people.¹⁰ From April 1714 onwards, these plans were used as the basis for orders on the types of houses to be built by different groups in society and what sort of materials were to be used. Such laws also indicate the ongoing presence of the European influence on this process – one of the laws on the construction of ‘wattle and daub’ (mazanka) houses specifically notes that this is ‘the Prussian style’.¹¹ There was also an attempt to legislate on where in the city houses should be located, which was linked to the role of their inhabitants within society. A decree of June 1712 stipulated that the nobility should build their houses along the Neva upriver from Peter’s original Winter Palace (4), whilst the merchants and artisans were to build their houses on the opposite bank of the river, on Vasil’evskii Island.¹² However, as with the commissioned plans for St Petersburg in the same period, such laws proved difficult to enforce. At the end of the following year, an official reminder was issued to these groups about their required relocation and such reminders were a common feature of this period.¹³

Similarly, Trezzini’s house plans served only for those who could afford to build such houses and only really applied to the façades of buildings in highly visible parts of the city, such as the banks of the main waterways. The decree on the desired location of houses was reissued in March 1720, but it continued to prove very difficult to make people move to certain parts of the city, notably Vasil’evskii Island.¹⁴ Foreign visitors to St Petersburg noted the relative neglect of this part of the city. After a visit to Vasil’evskii Island in March 1725, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Bergholz, a member of the Holstein delegation in Russia, described the considerable number of stone houses standing empty, since their noble owners had residences elsewhere in the city.¹⁵ Sir Francis Dashwood, who came to St Petersburg as part of an English trade delegation in the early 1730s, also noted these fine but uninhabited houses in 1733, as well as the fact that, although the island was supposedly the commercial centre of the city, many merchants did not live there. He believed that this was linked to the construction of a pontoon bridge (25), which allowed them to travel easily from the Admiralty side to the island to conduct their business at the Exchange (28).¹⁶

As a result of the speed with which the city sprang up, the implementation of Peter’s requirements was haphazard at best, not helped by the inhospitable climate and the vagaries of the city’s population. It was only after major fires around the Admiralty in the summers of 1736 and 1737 had destroyed much of the existing wooden housing, which lay behind the regulated stone buildings along the city’s main waterways and housed the lowest rungs of the city’s population, that a major overhaul could begin. The ‘Commission for Construction’ was established in St Petersburg in mid-1737 to regulate construction of streets and squares so as to ensure a more unified appearance to the central parts of the city.¹⁷ One of the leading architects on the Commission was Petr M. Eropkin, who had been sent abroad to study the arts in Amsterdam and in several Italian cities by Peter I between 1716 and 1724. Upon his return, Eropkin was a prolific architect, working on buildings throughout the city and on the royal estates around it, including Peterhof and Oranienbaum.¹⁸ He drafted a manuscript treatise on architecture, ‘Duty of the Architectural Expedition’ (Dolzhnost’ arkhitekturnoi ekspiditsii), several sections of which have been linked to the influence of Andrea Palladio’s famous ‘Four Books of Architecture’ (I quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570).¹⁹ The Commission’s work was affected by Eropkin’s arrest and execution for political conspiracy in 1740, but it succeeded in establishing five separate administrative areas for the city – Admiral’teiskaia, Vasil’evskaia, Peterburgskaia, Vyborgskaia and Moskovskaia – and consolidated the three-pronged street pattern emanating from the Admiralty fortress as the central axis of St Petersburg.²⁰

Another outbreak of fires in the late 1740s cleared yet more of the ramshackle housing from St Petersburg’s centre, allowing further development to take place. In particular, this period saw the consolidation of Nevskii Prospekt (16), as it became known from 1738 onwards, as the main arterial route in the city, excepting the Neva. The prospekt stretched from the Admiralty to the city limits just beyond the Fontanka river, continuing on to the St Aleksa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Location: Situating the City
• 2 Regulation: Policing the City
• 3 Organisation: the Court and its Celebrations
• 4 Interaction: the City’s Social Life
• 5 Instruction: Fashioning an Audience
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Key to Maps
• Index