In Our Time - The Building of St Petersburg

Episode Date: April 23, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the building of St Petersburg, Peter the Great's showcase city for a modern, European Russia. It is a city of ideas. of progress and the Baroque, of Russian identity and Tsarist power. The building of St Petersburg is a testament to Tsarist power but it is also a city of ideas; of progress, of the Baroque and Russian identity. Beset by fire and flood, the city was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 to symbolise a new Russia, one that faced away from the Slavic East and towards the European West. To this end Peter and his heirs imported European architects, craftsmen and merchants to fashion his new capital.The result is a grandiose European city set amidst the freezing swamps of the Baltic coast; a Venice or Rome of the North. Indeed, the Venetian art connoisseur, Francesco Algarotti called St Petersburg ‘a window through which Russia looks on Europe’. It is a city of beauty built upon the cruelty of a tyrant and to this day encapsulates many of the contradictions of Russia.With Simon Dixon, Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London; Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics; Anthony Cross, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge

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please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, when he visited St. Petersburg in Russia in 1739, the Venetian art connoisseur Francesco Agarotti made an unflattering observation. He said that were the ground less marshy, the building materials of better quality, and the inhabitants more pleasant, St. Petersburg, he said, would be surely one of the finest towns in the world.

That St. Petersburg now is among the finest towns in the world, indeed that it even exists, is testament to the unbending will of Peter the Great, and its tsarist successors, especially Catherine the Great. But St. Petersburg is also a testament to ideas of the Baroque and the neoclassical, of enlightened progress, and above all of the belief that Russia, having faced east for so long, must turn its face towards the West. Indeed, Argarotti also called St. Petersburg a window through which Russia looks on Europe. With me to discuss St. Petersburg are Tony Cross,

emeritus professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. And Simon Dixon, Sir Bernard Piers, Professor of Russian History at University College London. Simon Dixon, St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great. He came to sole power in Russia in 1696. when he was 24, can you explain what his basic idea and vision were? Well, Peter belonged to a generation of Muscovites at the end of the 17th century who were dissatisfied with the passivity of the state that they'd inherited.

Muscovy, by the end of the 17th century, was quite good at repelling its principal rivals, and it was all right at keeping the Romanov dynasty on the throne, which was quite an achievement, really, for it. The Romanovs had been in pass in 1613 only. But Peter and his contemporaries realized that if they were to transform muskly and make it capable of using productive power in the land, they'd have to make serious changes. They'd have to take over East-West trade. There were all sorts of things they could do, but it required reform. Now, those reforms, the story of the reforms are usually told as a secular story of borrowings from the West, and that's certainly true.

But there's another side to it which Peter's image makers were very strong on, and that was the vision of transfiguration, the change of the world. world, with the Tsar as a sort of messianic figure at the center of it. So Peter was very much had a vision of himself as predestined for greatness, and this vision of transfiguration led by this extraordinary person was all the more believable because he was six-foot-seven tall, extraordinarily brutal and vigorous, and seemed to be quite capable of exerting change. Now, the problem for him, of course, was that Moscow, as the capital city, didn't seem to be the right sort of place for this.

it looked both to his own generation and to foreign visitors at the time pretty much a sort of medieval higgledy-piggledy and so he began when he was on tour in the West in 1697, 1698, start thinking about ways of changing his environment that didn't mean to say that he already had in mind building a wonderful new capital in St Petersburg

that would become the window on the West that you've described that's really a much more contingent set of developments later But it did mean that he started in his urban development by trying to transform Moscow itself, making the whole city much more regular, wider streets and so on. Mr. Listeners should be told about Moscow is entirely wooden that time and prior to a great number of fires. And he had a good reason to hate Moscow, didn't he, Peter?

Yes, he hadn't enjoyed his time in Moscow as a youth, certainly. And he was nervous, of course, when he came back from the Grand Embassy in 1697-98. that he was facing a revolt on the part of the guards. And so there were certainly arguments for looking around for an alternative capital that could sort of symbolise this new great empire that he hoped to find. But he didn't necessarily look to St Petersburg first. He turned first to the south, to Azov, where he was already conducting a campaign against the Turks. And really it was war, first against the Turks and against the Swedes,

which eventually led to the foundation of St Petersburg. You used two words vision and transfiguration. That suggests to many people a religious dimension or a spiritual dimension. Was that part of his thinking? Yes, I think it was part of his thinking. And it was certainly part of the thinking of the advisors who surrounded him. The Russians at the end of the 17th century saw no real conflict between the secular vision that I've described of a more regular, productive state

and this transfigured, as it were, Baroque state. they were quite compatible in the eyes of most Russians. Peter himself attended church regularly. He wasn't a particularly spiritually minded person, but he certainly attended church regularly, and he saw no conflict there either. Janet Hartley, there was the vision which Simon has touched on and the idea of getting out of Moscow,

but there was an economic plan as well. It was multi-stranded this. Can you develop that? Yes, to me Peter's vision was important, but to me it's much more pragmatic. It's about economics fundamentally, and it's about war, more than anything else. For Peter, economically, St. Petersburg, the foundation of St. Petersburg, taking that territory in the north was just an enormous opportunity. We think of Russia in this period as a second-rate power, as a minor power, but it had a great strength,

and that was that it provided all the main ingredients to build the British Navy. It provided the main mass, the tallest mass, the hemp for sailcloth and for rope. It provided tar. And Peter, who as Simon said had been to the West, became very, very conscious that Russia had this power. It could export these goods. The great problem for Russia and for Peter was that Russia lacked a suitable port to export these goods. Archangel in the North was simply too difficult to get to for foreign traders and too difficult for Russians to export their goods too.

In the south, he had a port, Azov, but he hadn't got the north coast of the Black Sea, and in any event, the Ottoman Empire controlled access to the Black Sea. So for Peter, this was just a stroke of luck, an enormous opportunity to have found a city where he could actually, through a canal network, get goods out to a port in the Baltic. When he'd visited the West, he'd met canal builders, he realised there could be a river network which could connect the Volga through a fairly simple canal structure through to the river Neva in St. Petersburg. So it was just an enormous opportunity,

and he was very pragmatic about it. There were a couple of big obstacles in his way. The first was Sweden. Can you tell us about that? The Great Northern War broke out in 1700. Peter the Great allied with the Poles and the Danes to try to remove Swedish power from the Baltic. We're talking about the third great power in Europe at the time, Sweden.

Sweden was the great power. Russia was a secondary power. In 1700 there was quite a devastating battle in which the Swedes under Charles X12 beat the Russians at Nava, fairly near to the foundation of St Petersburg. And it was just a stroke of luck for Peter that Charles Xir 12 decided at that point

that Russia was not his most significant enemy. Poland was. He couldn't fight on two fronts, so he moved the bulk of his troops away to fight the more important country, Poland. And in that vacuum, Peter just had a stroke of luck that he was able to therefore

take over some of the territory which had been under Swedish control, including this godforsaken spot in the middle of the bogs which later became St. Petersburg. Was it first excuse me, was its first incarnation as a military base then? He took over a fort

from the Swedes near to St. Petersburg, Schlisselberg. But really it was just a location and it was an opportunity and a vacuum to then build something on a village there and a small fort. But in the first instance, it was military. But I think, Simon is right, the vision was greater than just building a fort.

But to me, the first instinct was to build a fort, military settlement there, but then to make it a centre for naval power and for trade. It wasn't an easy place, was it? I mean, one can go on about it, but it was swamps. It was infected. The hinterland wasn't producing goods to sustain it. It needed an enormous hour to work just to get the buildings up. and the floods and the floods, 10 mighty floods and so on.

Can you tell us what an awful place it was? No, it was an absolutely dreadful place. It was damp, it was subjected to floods, as it still is. The climate was appalling, the mosquitoes are dreadful. There is no hinterland, which is of crucial importance, because Moscow, of course, does have a hinterland, small towns, or villages, of people who can supply goods. St. Petersburg never had,

and that suffered from that, you know, right through, Second World War and the collapse of communism as well, not having a hinterland that could provide the people, the goods, the supplies. So Peter simply had to force it. He had to force people to go there. He had to force people not to work with stone elsewhere to transport the stone to St. Petersburg. It was an absolute determination.

But although I'm sure we'll talk about beautiful buildings in St. Petersburg, what he wanted to build was shipyards, dockyards, a port for a potential Russian fleet. and that, of course, requires a vast amount of investment, as much, if not more, than building palaces. Tony Cross, so at this stage, Peter Greed is Herculean and brutal, Herculean, I suppose, and brutal, but he founded it in 1703 against a lot of odds.

And can you tell us over the next few years, 10 years or whatever, what it looked like, what he did, what he made of this swamp, this flooding plain, this barren place? Perhaps first I might say that it's quite true that no modern estate agent would try and sell the site for a capital city. But it's not quite as Godforsaken as popularly thought as part of the vision. No, it's simply that this is the entrance to the traditional water system that's been exploited since the Vikings of getting. up the Njava into the Great Lake Ladoga and from Ladega down to Nizhny, down to Novgorod

and to the internal water system. And it's been fought over for centuries between Russians. I haven't had a terrible try this period back. And the point is it's more populated that area than one thinks about it. As Janet mentioned, there is this fortress which was called Nottaburg, which Peter renamed Shrew.

Kuzelberg as the key town, just where the Njava flows out of late Ladoga. And this was a fort which became later in Russian history a notorious prison, and which he started rebuilding, obviously, as a fort. And he moved down the river, which is a short river, really, from Ladoga out to the Gulf of Finland. And he encountered next, at the bend of the river, a thriving Swedish, town and fortress, known as Nienchance, and this, in fact, he took in the end of 1702. And there were, in the numerous farms, Russian merchants were working there. But then he moved on further down to the Delta itself and encountered this system of

approximately 19 islands in the Delta, which gave him much better access. out the Gulf of Finland. And his first plan was really to set up a military base. And this is why he chose this small island known as Hare Island, Yanisari, where he in May 1703, 16th of May, the traditional Foundation Day, 16th of May, according to the old calendar, of 703, that the first terms were cut, and this is where the Peter and Paul Fortress was initially built.

Now the point is between 1703 when this happened and the crucial battle and a defeat of the Swedes at Paltava in 1709, these are terribly difficult uncertain years for the creation, both of a fortress and of shipyards and of a city. It's only with Paltava that is able to say, today the foundations of St. Petersburg are truly laid. What sort of city was he building? He died in 1725, so, as a way, he's got 16 years to go.

And he doesn't know that, of course. And he said he wanted a city of spires rather than domes. He wanted a city of boats rather than bridges. Can you give us some idea what sort of city he was building as? Yes. I mean, initially... If you walked through it, what would you have seen? Well, you said initially about Moscow being... built of wood and prone to

fire and despite being inundated all the time these Delta Islands it was precisely these that early St. Petersburg was heir to and had devastating fires all the way through because the initial building was precisely out of wood because there was a heavily wooded area as well as inundated area so it was really it was described

up to about 1709 1710 really as a collection of shacks over several over several islands. These were essentially wooden buildings. It was only after... And inevitably, one really needs to see the topography of this. It's a group of islands, and Peter is not really certain where the centre of the city is going to be. He's looking out of what becomes crunched at

and thinks as late as 17-010 that that should be the centre of his new city. And he calls it the new Amsterdam. He actually draws up a grid rational system for that. It's only gradually that he centres on what is the historic centre of St Petersburg between the fortress, which is on one side, which is developed as a military fortress and where the cathedral is built, and opposite it where the Admiralty is built. This is this great ship-building area.

Simon Dixon, can we just take that up for a moment to do longer? Janet's talked about the transporting of stone, St. Petersburg, his determination after being to Europe to build in stone. So we get the stone building beginning after Poltava in the early, the teens of the 18th century. That's what's happening there. Yes, although right through the 18th century, really, stone buildings are in the minority.

But he has a stone frontage, as I understand it, which is the thing that impresses most people who turn up while he is still alive. It's great stone frontage. Yes, well, ultimately, having fiddled about a little bit, as Tony described, about where to put the main centre of the city, he decided to put it on St Baselz Island and Vasidisw Ostrov, where he had his main buildings, the 12 colleges, administrative colleges, that's now part of St. Petersburg University.

His sidekick, Alexander Mienchikov, had a palace further along the embankment. And this is on the northern side of the northern bank of the River Njava. So in order to get across from the mainland, in other words, most of Russia's to the south of that, lots of waterborne activity, lots of boats and so on, no bridge until 1728. He has the conscript. Can you give us some idea?

the number of people he had to conscript and the sort of conditions he forced them through in order to undertake what became a century of colossal application? Well, you're quite right that this was a city built largely by forced labour, by recruits, and between 1705, many of them primary recruits, yes, from all sorts of central provinces in Russia, as well as from more neighbouring Baltic province areas. And each year between about 1705 and 7025 his death, there are anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 of these people working. Of course, the death rate was very high, so there's a constant need to replenish the recruits.

By the 1720s, the construction chancellery, the bureaucratic office in charge of the whole thing, is spending about 5% of the state's income on building the city. So this is a major enterprise in every sense. Janet Hartley, as I understand, he took up residence himself in about 1712

and brought the court and the nobles there are. Can you give us some idea of how he switched, how he began to make the major swift? And the city is beginning, as Tony has pointed out, to emerge out of wood into some magnificent buildings. Stone is getting out of some idea of what it might become. He simply forced the whole centre of power to move from Moscow. I wouldn't say Moscow was eliminated as an importance of it. It never was, of course, in any of this period. But yes, it's brute force, which doesn't fit very easily with the beautiful vistas of St. Petersburg and the idea of it being an enlightened, modern, regulated city. And a force is at all levels.

So, yes, he forced conscripts to go there. He forced carpenters. He forced stonemasons. He forced peasants to work in shipyards. He forced nobleman to build palaces there at their expense. He forced merchants to go there. He actually, in effect, closed down Archangel. and forced merchants to move to Moscow.

He actually forbade exports of hemp from Archangel, and that almost at a stroke crippled that port from which it never recovered. So there's an immense amount of brutality and power there. Although I think to put it in perspective, he forced people to move elsewhere and to do other things as well. He forced workers to go to the south and build shipyards there. And other Tsar's right through to Alexander, simply recategorised groups of people,

obliged them to move, moved Cossacks from one part of the country to another, recategorised population, move people from the country to the city. So although Peter was particularly brutal, and I think had very, very little concern for the amount of human cost, it's not unusual for Zahs to use people in this way in order to achieve their ends. Tony Cron. No, I just wanted to come back to the original point you were making your first question to me about a city of steeple spires and of no bridges as being part of Peter's vision

and this is part of the tyrannical imposition of his will that he should be so. It's interesting that the creation of cathedrals and churches went on a pace to come back to one of Simon's early points and that during his reign for instance there were along the most famous

seaboard of the Niava, on both sides, the left and the right banks of this, were at least five structures with high steeples or spires. Two of them were secular, three, in fact, were cathedrals and churches. And the first cathedral to be built was the so-called Trinity Cathedral, as early as 1703, even before the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, within the fortress itself, which is another steeple.

And the Admiralty at the other side has, again, one of the most famous steeples, and there were two other churches of this. This was a direct reaction against the onion domes of orthodoxy, of the Orthodox churches. This were, as a vision of the towns he'd seen in Holland and in England, of the steeples rising above a regulated skyline, which he imposed very much. And interestingly, he, although nowadays we talk of St. Petersburg as a city that delights in its bridges, it has over 400 bridges of all dimensions over its canals and over its rivers. For Peter, they were anathema.

He hated bridges because, in a sense, they got in the way of him messing around in boats. And not only boats, he imposed that in 1714, he said people should not even row across, they should sail. He was mad about sailing there, for he had no bridges, except that there were, the first bridge, small bridge was built in 1703, a little one that connected the fortress. and some small bridges come, but in terms of bridges across the Nevae, it's only in the 19th century. I don't think it's particularly odd that Peter or anybody else to choose

foreign models. If we were building a new city in Britain now, I think it would be a bit naff if the whole thing was done in Moctuda. So it would be slightly odd if Peter wanted to reproduce a Moscow in St Petersburg. So I think what's important is what he borrowed rather than the

fact that he borrowed, and it is the fact that in the first instance, his first thoughts don't go to Paris. They go to Holland. They go to shipbuilding to a style of architecture, which is North German, German, Germanic style, rather than anything that

might be associated with Italy or France. And I think that's his particular interest. So it's not the borrowing, I think one would expect that. It's the fact that he borrows from a particular set of principles that he's interested in, and the regulation element as well, that you regulate

the city in every way, which is typical, not just the Peter of course, but of rulers in the 18th century generally, the idea that you can just pass a decree and the streets will be clean and they will be regular and they will be lit and they won't be full of muck. And I'd just like to take other point about messing around in Votes. He was obsessed with the idea of being a navy and perhaps he was saying getting as much practice as you can really because he wanted to build up the Baltic Navy and he needed it. But to go on from that, Simon Dixon, he brought in a number of foreigners and particularly

architects. As we're going to talk a bit about the look of St. Petersburg. Which key architect did he bring in and what did they do that was important for Peter and for St. Petersburg? Well, there'd always been foreign architects working in Russia since the 16th century, but Peter was much more eclectic in his choice. He was much more ecumenical in his choice, not only in his religious

beliefs, but also in his approach to foreigners. And I suppose the most important of all these for Peter was Domenico Tretzini, who was a Swiss-Italian, who was very influential in St. Petersburg in the first decades of its creation. And you were to talk about Tritsch. No, I mean, Tretzini, willy-nilly became the preeminent architect. Can you give us some idea of what he was good at and what he did in why?

Well, he'd been brought up as he'd worked in Northern Europe. He was, it's a sort of moderate form of Baroque, not the Baroque, we are going to associate and talk with of Elizabeth's reign later with Rastrelli. But Trezini was industrious. They're not showy buildings. Peter was against show. There was a strong pragmatic utilitarian thing about Trexene's buildings,

but Trexini built and built and built. And some of his buildings, unlike any of the earlier ones, still exist. The 12 colleges, which are now the University of St. of St. Petersburg is a famous one. He built the cathedral inside the Peter and Paul, Paul Fortress. These are, in a sense, modelled on Dutch and northern architecture.

So, as this the same time as he's bringing his court, I know with exceptions, Janet, not wholly, bringing them from Moscow and around to St. Petersburg and westernizing them, either telling them or forcing them to wear Western dress to build in a different style, not to have their estates as they had them in Moscow, to change their way of life, in a way, the look of the way of life.

Same time he's doing that. He's encouraging merchants and diplomats to come from the West who are arriving there. So how is he bringing about this confluence, isn't it? Yes, very much. I think the city became both a major port and naval centre and a Residenstadt in the German term. It was the centre of the Russian court

from about 1712, 14. absolutely certain exactly when. And, of course, it remained so right through to 1917. And one of the principal functions of the city was to act as the central residence of the monarchy. And as a result, all the sorts of things that went with a court society, purveyors, theatrical enterprises, concentrated in St. Petersburg.

It became a major cultural centre, as well as a major naval and military centre. And diplomats, including British diplomats, who spent a lot of time moaning. Indeed, they did. Yes, well, most of them, of course, didn't want to go there in the first place. and St. Petersburg wasn't the sort of place

that attracted the better kind of British diplomat. But Janelle will say more about that. Well, they moaned far more about being in Moscow than they did about being St Petersburg. I think that's the best thing to say. And British merchants moaned infinitely more about being an archangel than about being in St Petersburg

because the mosquitos were even worse in Archangel. I think British diplomats, I wrote a biography of the British diplomat who was there during Peter's reign and started off in Moscow, of course, and then ended up in St Petersburg. and I don't think he was very impressed by St. Petersburg because it was 1710 and right at the beginning of the construction.

But he loathed Moscow. There was no doubt about that. Moscow was strange, alien, exotic in a way, but horrendous for somebody, at least somebody who didn't even speak Russian. Whereas St. Petersburg, at least by the mid-18th century, was recognisably home. It wasn't so different from other European cities. So I think by that stage it becomes just very attractive,

both to Russians, to merchants in Russia and to foreign merchants and diplomats as well? So foreign merchants are coming in. I mean, it is working at his time. We're still, let's stay with Peter at 1725. We're going to move on to others of his family and his successors. But just to get the mix, Tony Cross, a lot of Brits are turning up at that time.

And sailors, merchants and engineers, they start having their own little club or whatever it is, section area. It was a sort of an inevitable consequence. of his famous expedition, if you like, to the West in 1698. This was as much a recruitment drive as an observation excursion. And lots of British experts, particularly shipbuilders, and particularly engineers, and particularly naval captains, were among the several hundred that he is known to have recruited

around 1698, 1699, who came and originally, obviously worked elsewhere than St. Peter's but after 1703 who were instrumental in many of laying down the first big men of war that came from the Admiralty shipyards, for instance. The first man of war, I think, was launched only in 1712. There were smaller ships before that, but they were British shipbuilders who were the main thrust behind the men of war that then for the next two, three decades came from those shipyards and were with what was ultimately built at Cronstadt, the basis of the, of the, the Baltic fleet of Peter. Simon Nixon, Peter died in 1725. We have to move on and we have to move on from him of a gangrenous infection in his early 50s. The future of St. Petersburg hung in the balance for a little while.

Just a little brief interregnum if we can have that briefly and then we can move on. Yes, well, the whole of Peter's reform was in a sense hung in the balance. The future of his city certainly did because in the aftermath of his death, the capital was moved back to Moscow again temporarily. and that was an index, I suppose, of the dissatisfaction that many Russians felt about being resident in St. Petersburg and their wish to return to their estates in and around Moscow. And it wasn't until Peter's niece, Empress Anna, returned the court to St. Petersburg in 1732, that things began to take off again. So really that interregnum between sort of 1725 and the early 1730s was a period of dissuitude for the city when a lot of those early wooden buildings began to fall apart, including many of. of the wooden churches he'd build.

But under Anna and then Elizabeth, it really got moving again, very strongly, Tony Cross. And more Rostrelli came in, more architects came in, and build, build, build in stone. Absolutely, but you were right in saying that by the end of Peter's reign,

what had been achieved was quite impressive. The rate of building in the last 10 years of Peter's reign was quite phenomenal from being a sort of collection of wooden huts. It actually became a city, leading. along the embankments of the Nevaar itself on both sides, enough as a line of imposing palaces out of brick and everything else stucco, if you like,

but to impress people who arrived and they mainly arrived up the Gulf of Finland, from the Gulf of Finland and seeing that. So it was already an impressive thing. But those few years where it went back to Moscow, everything always was threatening to fall apart. Yeah, but then it started to move. But then it started again, because Anna was brought up in those places, St. Petersburg for her was, was in fact the capital,

and it's under Anna that there is a great leap forward. One of the major points of it is these immense fires in 1736 and 1737, which cleared out on the Admiralty side, which we call the main part, many of the haphazard wooded buildings that have been accruing around the Admiralty, which is the most unregulated point of view. And it's after that she sets up a commission for the orderly development of St. Petersburg. and this is when the famous three prongs, the radials, the Nievesky prospect ultimately, and there are two other radials centred on the Admiralty,

which become the real planning basis of that part of St. Petersburg, and the development inland takes on quite a bit. You mentioned Rastrelia, of course. Rastelli starts building already under Anna, as Tretzini carries on building under Anna. so they conflict there. But Restrelli obviously comes into his own in the reign of Peter's daughter, Elizabeth.

And this is when the great Winter Palace, as we know it, was in fact built by Rastrelli in all the exuberance of European Baroque. These were massive buildings on a scale not seen before in St. Petersburg, and which, incidentally, Peter would never have liked, since he liked small buildings, one, two stories. These were big, fast buildings

that now are dominating various parts of St. Petersburg. So we come to Catherine the Great in 1762, who's the second great power associated with St. Petersburg. She took up the legacy of Peter and more emphatically because she was a usurper in a way. She wasn't in a direct line of descent, but she allied herself with Peter early on and continued this policy of aggrandizing buildings.

building, pushing it forward. And one point really that we have to face up to her that on the, this, it was, great beauty came out of great brutality. Yes, that's certainly true. One of Catherine's litigation strategist was, of course, to claim that she was the rightful inheritor

of Peter I, which of course she certainly wasn't. But it was useful for her to claim that she was completing what he had begun. That was one of her slogans. She was German. Yeah, she had married. another German in fact. Yes, Peter III was also German. So she hadn't got a drop of Russian blood in her body. And she'd come to the throne in 1762 as the result of the usurpation of her husband, Peter III, who was very shortly afterwards assassinated. So she was in a very difficult position, really. And it certainly suited her to appear to be following in Peter's footsteps. But she's no mere imitator, Catherine. The point about Catherine was always that she wanted not only to match, but also to surpass Peter's achievements and that meant partly operating outside

St Petersburg in the south, setting up her own, as it were, new creations, a Black Sea fleet to match his Baltic fleet and so on, but it also meant transforming the built environment of St. Petersburg in all sorts of ways, most notably probably the fantastic granite embankment along the river which was built from the early 60s through to the early 1780s, which is still visible and which, as it were, a sort of superhuman triumph over nature

holding in the banks of the river prone to flooding. Janet Hartley. It's not unusual, of course, for any ruler in this period to want to beautify towns or to found new towns. Catherine, Simon said, founded her own new town, Adesaph in the south. Many Russian provincial towns had their centres rebuilt in stone at this time, partly because, as in the case of Moscow, there had been so many fires. So in a way, St. Petersburg is the biggest,

and the best, but it's not unique. This is simply, I think, part of Catherine's much broader programme of modernising Russia, giving it a more civilised face, making it more urbanised. The one place no one could really tackle was Moscow because it was so big and already so higgledy-piggledy. You could build beautiful palaces there,

and they did in this period, but you couldn't really change the public image of the place. But St Petersburg was there as a blueprint which could be added to. It had space. So it was quite easy for Catherine to build palaces, and also, of course, for Russian nobles to build palaces. By this period, the brutality was no longer required for Russian nobleman.

They were no longer had to be forced to come to St Petersburg. They wanted to come to St. Petersburg and have a grand palace there, as well as a palace in Moscow and on their estates. So if you like, it's a change of a relationship. It's not just a continuation of Peter, because Catherine was so much more in tune with the Russian nobility. Both of them had the same interests in beautifying St. Petersburg. in the way that wasn't the case with Peter

when people had to be forced to go to St. Petersburg. One of the tags we put on, one of the way we tag, Catherine is her relationship with Voltaire and therefore with the European Enlightenment and therefore right in the middle of the European movement towards reason, secularism, art, culture and so on. Turn it across, can you talk about that?

How important was that to her? Because that is when it seemed to sweep into Europe. Not only St. Petersburg, but this was this great city of the Enlightenment, which was joining in the Enlightenment movements. Yes, and interesting enough, very early, as part of her enlightenment was that she trumpeted, if you like, her religious tolerance. And one of the striking developments in her reign

was on the famous Nievesky prospect as it became, in which you found churches of different faiths being built. So it added to the Lutheran Church, with the Armenian Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Khazan Church, on the opposite side of Nievesky. This was, in a sense, a manifest declaration of her religious tolerance, and in fact she organized dinners of toleration, as she called it,

to which she invited all the leading clerics of all the different faiths who sat very uncomfortably next to each other at these sort of things. But generally, in terms of town planning and everything else, it's still a continuation of the rational beginnings of Peter. But she had now the materials. And as Simon said, the great thing of this is that this is a great city that now emerges where it's not quite the completion of what Peter might have envisage. But this is when the city really becomes an ordered, enlightened, rational city,

where everyone, all the countries of it is multi-ethnic as it was from the people. in this is a great international centre over which a German-Russian reigned. I don't think we should get too carried away just with the beauty of St Petersburg. It was always a military, economic centre for all that was invested in palaces. Moore was invested, keeping Kronstadt up to date,

building the dockyards, building the shipyards. Catherine invested something like 400,000 roubles a year simply in making sure that the dockyards functioned. It was a great place... 400,000 roubles means, yeah. Oh, well... Have time to work it out? I haven't time to work it out, but I think in terms of expenses on the army,

always fortifications and dockyards were the most expensive items. Salaries, supplies, horses came way down the list. A new fort or a new dockyard was massively expensive, and investing that amount of money would be like building a new fort on the frontier in the Caucasus. So it's a vast investment. It was a great place for military parades, always. And I think that was something which impressed foreigners. But it was important.

It was important to Catherine. She'd come to power by a military coup. It's immensely important to Alexander that you could have these great military displays. So for all there's this cultured enlightened side, there's also a very strong element of this is Russia as a great power. It's made it.

Sorry, John. Alexander first took... Alexander first took... It wasn't it? It was perfectly legal part of the Petrine legacy. And Alexander I first sort of took it on and sort of didn't finish the job, but you could say completed the Petrine vision.

Well, in many ways, what had happened in Catherine's period was that the... The sort of Baroque architecture that we've been describing earlier gave way to neoclassical architecture, initially in the interiors of the palaces, but increasingly also in the exterior of palaces. And it's that neoclassical sort of vision which comes to fruition primarily under Alexander I first.

It's that vision which any visitor to St. Petersburg will now see, I think, predominantly buildings surviving from the reign of Alexander, between 1801 and 1825. No, I mean, that's absolutely right. That, really, you shouldn't stop with Catherine, that Alexander is the end of the long 18th century of development really of... The first year of the 19th century. The 19th century, yes, up to 1825 really the end of Alexander's reign.

And this is where now the St. Petersburg that we visit, the great imposing buildings like the exchange on the end of what's called the Spit on Vassili Island that's like a big Greek temple, or multi-colums, and they said Alexander was column mad. of all these buildings, had to have columns, columns, columns, and I agree. Is this triumph of the neoclassicism

in the capital there, and the great Admiralty building, which is, again, done under his reign. And many of the imposing buildings there are Alexander of this. But Simon's completely right, really. There's a change completely, an aesthetic change, as part of the Enlightenment, of course, of bringing in classicism

and English influences, as where English landscape guard, incomes. The gardens have changed from formal gardens into some much more open. When we get that at the beginning, let's say, let's take 1825, Sam and something like that, how was it regarded in the rest of Europe? We have London, we have Paris, we have Prague, we have Rome, and how is St. Peter's about part of that phone? Well, it certainly was because by then, of course,

Alexander had defeated Napoleon. He'd ridden down the Champs-Elise on his charger, and so the two great powers in continental Europe were Russia and well, the island power Britain. So Russia was certainly part of the great power system by then, and St. Petersburg was the sort of glittering icon of that state power. And so did it, it was known, it was known for its, Simon, has used the dread word icon, is known for that rather than for its forts, and people went there to visit a city which gave them great pleasure,

and a city of power and balls, opera house, and so on. All of that, yes, and it was a demonstration of power, as well as a very beautiful city. I don't think one should dismiss Moscow completely. We're talking about Alexander I, Napoleon attacked Moscow. He didn't attack St. Petersburg. Part of that, of course, was to do with the hinterland,

the supplies, the strategy. But part of it was because it was still seen culturally, spiritually, as the heart of Russia. So although St. Petersburg has made it. I mean, it really has made it, I think, by the end of the 18th century, I don't think it's made it to the extent that it's dismissed Moscow.

There's still this sort of, uneasy ambivalence, if you like, between what's often referred to as two capitals, one more historic, cultural, spiritual, and one, this sort of modern, thrusting vision of a great power and a great naval power. Do you see that, Simonix? Yes, I think that's right. I mean, towards the end of the reign of Catherine the Great in 1790, the Russian thinker, Alexander Radisha, wrote a highly critical account of Catherine our regime, and he called it a journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. And the idea was that the fictional traveller was travelling, as it were, away from,

this foreign northern Residencstadt towards the heart of true Russia. And that really awkward balance between the two rival capitals survived in Russia throughout the 19th century and of course it's still there today. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks Janet Hartley, Simon Dixon

and Tony Cross. Next week we can be talking about the vacuum of space with Jocelyn Belbenel, Frank Close and Ruth Gregory discussing the various forms of nothing from the inside of the atom to the vast reaches of outer space. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.