St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  On 23-4 June 1812, Napoleon crossed the River Niemen into Russian territory with between 300,000 and 400,000 men. A week later, the Vedomosti carried a report of Alexander’s vow to Nicholas Saltykov, President of the Imperial Council. He would never surrender as long as the enemy remained on Russian soil. While the Grande Armée pressed forward to Moscow, Napoleon’s 2nd French Corps and 10th Franco-Prussian Corps advanced in the direction of St Petersburg. Their aim was to cut off Count Peter Wittgenstein, the general defending the capital. But the French were defeated at the Battle of Kliastitzi in mid-July and Wittgenstein became known in the capital as the ‘Defender of Petropolis’.90 By mid-August, Napoleon’s main army was 350 kilometres south-west of the old capital, laying siege to Smolensk, which the Russians evacuated and set on fire. As Leo Tolstoy observed, the further the Russian army retreated, the more fiercely blazed ‘the spirit of fury against the enemy’.91

  Kutuzov was in the capital at the head of the St Petersburg militia when Alexander appointed him Commander-in-Chief.92 He immediately ordered the Russian Army to retreat, thereby luring the French deeper and deeper into unfriendly territory, stretching their supply lines beyond all strategic reasoning. On 26 August, 115 kilometres south-west of Moscow, the bloody Battle of Borodino was fought – much against Kutuzov’s will. Artillery action was so intense that, at times, as many as 700 guns were firing from both sides across a sector scarcely one kilometre wide.93 The Russians lost 50,000 men. Napoleon lost 40,000 and carried the day. By the time the first news arrived in Petersburg, mistakenly presenting Borodino as a great Russian victory, Napoleon was set to enter Moscow.

  General Kutuzov’s passionate aria in Prokofiev’s 1943 opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace leaves the listener in no doubt that, while St Petersburg may have been the fashionable capital, Moscow was the heart of Russia. To the invaders, Moscow was exotic —a Dutch engineer in Napoleon’s army thought it appeared like ‘a fairy tale city’.94 It was ‘Russian’, in marked contrast to that hybrid and still-unfinished European parody, St Petersburg. Napoleon entered the ancient capital on 2 September and set up his HQ in the Kremlin Palace. Much of the population had fled, and those who stayed – most probably encouraged by Moscow’s governor, Count Rostopchin – set fire to the city. When a strong wind rose on the night of 4 September the flames became impossible to control and French troops were ordered to shoot on sight any Muscovite suspected of arson.

  Tolstoy gives a caustic appraisal of the intricate personal battles which, while Moscow burned, hardly ruffled ‘Petersburg’s daily round tranquil, luxurious, concerned only with phantoms and reflections of life’.95 But when rumours of the fall of Moscow reached the capital, Alexander’s popularity plummeted. He took to riding in a closed carriage and ordered the Hermitage collection to be carted off to three remote northern towns.96 The English prepared to leave. Madame de Staël had already departed.

  In western Russia, snow fell early in 1812. On 9 November, as Adams took his morning walk, he noticed that the pontoon bridges on the Neva had been removed and found the river halffull of floating ice.97 In the deepening cold, Napoleon – whose position in Russia was untenable – had begun his retreat through burnt-out territory, harassed by determined guerrilla warriors. His sappers, who were building bridges to carry the retreating army, were swept away by the freezing water. A Russian officer in pursuit reached the River Berezina and found French horses and men frozen beneath the surface of the ice. The ‘anti-Christ’ who had come to conquer Russia struggled back across the River Niemen on 13-14 December, his Grande Armée decimated by the elements. Emperor Alexander arrived in Vilna on 23 December to declare the end of the war, in the very place it had begun half a year earlier.98 Napoleon’s campaign had been swift but devastating – both to his opponents and to himself. In St Petersburg, the emperor’s birthday passed off without celebration, as Alexander forbade expensive winter festivities in the wake of the recent suffering.99

  The tsar rode at the head of his army across Europe, and Paris fell to the allies at the end of March 1814. Napoleon was exiled to Elba, but escaped to France and gathered around him the very troops sent to check his advance from the south coast. His daring escapade was abruptly curtailed after 100 days when he was beaten by the allies at Waterloo. From less accessible exile on St Helena, he wrote in awe of Russian determination, warning that ‘all Europe could be Cossack’. In Paris, however, Alexander declared that he offered France ‘peace and commerce’.100 Seen as the saviour of Europe, he was enormously popular except among the politicians, who distrusted his simplistic notions and his developing mysticism. At the height of his international influence, between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Alexander was radiant. Convinced that he was blessed by God, he sought to establish a Holy Alliance to protect and preserve Europe“101 – a kind of Christian EU both ahead of and behind its time. Meanwhile, Russian officers who spent months in Europe with Alexander’s army absorbed progressive ideas that were to rattle the foundations of autocracy. Masonic lodges – ridiculed and suppressed by Catherine towards the end of her reign, but tolerated by Alexander when he acceded – gave their members a taste for conspiracy and secrecy that would help pave the way to revolution. The philanthropic tendencies of the Masons placed them in opposition to an emperor who – sanctioned by Divine Will – was growing increasingly reactionary.102

  St Petersburg had been physically untouched by Napoleon’s armies. It was, however, overrun by the Empire style, which – stimulated by Bonaparte’s various conquests – drew on Greek, Etruscan, Roman and Egyptian motifs. Sphinxes were placed on the quay of Vasilevsky Island in front of the Academy of Arts; an Egyptian Bridge was built over the Fontanka; Egyptian Gates – designed by Adam Menelaws – were added at Tsarskoe Selo. The neoclassical Empire style transformed interior decoration, furniture design and tableware. Outstanding among Russian designs of the period were the hundreds of variations on classical abstract motifs surrounding the dishes of the Guryev Service, which was produced by the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory.

  The pleasurable life of the capital continued much as it had done in the early years of Alexander’s reign. There was, however, a feeling of familiarity about everything, a sense of stasis – as if the city was impatient for some new impetus or energy. In his Memoirs the journalist O. A. Przhetslavsky complained of the ‘monotonous’ streets and the ‘unfinished’ look of the city.103 Alexander, however, was eager to raise his capital to a ‘perfection . . . commensurate with its worth’. Accordingly, St Petersburg’s last great homogenous architectural style came to dominate, and thereby rationalise, the centre of the capital. A Committee for Building and Hydraulic Works was created, and among the architects enlisted to fulfil the emperor’s dreams were Vasily Stasov, Carlo Rossi and Auguste Ricard de Montferrand, all active between 1816 and the 1840s. After 150 years of stumbling through successive styles and orders of architecture, the neoclassical style predominated, creating a majestic harmony across the façades of a city, which was to be forced – increasingly – to confront its underlying chaos.

  One outstanding project was the Stock Exchange, which occupies a prominent position on the spit of Vasilevsky Island. Quarenghi had submitted designs for this, but his scheme was abandoned after plans were provided by a passionately royalist Frenchman, Jean-François Thomas de Thomon, who fled to Petersburg from revolutionary France. Announcing his proposal with great showmanship, the Frenchman invited spectators to a specially constructed amphitheatre, where he dramatically revealed his ideas for a new exchange. Finished in 1810, de Thomon’s powerful Doric-columned structure was an unmitigated statement of confidence in the economic future of the capital. Clearly indebted to the Second Temple of Hera at Paestum, the entrance was crowned with a sober Doric frieze. Standing a little apart from the building on the Strelka were Thomon’s thirty-two-metre-high Rostral Columns, which were built in 1810 to imitate Roman columns of the third century BC. Stuck like slugs to the terrac
otta-coloured pillars were the prows of ships and bowls for oil, which were lit on ceremonial occasions. Unlit, they jar with the elegance of the nearby Exchange.104

  Ivan Cheskoy’s View of the Spit of Vasilevsky Island with the Stock Exchange and Rostral Columns, c. 1810.

  Looking through the gates of the Winter Palace at the base of the Alexander column and Rossi’s arches to the Nevsky Prospekt. In Eisenstein’s film October, Bolsheviks pour through those arches and scale these gates.

  Although there was a striking succession of deaths among the great architects of St Petersburg during the second decade of the nineteenth century – Zakharov in 1811, Cameron in 1812, Voronikhin in 1814, Quarenghi in 1817 and de Thomon in 1819 – the great genius responsible for much of the grandeur of the capital was coming to maturity. Carlo Rossi was born in Naples to a ballerina who later married the dancer and choreographer Charles le Picq. Invited to join the Russian imperial ballet in 1787, le Picq brought his wife and stepson to Petersburg, where the latter studied and worked under Tsar Paul’s architect, Vincenzo Brenna. Rossi’s 500-metre curving façade for the offices of the General Staff of the Army and the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs embrace Palace Square. Yet behind the right-hand axe of this magisterial parabola in typical Petersburg style stands a warren of confusing rear courtyards . It was Rossi who determined the sharp left turn towards the bottom of the Nevsky Prospekt into a wide passage of three linked arches, the last of which opens onto Palace Square and is crowned by a sculptural ensemble: Victory drawn by six horses and driving straight for the palace.105 By creating the passage, Rossi – unwittingly-set up the topography of revolution. It was down the Nevsky Prospekt and into this passage that people from the hidden spaces behind and beyond elegant St Petersburg would stream, in order to challenge autocracy. Rossi, while crowning the imperial capital, was preparing its demise. Meanwhile, his monumental vision produced a good number of gracious and stately buildings, including the second Imperial Library and a new Mikhailovsky Palace. Paul’s red fortress became home to the Guards Corps of the Engineers and was thereafter known as Engineers Castle. Rossi also contributed to the planning of twelve squares and thirteen streets in the capital, one of which bears his name. The short Rossi Street, which the architect planned in its entirety – two buildings 220 metres long, on either side of a street twenty-two metres wide – terminates at the back of his own Aleksandrinsky Theatre, which opened in 1832.106 It is a street designed by the son of a ballerina, along which Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsarvina and Nureyev would walk to reach the studios of their school, a street of well-ordered proportions and regular effects – like a perfect corps de ballet.

  During Alexander’s reign, Ivan Valberg, Russia’s first native ballet master, made his mark in St Petersburg. He studied under the Italian choreographer Gaspero Angiolini during Catherine’s reign, and danced under Rossi’s stepfather, le Picq. In response to Napoleon’s aggression, Valberg conceived Love for the Fatherland. It was set to music by the Italian composer Catterino Cavos, who lived in Petersburg for more than forty years and was the father of the architect of two of Russia’s greatest theatres, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky in the capital. While Catherine II had dabbled in historical opera, it was Cavos who is credited with introducing the genre to the Russian public. He composed Ivan Susanin in 1815 – twenty years before Mikhail Glinka wrote his more famous version of the story.107 The music Cavos produced for Valberg’s Love for the Fatherland was so stirring that, when it was performed in 1812, young men rushed from the theatre to the recruiting office.

  Soon after Alexander’s accession, the emperor appointed the collector and bibliophile Count Dmitry Buturlin to run the Hermitage, suggesting that the collection should be opened to the public for a certain period each year. Alexander also noticed that there were gaps in the collection. As Spanish painting was not well represented, canvases were bought from the English banker William Coesvelt. After the Tilsit Treaty, the services of Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Napoleonic Museum at the Louvre, were secured. When Franz Labenzsky, custodian of the Hermitage, went to Paris in 1808, Denon helped him obtain Caravaggio’s Lute Player, along with twenty-two other important paintings.108 After the final defeat of Napoleon, when Alexander was in Paris he delighted in the company of Napoleon’s first wife, Empress Joséphine. She was an arbiter of taste and dearly wished to keep her house at Malmaison, with its striking collection of art. Joséphine needed Alexander to look kindly upon her and, to that end, gave him the prized Gonzaga Cameo when they met in the spring of 1814. This fifteen-by-eleven-centimetre gem, dating from the third century BC, is a particularly ugly two-toned sardonyx treasure, with a lineage that makes that of the Maltese Falcon pale. During the sixteenth century it belonged to the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua.then, in the seventeenth, to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. After that, Queen Christina of Sweden possessed it. Then it passed to the Odescalchi family in Rome, on to the Vatican and, ultimately, to Josephine. She – in keeping with her contemporaries – thought the cameo represented Alexander the Great and his mother and thus imagined it to be an apt gift with which to flatter the Russian emperor. When, following one of their delightful picnics, Joséphine contracted a fatal bronchial disorder and died, leaving huge debts, Alexander bought thirty-eight paintings from the Malmaison estate, including Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, and twenty-one canvases which had been looted from the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. While the landgrave was able to repossess the paintings stolen from his collection that were hanging in the Louvre, he was appalled to find that those passed on to Alexander would only be returned if the tsar was reimbursed the 940,000 francs they had cost. The landgrave refused to pay twice, and so the canvases stayed in Russia, where they were exhibited in the new Malmaison Hall of the Hermitage.109

  Against a pan-European drive to limit monarchical power and edge towards democracy, Russia held fast to its autocractic form of government. During the early 1820s, revolts in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Naples and the Piedmont increased Alexander’s resolve to resist change, and many enlightened groups among the intelligentsia were bitterly disappointed. Merchants in Moscow complained that they were treated unfairly, and Petersburg shopkeepers felt they would profit greatly from a constitution.110 The daring young poet Alexander Pushkin wrote epigrams targeting the establishment and short poems celebrating liberty. Groups – some inspired by European secret societies, such as the Carbonari, who aimed to overturn the restoration of the French monarchy after the defeat of Napoleon – met for fervid political discussion. Dissent seemed to be growing alarmingly and, in August 1822, despite rumours that he himself was a member of a lodge, Alexander banned all secret societies, including the Freemasons.111

  It was ‘hard to describe the state in which St Petersburg found itself in the spring of 1823’, wrote the Russian diarist Filipp Vigel. ‘Alexander’s gloomy looks, more sorrowing than severe, were reflected on its inhabitants.’112 The tsar’s adjutant likewise suggested that the ruler was now ‘increasingly consumed with reticence and suspicion’."113 When, in November 1824, the capital suffered one of its worst floods – the deluge that Pushkin was to describe in his apocalyptic vision of tsarist power, ‘The Bronze Horseman’ – it seemed as if nature had joined the rising tide of human revolt. Across the city, hundreds of people were killed and nearly 500 houses were swept away, as the Nevsky Prospekt flooded as far up as the Anichkov Bridge over the Fontanka. Alexander’s sister, the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna, wrote that ‘in the space of one hour the square in front of the Winter Palace’ was sunk beneath ‘a raging sea’.114

  Against an ever-deepening gloom, a group of intellectual, aristocratic and military conspirators began to meet. They abhorred serfdom, looked towards Europe for enlightenment and yet were intensely patriotic. Nourished by the ideas published in a handful of Petersburg periodicals with spirited titles such as Son of the Fatherland and Champion of Enlightenment and Philanthropy,115 they grew into two important pressure groups, one bas
ed in a Ukraine garrison town and the other in the capital. After much discontent and debate, three officers – Nikita Muravyov, a senator’s son, heir to sizeable estates and thousands of serfs, along with Princes Yevgeny Obolensky and Sergei Trubetzkoy – decided that the time for talking was over. As their accomplice, Lieutenant Bestuzhev-Ryumin, asked: ‘Would the Russians, who had freed Europe from Napoleon’s yoke, fail to shake off their own?116

  Fyodor Alekseyev’s November 7th 1824 in Teatralnaya Square.

  The plan, at first, was to assassinate the tsar in May 1826 when he was scheduled to review troops in the south. At that moment, members of the imperial family in St Petersburg would be rounded up and deported, and Bestuzhev-Ryumin would march on Moscow. Fate intervened. On 19 November 1825, Alexander died in Taganrog. Masses were being sung in St Petersburg to celebrate his recovery while messengers were en route to the capital to report his death. Russia was without an emperor for days, and worse confusion was to come. When Alexander’s death was announced, Constantine, his younger brother, was proclaimed emperor, in ignorance of the fact that the grand duke had already renounced his claim to the throne, which left his younger brother, Nicholas, as heir apparent. Russia effectively remained without a tsar until Constantine’s letter from Warsaw, confirming his position, reached St Petersburg. Even then, Nicholas required Constantine’s endorsement before he would agree to ascend the throne.117 In all this mess, the idealistic architects of the original plan to murder Alexander decided to press on with their revolt, but in the event they proved faint-hearted and disorganised. They wanted to force the Senate to denounce the Romanovs, seize the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Winter Palace and assassinate Nicholas. Everything went wrong. Pyotr Kakhovsky, the man detailed to attack and occupy the Winter Palace, refused at the last minute. The rebel who promised to assassinate Nicholas reneged. Meanwhile, Grand Duke Nicholas – surprised to find himself tsar – exhibited exceptional cool and stole a march on the insurgents.