St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  At the outset of Alexander’s reign, to mark the 100th anniversary of the foundation of St Petersburg, the tsar had paraded 20,000 troops – their banners dipping in reverence as they marched past Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great.118 At 11 a.m. on 14 December 1825, on the first day of a new reign, troops in open rebellion against autocracy assembled around that same significant sculpture in Senate Square. But the senators had already sworn allegiance to their new emperor early that morning, and Nicholas was primed. He moved his family from the Anichkov Palace to the greater safety of the Winter Palace, which he then surrounded with the 1st Battalion of the Preobrazhensky Guards. Troops sealed off Carlo Rossi’s new passage between Palace Square and the Nevsky Prospekt. Stones and other debris were hurled at government forces by a rabble who promised that, if they were given arms, ‘in half an hour’ they would ‘turn the city upside down’. While loyal troops were ordered to load their firearms, churchmen tried to reason with the 3,000 insurgents. Grand Duke Mikhail was fired upon when he spoke with them. The governor of St Petersburg, Count Miladorovich, went to appeal to the rebels and was killed by Kakhovsky, who later shot the commander of the Grenadier Guards.

  By 3 p.m. dusk was beginning to obscure the scene. A band of rebel grenadiers set out to seize the imperial family from the palace, but were repulsed. Re-joining their comrades, they passed close enough to the new emperor to shoot with precision, but failed to recognise him. With darkness falling, Nicholas knew that the uprising had to be quashed. He gave the mutineers one last chance to lay down their arms and, when they refused, ordered his cavalry to attack. On the icy surface of Senate Square, the charge was not only ineffectual, but dangerous. Riders were thrown, as the horses skeltered. After that, Nicholas trained thirty-six cannon on Senate Square. A few rounds cleared the area, leaving about a hundred bodies bleeding in the snow. Innocent people and mutineers were among the dead, but none of the hard core of sixty conspirators had been touched. Bestuzhev-Ryumin attempted to assemble a group of rebels on the frozen Neva in order to march and seize the Peter and Paul Fortress. The tsar merely turned his cannon on the river and attempted to shatter the ice. It was 5 p.m. Night had fallen and the Decembrist uprising was over. General Alexander von Benckendorff – the man who would become the head of Nicholas I’s infamous Third Section – was despatched to round up the insurgents.119

  Karl Kolman’s Decembrist Rising, 1825.

  PART II

  SUBJECTS

  1825–1917

  8

  A NEW KIND OF COLD

  1825–55

  Within hours of their arrest, core members of the Decembrist uprising were being grilled in the Winter Palace. Nicholas I sat at a desk beneath Carlo Maratta’s arresting portrait of Pope Clement IX. Suspects were thus confronted by the rigorous inquisition of the new emperor, quickened by the Pope’s icy glare. Ivan Yakushkin – who distracted himself during questioning by focusing on Domenichino’s tender Holy Family1— refused to name names and was clapped in irons so tightly that he could not move. The poet Kondraty Ryleyev had been betrayed and – under questioning – unmasked Trubetzkoy, who begged the tsar for his life. Colonel Bulatov admitted his intention to kill the emperor and was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he committed suicide by smashing his head repeatedly against the stone wall of his cell.2

  During the six months in which the Investigating Committee sat through nearly 150 meetings, issued 175 reports and generated one million sheets of legal and bureaucratic rumination, the prisoners – deprived of pen, paper or any reading material – shared dank cells with water rats, mice and cockroaches.3 When it reported on 30 May 1826, the committee emphasised the smallness of the conspiracy, the vulnerability of its hard core to dangerous foreign ideas, and argued that – overall – the episode revealed widespread and sincere devotion to the emperor.4 Of the 1,400 Decembrists arrested, only 121 were convicted. Most of the conspirators were exiled to Siberia, but five – Ryleyev, Kakhovsky, Pestel, Muravyov and Bestuzhev-Ryumin – were to be quartered, a sentence that was commuted to hanging on 13 July 1826. When the instant of extinction came, ropes broke and knots slipped, and three of the offenders had to be hanged twice. A memorial service in Senate Square consecrated the punishment, and holy water was sprinkled to purify the ground where autocracy had been challenged. Nicholas claimed that revolution was ‘at the gates of Russia’ and swore to master it. ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ were the order of the day.5 All public discussion of the Decembrists was prohibited, but – as there had been no death-sentence under Alexander – the executed leaders rapidly gained status as martyrs. Portraits of the rebels were banned. Talismanic likenesses changed hands under the counter.

  Tsar Nicholas – realising that the suppressed rebellion had become a cause célèbre-established the notorious Third Section, a special branch of that power-centre, His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery. In the tsar’s own words, the functions of the Third Section included the gathering of ‘detailed information concerning all people under police surveillance’; the ‘exile and arrest of suspicious or dangerous persons’, and the tracking of foreigners ‘travelling in the country’. From September 1829, the Third Section received all copies of all printed matter. Nearly a decade later, it moved from its sizeable premises at the corner of the Moika Canal and Gorokhovaya Street to the old residence of Prince Kochubey near the Chain Bridge over the Fontanka. Behind forbidding gates, this large house with its warren of detention cells became a very busy interrogation centre. Police wagons clattered in and out of the courtyard under the cloak of darkness.6 The ‘Chain Bridge house’ was as notorious in the Petersburg of Nicholas I as the Leningrad headquarters of the KGB, the Bolshoi Dom on Liteiny Prospekt, or Moscow’s infamous Lubianka during the Soviet era.

  Until the oppressive rule of Nicholas I, the creation of St Petersburg and its culture had been driven by the court. After 1825, tsars – for as long as they lasted – became reactive. The initiative for change passed on to writers and thinkers – ‘little men’ with increasingly big voices. After a century of consolidating its magisterial cityscape, St Petersburg faced an era of turmoil. Alexander Herzen, the intellectual dynamo of the mid-nineteenth century, characterised the reign of Nicholas I as ‘a time of outward slavery and inner emancipation’. In a chilling foretaste of the shape of things to come, poems were circulated without being printed. Writers and intellectuals – albeit controlled, censored or incarcerated – began to contour the new character of the city. Lomonosov had provided them with a solid base by formalising Russian grammar in 1755, and by the late 1820s many young Russians had been abroad either to study or to fight and had returned with explosive ideas. In their search for a new order, they attempted a reconciliation between Western ideas and a growing awareness that the road to revolution began with the simple organisation of the Russian village commune.

  Despite a youth of dissipation and flirtation with the high society that he came to despise, the first great Russian writer was a product of the Decembrist Zeitgeist. Alexander Pushkin formed friendships with future Decembrists such as the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, who was to die exiled in Siberia. On his mother’s side, and still visible in his own physiognomy, Pushkin was the great-grandson of an African princeling, whom he identified as ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’ in an unfinished story of that name. This tall and well-proportioned man was taken from Constantinople; the tsar instructed him, promoted him and sent him off to Paris to acquire knowledge that would be useful to the development of the new Russian court.7

  Alexander Pushkin – descendant of this remarkable figure – burst upon the Petersburg literary scene with poetry that was epigrammatic, critical of authority and scathing about serfdom. This resulted in his banishment from the capital in 1820. Permitted to return in 1826 – only to be shadowed by agents of the Third Section8 – Pushkin was already well advanced in his masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Only months after the execution of the Decembrist ringleaders, Pushk
in wrote a subsequently deleted stanza elaborating the politics of his character Lensky who, in the poem, is pointlessly killed in a duel by the bored Onegin. Had Lensky lived, Pushkin tantalisingly suggests, he might have been executed like the Decembrist poet Ryleyev.

  Uncannily, the killing of Lensky is an eerie portent of Pushkin’s own death. Having married a simple yet ambitious beauty, Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin’s inflammable jealousy was sparked by the tattle of Petersburg socialites. Pestered by feelings that his position in society did not match his stature as a poet, perturbed by gossip that linked the emperor to his wife,9 Pushkin was taunted into a duel. He was mortally wounded by one of Natalia’s alleged lovers – the adopted son of the Dutch Ambassador, Baron d’Anthès de Heeckeren. The funeral was held in secret to prevent public disorder. Yet – to the consternation of the Third Section – Mikhail Lermontov’s lyric ‘The Death of a Poet’ stirred abundant emotion. In its final lines the writer painted a venomous picture of court toadies jibes that earned him a posting to the Caucasus. Lermontov found St Petersburg society like a French garden where ‘the clippers of the master had reduced all to uniformity’.10 Banishment to the provinces happily provided him with a fresh setting for Russia’s first great prose novel, A Hero of Our Time.

  Four years before his mortal wounding in the snowy woods to the north of St Petersburg, Pushkin wrestled with the idea of Peter the Great’s hubris in constructing an absurd, dangerous and oppressive capital. He offered Russian literature in the character of the humble clerk, Yevgeny – a prototype for the oppressed anti-hero driven mad by the acts and works of despotism. ‘The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale’ was inspired by the work of Pushkin’s sometime friend, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. In ‘Monument of Peter the Great’, part of a six-poem cycle, Digression, Mickiewicz bemoaned the state of Russia after the suppression of the Decembrists. He also composed a long poem presenting Petersburg as an unnatural and untenable construction devastated by the 1824 flood.11

  Pushkin commences his ‘Bronze Horseman’ with a eulogy in the tradition of the architectural odes to St Petersburg by eighteenth-century poets such as Lomonosov and Derzhavin. Celebrating the city just over a century after its founding, Pushkin punctuates his apparent tribute with the repeated declaration, ‘I love you.’ This litany later irritated the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who curtly addressed Pushkin’s passion for St Petersburg, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t love it,’ and left a substantial body of writing to prove his point.12 As a young man, when Dostoevsky arrived in St Petersburg to study at the Academy of Military Engineers, his first port of call had been the wood where Pushkin was shot. His second pilgrimage was to the room in the house on the Moika in which Pushkin died.13

  Although Dostoevsky was such an ardent admirer of the poet, Pushkin’s declaration of love to a place Dostoevsky later described as a ‘rotting and slimy city’ clearly disturbed him. But Pushkin’s opening panegyric was merely a springboard for his narrative. The celebration of nature tamed into a city of ‘stern and graceful countenance’14 provides a striking contrast to the tragedy of the downtrodden, humble clerk Yevgeny, which occupies the body of Pushkin’s poem. In fact Yevgeny was to act as an inspiration for a character in Dostoevsky’s 1846 novel The Double – Golyadkin, a ‘little man’ who is ‘snubbed and derided by his superiors in the official hierarchy and in society’.15 Taken as a whole, Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’ presents Petersburg as ‘a terrible bequest’.16

  Yevgeny imagines that Peter the Great leaps off the thunder rock and pounds after him in pursuit. Alexandre Benois’s frontispiece to an edition of Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman.

  A vivid image of the violence of the city’s worst flood, in which more than 500 people perished and hundreds of houses were destroyed, was provided by the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna. She described the Winter Palace, during the 1824 deluge, as ‘an island battered by the waves’.17 It was an image that took on a political resonance at the end of the following year, when the Decembrists initiated their rebellion against the palace, which would, at length, terminate in the 1917 October Revolution. It is in the context of the devastating 1824 flood that Pushkin introduces St Petersburg’s oppressed clerk, Yevgeny. As the flood rises, this ‘nobody’ vainly goes in search of his beloved Parasha, who lives on one of the city’s more vulnerable outlying islands.

  In the post-Decembrist world of the secret police state in which Pushkin was writing, tsarist power is perceived as indomitable. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman is seen by Yevgeny, poised:

  . . . high above the invaded land,

  above the raging of the flood

  with back to him, and outstretched hand

  in overmastering command . . .18

  Yevgeny goes wandering among the wreckage thrown up by the water – the first of those modern anti-heroes to negotiate their luckless way among the chaos of a metropolis, attempting to make sense of their anchorless lives. Parasha is drowned and Yevgeny goes mad, obsessed by the figure ultimately responsible for the tragedy, the autocratic tsar. In his demented state, Yevgeny fancies that Peter the Great leaps off the ‘thunder rock’ and pounds after him in pursuit. In Nicholas I’s Russia, Pushkin understood that a tsar would have the last word. Yet – simply by placing a humble clerk centre-stage – the poet allows the ‘little man’ a presence in what was to be the long struggle against ‘the vigilant spirit of autocracy’.19

  A very different, but equally unfavourable take on the capital was offered by the waspish and often brilliant French homosexual Astolphe de Custine, who visited the city in 1839 – two years after Pushkin’s death. Acknowledging St Petersburg as one of ‘the marvels of the world’, Custine fell into the perennial trap of comparing it to Venice ‘less beautiful but more astonishing’. The comparison is, at best, superficial. Venice is intimate and oozes history, whereas Petersburg is vast and – until well into the nineteenth century – persistent in its desire to be brand-new. But when Custine considers Petersburg’s soul – or lack of it – he at once becomes more penetrating. The capital is a freak, built ‘for a people which never existed anywhere’. By denying the natural grace of the Russian ‘Oriental genius’, Peter built a pompous city that was without ‘historical meaning’. It was, Custine remarked, ‘barely possible to see more of Russia in St Petersburg than in France’. He decried the artless imitation and damned the Russians not ‘for being what they are’, but for ‘pretending to be what we are’. Not only did the rulers who conceived the city betray their soul, but they also – perhaps ambitiously, perhaps pretentiously built ahead of themselves. ‘The magnificence and immensity of St Petersburg,’ Custine suggests, ‘are tokens set up by the Russians to honour their future power.’. He derides the city as the headquarters of an army, not the capital of a country. ‘Magnificent though this garrison town may be, it appears empty to Western eyes.’20 It was a city for the nobility, sustained by a bureaucracy and the military. Half the capital appeared to be wearing uniforms and, out of a population of nearly 450,000 in the early 1840s, nearly a quarter worked as domestics.21

  Custine’s opinions were shared by many Russians. The dandy libertarian thinker Peter Chaadaev questioned the direction taken by his nation in a series of letters written – ironically – in French. Russian culture was stranded in some no-man’s-land between East and West, not having truly learned from the example of the West, and guilty of having contributed no useful ideas to civilisation. The question of national character became a preoccupation for writers and intellectuals during the 1830s and 1840s.22 The ‘true Russian’ felt uncomfortable, even odd, in Petersburg’s alien cityscape. The sociologist and literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who moved from Moscow to the capital in 1839, suggested that if ‘one suffers in St Petersburg one is a true human being’.23

  Neoclassicism, Petersburg’s prevailing international architectural style, created large and gloomy squares in which Custine counted ‘fewer humans than columns’. Alexander Herzen – who, since his early adolescence,
was ‘against all imposed authority’ and for ‘the absolute independence of the individual’24 – wandered the capital’s regimented granite pavements ‘close to despair’.25 Meanwhile, the finishing touches of imperial bombast were being added to the ‘unrelieved regularity’ in the form of the new St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Alexander Column in Palace Square. Carlo Rossi had planned a monument to celebrate Alexander’s victory over Napoleon. In the event, it was Auguste de Montferrand – a Napoleonic soldier decorated with the Légion d’honneur – who eventually designed and erected the 600-tonne column between 1830 and 1834. Mounted on a sizeable plinth, the ensemble stands more than forty-seven metres high. Its single column of red granite, capped with a statue of the militant yet angelic Alexander crushing a serpent, was conceived as an image of Russia triumphant.26

  Montferrand was also responsible for the winning design to rebuild St Isaac’s Cathedral. In fact, the energetic Frenchman submitted twenty-four different proposals in every known style, so it is hardly surprising that he won the commission. The cathedral was eventually completed at a cost of more than twenty-three million roubles in 1857, two years after the death of Nicholas I. This dour, dark grey bastion of a church its four powerful porticoes supported by huge granite columns – appears as an architectural testimony to Nicholas’s unrelenting rigidity. Its formidable 100-metre-high dome rose to dominate the skyline of a city in which no civic building was permitted to exceed the height of the cornice on the Winter Palace. Inside the cathedral – under the innovative all-metal engineering of the twenty-six-metrewide dome – a sumptuous effect was created by 200 oil paintings and by the generous use of gilt, mosaic, malachite, porphyry, marble and lapis lazuli.27