The founding of Saint-Petersburg

During the course of the Northern War with Swedes the Russian forces have gradually moved from the Lake Ladoga region down the Neva River to the Swedish fort of Nyenschanz. After an 8-day siege on May 1, 1703 the Swedish garrison surrendered. To protect the newly conquered lands in the Neva delta Peter the Great needed a fortress, but Nyenschanz was small and badly damaged. Looking for a site for his new fortress, Peter the Great chose the island of Enisaari or Hare Island (Zayachii Ostrov), which was close to where the river divides into the Greater and Lesser Neva. From here guns would command access to both streams.

The construction of the fortress was begun by Peter on 16 (27) May 1703, at a spot dedicated in honor of his patron, Peter the Apostle, and ostentatiously in Dutch as 'Sankt Pieterburch' (superseded in time by the German equivalent, St Petersburg). The fortress itself, designed by Peter, who also turned the first sod, was likewise named after the Saints Peter & Paul. This was the birth-day of the city that was to rise and cover the Neva's marshes.

Touring Europe as a young man, Peter had inspected a number of great western cities, and now that he had taken possession of the mouth of the Neva and a stretch of coastline on the Gulf of Finland, he saw the opportunity to build from scratch a modern city that would be unlike anything ever seen before on Russian soil. "While the site still lay under flood water, Peter could write in a letter, 'Forsooth, here it is like unto paradise'. Peter had a little Dutch-stile timber cottage put up for him which can still be seen on the north side of the river, now encased within a later stone structure for its protection.

Twenty thousand workmen a day toiled at the site of the new city. The area was divided into districts, in each of which progress was supervised by the Tsar and his closest friends - Trubetskoy, Menshikov and Naryshkin, whose names are commemorated in the bastions of the fortification. The original clay walls and bastions of the fortress were completed by the end of the summer of 1703. By August 1703 the new settlers had already encountered the infamous St. Petersburg floods. The area was considered unhealthy for a town, but it had tremendous strategic importance, so Peter the Great continued constructing the city despite all the losses and extra expenditures. The builders of the fortress (mostly soldiers and peasants) worked in very primitive conditions, since the climate was very damp, good housing non-existent and food in very short supply. Working from the dawn to dusk, they died in great numbers, but the war still went on and the fort had to be completed as soon as possible. Within the next year, the fortress of Kronshtadt had been started on Kotlin Island, providing defense on the seaward side of the city.

Timber was the principal material used for the first stage of building both the Peter & Paul fortress and the like-named Cathedral. Ditches and embankments too were timber-faced. Drawbridges crossed the many waterways. Shipyards were laid down for building Russia's embryonic Baltic fleet, and the first launch took place in 1706. Dutch merchant ships had already begun visiting the new port at the mouth of the Neva in 1703, and Peter had already secured the services of some foreign architects, but the real expansion of the place had to wait until after he had won the decisive victories over the Swedes at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1709 and at Hangoe on the Finnish coast where, in 1714, a Swedish admiral and his flotilla were captured.

For its first few years the St. Petersburg of Peter the Great was a small town around the fortress, but by 1712 it was big enough to become the new Russian capital. Thus, in 1713, St. Petersburg was proclaimed the capital of the Russian empire, leaving Moscow to be the traditional coronation city of the Tsars.

Peters dislike of Moscow stemmed from his frightful experience at the age, when he witnessed mutineers of the Strelitz guards, incited by adherents of his elder half-sister Sophia, slaughtering a number of his mother's relatives and household. It gave him a life-long revulsion from Moscow as a dangerous and sinister place. Then he happened to visit the foreigners' quarter of the city, known as Niemetskaya Sloboda or German Suburb. At that time the Russians called all western Europeans by the name 'Niemtsy', meaning 'dumb', since they could speak no Russian. Among the rather mixed crowd of foreigners Peter got to know many good master craftsmen. Their houses, lifestyle and clothing (so much more convenient than Russian garb) were a revelation for Peter. He observed everything and stored up what he learnt.

Peter The Great

The first years of St. Petersburg's history saw an amazing transition from a swampy scarcely populated land to a fine European capital.

The first structure to be built in the new city was the Peter and Paul fortress, followed closely by the Cabin of Peter the Great. Designed to protect the area from the attacks of the Swedish army and navy, the fort was not involved in the actual fighting. Very soon it became infamous as Russia's political dungeon, and one of the first to be imprisoned there was Alexei, Peter's son by his first wife. The boy had been brought up by his mother to share her detestation of the Tsar's modernizing policies and, whether willingly or not, he had become a rallying point for anti-reformist elements. Peter tried hard to talk his heir apparent round - reasoning with him and appointing him ceaselessly to new military duties, but to no avail. In 1716, Alexei managed to escape abroad to the protection of the Habsburg emperor, at first in Vienna and then in the Castello Sant' Elmo at Naples. Count Alexei Tolstoy was sent out by the Tsar to lure him home to Russia, where he confessed under torture to all accusations, and named those who had helped or befriended him. Sentenced to death, Alexei died in June 1718 in the Peter & Paul fortress, apparently from the effects of flogging, before he could be executed. His remains lie in the Saints Peter & Paul Cathedral.

In the original plan, the new city was to be centered on the area where Peter's little house stood. A church, which was conspicuous for having the first dock tower ever seen in Russia, was built nearby. Peter had the clock itself brought there from Moscow, to show-that henceforth Russia's time would be set by Petersburg. The construction of the Peter & Paul Cathedral began soon after, in 1712, with its mast-like clock tower. The top of the sky-scraping gilded spire supported the figure of an angel watching over the city. This theme was echoed by the architects of several later structures in Petersburg, most strikingly in the Admiralty building. The Admiralty was a center of St. Petersburg's various activities. The most powerful ships of Russia's Baltic Fleet were built there, which led to a series of naval victories in the course of the Northern War. Many of the street and district names in St. Petersburg still remind us of Peter the Great's war preparations (Liteiny - "Foundry Yard", Smolny - "Tar Yard", which has produced tar for shipbuilding, etc.).

Tsar Peter the Great had originally lived in a tiny cabin, which became known as the Cabin of Peter the Great. The Summer Palace was built for him in 1714 at the northern end of the Fontanka, in the middle of a park laid out in the French fashion, with fountains, ponds, topiary-shaped trees, clipped hedges and baroque sculptures, and also the Winter Palace not far down the river. There were no bridges across the mighty Neva River and people had to be ferried across by boat (this is why they call St. Petersburg "the Venice of the North"). The original downtown was formed in the area between the fortress and the Cabin of Peter the Great, the place which later became the Trinity Square. The city center's focal point was near the city's first church, the Trinity Church. Houses for the local elite, the Gostinyi Dvor (a market for local and visiting merchants) and several inns and bars were also built.

Peter pushed ahead with the project, with new canals being dug, and twelve colleges and the Senate, the Menshikov palace and with the Chamber of Art, Russia's first museum, being erected. Then the whole plan changed, and the area on the south side of the Neva, which the Fontanka canal enclosed like a moat, became the city center. In 1710, Peter founded the Alexander Nevsky monastery upstream on the Neva, where the remains of the victor over the Swedes in 1240 were later brought for reburial. A major thoroughfare was built, running from the Admiralty south-west to the monastery, and later known as the Nevski Prospect. With its new shipyards, industry, mint, schools and a naval hospital, Petersburg was well on the way to becoming a Baltic metropolis. Peter's concern to foster intellectual culture here led him to decree the foundation of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724.

Most of the higher class social events (receptions, balls, etc.) took place either in the Summer Gardens or in the palace of the Governor General of St. Petersburg, the luxurious Menshikov Palace. Few buildings from the early 18th century have survived: many were torn down or remodeled. The building of the "Twelve Colleges" and the Kikin House might give you an impression of what the original city looked like. Many of the original buildings in the city were built according to a number of typical designs, approved by the Tsar. Some buildings in the city center still bear the mark of this early architecture.