Free Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon Page B

fantastic place where nothing is quite as it seems. 5 Tsar Peter and his image-makers did their best to enhance the illusion by investing the place he called his ‘paradise’ with layer upon layer of symbolic significance, designed to transform it at once into a New Amsterdam (a symbol of trade and prosperity), a New Rome and New Constantinople (symbols of power and kingship), and not least a New Jerusalem, a symbol of piety and devotion ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ and bisected by a ‘river of water of life’ (Revelation 21: 2; 22: 1). 6 These were probably not comparisons that entered the minds of most of St Petersburg’s 70,000 inhabitants at the time of Sophie’s arrival in 1744. She herself claimed fifty years later that only three of the city’s streets had then been built in stone: Millionnaya (Millionnaires’ Row, a street of grand mansion houses which still runs parallel to the Neva to the south-east of the Winter Palace); Lugovaya (Meadow Street, which ran westwards towards the Admiralty); and the elegant row of merchants’ houses along the river to the west of St Isaac’s Square (known as the English Line or Quay by the time of Catherine’s reign, and subsequently as the English Embankment). These three thoroughfares formed ‘a curtain, so to speak’ around rows of ‘wooden barracks as unpleasant as it is possible to imagine’. 7
    Though this was plainly an attempt to advertise her own glorious achievements in the field of urban reconstruction, there was no disguising the squalor of much of the early eighteenth-century city. Even its palaces were wooden. So were most churches apart from Trezzini’s Peter-Paul Cathedral. By the early 1740s, many of St Petersburg’s leading buildings had already gone the way of the derelict Holy Trinity, where Tsar Peter had worshipped almost every day when resident in his new capital. 8 Far from admiring the city, foreign visitors were now more likely to highlight the consequences of shoddy construction on marshy soil. According to Carl Reinhold Berch, a Swedish official resident in St Petersburg in 1735–6, careless building methods condemned the city’s brick walls to remain damp for years, while the timber in widespread use for roofs, gutters, staircases and vestibules was ‘notoriously and readily combustible’. ‘Many handsome houses,’ Berch complained, ‘cannot be reached by even a single carriage, so that one must enter via the back gates or through a breach in the wall on the first floor, in which case the passageway is as high as any triumphal arch: both these methods are utterly disgraceful.’ 9 Critics of tsarist despotism had a field day. Following hisvisit to Russia in 1739, the Venetian savant Francesco Algarotti snidely remarked that:
    If the ground were a little higher and less marshy, if the plans had not been changed so many times, if a Palladio had been the architect and the building materials had been of a better quality and better assembled and, furthermore, if it were inhabited by people who try to live there pleasantly and comfortably, St Petersburg would be surely one of the finest towns in the world. 10
    As it was, he found the Russian capital characterised by ‘a kind of bastard architecture’ in which Dutch influences predominated over those from Italy and France, and believed that the poor quality of the city’s construction reflected the fact that its palaces had been ‘built out of obedience rather than choice’: ‘Their walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall.’ Ruins generally formed themselves, Algarotti famously quipped, but at St Petersburg they were built from scratch. 11
    For more than a decade after Peter the Great’s death in 1725, the city’s growth had indeed lacked direction. The initial impetus was lost when the Court returned to Moscow in 1728, and even when Empress Anna brought it back to St Petersburg four years later, her advisers hesitated to take decisive