In 1811 the French woman of letters Madame de Staël arrived in St Petersburg to find herself enchanted by a city in which “a wizard with a wand had conjured all the marvels of Europe and Asia in the middle of a wasteland”. From the windows of the house she rented on the edge of Senate Square, De Staël could look down on the wizard himself. Étienne Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great, commissioned by Catherine the Great as a homage to her predecessor (and as a means of cementing her own claims to legitimacy), is the very embodiment of autocratic resolve. Peter bestrides a horse that tramples the serpent of Sweden beneath its hooves as it rears up on its hind legs at the edge of its vast granite plinth, the “thunder rock”. With arm outstretched, the imperious horseman urges his steed into the void.
The sculpture remains to this day the preeminent symbol of the city that Peter founded in defiance of nature on the freezing marshes of the Neva delta in 1703. It was immortalised in Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman”, which tells the story of the great flood of 1824 that engulfed entire neighbourhoods and washed away the lives and the homes of many of the city’s poor. Ever since, Falconet’s statue has represented one of the great fractures that runs through Russian history: the conflict between the ambitions of the rulers and the aspirations of the ruled. The bronze horseman emerges as the central motif, the “manifestation of the spirit of St Petersburg”, in Jonathan Miles’s cinematic telling of the 300-year history of Russia’s northern capital.
Miles chronicles the establishment of the city as a singular act of sovereign will. Peter mobilised the resources of an empire and legions of European engineers and architects to lay the foundations of a city that appeared for decades to enjoy only a precarious foothold on the banks of the unruly Neva. Tens of thousands of serfs perished in the miasma-filled swampland as they toiled to build first fortresses and dykes and, later, bridges and palaces. The tsar coerced reluctant nobles to move to the city on pain of having their Moscow homes destroyed. His successors, notably Catherine the Great, embellished the city, adding theatres, opera houses, squares and parks. “Within a century,” Miles writes, “St Petersburg had achieved what many cities take hundreds of years to accomplish: it had become one of the great capitals of the world.”
The early chapters are rather too dominated by the history of the court, which was peopled by characters by turns cunning, indomitable, repulsive and deranged. However, when Miles turns his attention to the merchants, coachmen, minor officials and craftsmen who thronged the expanding network of muddy roads, dingy apartment buildings and filthy workshops, he writes evocatively and sympathetically of “scribes and the copyists, the army of little men, who … scurried in their thousands through dwindling darkness, making haste to reach their uncomfortable high-stools in the countless cluttered copy offices of innumerable government departments”.
On Sunday 1 March 1881, the champions of the little people had their hour in the emerging revolutionary drama that would shape Russia for the next century. Miles wryly notes that terrorists finally succeeded in blowing up Alexander II on the very day that Vasily Surikov’s painting “Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy”, which depicts Peter the Great’s savage punishment of insurgents, went on display in St Petersburg: Peter “had built the city on the bones” of dead peasants. “Now the oppressed were constructing a road to revolution on the shattered bones of a tsar.”
St Petersburg shows how the drama, the absurdity, the splendour and the squalor of the imperial capital all found their way into Russia’s finest novels, operas and paintings. Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky each wrote about the vulgar, seamy underbelly of the city in which petty officials suffer daily humiliations and the destitute live in fetid corners, combing the city for rags and stale bread. Composers such as Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote operas that rejected the European culture of the capital in favour of a celebration of peasant Russia, while the Wanderers, a group of artists including Ilya Repin, depicted Russia’s lower classes in inescapably politicised canvasses.
Imperial grandeur was usurped in 1917 by revolutionary zeal, and yet the quiet miseries of life in the city still seemed to subvert the utopian dreams of its new rulers. By the 1930s, Leningraders, as they now were, remained in the grip of chronic shortages of even the most basic foodstuffs; they were “crammed into communal apartments, in which families shared kitchens and bathrooms and everybody knew what everybody else was up to”. Miles has little sympathy for the “nightmare vision of a good dream”, which saw the early post-revolutionary years of modernist cultural experimentation of poets such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and artists such as Kazimir Malevich cut short by “philistine party chiefs”.
The privations of Stalinist modernisation and the stealthy terror of the secret police gave way to the unspeakable horrors of the siege. As the puppeteer Liubov Shaporina wrote in her diary a few days after the Germans began to bombard the city in September 1941, “for 23 years we have all been on death row … but now we have reached the epoch’s grand finale”. Falconet’s Peter was sandbagged and boarded up to protect it from the incoming shells while the population began a desperate struggle against hunger and cold. By February, there were already 25,000 bodies piled up in a single cemetery, “stacked in rows 200 metres long and two metres high”. One powerful photograph shows Leningraders harvesting cabbages on St Isaac’s Square beneath the imposing edifice of Auguste de Montferrand’s neoclassical cathedral.
The collapse of the Soviet Union cast the city into impoverished chaos. It became, for a time, the criminal capital of Russia. Men would emerge from black Mercedes with tinted windows to settle business accounts with guns. Stability of a sort was restored in the 2000s but by then wealth was as unequally distributed as in 1917. As Miles writes perceptively, “between the nouveau riche, the urban poor and the villagers beyond, Russia was living in dramatically different ages”.
The story of this book is brought to a close on a note of elegiac pessimism. Miles beholds today a city that “brags and boasts to tourists” but behind the bright new facades of the city centre still lurk “dark entrance ways, drab staircases and creaky lifts”. Falconet’s Peter, with his “dubious legacy of 300 years of murderous desire”, now cuts a diminished figure. And yet, despite the city’s manifold sources of disenchantment, Miles still discerns “a magnificent Atlantis, an impossible metropolis risen from the mists, which the mud and the mire keep trying to reclaim”. In this compelling account of St Petersburg’s turbulent history, Miles peels back the layers of myth in which the city is swaddled, while never losing sight of its haunting grace.
Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars is published by Penguin.
• St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire is published by Hutchinson. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
