Petrine Petersburg and the Ukrainians
Every city, like every man, has a destiny of its own. “Europe’s most European capital,” as Saint Petersburg was called by Denis Diderot when he visited Catherine II in 1773, emerged “almost like a ghost” (a favorite leitmotif of early twentieth century Russian symbolists) in a marshy area, where the River Neva empties into the Gulf of Finland, on territory just seized from Swedish King Charles XII.
This city, born to be the imperial capital of Peter’s state supposedly governed by law, became the great and gigantic embodiment of European impressive, beautiful, clearly defined and well thought out “righteousness,” along with the empire’s Asiatic callousness and cold inhumanity. Russian classics, from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky and Blok, while admiring this Palmyra of the North, were keenly aware of this contradiction. Our great compatriots, above all, Taras Shevchenko, looked at Petropolis, as the Bard sometimes called it, with clear and sharp eyes free of heady imperial rapture.
The 300th anniversary of the foundation of the St. Petersburg fortress, the city’s first historical name, was observed on May 27, 2003, under the Gregorian calendar, or on May 16 under the Julian. This is quite an approximate date. Some historians still believe that the true birthday of the city should be celebrated in late June or early July. This event is not just a perfunctory jubilee of global scale but also a perfect occasion to recall how it all happened three centuries ago and what the role of the Ukrainians was, from hetman Mazepa and his entourage to ordinary Cossacks.
PARADISE, BLOODY AND GREAT
Let us first recall some well- known facts. During the Great Northern War against Sweden (1700-1721) in October 1702, Peter I’s troops won their first significant victory over the enemy: they captured the fortress of Noteburg. The control of that asset enabled the Russians to keep at gunpoint the movement of the Swedish fleet in the Gulf of Finland. In April 1703 Nienschantz, another strategically important, but not so strong fortress, fell. This raised the question of whether it was time to set up a powerful and permanent outpost on the Baltic coast And if so, where would be the best place for it?
The Journal of Peter I says, “After seizing Nienschantz, a military council was held to decide whether to strengthen that fortress or to look for another place because the fortress was quite small, far from the sea, and the area was not convenient enough by nature. The council decided to search for another place and a few days later a proper place was found, the island called Lust- Oeland (Swedish for Merry Island — Ed), where a fortress was founded and named Sankt Petersburg on May 16 of the Pentecostal week.”
It should be noted that the island was located next to the place where the Neva branches into two arms and the fortress erected there could keep the Swedish under fire wherever they might emerge. The island was surrounded by the Neva on three sides. The fourth side was separated from the neighboring island (the future Petersburg side) by a narrow strait that could serve as a defensive line. But that was only one, the strategic, part of the problem. For, month by month, the political part was growing more and more important for Peter.
The point is that the tsar was nurturing a decision to move the capital of the Rechtstaat, he was building, to the newly-laid fortress on the banks of the Neva, where everything could be under his control for only he, the tsar, knew what was good for his subjects (the first sign of totalitarianism). There is evidence that Peter I made up his mind as early as in 1704 that Moscow, which he hated so, would not be the capital. By 1712 the court, the senate, and all the top nobles had moved to the city on the Neva.
People often say that the creation always bears the stamp of its creator. This is absolutely true in the case of Peter I and his creation. The new city appeared according to a well-considered plan designed by one person. Peter I could not stand anarchy, chaos, and disorder in any questions concerning his state. Although the fortress was laid out in the tsar’s absence (which gave reasons to call Petersburg’s birthday into question), Peter later controlled everything down to the smallest details. In 1709 the Office of Construction was set up to manage the planning and building of the city. In 1713-1716 two prominent European architects, Leblond from France and Trezzini from Italy, arrived in the new capital. Peter placed utmost confidence in them. He wrote to Menshikov, “Tell all the architects not to start any projects without Leblond’s signature on the blueprints.”
In an effort to make his brainchild meet European, especially Dutch, standards, Peter demanded the following rules to be adhered to during the construction of Petersburg: the streets had to be absolutely straight and broad; they had to cross at a 90° angle to connect equally broad squares, “regular” gardens, and parks. In pursuit of this goal, in 1714, the tsar issued a ukase banning the construction of stone buildings all over the country apart from Petersburg. It was permitted only to build residential houses on the streets, with no fences or stables. Trying to control everything personally, the sovereign himself drew the sketches of houses for the noble, wealthy, and plebeian classes of population. Petersburg, the first city in the emerging empire, was the first to be lit up by street lamps and had cobblestone streets (a special tax was imposed: every carter entering the city was obliged to bring three stones in his cart).
“The beauty and wonder of northern countries,” as Pushkin put it, Petersburg was growing and getting stronger together with an autocratic police state. Meanwhile, the monarch often resorted to methods of state terror, not in the least with respect to Ukraine (as Voloshin wrote, “Peter I was the first Bolshevik”).
GROANS OF THE WHOLE NATION
It is no accident (on the contrary, typical of Peter’s methods) that Aleksandr Menshikov, whose bloody exploits during the seizure of Baturyn in 1708 are all too well known (he slaughtered the entire population of Hetman’s Mazepa’s capital — Ed.), was appointed the first governor of Petersburg. This devout favorite reported on July 25, 1703 to the tsar on metropolitan construction, “The city is being built under roper supervision. Many workmen have come and are still coming from other cities. Let us hope that, by the grace of God, the planned project will be successfully implemented.” Menshikov’s quaint words require explanation: the workmen were not “coming” but being forcibly driven by tens and hundreds of thousands into a marshy area to certain death, illness, and poverty. Those practices did not in fact differ from army press gangs, with cruel and severe punishment meted out for any attempt of evasion (for example, a 1712 ukase imposed criminal liability on the kinsmen of runaway conscripts). Pushkin was quite right to say this kind of Petrine masterpiece was “inscribed with the whip.”
Consider some dry facts. The newspaper Moskovskiye vedomosti reported on October 4, 1704, that 20,000 workmen and soldiers worked every day to build Petersburg’s fortifications. According to Dmytro Doroshenko, Ukrainian Cossacks, peasants, craftsmen, and poor folk accounted for at least 40% of that figure. Much to our regret, there is no reliable information about the mortality rate. Yet, the following indirect figure is quite telling: 13,000 Cossacks died in 1721-1725 alone when building the Ladoga Canal which Peter thought was indispensable for the reinforcement and development of Petersburg. The monarch had no pity on for his people.
Colonel Cherniak described in 1722 the course of canal construction in a report to the Russian Senate, “A large number of sick and dying Cossacks are doing the Ladoga Canal work, with such deadly diseases as enteric fever and swollen feet claiming more lives every day. Yet, despite this miserable plight of the poor Cossacks, the guard officers mercilessly and heartlessly cane them, by order of Brigadier Leontiev, at work, even though they work not only by day and by night but also on Sundays and holidays. I am thus afraid the toll of the dead Cossacks might be as high as it was last year, when only a third of them, at most, could return home.”
As contemporaries justly wrote, the whole empire was full of “the lamentation, groans, and discontent of the Cossacks and the whole people.” This lamentation and discontent was, in particular, expressed by Hetman Pavlo Polubotok who wrote indignantly to Peter, reminding him of the Cossacks’ faithful service to the crown: “For all this we have received scorn and insults instead of gratitude and fallen into crude captivity, paying a shameful and unbearable tribute. We have to dig canals, erect ramparts, and drain impassable swamps, strewing them with the dead bodies of our men who have been dying by the thousand of fatigue, starvation, and putrid air. Moreover, the current practices have only made worse all our privations and woes: we work under the oversight of almost illiterate Muscovite bureaucrats who are unaware of our rights and customs. They only know they are free to do with us what they please.”
This raises the main and crucial question: at what price were Peter’s reforms carried out with such cruel and in fact terrorist methods? Did Ukraine benefit from them? In essence, our country became an integral part of a bureaucratic absolutist empire, part of a new totalitarian entity. (Incidentally, there is every reason to consider the imperial quality as Russia’s dominant feature.) This would have been impossible if Mazepa, who enjoyed the tsar’s almost complete confidence until October 1708, had not bent over backwards to justify this trust, helping Peter tap Ukraine’s economic, military, and spiritual resources for unholy ends.
The tragedy lies not only in that the city of Peter was built to a large extent on Ukrainian bones. The tragedy is that our compatriots served Peter’s state faithfully and truly. For example, Feofan Prokopovych preached, “Any title is given by God... Only God knows what is the most important and necessary. Are you a tsar? Then reign and see to it that the people are happy, the authorities are honest, and the fatherland is defended from enemies.” What a clear and moving image of the fatherly tsar!
Still, in conclusion let us turn again to Shevchenko. His words sound lake a court sentence. In the poem Dream, Pavlo Polubotok curses Peter, “Oh, mean, damned, and devilish tsar, insatiable viper! What have you done to the Cossacks? You covered the marshes with their noble bones, you founded the capital on their tortured corpses!” When you read these lines, you clearly see that the much-repeated statement that Shevchenko is Ukraine’s prophet and bard is far from an empty phrase.
