ST. PETERSBURG

What must the man have been who, born and bred in this atmosphere, conceived and by one tremendous wrench, almost by his own manual labour and his own sole gigantic strength, executed the prodigious idea of dragging the nation, against its will, into the light of Europe, and erecting a new capital and a new empire among the cities and kingdoms of the world.

St. Petersburg is indeed his most enduring monument. A spot up to that time without a single association, selected instead of the Holy City to which even now every Russian turns as to his mother; a site which but a few years before had belonged to his most inveterate enemies, won from morass and forest, with difficulty defended, and perhaps even yet doomed to fall before the inundations of its own river.—Dean Stanley.

Russia, or Garthrealm, was not outside the circuit of saga lands. The Heimskringla indeed has much to tell us concerning it in days when the country formed a most hospitable refuge for those in trouble at home. And at one time or other most prominent men of the viking age were in that uncomfortable position.

Of the Slavs themselves, indeed, we do not learn a great deal. The saga writers were not much interested in foreign countries except as they affected the Norse, but the regard for law in Russia evidently made an impression, as did also the respect entertained for woman there, at any rate as she was represented by the queen. The chief town of Russia in those days was called by the Norsemen Holmgarth, because it stood on an island, to the Slavs it was known as Novgorod, or new town, although about the oldest we wot of in the land. It became in rather later days the eastern outpost of Hansa trade (p. 155).

Russia herself, like Normandy, was originally a Scandinavian state, and there seems to be little doubt that the name Russ was originally applied to the Norse. Even to-day the Finns know the Swedes as Ruotsi.[132] Thus Ruric and his viking followers[133] gave a name to the Slavs of the North, even as Bulgars from Asia named a portion of the Slavs of the South and the German Franks gave a new designation to Gaul. In all three cases the conquerors who gave a new name to the conquered received from them language and nearly everything else. It is quite possible, however, that Scandinavian vigour was potent in giving to northern Slavland that political unity which neither Mongol domination, nor the long lapse of centuries nor a series of drunken and incapable monarchs ever succeeded in breaking up.

While the disastrous failure of the southern Slavs to unite is patent to the whole earth.

Closely in touch with the Northlands Garthrealm long remained; it was clearly a district in which the Norse could feel themselves perfectly at home, however much at times they might feel the call of the rockbound fjords. Thus for several centuries, from the British Isles to the heart of Russia, all lands were Scandinavian pure, or under the influence of the ever conquering Norse. Had the race possessed a spark of Roman organising power, here had been established a dominion greater than any that the Southlands knew, for such an empire had hardly failed to girdle the world, expanding eastward through northern Asia, westward from Vinland the Good. Knut the Rich (p. 114) seems to have been about the only individual to whom any such ideas occurred, and the very keenness of all the Norse about local autonomy and parochial Things was a hopeless bar to such plans.

It is one of the chief characteristics of the Norse easily to be absorbed by other races, whether in ancient viking times or in the American North-West to-day. On Ireland they left no further impression than a few traditions and a church dedication or two; to Russia they gave a name, but little more. Norsemen failed to be absorbed by other races only in Iceland and Faroe, where no other races were.

Both Olaf, son of Tryggvi, and Olaf the Saint, were at different times resident in Russia, when Norway proved unkind. The former was nine winters old when he came into Garthrealm, and he abode with King Valdimar other nine winters.

One day the boy was standing idly in the gate of the city when he suddenly noticed the person who had slain his fosterer. "Olaf had a little axe in his hand, which same he drave into Klerkon's head, so that it stood right down in the brain of him; then he fell to running home to the house, and told Sigurd his kinsman thereof." Such a spirited action would not have mattered much in Scandinavia, for in those days the Norse were very tolerant toward such effervescence of youthful spirits, but it was otherwise in Russia.

"Now in Holmgarth was the peace so hallowed, that, according to the law thereof, whoso slew a man undoomed should himself be slain. And now all the people made a rush together, according to their custom and law, and sought after the lad, where he were; and it was told that he was in the queen's garth, and that there was an host of men all armed.

"Hereof was the king told, and he went thereto with his folk, and would not that they fought, and so brought about truce and peace thereafter; and the king adjudged the weregild, and the queen paid the fine.

"Thereafter abode Olaf with the queen, and was right dear to her."[134]

Why the queen, to whom Sigurd had hastily entrusted the boy, was able to do so much is explained to us later on: "Now it was much the wont of mighty kings in those days, that the queen should have half the court, and sustain it at her own costs, and have thereto of the scat and dues what she needed. And thus it was at King Valdimar's, and the queen had no less court than the king; and somewhat would they strive about men of fame, and either of them would have such for themselves.

"Now so it befell that the king trowed those redes aforesaid which folk spake before him, and became somewhat cold to Olaf, and rough. And when Olaf found that, he told the queen thereof, and said withal that he was minded to fare into the Northlands, where, said he, his kin had dominion aforetime" and where he deemed it like that he should have the most furtherance.

"So the queen biddeth him farewell, and sayeth that he shall be deemed a noble man whithersoever he cometh."[135]

The reasons for the king's suspicion are rather delicately explained: "Yet it befell, as oft it doth when outland men have dominion, or win fame more abundant than they of the land, that many envied him the great love he had of the king, and of the queen no less. So men bade the king beware lest he make Olaf over-great: 'For there is the greatest risk of such a man, lest he lend himself to doing thee or the realm some hurt, he being so fulfilled of prowess and might and the love of men; nor forsooth wot we whereof he and the queen are evermore talking.'"

Olaf the Holy was in slightly later days to find a refuge in Russia and to be welcomed there by a Scandinavian queen, daughter of his old enemy and namesake, the King of Sweden. This was the manner of the royal marriage, and somewhat modern it sounds. "The next spring there came to Sweden messengers from King Jarisleif east away from Holmgarth, and they fared to see to the matter of King Olaf's promise from the past summer to give Ingigerd his daughter to King Jarisleif. King Olaf put the matter before Ingigerd, and said it was his will that she should wed King Jarisleif."

Driven from his kingdom and somewhat broken in his fortunes, "King Olaf arrayed his journey and got him a ship. And he fared that summer, and letted not till he came east to Garth-realm to the meeting of King Jarisleif, him and his queen, Ingigerd.... King Jarisleif gave King Olaf a hearty welcome, and bade him abide there with him and have land as much as he needed for the costs of holding of his company. That King Olaf took with thanks, and tarried there. So it is said, that King Olaf was devout and prayerful unto God all the days of his life. But from the time that he found his reign was waning, and his enemies were waxing mightier, then he laid all his heart to the serving of God; he was then hindered herefrom no more by other cares, or the toil which aforetime he had had on hand."[136]

"Sithence King Olaf came to Garth-realm he had great imaginings, and turned it over in his mind what rede he had best take. King Jarisleif and Queen Ingigerd bade King Olaf dwell with them, and take over the dominion called Vulgaria, and that is one part of Garth-realm; and there in that land the folk was heathen. King Olaf bethought him in his mind of this offer; but when he laid it before his men, they all were loth to take up their abode there, and egged the king on to betake himself north to Norway to his own kingdom. The king would be still further thinking of this, to lay down his kingdom, and fare out into the world unto Jerusalem, or into some other holy places, and there to go under the Rule."[137]

Not infrequently the Norse passed through Russia to the great metropolis of the eastern world (whence Russia had received her faith), New Rome, or Constantinople itself. So much were they impressed by that splendid city that they knew it as Micklegarth. The stalwart arms of the Norsemen, organised in the Vaeringian Guard, propped the Byzantine Empire against its Asian foes and gained for the Scandinavians much wealth. Among others the founder of Oslo (p. 95) had in that realm gotten enormous riches. "But when Harald came to Holmgarth, King Jarisleif gave him a wondrous good welcome, and there he tarried the winter over, and took into his own keeping all the gold which he had sent afore thither from Micklegarth, and many kinds of dear-goods. That was so mickle wealth, that no man in northern lands had seen such in one man's owning. Harald had three times come into palace-spoil whiles he was in Micklegarth. For that is law, that whenever the king of the Greeks dies the Vaerings shall have palace-spoil; they shall then go over all the king's palaces where are his wealth hoards, and there each one shall freely have for his own whatso he may lay hands on."[138]

Strangely similar, both in weakness and in strength, were Alexander and Peter, both of them most justly surnamed Great. Each was born to a kingdom, each had marvellous foresight and each had imperial ideas. Semi-barbarous sceptres they both inherited, and they realised how much might be done by importing the civilisation of sea-powers further west; each was a worker with his own hands, each cared much for the science and art of his generation, but neither was superior to amusements of the grossest and pastimes of the beastliest. Both drank themselves into the other world at an untimely age, leaving their work half done.

Each is commemorated by a city placed on the sea with the express purpose of attracting foreign influence, beyond the ancient limits of the country whose capital it became. More attractive in some ways the career of the Ptolemaic successors of Alexander at Alexandria than that of the immediate Romanoff descendants of Peter at Petersburg, but the story of an ancient nation ruled from a corner of its territory by a half foreign court is in both cases very much the same.

Many of the capitals of Europe know at least traditional founders, but on none is impressed the stamp of an individual to such an extent as here. No city on earth of anything like equal importance is so entirely the creation of a single mind, nor so truly a monument to individual force of character. No capital except Tokyo is to such an extent the symbol of a new era in a nation's life.

Peter heard the call of Europe and saw that it had something to offer that Asia could not give. Asiatics have felt a strange attraction toward European lands in all the ages of the world. Persian, Hun, Saracen and Turk have each in turn sought a footing on European soil. Despite administrative inconvenience the successive rulers of the House of Othman early desired to have as their capital some city famous in the story of the West. Peter's people were not Asiatics; their early organisation had come from the purest European stock, the conquering Norse themselves, their civilisation and religion had come straight from Rome. Not indeed old Rome on the Tiber, but during the tenth century the daughter city by the Bosphorus was probably the more cultured of the two.

On the border-land of the continents the Russians had for centuries looked east and not west, the very year of Peter's accession to power (1689) they had fixed their first frontier with China. He desired that Russia should be definitely European, and in order to consolidate his reforms a westward-looking window was essential. Its communications must be by sea, Poland shut out direct intercourse with Europe overland. Southward was the better climate, but a Black Sea port would have increased relations with a purely Oriental Empire. At the farthest end of the icy Baltic, where the Neva flows into the Gulf of Finland, as near to ancient Novgorod as a seaside town could be, there eventually he decided the new capital of Russia should stand.

From a glance at the map it is difficult to realise why no town had risen in so convenient a spot long before, but it is at once explained by a glance at the ground. Swampy forest, liable to floods and dangerous to health, extended over all the land where the City of Peter was to rise. The island that became the nucleus of the settlement had received a name from its hares. A few Finnish fishers, alone among mankind, broke the silence of its woods. The noble river communicates with little except timber forests, and wood is to-day brought down to Petersburg in temporary boats remarkable for their size, their frailty, and their graceful appearance.

The difficulties in the way of founding a city in such a spot were such as might well have appalled any ordinary mind. The site had but a few years before belonged to the Swedes, who maintained a small fort on the edge of Ladoga, the lake which the Neva drains. They were constantly making attacks; Charles XII. remarked that Peter was founding cities only that he might capture them. Petersburg might well have anticipated the fate of Port Arthur.

The wretched conditions in which operations had to be carried on brought about an appalling mortality among the workmen employed in building the new town, however much exaggerated may have been the foreign reports that two hundred thousand died. The mechanical appliances available were so extraordinarily poor that earth had to be carried by each workman as best he could; there was no one about who could construct a wheelbarrow! Brigands made communications with Russia unsafe and sometimes did as they pleased in the city itself, while sentries on duty or citizens going about their business were occasionally carried off by the wolves. Provisions had to be fetched from an enormous distance, the cost of living was extremely high. Though the woods were all around, fuel was so scarce that even the nobles (who most unwillingly had been compelled to live here for part of the year) were not allowed to have hot baths excepting once a week.

To add to all this no one except Peter could see the slightest need for any other capital than Moscow, still less the point of building a city on this forbidding and man-forsaken spot. But to the Tsar the rising town was a Paradise, so well loved that he had soon decided to make it not merely the chief seaport of his Empire, but the capital as well.

The objection which the sagas tell us the eleventh century Russians showed to outland men having dominion was fully shared by eighteenth century Russians, and the huge number of them employed about St. Petersburg helped still more to increase the general loathing for the new capital. Hardly a nation of Europe failed to supply Peter with friends and fellow-workers. He honoured them above his own subjects. Nor did it matter in the least in what circumstances he happened to encounter them. One day as he was inspecting the operations he chanced to notice working with the other convicts a scion of the fightingest family of Scotland, who, born in Sweden, combined with the surname of Douglas the designation of Gustaf Otto. Captured at Pultowa he entered the Russian service; having slain a general in wrath, he entered a Russian jail. But to Peter his failings did not appear at all seriously to cry to heaven for vengeance. He could well make allowance for the spirit of a Douglas when provoked, so restored him to all his honours. In 1719 the now Russified Swede-Scot seized the ancient capital of Finland, and bore in triumph from the cathedral of Abo the bones of Henry the English saint (p. 188).[139]

The only antiquities of St. Petersburg are the structures connected with the life of the strenuous founder. Peter's cottage, which was erected soon after the works began in 1703, is a large four-roomed, shingle-roof, log-hut; and the living-room which still contains the simple wooden furniture that he used enables one to some extent to picture the backwoods life of the imperial pioneer. The whole is enclosed in a larger structure of brick, and a miracle-eikon is the central feature of the shrine that now occupies the chamber where the great Tsar slept.

Never perhaps was Peter so happy as when he was living here. He hated lofty rooms and luxurious furniture and costly food. He liked to wear his oldest clothes and enjoyed working with his own hands. As a great concession to his wife he consented at Catherine's coronation to wear a gold-embroidered coat, but could think of nothing except the fact that its cost would have paid for several soldiers. In Paris he found the luxury of the Louvre absolutely insupportable. After looking impatiently at the sumptuous feast set out, he dined off radishes and bread which he washed down with two glasses of beer. After a contemptuous survey of the superbly fitted French bedrooms, he rested for the night on a camp-bed set up in a closet.

Close by the cottage was the small wooden church of the Trinity with two towers and onion domes which Peter built, but which was burned down early in 1913.

A picturesque appearance is given to the Neva's northern bank by the old fort with its needle spire of gold that stands on a little island of its own, close to the cottage and Trinity church. Peter's old earth bastions were faced with granite in later days and the east gate is dated 1740. For defending anything whatever the fortress is no more use than the Tower of London, but within are pleasant avenues of trees, and over the roofs of the barracks and other buildings rises the famous Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, where rest the city's founder and the later Tsars.[140] A soldiers' city from the very first St. Petersburg has been, and such it is to-day. Troops constantly pass along the streets; sentries with bayonets fixed are to be seen on every hand. The thoroughfares are patrolled by policemen, each armed with baton, revolver and sword.

Peter planned to build rather a canal town of Holland than a boulevard city of France. Many of the canals have been filled up, but beside one of those that remain, in the corner of the beautiful Summer Gardens, stands the delightful two-storey house with plaster bas-reliefs and metal roof that Dutch workmen built for Peter; it is known as his palace to-day. The rooms inside, doored and shuttered with panelled oak and partly lined with blue Dutch tiles, have a most cheerful and pleasant character; they contain some rather good carved work that was tooled by the great Tsar; a mirror-case with stag, foliage, birds and other things is signed and dated "Peter. 1710."[141]

In this same year he founded a Battle Abbey in thanksgiving for his victories, although he fully realised the need for reducing the extremely large number of monks that Russia contained. This convent helps one to realise how well Peter came to understand the people that he ruled. If the new city was really to be the capital of this pious land, something of old Russia, of Holy Russia, must be brought into its midst. Most fortunately for Peter's plans it chanced that as early as 1241 a Russian general had gotten the surname of Nevski from a victory he gained over a Swedish army on the banks of the Neva; he had also become one of the most venerated of Russian saints. Thus the enshrining of his relics in the cloister church brought to St. Petersburg one of the holiest things in all the land. Venerable associations that meant much to the devout were secured to the brand new town.

The very ornate silver shrine stands at present in the south transept of the church or cathedral which was erected for Catherine II. by a Russian architect named Staroff.[142] The peace that broods over this quiet cloister rather reminds one of the south of Europe. The picturesque convent buildings of yellow and bluish-white plaster are seen among gardens and trees, while over them appear the towers and dome of the cathedral and the steeples of the smaller chapels, in one of which Suworof is at rest. Across a placid canal is the burial ground of the monks. Even in Russia these men are famous for the beauty with which they sing the daily offices of the church, unaccompanied by any kind of instrument—for such is never allowed in buildings of the Communion of the East.

A roadway cut straight through the forest between this convent and the Admiralty formed the beginning of the chief street of the present day city, the well-known Nevski Prospect. The Admiralty stands on the Neva side where Peter built his first boat on the Baltic; it forms the chief centre of the city, to which many of the streets converge. The building in some ways is one of the best in the city, erected in the Renaissance style by a Russian architect named Zucharoff. A ship in full sail forms a vane on the needle spire that rises from a square tower lined with Ionic columns, while the vast building, measuring over 1,300 by 500 feet, is well managed, the long faÇade being relieved from serious monotony by an imposing gateway in the centre and by the pilastered wings rising much higher than the plainer middle part.

Close by is the splendid Winter Palace, another Renaissance building, designed in 1754 by Rastrelli but considerably modified after a fire in 1837.[143] One side faces the river, the other looks on, to the square in which rises the tall monolith column that commemorates Alexander I.—the site of the terrible scenes of January, 1905. By an archway over the street the palace is joined to the Hermitage, which houses one of the finest collections on the earth.[144]

While St. Petersburg has been greatly influenced by the street architecture of Italy and France, its broadways have a distinct character of their own and resemble the thoroughfares of no other city. Over streets roughly paved with sharp-edged stones, or the upturned ends of logs, rattle droskeys, whose shafts and traces both start from the axle-trees. The horses wear high hames and the drivers long beards, for Peter's commands that all must shave are now no longer enforced.[145] The pace at which the horses move is a great contrast to the leisurely dignity that characterises the citizens.

Over the windows of most of the shops are painted pictures of what men sell within, for many of the customers are unable to read and appreciate this guide. Huge gargoyles shoot waterfalls from rain or melting snow on to the pavements below them, so that much caution must be used in walking about in wet weather. Something of the cafÉ life of the Continent is to be seen under the creepers and trees of the pleasant courtyards of hotels. The way in which men kiss each other both here and in the public streets is at first sight rather startling to races trained to keep emotions more suppressed, but there is nothing insincere, and—coupled with many qualities one would fain see changed—there is a certain gentle and affectionate disposition about the Russians that becomes more and more attractive as one gets to know them better.[146]

The most prominent, and in some ways the most interesting, building in the city is the Metropolitan Church of Russia, the great Cathedral of St. Isaac of Dalmatia, on whose festival Peter was born. Other statesmen have chosen new capitals but have been satisfied to leave the ecclesiastical centre in the older town. No half measures for Peter. Even the holy Patriarchate of Moscow, sacred to the whole of Eastern Christendom in a sense from making up again the number of five after the western one had lapsed into heresy (from the eastern point of view), he insisted upon sweeping away.[147] It was one of the duties of the Tsar to lead the donkey upon which the Patriarch rode on Palm Sunday, and that seemed to Peter to be putting the relations between Church and State on to a footing wholly wrong. A patriarch once found fault with the shabby-looking European dress of the emperor, who had discarded the flowing robes of the East, and Peter had retorted that he would have expected the head of the Church to be otherwise engaged than in minding the business of tailors. So when the patriarch died he did not name another, and at last when the priests begged that some one might sit in the throne, he is said to have sat there himself with the remark that he would be patriarch. The Holy Synod was organised instead and the Church lost almost entirely its old comparative independence of the State. The synod building is close to the cathedral and the highest dignitary of the Russian Church is now the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg.