W. Bruce Lincoln - Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia

C LIMATE, COMFORT, AND CONVENIENCE were not what Russias Tsar Peter the Great had in mind when he decided to build a new capital in the muddy marshes of the Neva River delta. The site he chose stood in a remote northwest corner of his realm and was still claimed by the Swedes, with whom Russia was in the midst of a long and bruising war. Barely five hundred miles below the Arctic Circle and easily submerged by the tides that flowed upriver from the Gulf of Finland, the region saw snow as early as September and as late as May. Its foul weather, bad water, and low-lying, sodden soil made it triply unattractive. Yet in the imagination of the larger-than-life Tsar of All the Russias, the place he named Sankt Pieter Burkh in the spring of 1703 had the makings of a paradise. His successors would call it St. Petersburg, Petrograd, and Leningrad. But to the generations of men and women who watched picturesque canals and stately palaces rise from its fever-ridden swamps, Peters city would be forever known as Piter, the Dutch version of the name of the sovereign whose will had brought it into being.

Fascinated by the manner in which the Dutch had drawn wealth and power from the sea, Peter wanted Russia to become a seafaring nation like Holland. St. Petersburgs greatest attraction therefore lay in its nearness to the sea lanes of Europe, from which the Russians could acquire the means to escape from the backwardness that made them so vulnerable to their enemies. Peter knew that it would take decades to borrow from the West all the new weapons, technology, and ways of looking at the world that his nation needed, for Russia had not yet embraced the modern ways of thinking that had made Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so daring and adventurous. Thanks to the instruments of modern naval science, ship captains from the West had discovered new continents and circumnavigated the globe, while Russia at the time of Peters birth in 1672 was not very different from what it had been when Ivan the Terrible had mounted its throne almost 150 years earlier. Russians continued to be superstitious, afraid of change, and wedded to traditions that bound them closely to the past. Only in the lands east of the Urals, where a handful of adventurers had begun to reach toward the Pacific at the end of the sixteenth century, had there been any concerted effort to break those bonds. But the numbers who had shared in the conquest of Siberia were minuscule at best. Although the Russians reached the Pacific before 1650, the men and women who had dared to challenge the Siberian wilderness still numbered far fewer than five thousand half a century later.

Progressthe force that modernized the lives of Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswas not a concept that most Russians living at the time of Peters birth understood. Scientific inquiry and rational thoughtthe new ways of thinking about the present and future that had transformed Europestill remained foreign to all but a handful of Peters subjects, and most of them continued to place greater value on thoughts about the hereafter than on concerns for the here-and-now. People whose everyday language could express neither the idea of progress nor a sense of efficiency still confused miracles with the achievements of modern technology. Most Russians still thought that the earth stood at the center of the universe, and that the hand of God shaped their daily lives. To their way of thinking, famines, plagues, floods, and any sort of personal misfortune all stemmed from forces that lay beyond the realm of human comprehension. That the power of science could harness the forces of nature in the service of human masters was not yet something in which they could bring themselves to believe.