Unlike older European metropolises, St. Petersburg was never enclosed within walls. Divided into two parts, the official center and residential suburbs, it sprawled in all directions from the center. Like the Empire itself, the periphery had no limits and the central part of the city developed more slowly than the suburbs. The enormous central squares and construction sites of the future palaces stretched along the spacious river, creating a gigantic void in the center which was analogous to the larger geography of this Empire. Throughout the High Imperial Period, the center of St. Petersburg was still a work in progress, which was completed only after this period ended, with the ensemble of the Palace Square finished in 1843 and St Isaac's Cathedral in 1858.
The abundant columns, the painted brick, and the regularity of streets and squares followed Palladian examples. Everywhere on the four continents of the colonized world, one could find similar porticos, heroic sculptures, coats of arms, Greek columns, lions, eagles, balconies, fountains, meadows. Against the flat, cold terrain, the painted, multicolored facades look irreconcilably alien: a beautiful embodiment of the occult instability of a colonial situation. As in Washington DC, all was big and sublime in St. Petersburg. One feels a resemblance between these two capitals that were both built on no-man's land, a territory that was cut out from the existing polities so that it could rule over them from an outstanding point, specifically designed as the site of power. A central part of Washington, the empty mall that divides and connects the city, is similar to the line of St.
Petersburg squares and parks along the Neva. Rooted in the same European tradition, both capitals promoted their self-images as aspiring masters of the world. They also had similar insecurities, one being too far to the north, another too far to the south, both distant from the economic and demographic centers of their lands, and both ridiculously available to their common enemy, the British Navy.
St. Petersburg's consumption outweighed any trade advantage that it could provide as a seaport. Peter's idea was to launch an export of grain from the city to Germanic lands; but since the construction of St. Petersburg led to the increase of grain prices in Moscow, the authorities regularly stopped the export of grain altogether. Exporting goods from the existing Russian ports in Riga and Archangel was more efficient than from St. Petersburg, and the government restricted operations in these older ports (Jones 2001).
As St. Petersburg was developing its current shape, with large apartment buildings facing its straight, flat streets, another feature of the city became apparent. Colder than Berlin or almost anywhere in the urban world, Petersburg winters required serious amounts of firewood. Food was a problem in Ingria, but at least firewood was readily available in the country. In the well-ordered plan of the city there was no place to store it but in the internal courtyards - large, passable spaces of relative wilderness. Classical facades and low gates hid the chaos of life from the eye of power. Courtyards contained the real economy of storage, stables, workshops, outhouses, sewage systems, and huge piles of firewood. Three centuries after Peter, many of these spaces are still awaiting cultivation. On several levels, the development of the capital reproduced the script of internal colonization.
A Big Shave
Catherine II famously observed to Diderot that he should be happy to write on paper - monarchs write on skins. Writing on the bodies, faces, and minds of its subjects, the Russian Empire needed a substitute for race, which proved to be even more problematic than race itself. Physical, visible, and, preferably, unwashable signs of distinction had to be found or made between the newly created estates. If estate could be written on skin, this racialized status would work for police officials, road patrols, and plantation managers. "Culture can also function like nature," writes Etienne Balibar; culture can selectively mark individuals and groups and lock them into immutable, intangible categories of discrimination and privilege that work as races (Balibar 1999: 22).
Peter the Great produced a great experiment on the subject. Immediately after his return from a grand European trip, he demanded that the gentry's beards be shaved. As the Austrian envoy wrote on that day of August 26, 1698, "the razor plied promiscuously among the beards of those present" (quoted in Hughes 2004: 22). Peter began with his immediate entourage, then sent police barbers into the streets, and then introduced national legislation that included a beard tax. The history of beards is a rich subject (Reynolds 1949; Peterkin 2001) but nothing similar in scope to Peter's shaving reform has ever been recorded. Dress code was also changed, with the additional advantage that it embraced both genders. During the following decades, several decrees on shaving became more discriminate. The purpose was not to shave all Russian males, but to differentiate between them (Hughes 2004: 31). The gentry had to be clean-shaven; the clergy and peasantry remained bearded; townspeople existed in a gray zone with the rules constantly changing.
The big shave of 1698 preceded the other founding acts of internal colonization, such as "The Manifesto on the Summoning of Foreigners into Russia" (1702), the foundation of the new capital on the occupied land (1703), and the birth of the Russian Empire (1721). In a very Petrine way, abrupt and foundational, shaving established a class structure where there was not one. Before Peter, Russia did not have estates (Freeze 1986) though it had myriad self-conscious groups - ethnic, religious, professional, genealogical, and others. Though some of the previously accepted laws had codified social differences, estates - large non-ethnic social groups that were recognized and differentially treated by the government - were created by Peter's decrees on beards.
While estate was a substitute for race, the beard was a substitute for skin color. In A Sportsman's Sketches, Ivan Turgenev presents a serf called Khor who was prosperous enough to buy freedom from his master, but who chose not to do so. The narrator insists, "It's always better to be free." To this Khor objects that even after buying his freedom he would keep his beard, even though he knows that he would be considered inferior because of it. The narrator's solution is easy again: "Then shave your beard." But Khor chooses to stay with his serfdom, his beard, and his money (Turgenev 1963: 4/12).
In Europe during this period, beards also connoted Romanticism and something like a return to nature. The early Russian nationalists, the so-called Slavophiles, had grown beards, but in 1849 the government ordered them to shave these off, as being "unsuitable for the nobility" (Tsimbaev 1986: 13). Garibaldi's rebels were all bearded; in 1853, the Austrian Emperor ordered his civil servants to shave off their beards. With the advent of populism in Russia in the 1870s, facial hair sprouted again: the higher estate emulated the lower one. As Russia approached its twentieth-century turmoil, the beards of artists and bureaucrats, favorites of the imperial court and leaders of popular sects, became longer and longer. Following western fashion and characteristically exceeding it, the length of the Russian beard, black and white, found expression in the symmetrical figures of Rasputin, the folk prophet who became a favorite of the Imperial court, and Tolstoy, the aristocratic writer who became a folk prophet.