So this two-hundred-and-seventy-six-year-old city has two names, maiden and alias, and by and large its inhabitants tend to use neither. When it comes to their mail or identity papers, they certainly write "Leningrad," but in a normal conversation they would rather call it simply "Peter." This choice of name has very little to do with their politics; the point is that both "Leningrad" and "Petersburg" are a bit cumbersome phonetically, and anyway, people are inclined to nickname their habitats—it's a further degree of domestication. "Lenin" certainly won't do, if only because this was the last name of the man (and an alias at that); whereas "Peter" seems to be the most natural choice. For one thing, the city already has been called that for two centuries. Also, the presence of Peter I's spirit is still much more palpable here than the flavor of the new epoch. On top of that, since the real name of the Emperor in Russian is Pyotr, "Peter" suggests a certain foreignness and sounds congenial—for there is something distinctly foreign and alienating in the atmosphere of the city: its European- looking buildings, perhaps its location itself, in the delta of that northern river which flows into the hostile open sea. In otherwords, on the edge of so familiar a world.
Russia is a very continental country; its land mass constitutes one-sixth of the world's Ornament. The idea of building a city on the edge of the land, and furthermore proclaiming it the capital of the nation, was regarded by Peter I's contemporaries as ill conceived, to say the least. The womb-warm, and traditional to the point of idiosyncrasy, claustrophobic world of Russia proper was shivering badly under the cold, searching Baltic wind. The opposition to Peter's reforms was formidable, not least because the lands of the Neva delta were really bad. They were lowlands, and swamps; and, in order to build on them, the ground would have to be strengthened. There was plenty of timber around but no volunteers to cut it, much less to drive the piles into the ground.
But Peter I had a vision of the city, and of more than the city: he saw Russia with her face turned to the world. In the context of his time, this meant to the West, and the city was destined to become—in the words of a European writer who visited Russia then—a window on Europe. Actually, Peter wanted a gate, and he wanted it ajar. Unlike both his predecessors and his successors on the Russian throne, this six-and-a-half-foot-tall monarch didn't suffer from the traditional Russian malaise—an inferiority complex toward Europe. He didn't want to imitate Europe: he wanted Russia to be Europe, in much the same way as he was, at least partly, a European himself. Since his childhood many of his intimate friends and companions, as well as the principal enemies with whom he warred, were Europeans; he spent more than a year working, traveling, and literally living in Europe; he visited it frequently afterward. For him, the West wasn't terra incognita. A man of sober mind, though of frightful drinking habits, he regarded every country where he had set his foot—his own included—as but a continuation of space. In a way, geography was far more real for him than history, and his most beloved directions were north and west.
In general, he was in love with space, and with the sea in particular. He wanted Russia to have a navy, and with his own hands this "Czar-carpenter," as he was called by contemporaries, built its first boat (currently on display at the Navy Museum), using the skills he had acquired while working in the Dutch and British shipyards. So his vision of this city was quite particular. He wanted it to be a harbor for the Russian fleet, a fortress against the Swedes, who beset these shores for centuries, the northern stronghold of his nation. At the same time, he thought of this city becoming the spiritual center of the new Russia: the center of reason, of the sciences, of education, of knowledge. For him, these were the elements of vision, and conscious goals, not the by-products of the military drive of the subsequent epochs.
When a visionary happens also to be an emperor, he acts ruthlessly. The methods to which Peter I resorted, to carry out his project, could be at best defined as conscription. He taxed everything and everyone to force his subjects to fight the land. During Peter's reign, a subject of the Russian cro^ had a somewhat limited choice of being either drafted into the army or sent to build St. Petersburg, and it's hard to say which was deadlier. Tens of thousands found their anonymous end in the swamps of the Neva delta, whose islands enjoyed a reputation similar to that of today's Gulag. Except that in the eighteenth century you knew what you were building and also had a chance in the end to receive the last rites and a wooden cross on the top of your grave.
Perhaps there was no other way for Peter to ensure the execution of the project. Save for wars, Russia until his reign hardly knew centralization and never acted as an overall entity. The universal coercion exercised by the future Bronze Horseman to get his project done united the nation for the first time and gave birth to the Russian totalitarianism whose fruits taste no better than did the seeds. Mass had invited a mass solution, and neither by education nor by Russian history itself was Peter prepared for anything else. He dealt with the people in exactly the same fashion as he dealt with the land for his would-be capital. Carpenter and navigator, this ruler used only one instrument while designing his city: a ruler. The space unrolling before him was utterly flat, horizontal, and he had every reason to treat it like a map, where a straight line suffices. If anything curves in this city, it's not because of specific planning but because he was a sloppy draftsman whose finger would slide occasionally off the edge of the ruler, and the pencil followed this slip. So did his terrified subordinates.
This city reaUy rests on the bones of its builders as much as on the wooden piles that they drove into the ground. So does, to a degree, nearly any other place in the Old World; but then history takes good care of unpleasant memories. St. Petersburg happens to be too young for soothing mythology; and every time a natural or premeditated disaster takes place, you can spot in a crowd a pale, somewhat starved, ageless face with its deep-set, white, fixed eyes, and hear the whisper: "I tell you, this place is cursed!" You'll shudder, but a moment later, when you try to take another look at the speaker, the face is gone. In vain, your eyes will search the slowly milling crowds, the traffic creeping along: you will see nothing except the indifferent passersby and, through the slanted veil of rain, the magnificent features of the great imperial buildings. The geometry of this city's architectural perspectives is perfect for losing things forever.
But on the whole the sentiment about nature returning someday to reclaim its usurped property, yielded Clnce under human assault, has its logic here. It derives from the long history of Hoods that have ravaged this city, from the city's palpable, physical proximity to the sea. Even though the trouble never goes beyond the Neva's jumping out of her granite straitjacket, the very sight of those massive leaden wads of clouds rushing in on the city from the Baltic makes the inhabitants weary with anxieties that are always there anyway. Sometimes, especially in the late fall, this kind of weather with its gushing winds, pouring rain, and the Neva tipping over the embankments lasts for weeks. Even though nothing changes, the mere time factor makes you think that it's getting worse. On such days, you recall that there are no dikes around the city and that you are literally surrounded by this fifth column of canals and tributaries; that you are practically living on an island, one of the 101 of them; that you saw in that movie—or was it in your dream?—that gigantic wave which et cetera, et cetera; and then you turn on the radio for the next forecast. Which usually sounds affirmative and optimistic.