The bloody founding of St Petersburg

St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire. By Jonathan Miles. Random House; 488 pages; £25. To be published in America by Pegasus in March 2018.

ANNA AKHMATOVA, one of Russia’s finest 20th-century poets, once described St Petersburg as being “particularly well suited to catastrophes”. Founded in 1703, the city went on to experience two historical traumas—the Russian revolution and the siege of Leningrad, as it was known under the Soviets. In his new biography of the tormented delta, Jonathan Miles, a British cultural historian, manoeuvres swiftly through these tragedies, devoting the bulk of his attention to the social and cultural life beneath the city’s “spiders’ webs of tramlines”.

By almost every measure St Petersburg is a haunted metropolis. The windswept city built on the mouth of the Neva is prone to flooding, as is vividly described in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”, the greatest literary tribute to Peter the Great’s austere and splendid creation. The city stands as a testament to the manic ambitions of a ruthless and visionary tsar who showed no regard for human life in his bid to westernise Russia.

At the end of the 17th century Peter travelled to several European capitals, including Riga and London. He also went to the Netherlands to learn at first hand about Dutch shipbuilding techniques—part of an effort to strengthen his naval campaign against Russia’s Ottoman neighbours. He returned home determined to build a new capital city of harbours and canals in the mould of Amsterdam which, unlike landlocked Moscow, could welcome ships from across the world. St Petersburg would be Peter’s “window to Europe”.

Mr Miles estimates that 30,000 people died, many of them succumbing to malaria, scurvy and dysentery, during the initial construction, while others were torn apart by packs of wolves in broad daylight. It is unlikely that such suffering bothered the tsar, who enjoyed executing criminals and traitors in public. Peter coerced wealthy Muscovites to move to his new capital, threatening them with the loss of their titles if they did not comply. European art, culture and trade were in vogue, but European liberalism was kept at arm’s length and would remain so for hundreds of years to come.

Rather than focus on the revolution, the centenary of which falls this year, Mr Miles writes mostly of its effects on people. Between 1917 and the early 1920s, as Lenin moved the government back to Moscow, the population of the city, now renamed Petrograd, fell from 2.5m to 740,000 as food became scarce and violence and killing spread as a result of the revolution and the ensuing civil war.

The decision to relocate the capital was vindicated when the Nazis laid siege to the city, which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924. Hitler was determined to wipe from the map this cradle of communism: it was a base for the Baltic Sea fleet and one of the most important industrial centres in the Soviet Union. The 900-day siege led to mass starvation so severe that some people began to eat the flesh of the dead. In just one month towards the end of 1941, 50,000 people starved to death. The city where Shostakovich composed his famous “Leningrad Symphony” became a symbol of resistance and the strength of the human spirit—something that Stalin and subsequent Soviet rulers deeply feared. Indeed, when a museum dedicated to the suffering of the besieged opened up, it was immediately shut down and its directors arrested. The city was subjected to one of the worst post-war purges by Stalin and was sidelined economically and politically for years afterwards.

St Petersburg today is as paradoxical as it has ever been. As the childhood home of Vladimir Putin, it has been promoted by the Kremlin as a symbol of Russian imperial splendour and ambition. At the same time it has also become a centre of resistance to the Kremlin’s attempt to impose its will and subvert the city’s independence and spirit. Mr Miles’s affectionate history serves as a lively contribution to perceptions of the city’s allure.