But it was so different from any other Russian city, such an affront to their easygoing, semi-rural rambling streets and dwellings, that it has always retained an aura of unreality. Dostoevskii called it ‘an invented city’ and loved to evoke it in the ghostly light of the northern summer as a dreamlike setting in which his characters play out their spiritual dramas.
Prince Odoevskii, assiduous collector of folktales, cited a Finnish legend which well captured St Petersburg’s origins and its insubstantial quality. The workmen building the city found that whenever they laid a stone it was sucked into the marsh. They piled stone on stone, rock on rock, timber on timber, but it made no difference: the swamp swallowed them all up, and only the mud remained. At length Peter, who was absorbed in building a ship, looked round and saw that there was no city. ‘You don’t know how to do anything,’ he said to his people, and thereupon began to lift rock after rock, shaping each one in the air. When in this manner the whole city was built, he let it gently down on to the ground, and this time it stood without disappearing into the mud.21
Whether or not de Custine knew of this legend, he tempered his admiration for the city with analogous apprehensions: ‘Should this capital, rooted neither in history nor in the soil, be forgotten by the sovereign for a single day; or should some change in policy carry the master’s thoughts elsewhere, the granite hidden beneath the water would crumble, the flooded lowlands return to their natural state and the rightful owners of this solitude would regain possession of their home.’22
The new capital city became the forum for a new elite secular culture. Flowing Russian robes were replaced by the tight-fitting jackets and breeches current in most of Europe. A ‘decree on assemblies’ required nobles to gather regularly at soirées, balls and salons where they could meet each other, discuss business, learn what was going on in the world, and generally cultivate the social graces expounded in Peter’s primer on etiquette, An Honourable Mirror to Youth, or an Instruction for Social Intercourse, drawn from Divers Authors. This manual, translated from the German, and much of it drawn originally from Erasmus, enjoined its readers ‘not to snuffle at table’, ‘not to blow one’s nose like a trumpet’ and ‘not to slobber over one’s food or to scratch one’s head’.23 Women were expected to take a full part in these ‘assemblies’, in contrast to the seclusion imposed upon them previously. An official newspaper was issued, to announce and record the main social occasions, and to keep the public up to date with diplomatic, commercial and other news.
EDUCATION AND CULTURE In his attitude to education and culture, Peter was at first strictly utilitarian: he set up schools which could train his young nobles in the skills required by the state. Hence the so-called ‘cipher schools’, which taught mathematics, navigation and other arts useful to future civil servants, army and naval officers. They were not always successful at attracting and holding their pupils, even when backed by Peter’s compulsion, and towards the end of his life, he felt the need to integrate them into a more general educational framework, which would give science and technology a secure place in Russian society. At this time the only higher educational institutions were the Slav-Greek-Latin Academies in Moscow and Kiev, which provided for the needs of the church, their curriculum based partly on Byzantine tradition and partly on the Jesuit Counter-Reformation learning of the seventeenth century.
Peter’s aspiration to give science and technology a special place in Russian society originated in his correspondence with Leibniz, which began in 1697. Leibniz, who had grand schemes for the spread of civilization, learning and technology throughout the world, was delighted to number the Emperor of Russia among his adherents. He recommended that Peter should appoint foreigners able to disseminate good learning in Russia, and at the same time should establish schools, libraries, museums, botanical and zoological gardens able to collect knowledge in all its forms and make it available to Russians. He also advised that Russia should have its own research institutes, to investigate the country’s immense and largely uncharted resources and to propose ways of improving and developing the national economy.
Peter implemented much of this programme. He opened Russia’s first museum (the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg), directed the purchasing of books for the first public library, sponsored expeditions to little-known regions to look for minerals, survey natural resources and make maps. In his later years he laid the foundation for a national Academy of Sciences on the model of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris, both of which he had visited. To set up such an institution in Russia was not an easy task, for there were no native scholars with whom to staff it. Several advisers, including Christian Wolff, from the University of Halle, warned him that to found an Academy without a supporting network of lower educational institutions was to put the cart before the horse in no uncertain fashion.
Peter, who had already, as it were, built a capital city in mid-air and then lowered it to the ground, was not likely to falter before such advice. He was dissatisfied with his earlier schemes for introducing Western learning in Russia, and he decided, as so often in his career, to break the logjam from the very top. The draft plan which he approved in 1724 made provision for the Academy to be combined with a university, to teach the new knowledge generated therein, and even for a Gymnasium, to prepare suitable students for the university. It duly opened in this form shortly after his death.
The result of his efforts was that Russia did indeed receive science and learning at the highest international levels, as something sponsored by the state and connected with the empire’s ambition to be in all ways a leading player among the powers of Europe. Science and learning from the outset had the highest prestige and priority in state expenditure.24
But there was a price to be paid for vaulting most of the normal stages in building up a scientific community. Nearly all Russia’s early scientists were foreign – a good many of them German – and the suspicion came to be widely entertained that science was something alien to the life of the ordinary people. Since moreover it had been launched at the same time as the church was being restricted, learning had the air of being godless, perhaps even the work of the Antichrist.
A biography in the spirit of Peter was that of Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), perhaps the first outstanding native Russian scholar. He came from the far northern Arkhangel’sk region, where serfdom was absent and where the Old Belief lent an independent air to spiritual life. Enchanted by Russian versions of the Psalms, the young Lomonosov managed to make his way to Moscow to study prosody by joining a caravan of salted fish. He contrived to enrol in the Slav-Greek-Latin Academy by declaring himself to be a nobleman: only through deception could he leap from the tax-paying to the service estates. Thanks to his evident abilities he was invited to become a student at the newly established Academy of Sciences, which was desperately short of home-grown talent, and he was sent to study in Germany.
On his return he was appointed at different stages to teach chemistry, mineralogy, rhetoric, versification and Russian language at the Academy, in all of which fields he made significant contributions. He also led a campaign to free higher education of German influence by establishing a Russian university in Moscow, which opened in 1755. His theory of the three levels of the Russian language did much to establish a consistent written language out of the confusion of Church Slavonic, bureaucratic and spoken Russian. Like Peter, however, he supplemented his work of enlightenment with episodes of coarse abuse, when he would make obscene gestures at German colleagues and call them Hundsfotter and Spitzbuben.25
THE TENSIONS OF PETER’S HERITAGE Rousseau wrote in his Social Contract that in certain circumstances the ruler has no choice but ‘to force men to be free’. One cannot help recalling the phrase when considering Peter’s measures. He was artificially implanting enterprise,