The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

In this matter, though Peter may not have clearly felt and thought it out, he was actuated by the mighty and unerring instinct of his genius. I am willing to admit that here, as in everything else, there was a certain amount of whim, and perhaps some childish desire to ape Amsterdam. I will even go further, and acknowledge that the manner in which he carried out his plan was anything but reasonable. Two hundred thousand laborers, we are told, died during the construction of the new city, and the Russian nobles ruined themselves to build palaces which soon fell out of occupation. But an abyss was opened between the past the reformer had doomed and the future on which he had set his heart, and the national life, thus violently forced into a new channel, was stamped, superficially at first, but more and more deeply by degrees, with the Western and European character he desired to impart.

Moscow, down to the present day, has preserved a religious, almost a monastic air; at every street corner chapels attract the passers-by, and the local population, even at its busiest, crosses itself and bends as it passes before the sacred pictures which rouse its devotion at every turn. St. Petersburg, from the very earliest days, presented a different and quite a secular appearance. At Moscow no public performance of profane music was permitted. At St. Petersburg the Czar's German musicians played every day on the balcony of his tavern. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the new city boasted a French theatre and an Italian opera, and Schloezer noted that divine service was performed in fourteen languages! Modern Russia, governed, educated to a certain extent, intellectually speaking emancipated, and relatively liberal, could not have come into existence nor grown in stature elsewhere.

And to conclude: Peter was able to effect this singular change without doing too great violence to the historical traditions of his country. From the earliest days of Russian history, the capital had been removed from place to place—from Novgorod to Kiev, from Kiev to Vladimir, from Vladimir to Moscow. This phenomenon was the consequence of the immense area of the national territory, and the want of consistency in the elements of the national life. From the beginning to the end of an evolution which lasted centuries the centre of gravity of the disjointed, scattered, and floating forces of ancient Russia perpetually changed its place. Thus the creation of St. Petersburg was nothing but the working out of a problem in dynamics. The struggle with Sweden, the conquest of the Baltic provinces, and the yet more important conquest of a position in the European world naturally turned the whole current of the national energies and life in that direction. Peter desired to perpetuate this course. I am inclined to think he acted wisely.