Among the Russians(32)

Even then the prestige of size seemed to mesmerize the nation. Buildings became symbols. Along the 25-acre parklands of the Field of Mars, a Palladian salient of barracks sweeps for literally hundreds of yards. A mammoth 768-windowed crescent of imperial offices encloses the southern facade of the fifteen-hundred-roomed Winter Palace. The nearby Admiralty, on whose site ten thousand men laboured in the time of Peter the Great, rises to a height of almost two hundred feet. St Isaac’s Cathedral is more than half as tall again, and once held congregations of thirteen thousand, while that of Our Lady of Kazan was built as the third largest cathedral in the world, to rival St Peter’s in Rome. Such buildings, I think, once occupied the same place in the national heart as do today’s Bratsk High Dam or Kama River Truck Plant. They belong to the gigantism of a people troubled, in their most secret selves, by fears of inferiority—a nation which centuries of Tartar domination held back from Europe.

St Petersburg itself was founded by the eruptive energies of a man furious to catch up. Almost single-handed, Peter the Great heaved his country out of its mediaeval sleep and hurled it into the scientific age; and although he only accelerated a process already tentatively begun, and left his revolution insecure, Russia was never the same again. He overhauled the army and created the navy—his passion—out of nothing, developed industry tenfold and recast the entire administration, producing a new technical and professional élite. The whole nation was set to work. Its noblemen and gentry were tied to government service for life by being conscripted into a meritocracy graded into fourteen ranks, starting at the bottom.

So the old aristocratic order ended. But from this new ‘Table of Ranks’, it seems, there developed that stultifying snobbery of grade, that corrupt bureaucracy obsessed with petty formalities, which has oppressed the country ever since. It is perhaps the Russians’ very inexpertize at such work, their disinterest in everyday data, which has translated them into this unwieldly officialdom. Bureaucracy has multiplied precisely because they are so bad at it. Marx wrote that under Communism the state itself would wither away; but here it has proliferated and ramified like stinging nettles.

Peter the Great had no patience with such dilatoriness. In fact he had no patience with anything. He blew gale-force through his country’s past. Nothing and nobody escaped him. He modernized its orthography and calendar and forced his upper classes to abandon their lapping beards and ankle-length caftans for Western dress, sometimes shearing off their hair and sleeves himself in a frenzy of urgency. He commanded their secluded wives to appear at court thrust into Parisian dresses. ‘They all sit as though they were dumb’, remarked an ambassador, ‘and do nothing but look at each other.’

As for St Petersburg, it was a pure creation of the emperor’s will. Raised on stone and wooden piles among the marshy islets of his newly-conquered bridgehead on the Baltic, this ‘window on Europe’ became a base for Peter’s infant navy and a self-consciously Western capital. Exposed to sudden floods and sunk in a lacework of streams, its birth was a nightmare. Peter drove on its builders like a flail. They were marched here in tens of thousands under armed guard from all over the empire. Shelterless and half starved, thousands died of dysentery and scurvy, or were swept away by flood. They deserted in hordes. But thousands more were marched up to replace them; and the nobility, who hated the site, were forced by imperial decree to live and build stone houses there. ‘On one side the sea,’ moaned a court jester, ‘on the other sorrow, on the other third moss, on the fourth a sigh.’

Peter himself supervised his capital’s creation from a three-room cottage, which was later enshrined in a stone shelter by Catherine the Great; and his modest summer palace, its rooms friendly with Dutch tiles and stoves, still occupies the gardens which he peopled with statues transported from Rome and Venice. Under the towering shadow of oak and plane trees, these sculptured gods and demi-gods, Greek heroes and Roman emperors, pose and lounge and slumber on their plinths in all the graceful prolixity of the ancient world. If there is a true Park of Rest and Culture in the nation, it is perhaps this one, for the classical pantheon kept open house, and tolerantly enrolled whatever extra gods came along. Even now the abstract postures and secret smiles of its statues do not caution the passer-by into lipservice, like the bitter ideologies which followed them. Burly workers on holiday, portly ladies in astonishing hats, children, babushkas (grandmothers), old soldiers, all go past unsolicited, or stop to examine the statues like people striving to read a foreign language.

Peter the Great, predictably, engaged in pagan tippling here. Visiting gentlemen and their ladies might suddenly find themselves locked in, then be whirled up by the czar and his cronies in an obligatory drinking debauch of Bacchic enormity. For this awesome wild beast of a man could tolerate little court life, and no ceremonial at all. Impetuous, coarse, hugely physical, he surrounded himself with gifted foreigners and upstart Russians, shipwrights and proletarian mistresses, and eventually married the daughter of a Lithuanian peasant. On all these, mindless of their age or sex or rank, he would shower hugs, blows, kisses and tears in a blinding rainbow of emotions. Ungovernable fits of violence would set him smashing the faces of his advisers with a cudgel or bare hands, or hurling them to the floor and kicking them in a paroxysm of impatience. His voracious fascination with practical crafts pitched him into the sciences of gunnery and engineering, fortification, stone-masonry, metalwork, woodturning, paper-making, leatherwork, etching and engraving. He was driven on by a ravening, barbarian intelligence. He made his own boots, his own furniture, his own boats. Yet his handwriting was appalling and he could barely spell. The official regimen of his reign was filled with a counterpoint of patriotic object-lessons and grotesque horseplay; blasphemous religious ceremonies mingled with Roman-style military triumphs, dwarfs’ weddings, titanic firework displays, public flagellations and beheadings, open debauches, prestigious ship-launchings, furious drunkenness.