ABSTRACT
In one of his celebrated narrative poems, The Bronze Horseman (1833), Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin depicted a truly horrific scene. In fear for his fiancee, the main figure Yevgeny roams the flooded Petersburg and comes to the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great, the founder of the city. A dialogue between the two, a central part of the tale, might be viewed as an allegory of the clash between the ‘little’ and ‘great’ history, as a conflict of an individual longing for safety and personal happiness with the powerful absolutist state turning a blind eye to the desires and dreams of the ordinary man. Whoever has read the poem should know that Yevgeny’s hatred of the Tzar was well-founded and the object of their dispute was the CITY itself. Enraged by the catastrophic consequences of the deluge Yevgeny curses the Tzar and condemns his decision to build Petersburg by the swampy mouth of the river Neva. Historians usually explain this strategy with reference to the Russian-Swedish conflict over the economic and power dominance in the Eastern Baltic. Yet such an answer by no means explains the motives behind Peter’s decision to make Petersburg the imperial residence and new capital of the state. The main reason for doing so was the Tzar’s vision of the utterly new and modern Russian empire with a centralized and efficient bureaucracy and strong, well-trained army. Erecting the future capital of Russia on the green meadow was a spectacular symbolical act demonstrating Peter’s devotion to this idea. Petersburg, the grandiose evidence of the renascent state power, was designed as an imperial city whose economy, administration, population structure and layout were to be completely subject to the needs of the court and its representation. At the same time, the rise of Petersburg was seen by Peter as an escape from Moscow, the incarnation of the medieval past, ancient privileges, persistent old customs and obsolete manners. In the European context, Peter’s resolution to build a completely new centre of state was an extreme project. In other cases of capital relocation, be it Warsaw or Madrid, the court opted for long pre-existent cities equipped with their own municipal administration and autonomy since the Middle Ages. Disciplining the city and subordinating it to the full control of the ruler thus became the task of the day. Sooner or later, this scenario came true in many European countries. Hindered in its expansion by urban particularism and medieval urban freedoms the premodern state had to resort to open confrontation with self-asserting cities.
