Explore St Petersburg, Russia: the Venice of the north

On Vasilyevsky Island at the mouth of the river Neva stands the Kunstkamera, Peter’s ‘Art Chamber’, completed in 1727. It was built to house his collection of biological curiosities found in Siberia or purchased from Dutch collectors such as Frederik Ruysch. Exhibits include a two-headed calf, a lamb with eight legs and a dubious ‘flying dragon’.

Just across the river stands the Winter Palace complex and the General Staff Building, which now house the State Hermitage Museum. Its collections were established when Peter the Great acquired paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt, and were greatly enlarged by Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–96). Despite sell-offs from the 1920s by a cash-strapped Soviet government, a 1972 guide boasted that the “museum’s displays and store rooms contain about 2,650,000 works of art and other objects”.

Some 5 miles south of the city centre, hidden among Soviet housing developments, is Chesme Church, consecrated in 1780 and resembling an elaborate wedding cake. Yuri Veldten built this church and nearby Chesmenskiy Palace for Catherine the Great as a staging-post en route to her summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine ordered a 952-piece dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood for this chateau, then called Kekerekeksinen, or ‘Frog Marsh’ Palace. Each piece featured an image of English country scenery, reflecting Catherine’s preference for the quiet respectability of England over the tastes of revolutionary France.

In the constellation of palaces around Petersburg, the most gracious is the Palladian-style Pavlovsk, built from 1781 for Catherine’s son Grand Duke Paul. The ordered informality of the English-style garden, designed by Scot Charles Cameron, suited Catherine, who despised “straight lines and paired paths” and “fountains which torture water”.

So much of Petersburg’s history has occurred on its premier thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. By 1830, it had become a ‘show street’, comparable to the Rivoli in Paris or London’s Regent Street. The Nevsky offered glimmers of hope, yet frequently – particularly in the pages of Gogol and Dostoyevsky – delivered despair. It reinforced hierarchies but also offered a space shared by different orders of society, providing the context for the social interaction that led to revolution.

Some of the greatest dancers came of age at the Mariinsky Theatre, built in 1860, including Nijinksy, Pavlova and Nureyev. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker premiered here on 18 December 1892.

In August 1942, during the long siege by Hitler’s forces (from September 1941 to January 1944), the neoclassical Philharmonia Theatre hosted the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony. Some members of the cobbled-together orchestra died of starvation before the performance. That era is commemorated by the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad on Ploschad Pobedy (Victory Square) six miles south of the centre. The obelisk-and-ring memorial is accompanied by statues paying homage to the female workers, barricade-makers, snipers, soldiers and sailors whose fortitude helped the city endure that long, terrible siege.

Jonathan Miles is a cultural historian, author of St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire (Hutchinson, 2017)

This article was taken from issue 8 of BBC World Histories magazine, first published in February 2018