Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / The Romanovs and Peter the Great: Building St. Petersburg from the Swamp
Transcript
- Lucas: So, Luna, we've covered a lot of Romanov ground—Catherine's partitions, the Decembrists, Nicholas II's revolution. But I want to step back to the very beginning of their imperial story, not the dynasty's founding in 1613, but the moment they really became an empire. I'm thinking of Peter the Great and the creation of St. Petersburg. Luna: Wait—the city built on a swamp? I've heard that phrase, but I never really understood what it meant. Lucas: Exactly that. In 1703, Peter captured a Swedish fortress called Nyenskans at the mouth of the Neva River. This was during the Great Northern War, which Russia was fighting against Sweden for access to the Baltic. Peter decided then and there to build a new city on that marshy delta. It was a crazy idea. The land was barely above sea level, prone to flooding, and covered in dense forest and bog. But Peter saw it as Russia's window to the West, a seaport that would connect his country to Europe by sea. Lucas: He named it Sankt-Peterburg, after his patron saint, not after himself—though later it became Petrograd and then Leningrad. The first structure was the Peter and Paul Fortress, built on Zayachy Island. And from the start, the scale was staggering. Thousands of workers were drafted from across Russia: serfs, state peasants, even Swedish prisoners of war. They worked in appalling conditions—disease, exposure, starvation. Estimates of the death toll run into the tens of thousands, maybe over a hundred thousand by the time the city was established. Luna: So it really was built on bones, then? Not just a metaphor? Lucas: There's a persistent legend that Peter literally buried workers in the foundation—that the city is built on skeletons. That's almost certainly a myth, a poetic exaggeration. The reality is grim enough without it: mass graves from typhus, dysentery, and exhaustion. The soil was so wet that workers had to drive piles deep into the mud before they could lay stone. They used up to forty thousand piles just for the foundations of the fortress alone. Lucas: But Peter pushed on relentlessly. He forced nobles and merchants to move to the new city, building stone houses at their own expense. He banned stone construction elsewhere in Russia so that all masons would come to St. Petersburg. By 1712, he moved the capital from Moscow to this half-built city on the edge of nowhere. Can you imagine the symbolism? Moscow was the ancient heart of Russia, with its onion domes and Kremlin. St. Petersburg was straight lines, Dutch-style canals, and Baroque palaces. It was a physical break with the past. Luna: That must have been hugely unpopular with the old aristocracy. Moscow was their home. Lucas: It was. Peter didn't care. He was an autocrat in the fullest sense. He even dictated what clothes people could wear—ordering nobles to shave their beards and adopt Western dress. He introduced the Table of Ranks, which let commoners rise through state service based on merit, not birth. And all of this was centered on St. Petersburg, which became a showcase for his reforms. The city was designed by foreign architects—the Swiss-Italian Domenico Trezzini, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Le Blond. They built long, straight avenues and the famous Nevsky Prospekt, which was originally a cleared path through the forest. Lucas: One of the most iconic buildings from that early period is the Winter Palace—well, the fourth version of it, since the first three were cheaper and less grand. Peter's original was a modest two-story house. But by the time Catherine the Great was done, it was the lavish baroque masterpiece we know today. Still, Peter's vision set the template: a city that looked outward, that was built for trade, for the navy, for state ceremony. Luna: And the navy—that was a huge part of Peter's obsession, right? The Baltic Fleet? Lucas: Absolutely. The whole point of the city was to give Russia a warm-water port and a navy. Peter himself worked as a shipbuilder in the Netherlands and England, and he brought that expertise back. St. Petersburg's Admiralty became the heart of Russia's naval power. The city's shipyards churned out galleys and ships of the line. By the end of Peter's reign, Russia had a Baltic fleet of dozens of vessels. That was a complete transformation from the landlocked Muscovy he inherited. Luna: It's almost like he was trying to create a whole new country, not just a new city. Lucas: He was. And in many ways, he succeeded. St. Petersburg became the capital for over two centuries, until the Bolsheviks moved it back to Moscow in 1918. It was the stage for almost all of Romanov history after Peter: the palace coups, the assassinations, the balls, the revolutions. Every Romanov ruler after Peter—except for a brief period under Peter II—reigned from that city. So when we talk about the Romanovs, we're really talking about St. Petersburg. Lucas: But let's not romanticize it too much. The human cost was enormous. And the city itself remained vulnerable. The Neva flooded regularly; the worst flood in 1824 killed thousands and inspired Pushkin's poem 'The Bronze Horseman.' And all that grandeur was built on the backs of serfs who had no say in their own lives. That tension—between the glittering facade and the brutal reality—is the story of the Romanovs in a nutshell. Luna: It's funny you mention that tension, Lucas. Because this whole deep dive into St. Petersburg—and the way it was built, the vision behind it—it makes me think about how history shows us things like this. The big grand stories, but also the hidden costs. And it's exactly the kind of perspective we try to bring on this show. Lucas: Exactly. And you know, if you've been coming with us through these conversations—whether it's about the partitions of Poland or the Decembrists or Peter's window to the West—it's because listeners like you make this possible. We keep the show ad-free and focused on the details. If you'd like to support us, there's a simple way: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's it. No pressure, just a way to keep these conversations going. Luna: Yeah, every little bit helps. And it lets us spend time on the stuff that really matters—like how Peter got thousands of people to drag stones through a swamp. Lucas: Right. So back to that swamp. The engineering was astonishing for its time. They dug canals to drain the land, brought in tons of rubble to raise the ground level. The first major building, the Peter and Paul Fortress, was completed in 1704. It wasn't just a military stronghold—it became a prison and a symbol of state power. Later, the cathedral inside became the burial place for all Romanov tsars from Peter to Nicholas II. So that fortress literally holds the dynasty's remains. Luna: Including the last tsar? I thought they were buried in Yekaterinburg. Lucas: The remains of Nicholas II and his family were finally interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998, after a long controversy. So yes, the dynasty's story begins and ends in that fortress, in a way. Peter founded it, and the last Romanovs are buried there. It's a powerful arc. Luna: That's incredible. I never connected those dots. Lucas: It's one of those historical symmetries that feels almost too neat. But it's real. And it speaks to how Peter's vision outlasted his dynasty. Even after the Romanovs fell, St. Petersburg remained Russia's cultural heart—the city of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky. It's a living monument to one man's ambition, for better and worse.