Peter Founds Saint Petersburg: Russia's Western Window Opens

Tsar Peter I hammered the foundation of a fortress into a swamp on a Baltic island and declared it the site of Russia's new capital. On May 27, 1703, Peter the Great laid the cornerstone of the Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island at the mouth of the Neva River, founding the city of Saint Petersburg in territory he had just captured from Sweden during the Great Northern War. The location was deliberately provocative. Russia had no coastline on the Baltic before Peter's war with Sweden, and the city was built on conquered land before the war was even won. The terrain was a marshy delta where the Neva empties into the Gulf of Finland, prone to catastrophic flooding and frozen for five months of the year. No rational assessment of geography would have chosen it. Peter chose it anyway. He wanted a "window to Europe," a port city that could trade directly with Western nations and serve as a symbol of Russia's transformation from a landlocked, inward-looking state into a modern European power. The construction was driven by imperial command and built by forced labor. Tens of thousands of conscripted peasants, prisoners of war, and convicts dug canals, drove piles into the mud, and hauled granite for the emerging city. An estimated 30,000 workers died during the initial construction. Peter moved the Russian capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, forcing the nobility to follow by decree. The city became the seat of the Russian Empire and a center of European culture, architecture, and science. The Hermitage, founded later by Catherine the Great, became one of the world's greatest museums. Russian literature, ballet, and music flourished within its neoclassical facades. Saint Petersburg remained Russia's capital until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when Lenin moved the government back to Moscow. Renamed Leningrad in 1924, the city endured a 900-day Nazi siege during World War II that killed an estimated one million civilians. Restored and renamed again after the Soviet Union's collapse, Peter's swamp city endures as Russia's cultural capital, the improbable monument to one tsar's refusal to accept geography as destiny.