A City of Many Contrasts

...Twelve years later, in 1782, the statue was unveiled before thousands of troops and civilians to the accompaniment of an exploding rocket and the thunder of cannon...

...Petersburg's role as a breeding ground of dissidence and revolutionary opposition to the autocracy—from its embryonic stage under Catherine through the 19th century and up to 1917...

...The book's title refers to the "White Nights" in June and early July when the sun barely sets...

...After cheering Petersburgers greeted the arrival of the "colossus-stone" and it was set in its proper position, "Falconet proceeded to reduce its size by nearly half...

...Petersburg fromMoscow—the city of Russia's past, dominated by the Orthodox Church—in 1712...

...Petersburg's future...

...Petersburg to Moscow...

...They built the Winter Palace, St...

...As the Industrial Revolution progressed in Russia, workers poured into St...

...It symbolizes the city he founded in 1703 as a bastion against the Swedes and other enemies...

...Petersburg and were crowded together in appalling living conditions...

...Isaac's Cathedral, the Nevsky Prospekt (as wide as the Champs Elysées), and other masterpieces...

...The future sixth President of the United States was there when Napoleon invaded Russia...

...Russians soon called it "Sankt Peterburg," affectionately "Piter," and so it remained until 1914, when it became Petrograd, then Leningrad in 1924, and again St...

...Russia's greatest poet stirred the hearts of Petersburg's aristocratic youth with his praise of freedom...

...The rock had to be dislodged and transported for five miles over the Neva's marshes, then floated another eight miles...

...Lincoln describes the cruel conditions under which tens of thousands of Peter's serf laborers, prisoners of war and common criminals drained the marshes and built the city...

...In the late 1980s we also heeded that warning...

...Petersburg in 1809...

...Drawing on a number of authoritative sources, he provides a superb distillation of the horror and the heroism of the people's resistance to the German siege...

...Tsar Nicholas I quickly put down the revolt...

...Petersburg's frequent floods, who represents the individual opposed to the Empire...

...Catherine's military engineers, writes Lincoln, "simply applied that unique blend of brute force and human cunning that has shaped so much of Russia's history," without regard for "cost, convenience, human life and labor —even common sense...

...Or, will they 'borrow' only the essentials needed to regain their strength, and then—in Peter's memorable phrase—'show their ass to the West?'" These questions are more relevant than ever in the uncertain era of Vladimir V Putin, himself a law graduate of Leningrad State University who, before becoming President, was a KGB colonel and then the Deputy Mayor of post-Soviet St...

...The author describes the growing resentment of the masses and its expression in assassinations and strikes, culminating in the political action of the various Socialist factions that led to the fateful year 1917...

...On that grim St...

...She condemned the work and exiled him to Siberia...

...There on the river's shore, atop a huge granite monolith, stood the object of my nostalgia: the menacing bronze statue of Peter the Great astride a rearing steed...

...He also honors two of Leningrad's most distinguished poets, Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, who like other independent writers, artists, ballet dancers, and musicians were repressed by the Soviet regime for refusing "to embrace the collectivist teachings of the Soviet system...

...He developed a close rapport with the Tsar, who at least initially was a humanitarian sovereign...

...Petersburg in 1991...

...In researching this elegantly written history of the city Peter named for his patron saint, Professor W Bruce Lincoln, who died last year at age 61, seems to have consulted almost every conceivable source, Russian and Western, from the tsarist era to the present day...

...Particularly fascinating is Lincoln's account of Empress Catherine commissioning French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet to create the statue of Peter and place it on a rock weighing "no less than 3 million pounds" that had been found in a swamp...

...As Pushkin put it in his poem, "Where do you gallop, proud steed?/ And where will you plant your hooves...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, "Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty" ON A rainy evening in October 1986, I arrived in Leningrad for the first time in almost 30 years...

...His deep affection for Russia's former capital is evident throughout his exhaustive exploration of its evolution on many levels— architectural, cultural, scientific, religious, political, economic, and sociological...

...Petersburg had become not only the hub of the Romanovs' empire, but also the seedbed of the new ferment that would lead to the Russian Revolution...

...It opens with Peter standing at the river and musing about building a city on the marshes of the Neva delta, for "Nature has destined us to cut a window through to Europe...

...Will the city and the Russians "again embrace foreign ways as they did 300 years ago and return to the mainstream of the European culture and politics of which Peter the Great made them a part...

...five of the "Decembrists" were hanged and more than a hundred were sent to Siberia...

...Signs of liberalization by the new Communist Party General Secretary, Mikhail S. Gorbachev— shortly to become known as perestroika and glasnost—were already visible...

...In his treatment of the city's Soviet period (when Moscow was once more designated as the capital), Lincoln similarly focuses on the suffering of its citizens— especially at the time of Stalin's purges, and of the unique tragedy Leningrad experienced during the Nazi invasion...

...He named it "Sankt Pieter Burkh" in Dutch, to invoke the industrious and seafaring people of the Netherlands he was determined to have his backward subjects emulate...

...Petersburg, with its gloomy, foggy atmosphere and brooding winter nights...

...The poet himself credits Count Francesco Algarotti, an Italian scientist and friend of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, who visited Russia in 1739 and wrote about "the great window lately opened in the north, through which Russia looks into Europe...

...Indeed, on December 14, 1825 several hundred young officers of the Imperial Guards revolted in an effort to win human rights for all Russians...

...Even in the early 20th century, as Lincoln notes, the Baedeker guidebook cautioned visitors to what had become Russia's capital that "unboiled water should on no account be drunk...

...More important than its pomp and ceremony, though, was St...

...These noblemen," Lincoln tells us, "led their men to the Senate Square...

...Petersburg day, the first shots had been fired in the struggle that would bring down the Romanovs...

...Once settled in my hotel, I took a taxi to the Neva...

...But, says Lincoln, "the sparks of their uprising continued to smolder...

...Despite the Empress' desire to move Russia closer to the West, she soon realized that the ideals of liberty, fraternity and the rights of man, if permitted free expression, wouldundermine the established order...

...Lincoln wonders about St...

...Actually, the oft-quoted window was neither Peter's nor Pushkin's...

...By the time Pushkin "burst onto the city's literary scene in the early 1820s," the gap between writers and rulers was growing wider...

...Ultimately he was released by her grandson Alexander I. (Lincoln misses an interesting historical footnote in failing to mention that Alexander received Minister Plenipotentiary John Quincy Adams in St...

...In times past there was also the disparity between the aristocrats and the faceless government clerks and poor folk, whose misery was captured by writers like Gogol and Dostoyevsky...

...The historian Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote of the undertaking, "It would be difficult to find in the annals of military history any battle that claimed more lives than the number of workers who died...

...The hero of Pushkin's "sorrowful" tale is not only the Tsar but the humble civil servant Yevgeny, a victim of one of St...

...formed them in ranks around Falconet's Bronze Horseman, and called for a constitution and an end to autocracy...

...PETER moved the Russian capital to St...

...Alexander Pushkin immortalized his beloved adopted city in his greatest narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman, subtitled A Petersburg Tale...

...Throughout Sunlight at Midnight Lincoln empathizes with the common people—the "insulted and injured" as Dostoyevsky called them...

...But that is merely one of the contradictory aspects of St...

...Italian architects engaged by him and by his successors gradually transformed it into a European style metropolis with an abundance of consumer goods for the upper classes...

...A young intellectual named Aleksandr N. Radishchev, whom she sent to Leipzig to study, subsequently criticized serfdom as well as other injustices in a fictional work entitled Journey from St...

...They were constantly exposed to the polluted water that caused virulent intestinal ailments...