Introduction

Abstract

Cities attract and repel in equal measure, capital cities particularly so. Capitals, like books, have their destinies and none perhaps more melancholy than St Petersburg’s. Created to be the centre (in no way geographical) and showpiece of a new Russia, situated as near to the sea as despotic will rather than common sense could command, looking to the West, menacingly or welcomingly as the hour dictated, built and embellished by western or western-schooled architects and artists, Peter’s city grew out of the swampy delta of the Neva, flourished, floundered and fell. Moscow, dispossessed capital of ‘barbarous Muscovy’, bided its time, crowned Russia’s emperors and empresses, and regained its lost status by the decree of a man, whose mother had been born in a house on the English Embankment overlooking the Neva and who was also, in death, to deprive Petersburg/Petrograd of its very name. As a capital St Petersburg existed for a little over two centuries (no decree was ever promulgated giving it this status, but after the removal of the court from Moscow in 1712 it was de facto and so it remained until March 1918) and as a city it reaches its tercentenary in 2003.