PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

St. Petersburg's anniversary

On May 27, 1703, Tsar Peter the Great placed the first stone for the Peter and Paul Fortress, giving birth to St. Petersburg. Located just 450 miles south of the Arctic Circle where the Neva River meets the Baltic Sea, the city is young by European standards. Kyiv, by contrast, is more than 1,500 years old, Paris nearly 2,000, Rome more than 2,700 and Athens at least 3,500 years old. Still, in its 300 years, St. Petersburg has truly been a city of destiny.

It was there that the tsars presided over the vast Russian Empire. The poet Pushkin, novelist Turgenev, composer Tchaikovsky, along with world-class painters, dancers and revolutionaries walked the city's streets and squares. At times, no doubt, they looked over at the grim fortress as they made their way to glittering theaters, museums and salons, and perhaps shuddered at the memory of Peter supervising the torture-murder of his son inside its walls or recalled how the defiant Hetman Pavlo Polubotok starved to death in a dungeon there, how Fyodor Dostoyevsky was tormented with a mock execution and how Lenin's brother was hanged.

For more than 200 years, St. Petersburg - renamed Petrograd during the first world war - remained the political and cultural capital of Russia until the spring of 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. A few months later the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and moved the capital to Moscow. In 1924 the city was renamed Leningrad. In 1991 it reverted to its original name.

Although it's more than 600 miles north of Kyiv, St. Petersburg looms large in Ukrainian history and culture. Ukrainians first arrived there in substantial numbers in 1709, after Hetman Ivan Mazepa's defeat at the Battle of Poltava where he fought to free Ukraine from Russian rule. To punish what he saw as disloyalty, Peter condemned tens of thousands of Kozaks to build canals and drain marshes, clear forests, drag stones to pave the streets, cut, hew and haul lumber to the banks of the Neva and drive piles, build docks. The slaves lived in crowded, filthy huts in the midst of swamps and squalor. Many died from malaria, scurvy and dysentery. In the wintertime, they froze. According to estimates from Peter's time, at least 100,000 people died building his city.

One hundred twenty years later, another slave arrived there: Taras Shevchenko. Soon, he met fellow Ukrainians, notably, the painter Ivan Soshenko and writer Yevhen Hrebinka who convinced some influential Russian friends to arrange for Shevchenko's emancipation. The rest is history. Once free, Shevchenko applied his genius to the "Kobzar," the poetry collection that tapped into the ancient songs he'd heard as a boy. The wandering minstrels who sang them helped Ukraine's peasant-serfs maintain their national consciousness more than two generations after the last Kozak stronghold, the Sich, had been destroyed. Published in 1840 in St. Petersburg, the "Kobzar" is easily the most important book in Ukrainian history. As for the orphan whose poetry mobilized a defeated nation and changed the course of history, his story has been elevated to mythological levels.

Ukraine in Shevchenko's day had been part of Russia for nearly 200 years. Virtually everyone was reconciled to the reality of imperial rule. So, if you had talent, ambition and opportunity, you went to the capital to build a career. In the 18th century, composers Bortniansky, Vedel and Berezovsky, along with painters Borovykovsky and Levytsky left their homes in Ukraine for St. Petersburg, where success or failure was measured in the context of the imperial court. They might have looked to their Ukrainian roots for inspiration, but essentially they lived the lives of Russian gentry.

Still, a Ukrainian could do quite well in St. Petersburg. In 1831, when 17-year-old Shevchenko first set foot there, Ukrainian themes were very fashionable, largely the result of Nikolai Gogol's book, "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka," about a fairy-tale Ukraine from long ago. Like Shevchenko, 24-year-old Gogol was Ukrainian. Writing in Russian for a Russian audience, he was a best-selling author of quaint stories (Dikanka) about a quaint "province" ("Little Russia") with an unruly past (e.g., Taras Bulba).

Shevchenko, for his part, refused to cater to Russians. He was moved by a mystical attachment to every Ukrainian who had ever lived or was yet to be born. This was his audience, and he deliberately chose their language to communicate a blunt political message - born of his rage over the plight of a disenfranchised nation of slaves.

Haunted by the ghosts of Kozaks who had perished building St. Petersburg, Shevchenko called it "The Capital of Woe," and bitterly condemned Peter, its founder:

O serpent that all earth should shun
What have you to my Kozaks done?
For you have glutted all these swamps
With noble bones!

Shevchenko also condemned the archeological expeditions that excavated the Scythian treasures of Ukraine and put them on display at St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum:

And my dear mounds the Muscovite
Is shattering apart.
There let him ferret, let him dig;
He takes and is a thief ...

In 1847 Shevchenko was arrested for his poetry and exiled to a penal battalion on the Caspian Sea. It was more than a decade before he returned to St. Petersburg, where he died in 1861. Still in exile, he was forbidden to go to Ukraine.

After Shevchenko's death, St. Petersburg continued to exert a profound influence on Ukrainian culture, mostly disastrous. In 1863 the tsar issued the Valuiev Ukase banning the Ukrainian language. Only after the 1905 Revolution, which began with a demonstration in St. Petersburg, was the ban lifted. In 1918 a monument to Shevchenko was built in St. Petersburg, but in 1926 it was torn down. In 1937 the murder of Sergei Kirov, the thuggish boss of the Leningrad Communist Party organization, gave Stalin the pretext to launch the Great Terror. Probably it was Stalin himself who ordered the murder. Countless Ukrainian cultural and political figures were massacred, including 300 victims whose bodies were found in 1997 in a mass grave just outside of St. Petersburg.

Looking back on 300 years, you have to marvel how the very best and absolute worst of Russian culture were served up in St. Petersburg, seasoned with a rich dollop of Ukrainian genius, some of it obediently offered the tsar by courtiers seeking favor and some of it defiantly thrown in his face. But give the city credit: in December 2000 it dedicated a new monument to Shevchenko, barely in time for this year's birthday bash.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: [email protected].

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 25, 2003, No. 21, Vol. LXXI

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