A Window To The West Essay Research

A Window To The West Essay, Research Paper

History has it that the United States capital city of Washington D.C. was

designed with the intention of intimidating visiting foreign heads of state. The

creation of this city had purpose and reason; neither of which are very natural or

human. St. Petersburg was viewed by the Russian people in this context.

Typically a city grows from a small town to a massive metropolis with years and

years of expansion outward. The Russian people already plagued with

xenophobia, could not accept Peter the Great’s new city designed with Western

ideals and made by Western minds.

Peter the Great sought to bring his country into the modern and more

western world. By means of taxing old dress, and creating a table of ranks by

which upward mobility is possible and higher education institutions. Through his

travels throughout Europe Peter, yearned to update and facilitate Russia as a

respected power and as a modernized country.

In order to westernize Russia a physical connection had to be established

between the Old World Russia and the rest of Europe. The only way to

accomplish this feat, was to create trade and travel routes between the West

and Russia. After securing his borders, the next task “of expanding Russia’s

contacts and territory, especially in ways that would liberate Russia from its long

isolation as a landlocked country.”(Thompson 98) Contact with the west was

limited because of Russia’s lack of access to warm water seaports where trade

and travel between Russia and the West could take place. The need for warm

water seaports therefore shaped Peter’s foreign policy.

Peter attempted to gain access to the Baltic Sea by defeating Sweden,

the most powerful force in north central Europe. War with Sweden raged on for

twenty-one years during which Peter gained enough access in the Baltic to

establish a city he named St. Petersburg, his “window to the West.”(Thompson

98) . Indeed Peter’s efforts helped create a window to the Western Europe but

like all windows the rest of Europe could look into Russia as mush as Russia

could look out to Western Europe. Peter wanted to create a city that showed

Europe Russia’s prestige.

The premeditated creation of the city, through

Peter’s will to carve for himself a “window on the

West” overshadowing the old capital of Moscow

and steering the country away from its cultural

and religious traditions, led to the notion that the

city’s life had a rootless, unreal quality. Leiter 5

Petersburg was seen as an unnatural city to many of the Russian citizens.

Physically situated upon a march on the Neva River, the plan of the city was

planned and created according to the plan of Peter’s. “The terrain on which St.

Petersburg rose was a marshy coastal plain divided into many islands by the

branches of the Neva.”(Shvidkovsky 20) This site, for all of its obvious flaws,

should have never been developed into a city making the physical plan of the

city unnatural. Culturally and socially Peter planned the city also, not allowing

the inhabitants choose to come to the new city, as all other cities usually became

occupied. “Peter issued a decree stipulating that a 1000 noble families, a 1000

merchant families, and a 1000 artisan families were to emigrate” to his new

capital and only the “best candidates should settle. The urban planning was not

so much for aesthetic principle as a means of social organization.”(Shvidkovsky

22) Peter planned the city from its culture, its inhabitants, its architecture and its

economics before construction even began.

Being a country consumed with xenophobia, most Russians saw the

construction of St. Petersburg as unnatural to their nation also. “The

architectural aspect of Petersburg was entirely the work of foreign architects. At

that time there was not a single Russian master capable of shaping the city’s

style”(Shvidkovsky 24) according to Peter. Yet he felt that his people were good

enough to slave over the construction of the city and die laboring for his cause. It

was not uncommon for a building to be designed by an Italian, under the

supervision of a Dutchman, continued by a German and so on until its

completion. Each of these workers contributed their own racial and national

characteristics to each of their roles in building the city. Peter wanted his capital

and “window” to be laid out and built along the lines of a great Occidental

capital. The Russians saw this development of a Western capital in their Russia

as an abandonment of their past and as an invasion of the West; consequently,

St. Petersburg was not accepted and feared by the rest of Russia. “[St.

Petersburg] had to be as different as possible from the old metropolis which

symbolized Old Mother Russia, and which the plebeian classes still considered

their capital.”(Voyce 12)

The capi

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