Book Launch -- St. Petersburg's 300 Years: New Perspectives on Old Myths

At a recent Kennan Institute book launch, Arthur George, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Chicago, discussed his new book, St. Petersburg: Russia's Window to the Future -- The First Three Centuries. As a lawyer who has lived and worked extensively in St. Petersburg, George brought a fresh perspective to his history of the imperial city, unrestricted by the conventional polemics on the place of St. Petersburg in Russian and world history.

George began his presentation with a quotation from Dostoevsky: "Petersburg is both the head and the heart of Russia... ; it is still being created, still becoming. Its future is still an idea; but this idea belongs to Peter I; it is being embodied, growing and taking root with each day, not alone in the Petersburg swamp but in all of Russia." According to George, St. Petersburg's importance goes far beyond its famous beauty; created out of Peter the Great's utopian idea, the city itself is fashioned of ideas.

George gave a brief history of the ideas that are woven into the fabric of St. Petersburg's history: the impulse of reform that sent Peter I to look for a new capital away from Moscow; the fact of the city's establishment as part of the logical expansion of the Russian empire to a northern port and trade routes; the new concepts that emerged from Peter I to Elizabeth of the role of the state, government reform, the place of religion, the need for education and scholarship, the changes in social roles, the introduction of Western fine and performing arts. He spoke of the efforts to reform under Catherine the Great and the emergence of critical social thinking and civil society under her rule. Within long stretches of Petersburg history, the city was an example of a place where ideas of reform could flourish (although periodically repressed).

Throughout his presentation, George highlighted the special role of St. Petersburg in cultural history—how, in the late 19th and early 20th century, St. Petersburg had become one of the world's great cultural centers: particularly in the fields of ballet, literature, poetry, opera, and orchestral music.

During the Soviet period, the capital returned to Moscow, and Leningrad—as Petersburg was renamed—became a place of resistance to Soviet power; it became the "leading independent voice and conscience" of the Soviet Union. Because of this, Lenin and Stalin "intensely disliked" the city, which asserted its independence in the arts, as well as within the Communist party.

This independent impulse continued into the perestroika years. During the August 1991 putsch, it was, according to George, Leningrad's defiance of the coup that signaled that "the fear of the Soviet power [was] lost," and consequently caused the coup to fail and the Soviet Union to fall. Under the visionary leadership of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the euphoria of that period propelled the country into the new post-Soviet decade. If many of the hopes of that period sank in the 1990s as the great transition away from state socialism proved more difficult than most had imagined, it continues to be true, George reminded the audience, that St. Petersburg is full of a wealth of potential for the new millennium.