Aleksandr Gorianin
“Petersburg grew atop the bones of its builders”—this myth is so persistent in both popular opinion and the work of historians who don’t specifically study this topic that it has hardly been discussed seriously until very recently. Meanwhile, this story has a few interesting twists in it.
The Swede’s Envy
The rumor was started in the middle of the eighteenth century by the Swedes—which isn’t surprising since the mouth of the Neva was taken from them and Swedish captives cut out the first trenches for what would become the city’s roads. (In the case of Nevsky Avenue, they started from opposite ends and misjudged the trajectory. The avenue was planned to be straight as an arrow from the Monastery to the Admiralty, but it actually bends at Moscow Train Station.)
With these rumors the Swedes were trying to at least partially avenge their defeat in the Northern War. Their envy of the victorious government that had erected this fairy tale capital drove them to devalue their success at any cost.
These rumors were supported and passed along like a relay baton, gaining more apocalyptic overtones as they went along. If Aubry de la Motraye, a French agent of the Swedish King Karl XII, tells of 30 thousand deaths during the building of the new capital, the English traveler Francis Dashwood claims that there were 300(!) thousand deaths. There were dozens of such authors, and each of them assured their readers that they wrote “from the testimony of reliable sources.” It never occurred to conscientious Russian journalists and writers—and much less to the opponents of tsarism—to apply even a minimal amount of common sense to claims of this kind. And in Europe people continued to believe these terrible figures without question even two centuries later. For instance, the French author Luc Durtain (1881-1959), who was popular between the two world wars, wrote in his book Baltika (1928) after visiting Leningrad: “Erecting this city of stone cost more lives than the excavation for Versailles.” In his book The Other Europe he offers his own number: “The city rests on bones—on the swamp where the tsar Peter buried 150 thousand workers.”
The part about Versailles needs some explanation. In this case, one myth was transposed onto another: many people did die during the construction of Versailles, and this fact was held up as a major charge against the monarchy during the French Revolution, but the number of deaths was exaggerated to the limit of believability. For many generations of French citizens who were raised to venerate the Revolution, the “victims of Versailles” provided a common measure for comparison.
Valuable Workers
But today who hasn’t heard the tale of this “city built upon bones”? Of course, no one has ever offered any evidence for this “well-known truth,” and under close examination it becomes clear that the thesis of a “city built upon bones” is decidedly not confirmed by any evidence—not by historical documents, nor by church or graveyard records.
“In the registry lists for the building of the city, we saw the names of the very same workers from the very same places year after year,” writes Petr Nikolaevich Petrov, the author of the monumental History of Saint Petersburg from the founding of the city to the introduction of an elected city government, according to the government offices. 1703-1782 (Saint Petersburg, 1884).
The workers lived in Petersburg in two shifts of three months each between May and November. During the cold months the construction halted (with certain exceptions). From the report by the commissioner of the building office, Iulian Seniavin, it follows that 61out of 2210 craftsman sent to Petersburg in 1712 died—and 46 of these were “enfeebled by age.” (I cite from O.G. Ageev, “Greater and More Renowned Than All Cities in the World”—The City of Saint Peter: Petersburg in the Consciousness of Russian Society in the Beginning of the 18th Century, Saint Petersburg: 1999, pg. 110.) That is, the mortality rate for this group of craftsman, who were evidently not young men, was 2.76 %. This is similar to the mortality coefficient among adults of our day in Congo, Burundi, Liberia, and several other countries—even though they are not at war, the population receives necessary vaccines, and they are not laboring over the construction of a new capital. The mortality rates of common people three centuries ago were high all across the world—in Versailles, in Petersburg, or in London. Moreover, Petersburg was always in need of more workers, so they protected them.
The following fact also fails to corroborate the idea that there was a significant mortality rate among the people assigned to this city. E.A. Andreeva, who studied information about the workers sent to Petersburg, was able to establish that regional governments were not supposed to send new workers to replace those who died—which would have been a tragic necessity if many of them were dying. But any shortage on account of runaways and a failure to deliver workers would be made up without fail. It’s clear that these were incomparable numbers. By the calculations of this researcher, during the first, most difficult decade in Petersburg 13.5 to 18 thousand out of a total of 227 thousand workers died. Interestingly, the estimated number of infirm, deceased, and runaway workers subtracted by the emperor himself from his plans was around 8%.
As a preventative measure and a means of curing sickness among the workers, they used vodka infused with pinecones, fish oil, salt, and vinegar—and even “Rhine wine” (“ninety-five vedro [over 1,100 liters—Ed.] of wine were given out as treatment for sick soldiers”).
It is evident from the papers of the head of the Office of City Affairs, Prince A. M. Cherkassky, that (I cite these numbers from A. M. Burovskii, Petersburg as a Geographic Phenomenon, Saint Petersburg: 2003, pg. 67) out of 32 thousand workers registered in 1717, 1000 were listed as ill (three percent and, naturally, not all of them died) and 3200 were cooks (1 in 10!!!). Moreover, 1717 was the last year when workers came by assignment. After that, the city was built almost exclusively by hired workers.
Even the extremely careful Soviet historian S. P. Luppov, who didn’t miss the chance to qualify his statement with a caveat about Russia “longstanding backwardness” and “resistance to any initiative,” claimed in his book The History of the Construction of Petersburg in the First Quarter of the 18th Century (Moscow, 1957): “By the 1720s such a reliable foundation had been created for the enlistment of hired workers in Petersburg that the state was able to break away from forced labor almost entirely.”
By the way, there were quite a few hired laborers in the early stages as well: people were eager to find their way onto this “great project” on account of its high pay—especially masons, stove makers, carpenters, roofers, joiners, pavers, bricklayers, tile makers (which was a rare specialty at the time), and wagon drivers. What’s more, Petersburg was a magnet for runaways of all stripes, before 1717 and after. In need of working hands, the government in Petersburg would frequently pretend to believe a runaway serf that he was free to leave his master’s land.
In this context, the death of a thousand or so builders in Oranienbaum and Strelna in the summer of 1716 really does look massive. Alexander Menshikov wrote to cabinet secretary A.V. Makarov at the time: “In Peterhoff and Strelny there are very many invalids and they die continually… more than a thousand have died.” The anomalousness of this number leads one to suggest that there was some kind of mass illness, most likely dysentery. It’s telling that Menshikov asks in the same letter that Peter the Great should not find out what happened, since “misconduct” in the construction was already “burdening” the ruler too much without this additional worry.
If the death of a thousand persons were a routine occurrence in building the new capital, Menshikov would not have made such a request. But he was clearly worried about the conclusions that the tsar might come to: for instance, that his favorite had once again “gone cheap” on something, let’s say, on provisions—maybe he bought spoiled goods on the cheap. But he needed to give notice to the cabinet secretary in case this led to an investigation.
The figures from the previously cited work by O. G. Ageeva (pp. 79-81) also point to the anomalousness of Menshikov’s project: in that very year, 1716, out of 3262 workers who labored over Nevsky Avenue, 27 of them died (0.83%).
A Branching Myth
During the fevered construction in the city during the nineteenth century, workers repeatedly came across graveyards from pre-Petrine times (the XIV-XVI centuries) while digging out foundations for new buildings, but no one thought of trying to date these burials, and as a result they were often attributed to the first years of Petersburg. At the time, the leading opinion was that the Neva delta was always a land of “desolate waves” (as Pushkin put it), where one might encounter at most the lonely “hut of a poor Finn.” Today, however, it’s well known that the area was populated—not densely but in scattered patches. Nonetheless, a century or two ago everyone took the discovery of skulls and bones to be convincing proof that this city had grown upon the bones of its builders.
This fairytale, called “Petersburg is built upon bones,” soon spawned offshoots: the railroad from Petersburg to Moscow was “built upon bones” (“And it’s all Russian bones on either side,” wrote the poet Nekrasov), or the Trans-Siberian railway was “built upon bones.”
As for the Trans-Siberian railway, I recommend you visit the Krasnoyarsk regional museum, which has an exhibit that elucidates the process of constructing the Trans-Siberian railway. I visited this museum back during the Soviet Union, when any fact that could cast a shadow over “tsarism” was trotted out and given a place of prominence—but it appears there was nothing to trot out in this case.
See also: The Myth of the “Potemkin Village”
There is common cause in all these cases: a drive to diminish and devalue Russian accomplishments. The authors of this myth might be foreigners or “social progressives” of Russian extraction, and many of them were sincere people who believed in “happiness for the people.” How could one fail to believe such passionate and unselfish individuals?
The investigations that have begun will certainly continue. Among the coming studies, I hope, a comparison will be made with other “great projects” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, taking into account a factor like the abundance of the population (France, England) or, conversely, its deficit (Russia, Sweden). One doesn’t have to look hard to find interesting stories: Who dug out nearly five thousand kilometers (that’s not a typo!) of French canals before mechanization? How did they do it? Who excavated from quarries, beginning in the Middle Ages, a fantastical amount of stone in order to construct thousands of mansions, palaces, and monasteries for their secular and religious masters?
