“in Dutch,” and a batch of Fragonards that should have gone to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. All of this is slapped on the walls at random, hanging in full sunlight in galleries with the windows standing open. The place looks like Art Club for Czars. Which it was. Catherine the Great bought European art collections wholesale and shipped them to her private quarters. “Only the mice and I admire all this,” she gloated. Russia is a country that didn’t even become medieval until Ivan the Terrible introduced feudalism in the late 1500s, a country where the small landowner was known as a smerd, a “stinker.” Russia never had a Renaissance, never had a Reformation. There was no Enlightenment here, no Romantic period, no Rights of Man, no parliamentary reform. What little Industrial Revolution Russia had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia never had a Roaring ’20s, a Booming ’50s, a Swinging ’60s, or a Me Generation. There was just one Them Generation after another. Standing in the Hermitage, you realize just how far out in the suburbs of Western civilization Russia is. Of course, America is pretty far out in sophistication’s subdivisions, too. An American instinctively understands big, silly, sprawling, clumsy St. Petersburg. It’s an artificial capital like our own, willed into existence from nothingness, built in a swamp as worthless as the District of Columbia’s, and designed and laid out the way Washington was by arty-farty foreigners who loved grand vistas and hated places to park. St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Czar Peter the Great as a base for Russia’s navy. Russia didn’t really have a navy. Russia didn’t even own the land. This corner of the Baltic coast was occupied Swedish territory and didn’t officially become part of Russia until the Peace of Nystad, in 1721. The climate was terrible. There was nothing to eat. No building supplies existed. The Neva River regularly flooded. And Russia already had a principal city and seat of government that no one was interested in leaving. Peter the Great was no more daunted by these things than a good American would be, though he used some Russian methods to overcome the difficulties. He press-ganged 40,000 workers. They died of cold, starvation, and disease. The next year, he press-ganged 40,000 more. And so on. For nearly six decades, every carriage, wagon, boat, barge, or sled entering St. Petersburg had to pay a toll of building stones—very inconvenient things to carry in the troika’s change
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