Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1682-1725, is one of the most compelling yet brutal rulers I have ever read about. On the one hand he was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment, a champion of science and a great builder of state and public institutions. On the other, he was a capricious autocrat who ruled over a degenerate drunken court and had scant regard for the life of the poverty-stricken masses.

In his youth, Peter travelled throughout Europe learning about shipbuilding and admiring Amsterdam and London (my favourite anecdote is how he and his courtiers completely trashed John Evelyn’s house and garden in Deptford, after Evelyn unwisely let it to them for their English visit). Peter returned from his tour determined to make his country into a great European power, and to build a magnificent city worthy of a newly resurgent Russia.

Peter certainly chose an odd location for this flagship capital. Instead of rebuilding or improving Moscow, which had been the capital of Muscovy, he plumped for a marshy spot of land near the mouth of the River Neva, on the Gulf of Finland. The site had some strategic significance because it was near the front of the war with the Swedes, who were fighting for control of the area. It would also be able to do double-duty as a port. These considerations notwithstanding, however, it was not an ideal place for settlement given the harsh climate and boggy landscape.

Once Peter had decided to build St Petersburg, he threw himself into the project with typical energy. Busy as he was with military campaigns, he still got involved with the minutiae of city building, dictating matters as diverse as road grids, public buildings, and where people were allowed to defecate.

In Peter’s wider quest to modernise Russia, he used characteristically heavy-handed measures. So it was not enough that aristocrats were ordered to cut off their beards; he personally took a razor to them. He threatened to strip wealthy Muscovites of their titles if they did not move to St Petersburg. The punishment for defecating outside appointed places in the city was to be ‘beaten with a cat-o’-nine-tails and ordered to clean it up’. Also, in order to enforce his rules about holding Western-style social gatherings, Peter fined aristocrats who didn’t turn up to them, and posted soldiers at the doors to prevent anyone from leaving. Simon Sebag Montefiore very aptly describes this ruling style as ‘menacing hyperactivity’ (The Romanovs, 2016).

Given this, it is unsurprising that in order to build his showcase European-style city, Peter was happy to let tens of thousands of slave workers die of weakness, disease and cold when building St Petersburg. Many of the workers were conscripted peasants, and others were criminals serving out their sentences through hard labour. It’s hard to decide who was least fortunate: the criminals sent to mine gold and silver in deepest darkest Siberia, or those assigned to building a city in a marshy area which froze in winter and was mosquito-ridden and malarial in summer. Jonathan Miles, author of St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire, estimates that 30,000 people died in the city’s initial construction alone. They died of scurvy, dysentery and malaria, and Miles cites at least one instance of workers being attacked and killed by a pack of wolves.

Grand pastel-painted palaces did eventually line St Petersburg’s canals as it grew into a proper city, resplendent with art, wealth, and elegant society. However, St Petersburg always had its poverty-stricken suburbs, too; in the early days they were a mass of ramshackle wooden huts, later to be replaced by the sort of dreary slum tenements found in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). In the nineteenth century, artists and writers rebelled against St Petersburg as an unnatural city which they believed was foreign to the Russian soul. The city suffered much in the twentieth century, enduring the Siege of Leningrad and Soviet repression. Now, it is a popular tourist destination stuffed full of history and culture. But even among the crowds on a sunny June day, it still strikes you as a strange city, built on the dreams of an autocrat and the bones of his people.