Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/68

 "mother of Russian towns," is far younger than New York. Saratov, the chief commercial centre of the lower Volga, acquired serious economic importance only in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The foundation of St Petersburg, or Petrograd as it is now called, also really bears a colonial stamp. Petrograd is not to be compared with other new towns which owed their origin to the wish or to the caprice of enlightened absolute monarchs. The artificiality of St Petersburg, founded in 1703, is quite different in kind from the artificiality of—shall we say, Karlsruhe, founded in 1715—quite apart from the impossibility of drawing comparisons in point of size between the Duchy of Baden and the Empire of Russia. Petrograd, considered both historically and economically, is a town colony on a gigantic scale, deliberately set down "on the banks of the desolate waters"—so run the words of Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, who sang the praises of the mighty founder of the Empire. St Petersburg was built in the midst of war by the methods of war. Few there are among those who admire the magnificent "Nevsky Prospekt," who know that this, the finest of the central thoroughfares of our capital, was laid down by the hands of Swedish prisoners of war, who, in the year of the conclusion of the Peace of Nystad, which brought to an end the great Northern War, had every Saturday to sweep clean the street they themselves had built. At present there is much