Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/69

 talk of the artificiality and even of the harmfulness of Petrograd. Not long ago a well-known Russian writer wrote a striking article in which he contended that Petrograd was fated to disappear from the face of the earth. Nowadays talk of this kind is but irresponsible chatter, and comes either from people who have become absorbed in over-profound thought on the political themes of the past and of the present, or from those who have given their fancy too free a rein in the same political sphere of thought. But at the time of the foundation of Petrograd—Petrograd, which was not the result of organic growth but was created by the will of the State and of the Monarch—it was in very fact a matter of doubt whether the newly created city could continue to exist. On the occasion of one of Peter the Great's festivals there was erected a triumphal arch with two pictures representing respectively St Petersburg and its harbour. Under the one there was the inscription: "urbs ubi silva fuit" (the city where a forest was); under the other, in which Neptune was depicted standing before the harbour, there appeared the words: "videt et stupescit" (he sees and is amazed). It was this that made so acute an observer as Vockerodt, the secretary of the Prussian Embassy, writing in 1737, twelve years after the death of Peter the Great, express, and not without good reason, doubts as to whether Petrograd would maintain its position ,—so artificial in a sense and so fragile