What Was the Russian Empire’s Capital?
The Russian Empire had two capitals. Moscow was the older capital of the Russian state, the seat of the Kremlin, the metropolitan see, and the coronation of the tsars; Saint Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great on land taken from Sweden in 1703, was the imperial capital from 1712 to 1918, except for a brief interlude in 1728-1732 when the boyar-tsar Peter II moved the court back to Moscow. The two cities retained distinct identities throughout the imperial period: Moscow the religious, merchant, and increasingly industrial capital, Saint Petersburg the administrative, military, and Western-facing capital. The Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow in March 1918, and Moscow has been the capital of Russia ever since (see Lieven, The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, 2006, on the two-capitals system).
Moscow
Moscow became the capital of the rising Grand Duchy of Moscow in the late fifteenth century, when Ivan III took the title of Grand Prince of All Russia and made the Moscow Kremlin the seat of the united Russian state. The Kremlin was rebuilt in 1485-1495 in the form it still has, with the three great cathedrals (the Annunciation, the Archangel, and the Dormition) and the wooden palace of the tsars. Moscow was the coronation city throughout the imperial period, and the Russian coronation ceremony, which was elaborated in the late sixteenth century and re-coded in 1722, took place in the Dormition Cathedral. Moscow was also the metropolitan see of the Russian Orthodox Church until 1326; after the autocephaly of the Moscow patriarchate in 1589, it was the seat of the patriarch, and then, after 1721, the place of residence of the senior metropolitan of the Holy Synod.
Moscow retained its character as the second capital. The Moscow University, founded in 1755, was the second university of the empire (after St Petersburg’s, which had been reorganised in 1724). The Moscow merchant class remained, throughout the imperial period, distinct from the St Petersburg nobility. The Moscow nobility was closer to the landowning gentry of the central Russian provinces; the St Petersburg nobility was closer to the imperial service. The two cities, accordingly, played different roles in the cultural history of the empire: Moscow was the home of the merchant and of the Russian vernacular; Saint Petersburg was the home of the European-facing intelligentsia.
The founding of Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg was founded on 27 May 1703 (16 May old style), when Peter the Great laid the first stone of the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island in the Neva delta. The site was strategically important — it commanded the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland — and Peter had resolved, in 1700, that the Russian state needed a Baltic port and a modernised capital. The new city was built in marshy, unhealthy terrain; the mortality rate among the workers, who were conscripted from all over the empire, was extraordinary, and the city was, in its first decade, the most unhealthy capital in Europe. The total death toll during the construction is unknown, but the city of 40,000 in 1710 had been built largely by peasants who would not live to see it finished (Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 1998).
The move of the capital followed. Peter had already moved his own court to the new city; in 1712 he ordered the transfer of the principal government offices, and in 1713 the Russian Holy Synod and the Senate moved to the new capital. Saint Petersburg was declared the imperial capital in 1721, with the proclamation of the Russian Empire. The city grew rapidly: it was a city of 70,000 in 1725, 220,000 in 1750, and 385,000 in 1800. The population in 1914 was 2.1 million, the fourth largest city in Europe after London, Paris, and Berlin (Hughes, 1998).
Saint Petersburg as the imperial capital
The imperial court, the imperial government, the foreign embassies, and the imperial cultural establishment all sat in Saint Petersburg. The Winter Palace, the Admiralty, the General Staff, the Senate and Synod building, the Marble Palace, and the Tauride Palace were built in succession through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the imperial family took up residence in the new capital from 1732, with the completion of the second Winter Palace. Saint Petersburg was the scene of the great imperial ceremonies: the coronation of the empresses (Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine II) in the absence of their male predecessors, the imperial balls, the diplomatic receptions, and the great military reviews.
The city’s cultural life was equally distinct. The Imperial Academy of Sciences, founded in 1724, sat in the city; the Imperial Russian Academy, founded in 1783, was the centre of the Russian literary language. The Hermitage was in the city. The Russian classical music tradition — the conservatoire, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Imperial Russian Musical Society — was a Saint Petersburg institution. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Blok all lived and worked in the city; Tchaikovsky trained there. The “Petersburg text” of Russian literature is the longest sustained meditation on a single city in world literature (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002).
The two cities
The relationship between the two capitals was an enduring theme of Russian life. The “Petersburg and Moscow” debate of the 1830s and 1840s, between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, was also a debate about the meaning of the two cities. The Slavophiles, in particular, saw Moscow as the seat of the true Russian spirit — the merchantry, the Church, the peasant commune — and Saint Petersburg as an alien, imposed, German institution. The Westernizers, in contrast, saw Saint Petersburg as the modernising capital that had made Russia a great European power. Both readings were carried into the twentieth century; the question of which was the “real” Russian capital was, in essence, the question of which Russia was the real Russia (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1982).
The fall of Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg lost its status as the capital in the first months of the revolution. The Provisional Government kept the capital in Petrograd, as the city was called from 1914 to 1924, until 25 October 1917 (new style). The Bolsheviks moved the government first to the Smolny Institute, then to Moscow, where the All-Russian Central Executive Committee met in the Kremlin in March 1918. The decision was made partly for security — Petrograd was within shelling distance of the German front in 1918 — and partly for symbolic reasons. The city was renamed Leningrad in 1924 and was the second city of the USSR until 1991, when a popular referendum restored the name Saint Petersburg. The imperial capital has been a museum, a federal subject, and a tourist destination; it has not been the capital of Russia since 1918 (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).